Cold Corner: Searching for Humanity on the Streets of San Francisco

by Aurelia Lorca
– USA –

Powell and Market Streets, in San Francisco, where the cable-cars turn, is the intersection of the city’s heart and gut in a melee of consumerism, poverty, street-art, soggy gutters, and timeless elegance. The lampposts of Powell and Market preside over red bricks in green rod iron, filigreed with curlicues and old San Francisco charm. At the cable-car turn around, from dawn ‘til dusk, a man named José twists a piece of neon green cardboard on a pole reminding Jesus Loves Us. Yet this is a place where you don’t smile, you don’t make eye contact. Slow moving tourists with shopping bags and cameras might take it all in, even the garbage, but they don’t make eye contact. Even my friend Hester, sporting over-sized sunglasses, rushed right by me until I bleated out her name several times. “You don’t want to make eye contact down here,” she told me.

Practically speaking, there’s no time for eye contact; we’re all too busy getting somewhere. Briskly dressed business people from the financial district, service employees, teachers, street people, drug dealers, gang-bangers focus on destination and agenda. We rush past the latest special at Bath and Body Works, genuine sapphire rings, and kids hanging out on the block, who we are more blind to than the homeless. One afternoon I talked to a group of them, asked how old they are. A chubby-cheeked girl told me she is 12, but didn’t look it because of the hormones in the food. Another girl said she was sixteen, showed off a little dress with pink flowers for her daughter she had just palmed from the GAP.

In the midst of hyper-commerce and fear, car-alarms scream just in case, and a busker plays Aude Lyn Sange on a cello. Store windows in old wedding-cake brick buildings blaze, sale, sale, sale. The Westfield Shopping Center, a new billion-dollar arena across Market from the Powell BART station, compels in sparkling nouveau architecture and high-end stores to buy, buy, buy. Even Lush, my favorite store with soaps and bath products made from organic essential oils and scents that waft down Powell, is a perfumed persuasion to purchase. Restaurant marquees boast All You Could Ever Want To Eat, and a guy out front stands on his head for spare change.

The least aggressive on Powell Street are not the stores, but aspiring rappers selling their CDs, the homeless selling the street sheets. These are the sellers we largely ignore. We want to buy in single-minded determination. We see the shoe sales and the pink balloons at Sephora, but we don’t see each other, except for the construction worker with an eye patch who sits across from the new Bloomingdales every 5 p.m. with his safety orange hard-hat at his feet and a 40 oz watching it all with his one eye as he sips his beer.

I am no exception. I don’t make eye contact and I keep pepper spray in my purse, which is at all times zipped and in the crook of my arm. Like most, I buy as a comfort, yet squeeze with guilt for having the luxury…and buy more. Forget electronics, my passion is clothes. In the solitude of my screaming mind there’s nowhere to hide. I wish I could not notice the poverty amid the complacency of hyper-consumerism, but I can’t shut it out. It’s too much, and I cannot walk fast enough.

Who am I? Just a schoolteacher, just a schoolteacher. But not here on Powell Street, where I can’t save the homeless or the kids hanging out. So I buy clothes.

Every Thursday at 5 p.m. takes me to Market and Powell for a weekly appointment in the Flood Building. On the particularly cold Thursday after President Bush’s State of the Union speech, announcing his intention to send more troops to Iraq, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War And End Racism), the most clever antiwar acronym and largest antiwar interest group, staged a rally at Powell and Market. En route to my Thursday engagement, I found myself trapped in the thick of the protest. Protesters screamed over microphones a cacophony of raucous noise that I couldn’t understand. The crowd shouted back in agreement of angry cheers. How could they hear? I was standing right next to them, and I couldn’t make out a word. Though the scene conjured thoughts of John Steinbeck’s phalanx theories and mob mentality, something else bothered me. Something just wasn’t right. I looked around.

A woman in a thick wool overcoat and a vibrant red scarf shoved a flier into my hands and informed me that the only hope to end the war was to get out and protest. I told the woman I wasn’t much for crowds, but contributed to the antiwar movement by teaching my students the essays of Henry David Thoreau. I contemplated asking her what she was doing to help the kids here in the Bay Area who live in communities that are like war zones, but I politely moved away and read her flier—an advertisement for ANSWER’s next protest—against the wall of the GAP, near a tall kid in black Dickies and a black Giants starter jacket. I asked him what he thought about the protest. He held back his jaw and wouldn’t answer. Only when I bid him goodnight did he acknowledge me and smile.

It took me until I came back the next week to realize what had really been wrong with the protest: there were no street performers, no dancers dancing in diaphanous rhythm. The few who succeed in removing our blinders with their talents, who the kids, the homeless, the service workers, and the shoppers gather round to watch. 5 p.m. is prime time for tips, when everyone is heading to the BART. But that Thursday they weren’t there.

Later, when I got a chance to ask some of them, they weren’t clear if the antiwar protesters had directly requested that they be removed, but the police made them leave and no one from ANSWER bothered to stop them, or notice.
One group that was sure was the East Oakland Breakdancers, who said it was the protesters who told them to pack it up. In communities like East Oakland, breakdancing is an outlet from war (gang violence) and racism. How unfortunate the breakdancers were pushed out of a protest aspiring to end the same ills.

When I called their San Francisco headquarters, ANSWER said that the protests they organize are lawful, “with a permit,” and take “lots of time, planning, and money.” ANSWER said they couldn’t be responsible for “problems” like the ones I described. When I asked what ANSWER does to not displace street performers and engage the communities they protest in, I was informed that Powell and Market is a historic spot for emergency protests. When I said I couldn’t see Allen Ginsberg allowing the police to kick out street performers, I was informed I talked too much and had a problem listening. When I questioned what good protesting does if it means displacing and ignoring the very people that need it most, I was informed that ANSWER “often organizes protests in Hunter’s Point.”

At this I had to hang up the phone. Much good protests like the one I witnessed at Powell and Market will do in communities ravaged by unemployment, broke schools, and gang violence. Don’t let the progressive rhetoric deceive you: the left, at times, especially in this city, is as Machiavellian, narrow minded, and arrogant as the Bush administration.

By 6:30 p.m. on that fateful Thursday, the protest had died down, except for a few angry shouters. I lapsed into Franny Glass despondency, that we were doomed if this was the largest movement against President Bush and racism, until two tiny women linking arms in matching leopard coats began walking up Powell Street. It was the San Francisco twins of Doublemint and postcard fame. Mythical women, practically magical, identical in height and feature, both with blond wigs, pancake makeup, high arched painted eyebrows, and Max Factor red.

As a girl, whenever I visited my grandfather at work on Market Street, it was a treat to see them. They had enchanted my childhood in pillbox hats. The twins moved through the waning fury of the protesters, their legs pumping in cheery unison. Both women wore sling-back sandals barelegged. Black spider veins snared the backs of their calves. A woman with braids and a Warriors starter jacket was concerned and said, “Ladies, walk quickly, it’s cold, and you have bare legs!” The twins winked at her and nodded. The woman with the braids stayed with them for a half a block, told them how happy she was just to see them. The twins thanked the woman, called her “doll.” Shoppers echoed, “Look, it’s the San Francisco twins! Hey, they have bare legs! Walk fast girls, it’s cold!” Someone asked if they could get the ladies a cab. They nodded no and kept walking, moving through, smiling their sweet Max Factor smiles. I ascended Powell Street with them and struggled to keep up.

About the Author
A high school English teacher, Aurelia Lorca believes Grendel did not kill the Danes just because he was “evil,” and has been staunchly against the war in Iraq, as well as the use of force in Afghanistan since its inception.