My city of contradictions

By Dan Moore

The city is alive.

I’m standing on the corner of Third and Mission, watching the traffic wash in and out like the exhalations of some great, concrete god, and that’s what I’m thinking: This place breathes.

Across the street, something catches my eye: A young Asian couple in trim-fitting clothes seated on chairs outside a cafe attempting to feed what I perceive to be their child. The baby?—?thin black hair pinned by a pink bow?—?kicks her feet joyously atop her mother’s softly bobbing knee. She seems totally uninterested in the small plastic spoon her dad keeps trying to coerce into her mouth. I tend to embellish such stuff, but I swear I can see something like a halo around the baby’s face, a radiation of curiosity. At some point she laughs, lifting a little baby finger toward one of the cafe’s other patrons seated at a different outdoor table. I try and follow her finger to see who she’s pointing at, but I get distracted by the nearly-completed Salesforce Tower in the distance, ascending into the fog four blocks east, a massive and marvelous totem to the landscape-morphing power of this city’s economic and technological might. For a while I stand there just looking at the tower, feeling amazed and thankful to live here, in this city that is alive and that feels like the center of the world. I love this city, I think.

At some point, however, my eyes turn to the other side of Mission, where a homeless man?—?or a man who at least appears to be homeless, caked as he is in layers of mud, bare feet coated in scales of volcanic black grime?—?lays crookedly on the sidewalk, twitching in sharp jolts. A different sort of spoon rests at his side. He lays there sort of slumped against the side of the Museum of the African Diaspora, and in his rigid bundle of dirty jackets, he reminds me of a rug someone’s rolled up and discarded, left to rot.

As I watch the man sleep, the fog above seems to get thicker, a sagging down comforter of dark grey, roughly the color of wet cement, and the smell of urine, lurid and vaguely purple, becomes more noticeable in the air.

I turn back to the couple in the cafe. The man is wearing a company-issued t shirt, and has gel in his hair. The woman sports high heels. They are surrounded by other well-dressed, similarly trim and clean youngish people?—?the kind of people tourists probably expect to see in San Francisco, smart people, successful people, creative people. People with whom the money this city generates might realistically be shared. People who work largely on laptops, maybe in co-working spaces decorated by inspirational phrases.People who’ve founded companies or sell ad space for people who’ve founded companies. People who work for or with Salesforce. People who treat themselves as works-in-progress. People blessed with the luxury of living in a city that feels like theirs. After they leave the cafe today, I imagine they’ll go back to their apartments set near the top of Russian Hill or near the top of Nob Hill or on the side Pacific Heights, apartments with hardwood floors and bay windowed-bedrooms and warm, comfortable views of the Golden Gate Bridge. And on the way they’ll pass women with red eyes not wearing any shoes. They’ll pass processions of men waiting in line for food outside of Glide. Humans composed of the same essential organs and possessing of the same basic needs and desires as them, with hopes and self-awareness. And while some of these people on their way home will offer to the shoeless a nod or a “no I’m sorry, no change” or maybe even a couple bucks, most will simply carry on their way, ignoring the indignity their neighbors endure. Because…what are they supposed to do? This is the way things are. You can’t eradicate this inequality on your own, and unless you desensitize yourself to its brutal reality, you’ll spend all your time infuriated and sad and depressed and detached…

At this point my pulse picks up, the quickening of dawning complicity. I feel as if I know these people sitting in the cafe. I feel this because I am one of these people. This is more clear to me than ever before.

Before I walk away, I turn back to the man sleeping outside the Museum of the African Diaspora. I wonder, what’s his story? What insidious twists of plot and fate landed him here? Passed out on a sidewalk at three in the afternoon, lost in a city corrupted by a confounding and endemic cruelty. A city of eternal and near bicameral contradictions. A city of magnificent wealth and medieval inequality. I realize: I don’t know this man at all.

By the time I finally leave the corner it becomes clear that, in my initial observation of the afternoon, I’d been dead wrong: This city is alive in the joyous, exciting, opportunistic way only for some. For others?—?for many?—?it is a dark, isolated place, a prison on a peninsula, a city of season-less skies sequestered on the lip of the edge of a continent, wherein days deliquesce into months and people get lost and forgotten. A city at once timeless and, yet, very much of its time. Of our time. It feels important to remain cognizant of this.

This article has been previously published on P.S. I Love You.