Choire Sicha

Saturday, September 20

My first real job, which I stumbled into, was working in a drop-in shelter for homeless kids in San Francisco. The drop-in was a big long room, sort of like a messy art gallery. Mostly I made giant piles of scrambled eggs and french toast, and hung out on the sidewalk with them and smoked, and kept them entertained while they went off on long speed-induced ramblings about just who was out to get them. The shelter paid me ten dollars an hour, I think. We told jokes, and we were all kind of friends but never too friendly, mostly because if they OD'ed or I thought they were going to OD I had to call the police and get paramedics there or get them sent away for psychiatric observation. I helped them with their mohawks, and listened to their teen love dramas, and sometimes took them to the weekly needle exchange in a nearby alley. About a third of the kids there were from Mexico and Central America, speaking mostly Spanish but also many other languages which of course no one else spoke. They were always there for different reasons than the American kids. My Spanish improved as their English improved. They were funny, and they stuck together. A couple of the Mexican guys made rather aggressive sexual overtures to me. Some of them avoided me. Some of them spent long hours comparing Spanish and English names of things, always useful in the kitchen. There was one guy I remember who resisted learning English, but one day he suddenly started to get it, mostly by comparing similar words in both languages. He came up to me at the front desk one day and really loudly said, "You humiliate me!" with a big smile on his face. He said this over and over to all of us on the staff for weeks, usually pointing a finger at our chests and always looking really happy. He didn't really learn much more English before he stopped coming there but he was always very nice and polite, a really sweet kid. I say that all the time to people now, "You humiliate me," and always with a big smile on my face, but nobody has any idea what I'm talking about. It's sort of an ancient private joke between me and some guy whose name I couldn't possibly remember anymore. I don't even really remember what he looks like, but I totally remember what he sounds like. ⊕

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Thursday, September 18

I have only been north of Penn Station once in the last two months, and that was just for a quick dinner at the newly opened Lever House restaurant. But yesterday I went uptown twice -- and, now that I think of it, all three of these trips have been to a particularly lovely stretch of Park Avenue, one of my favorite places on earth. In a fun coincidence: the first trip yesterday was to see the famous homosexual dermatologist for a mole biopsy (removed from my body, not his), and the second trip was for a cancer benefit at the Four Seasons. Life ties up such thematic packages, no? Back downtown for a lovely dinner with a friend in what used to be the deep East Village and now seems to be Melrose Place. On Avenue A, a wild-haired homeless man wielding a giant pipe took out the back window of a police cruiser; first two shouting cops with guns, then four shaking cops with guns, then eight screaming cops with guns. Gapers gaped stockstill; my sensible companion ducked us below the cars and pulled me along into the dark Odessa cafe, where youngsters (literally) clad in trucker cabs swilled Bud. Across the street we saw twenty cops pile on the pipe-swinging crazy man like black ants swarming the last morsel of the picnic. ⊕

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Tuesday, September 16

The screenshot below is of a headline and story excerpt posted on the BBC news website, found on the afternoon of Sunday, September 14th, 2003:

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