Author and Artist
A Proper Freedom
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
At the triangled corner of Market and McAlister streets, I inch my way through the Proper Hotel foyer. A doorman dressed like a black belt ninja, asks in quiet, reassuring tones, “Would you like a security escort, sir?”
In a daring act of civic optimism, my hip San Francisco hotel sits in the middle of an earthquake zone of human misery. On the hotel’s doorstep—up close, too close—are the homeless, the mentally ill, the poverty-trapped.
The monsters who hid under my boyhood bed are on the prowl. As if mocking me, a cheery, multi-colored ‘weave mural’ by Alicia McCarthy covers the eight-story hotel from top to bottom.
My gut dry heaves.
I didn’t want to leave my hotel room. I certainly don’t want to leave the hotel.
Littering the streetscape, like so much abandoned salvage, are broken lives. Men, mostly men, sleep in doorways. Urine, vomit and shit assault my nostrils. Stick-figure drug addicts stare with cabaret amusement as a whore screams at her pimp. Crazed men and women, probably crackheads, dart into traffic.
Looking down on the filthy streets from my hotel window, a virtual village—a city-within-a-city—struggles to survive. Above the sordid and sorry shops, the tenderloin is as torn and tumultuous as a war zone. It’s a subject I assign my high school civics students to essay about.
A gauntlet away are the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora. City Hall and the Opera House—built in the culturally-appropriated Parisian Beaux-Arts Revival style—seem as unreachably distant as if they were in a different city.
Here, I’m an immigrant. An outsider.
In a civilized act of grace, private auto traffic on Market Street, the city’s Champs-Elysées, is banned. Turn-of-the-century lamp posts and leafy plane trees watch as historic streetcars clatter by. I’d like to stroll along the boulevard towards the Ferry Building, but don’t.
There’s no crime called homelessness, so there’s no one to call. The dirty, the down-and-out, the displaced deserve better.
So do I.
I’m in San Francisco to be entertained. To unshackle from the classroom, the colleagues and commitments that anchor my life.
On the road, I’m transformed. Like a molting snake, my phony outer skin peels away. The empathetic teacher, the always helpful co-worker, the responsible citizen is left behind at the airport.
The phony avatar that others think that I am is no more. I travel alone—callously, selfishly. My secret self stays secret. I refuse to let reality ruin a perfectly good vacation.
I’ve got a particular privilege that many in this living city will never have. The liberty to leave. Homeless people don’t have freedom to move into good housing; workers on subpar wages don’t have the freedom to quit their shit jobs.
My tourist dollars buy me the permission to enjoy the best of a place—its pomp and pageantry—without getting to know its underbelly. I’m not here for that.
Life isn’t fair. Not my problem.
Back home, I’ll fake doing better. I will. I’m practiced at pretending.
At the car rental agency, I book a convertible for a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. At the overlook at the end of the bridge, only three miles away, I pull over.
The city sparkles.
