Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

Gypsy awakens from a restless sleep, stretches, hears his bones crack. Sees how the curtains in his room at the Cadillac Hotel absorb the light of a late afternoon on Eddy Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and at that moment decides to start drinking again.

He doesn’t remember having a booze dream, just woke up and decided: Today is the day I’m going to get fucked up. Something clicks into place. Thank God, it’s been settled. For days he had been agitated and unable to sleep. His body ached from the weight of his bitterness. He tried to read some of his old textbooks on alcoholism and its treatment, tried to take pleasure in his term papers and the comments scrawled in red by his professors, Nice insight! and Excellent observation! but those evening extension classes at U. C. Berkeley had been nothing but a betrayal, an illusion of accomplishment, and he tossed the books and his notepads across the room with a rage that kept him awake at night. He had done everything he should, and still he was denied the promotion he deserved.

Now that he has decided to drink, he feels calm and almost falls asleep again. He folds his hands behind his head and plans. He’ll do his shift at the Ozanam Center as scheduled. When he gets off, he’ll wait for me. I’m interviewing for shelter director at nine. Gypsy had pushed me to apply, and he’ll want to wish me well. Then he’ll start drinking.

When Jim Curtis, the director of the Ozanam Center, hired me in May 1983, he assigned me to nights: 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., five days a week, Saturday to Wednesday.

My first evening, the shift supervisor, Bill Vidaver, took me up a flight of stairs to a room filled with intoxicated men and women. Some of them were shaking. Others were passed out. Still others smoked and stared at the floor as if they were ashamed. A deep brown carpet made the dimly lit space even dimmer. Six round tables took up one side of the room, and four couches provided additional places to pass out when the thirty-bed dormitory behind the kitchenette filled up.

A man with thinning black hair, a handlebar mustache, plaid shirt, jeans, and boots sat behind a desk. He glanced at me and then turned away to change stations on a radio playing Muzak.

Still in his room at the Cadillac, Gypsy rolls a joint. He is sober. Not clean and sober. Sober, period. Not like some of the other recovering Ozanam staff who smoke dope but say they’re sober and clean. That bugs him. The lies. He never pretends he doesn’t smoke pot. Gave Little Stevie a joint one morning on Seventh Street when Stevie had the shakes so bad he couldn’t walk, just rattled in place like an idling car with a bad engine. Stevie had been on the street fifteen years easy. Drinking maybe longer. He and Gypsy hung out together when Gypsy was doing his thing. A sight, the two of them. Gypsy over six feet and Little Stevie peaking at five foot four on a good day. Face dirt-streaked, scraggly goatee, mop of brown hair, long tobacco-stained fingers dancing with the jitters, Stevie, shaking uncontrollably, looks to his friend Gypsy for help.

Gypsy held the joint that morning until Stevie’s body ceased quaking long enough for him to clamp his trembling lips around it. He inhaled so long and deep Gypsy thought he might burst. After another hit Stevie collapsed, higher than God, in the doorway of a used clothing store. Gypsy left him there to buy a mickey of Thunderbird at Fred’s Liquor store a good two blocks away. He gave it to Stevie, who held it in both hands like an infant with a bottle of formula and downed it in four hard swallows, his Adam’s apple dancing up and down his throat. Then he belched and let out a long sigh, staining the air with the venom of his breath.

Stevie laughed, showing toothless gums flecked with bits of weed. Gypsy gave him two dollars, one extra for inflation, he said, and walked to work. He felt good about helping Stevie but a little ashamed too, because he felt he was better than Stevie. He had beaten booze. The framed certificates he’d accumulated from the alcoholism classes he’d completed at Berkeley hung on his walls. Maybe it wasn’t superiority he felt but confidence. Maybe he was just grateful not to be in the same shape as Little Stevie. He didn’t know, didn’t dwell on it. He pocketed the joint and kept walking.

Hands clasped behind his head, Gypsy imagines his first swallow of Jack Daniel’s. It will fill him with warmth like a spring day after a long winter, gradually spreading its heat into every muscle, until all the stiffness in his neck and shoulders vanishes and his head clears of anger. The booze will burn his throat, leave his mouth dry and in need of more. He’ll order a beer and another shot of Jack, run his tongue against his teeth. He has a reservoir he needs to fill.

After Bill left, Gypsy told me about a sex addict who had tried to check into detox weeks before. The addict told Bill he went through ten male prostitutes a day. “Oh,” Bill said. “Oh, oh! I can’t stand it! Give me one!” Kind of jumping in his seat as the guy described each of his encounters. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Of all my addictions, why couldn’t I have had that one?” Bill said in a high-pitched drawl, exaggerating every syllable. At least that was the way Gypsy imitated him.

Bill was a recovering dope fiend. Been clean maybe five years, Gypsy said. Never cuts his hair, ties it off with a rubber band into a long ponytail and considers it combed for the day.

Always wears a long underwear top no matter how hot the weather and an open chamois shirt. Has enough track marks on his arm to map out a road trip. Promoted to counselor a few months back.

“Oh!” Gypsy said, imitating him again, “Oh!” and laughed some more, a light breathy laugh, and I laughed with him.

That night Gypsy told me he had started drinking in the army in the 1970s. After his discharge, he roamed the country. Drank Jack Daniel’s in the back of Greyhound buses to be close to the bathroom. He would pass out, wake up, and ask the driver where they were headed. His friends started calling him Gypsy because he never stayed in one place very long before he came to California. He was thirty-seven when I met him and had been in San Francisco ten years.

The police often picked up fucked-up homeless people. They slipped on plastic gloves, pulled men and women infested with lice from the back of their squad cars, and delivered them to the Ozanam Center. Intake counselors like me checked them in. They could stay twenty-four hours. Ten days had to pass before they were eligible for detox again, a rule that was little more than a token effort at preventing the detox from becoming a nightly crash pad for alcoholics. It was obvious from the thickness of the files that the majority of clients returned to the center repeatedly and saw the detox as their permanent home. The intake took seconds to complete: name, age, when did they have their last drink, any known medical conditions. Then the client climbed the flight of stairs to detox, their steps heavy and slow until they stood swaying before Gypsy and me. We assigned them a bed, gave them a towel and soap, and pointed them to the shower.

There is no logic to good fortune or bad.

An unpredictable randomness influences the outcome of most things.

Almost everyone admitted to detox knew Gypsy from the street. “Gypsy!” they would shout in hoarse voices ruined by cigarettes and booze. Gypsy growled back in the same tone and they would all burst out laughing, reveling in a camaraderie that came from common experience and shared ruin. Gypsy would do them favors: wash their clothes, call their families, allow them to stay in detox longer than twenty-four hours. They treated him with the joyous self-consciousness a delinquent high school student might feel visiting his favorite grammar school teacher.

Not all of them liked Gypsy. I recall one guy in particular. He was lean and all sinewy muscle and had done time in San Quentin for drug dealing. He walked stiff-legged and with his back arched in a jailhouse strut. Call his name and he’d swivel around in a hot second, perfectly balanced like a ballerina, lasering you with a what-do-you-want-look. This guy—I don’t remember his name—thought Gypsy had gotten too full of himself. Who did he think he was, taking college classes? He was confident Gypsy would start drinking again because, he said, Gypsy was going nowhere. Nothing in his life had changed except his ego. Was he employed in the financial district or something? Was he hanging out with suits? Did he know anyone other than the guys he put in detox? No, Gypsy was still working the street even if it was as an intake counselor. The only difference was, he wasn’t drinking.

During our shift, Gypsy often recited passages he had memorized from his textbooks, but I never had the sense he fully understood what he was saying. He had all this information in his head about alcoholism yet seemed unable to interpret it and draw conclusions or make it his own. He often lost his train of thought, and at those times began to mumble insensibly. Then, when his mind reconnected with the memorized bit, he’d speak clearly again. Most of the staff ignored him when he went off on one of his textbook monologues. They patronized him with the feigned interest adults reserve for the antics of very small children.

I don’t think Gypsy picked up on their condescension. Addicts are by their nature self-centered. It’s all about the next drink, the next fix, the next near disaster. In Gypsy’s case it was about the next class, the next certificate, the next chance to recite data from his textbooks as if it meant something.

After a detox client had showered, we offered him or her a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a sandwich: cheese, peanut butter and jelly, or tuna fish. We stretched the soup by adding so much water that it lost its color and globs of pale fat rose to the surface like decomposing jellyfish. The sandwiches were made in the morning. By the time I came in to work they were either soggy or hard as bricks.

Twenty-four hours later, we referred clients to the Salvation Army detox—Sally’s, we called it—on Harrison Street, where they remained for three additional days of drying out. From there, if they were lucky, an inpatient alcoholism program took them in. But most city programs were full, and the waiting lists could be months long. With no options other than white-knuckled sobriety, they returned to the street and we saw them again in ten days.

I gradually noticed that most of the clients who stopped drinking had a college education and a solid job history before alcohol overpowered them. Sober, they recognized they still had opportunities they could pursue. They had professional backgrounds and family support that would help them make up for the years wasted boozing.

In addition, I saw that the Ozanam Center hired most of its staff from halfway houses. They knew how to cadge drinks and drugs, and their only friends were other street hustlers. They started out like me, as intake counselors, until they were promoted to counselor, a position they kept for as long as they stayed at the center. Further advancement to an administrative position required a university degree, which most of them didn’t have.

He wondered if the credits from his extension courses would add up to a degree. I didn’t know, and suggested he look into it. He said he would. As the senior program assistant, he expected to be promoted to counselor when a position opened.

I imagine Gypsy staring at the ceiling of his room, waiting. He decides to resign before he starts drinking again. He won’t be like some of the other staff who have fallen off and then never show up to work again. He’s more responsible than that. He’ll complete his shift and resign effective immediately, before he punches out and waits for me. Not much of a heads-up but it will do. They’ll find someone to replace him. Everyone wants extra hours. Some guy at a halfway house will need a job. Gypsy will come back to get his final check, he doesn’t know when. If he must, he’ll ask someone to pick it up for him.

He looks at his watch. He has more than twelve hours to wait before he holds a Jack-filled shot glass in his hand. Twelve hours. A ways to go. He’ll make up for lost time soon enough.

My first night on the job, Gypsy would not allow me a break. He wanted me to see the shift in its entirety, he said, every little thing. I struggled to stay awake, checked on sleeping clients, and mopped the floors several times while Gypsy took a nap for two hours. Later he admitted he had been fucking with me because I was new.

He dared me one night to walk down Sixth Street on my way to work to see for myself San Francisco’s skid row. I knew he was messing with me again but took him up on it to show I wasn’t afraid. In the 1950s, the row was centered downtown, just south of Market Street on Howard between Third and Fourth and more or less leaching into streets and alleys for a few blocks all around. It was where most of San Francisco’s chronic street alcoholics hung out during the day, bought their booze, panhandled, and slept in flophouses or doorways. The area was gentrified beginning in the 1970s with then controversial urban-renewal programs that tore down cheap housing. The result: Sixth Street between Market and Howard became the new row.

Neon lights glowed in multiple colors above triple-X arcades the night I took Gypsy’s dare. Liquor stores lined both sides of the street with posters in their windows advertising ninety-nine-cent pint bottles of Night Train and Thunderbird. Dilapidated welfare hotels, once called flophouses, rose above the liquor stores, and chunks of broken plaster and shattered glass and pigeon shit speckled the sidewalks. Men lounged in doorways and poorly lit lobbies where televisions flickered in spastic bursts. I passed vacant stores, peered down gloomy alleys that echoed with the gruff voices of invisible people. I glanced into bars and saw men and women huddled together like gnomes: not speaking, staring absently, heavy-lidded and confused. They leaned forward on crutches and watched me, knowing by my determined gait that I had a destination and therefore did not belong there. People on the sidewalk clutched at me demanding change, spouting slurred words, their clothes piss-stained. I hurried the rest of the way to work.

Gypsy told me he had had his last drink at a Sixth Street bar in 1981, about two years before I moved to San Francisco. By then he had been homeless and out of work as a truck driver for about five years. Someone had snatched his shoes when he had passed out on the street earlier in the day, and he entered the bar barefoot. He sat on a stool, stared at his lap, and used his last few dollars to buy a drink. His mouth tasted like he had cleaned gutters with his tongue. Threads of saliva hung off his bottom lip and fell on his toes. A sad song was playing on a radio behind the bar.

He stood up and walked out without finishing his drink. He stumbled and weaved the few blocks to the Ozanam Center and checked into detox. After twenty-four hours he was transferred to the Salvation Army. He told a counselor he wanted a program. Just Gypsy’s luck, the Army’s Rehabilitation Center had an opening.

On the nights when the detox was quiet and Gypsy and I sat together listening to people snore, he would sometimes whisper to himself the opening line of the Allen Ginsberg poem “Howl”:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

One morning after work, we went out for coffee and then walked to North Beach and City Lights Bookstore, founded by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There Gypsy showed me books by Ginsberg and other writers who’d come to prominence in the fifties for their jazzy word riffs. Gypsy had attended some of their readings back in the 1960s. He leafed through books and read aloud to himself.

After an hour I wanted to go home and crash. Gypsy, however, was not tired. He offered to walk with me to the bus stop although I was headed in the opposite direction from where he lived. He stayed with me until I caught my bus. I sat by a window and watched him pace as if uncertain which direction to take. Eventually, I knew, he would go home and get stoned. He would then roam the streets, impelled by a restlessness that put him on autopilot, an itch he couldn’t control.

On the afternoon he finished his program at the Army Rehabilitation Center, Gypsy checked into a halfway house and then spent the afternoon with his buddy Rocky at the corner of Market and Van Ness. Rocky held out a hat to passersby. Gypsy had drunk with Rocky as much as he had with Little Stevie. Rocky was a gentle man. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt stained from constant wear and too little laundry detergent. He always wore a loopy grin that let everyone see that he was in on the joke that was his life.

Another homeless man, Alabama, sat across the street on a planter drinking a mickey of Thunderbird. He suffered fierce alcoholic seizures that spun him in violent circles before he collapsed to the ground flopping and twisting like someone electrocuted. He always had bloodstained gauze wrapped around his battered head and face from the many falls resulting from his seizures. On that day, he was to relieve Rocky every other hour to allow Rocky a turn at the wine bottle.

Gypsy smelled Rocky’s breath, the blended funk of cigarettes and wine rolled into a churning ball of foul heat, and his stomach turned. He felt the crisp newness of his shirt and jeans, the cleanliness of his body that for more than a month had experienced a shower every morning. He heard the noise of cars, the scuffing of shoes on the sidewalk, the flutter of pigeons. Gypsy tingled with the hyperaware sensation of being free of the Salvation Army. He was outside, sober, alert.

He had no place to go except back to the halfway house. Sit in his room and stare at the walls, alone and sober. Attend an AA meeting. Think about how good he felt not being fucked up.

Gypsy treated our shifts as seminars on alcoholism. He was the lecturer, I the student. He told me it took three days to get alcohol completely out of the body, that alcoholism had nothing to do with the kind of alcohol one drank or how long one had been drinking or even how much alcohol one consumed. He said alcohol abuse differs from alcoholism in that it did not include extreme craving for alcohol, loss of control, or physical dependence.

He would close his eyes and crinkle his forehead, conjuring more knowledge, and then, as if unburdening himself, continue imparting all that he had memorized in the early morning hours while I struggled to stay awake.

I wonder if a question occurred to Gypsy as he sat in his room at the Cadillac: What’s a shot of Jack cost? I see him stand up and run his hand through his hair, thinking. Doesn’t matter. Even if a shot is dirt cheap, his money won’t last. Never did before. He’ll be drinking dollar bottles of Night Train and Thunderbird before the week’s out. Pissing and shitting himself, too. He sees his future but remains undeterred. He has no false expectations.

He takes another hit from his joint. He glances about his room: the disheveled bed, dirty clothes on the floor, spilled ashtrays, the broken chair by the closet, crumpled cigarette packs everywhere. He has lived in the Cadillac for four years. He never changed his clothes when he was drinking unless he went to a homeless shelter and was given something new to wear. Tossed his old shit down and put on the new shit. He still does that. No one picks up the old shit now. It stays on the floor until he decides to wash it or give it to the Ozanam Center’s clothes closet. Maybe today he’ll do laundry. Then again, what’s the point? When he gets off work he won’t be going back.

I stayed on nights for two months before Curtis moved me to days at my request. I had decided to apply to San Francisco State University and earn a master’s degree in social work. I would need my nights free for classes and homework.

My new shift started at 6:30 in the morning, just as Gypsy was getting off. He’d meet me downstairs and we’d sit with clients who had come in the drop-in for coffee and rolls. More often than not, Gypsy stuck around for hours talking to Little Stevie, Rocky, and Eddie Conover, one of the few clients who went by his real name. Gypsy played pinochle with them in the area where people waited for detox. He taught me how to play.

Eddie always passed out in the middle of a game and pissed himself, the piss striking the floor in a steady stream like runoff from a gutter. He was beyond waking up, and Gypsy would help me carry him to a mat to sleep it off.

Sometimes, on my days off, I’d meet Gypsy at the Cadillac and we’d get stoned. He showed me his term papers, all of them graded A-plus. Some were typed, others written in neat, tight script. His punctuation, grammar, and footnotes were spot-on. He pointed out his certificates. He ran a finger under the University of California logo at the top of each one to emphasize that he was not attending just any school.

We walked the streets looped out of our minds, stopping to talk to the handful of homeless men and women who knew him. They called out to Gypsy in raspy voices I will always associate with people on the street who smoke too much and are exposed to every kind of inclement weather. Other of his acquaintances nodded silently and walked past, and Gypsy let them go without a word. He shook the ones who were passed out to see if they were asleep or dead. He doled out cigarettes and change and advised anyone who would listen to check into detox.

“I’m not eligible,” Little Stevie told him one afternoon. “My ten days ain’t up.”

“What’s going to become of us, Gypo?” Little Stevie said, tears in his eyes.

The director of the night shelter resigned about six months after I moved to days. The executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society posted a job announcement. Applicants needed at least two years of experience in social services, a background in alcoholism treatment, and a college degree. Intake workers and counselors complained about the education requirement because none of them could meet it. A few decided to apply anyway.

That morning, after Gypsy got off his shift, we had coffee. He was quiet at first, and I could tell he was mulling something over.

First of the month, everybody had their welfare and disability checks. It’d be a few days before they spent all their money and needed a place to stay.

Then Gypsy suggested I apply for the shelter director job. No transition, nothing, just boom, you should apply. I laughed, told him he was nuts. I didn’t have the experience.

“Experience is something you pick up every day,” he said. “Education takes time. I’m still not done with my classes. I don’t know how long it will take. You have a college degree. You have that much.”

I heard no resentment in his voice, no veiled anger toward a new colleague who also happened to be a college graduate and more than ten years his junior. I was not an alcoholic. I had never been on the street.

I heard in his voice the weariness of someone who had been up all night with too little to do and who was still awake and knew he would be unable to sleep for hours. Perhaps in his exhaustion he had an image of his own future and, in a moment of clarity, seeing where his life would lead, decided to pass his ambitions on to me.

The end came when a counselor position opened. Curtis thought the center needed to promote more women. Only four were on staff. He gave the job to Mary, an intake counselor who was a new employee.

I don’t know how Gypsy heard about Mary. He came in that afternoon with a bicycle pack filled with his framed certificates. I wasn’t there, but I heard he walked into Curtis’s office and placed each certificate on his desk. He began shouting. Everyone watched him through the glass window of Curtis’s office that overlooked the drop-in. Curtis waited for Gypsy to finish. Then he spoke. When he finished, he and Gypsy stared at each other for a long time before Gypsy slumped slightly. He gathered his certificates into his bicycle pack and then hesitated. He stared at the pack for a long time. Then he tossed it to the floor and walked out.

Shortly after I was hired at the Ozanam Center, I’d spoken to Curtis about the extension classes offered at Berkeley. Alcoholism was considered a disability, and Gypsy and other recovering staff were eligible for state aid. The California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation covered their tuition. I, on the other hand, would have to pay out of pocket. The classes cost $300 apiece.

He considered my question, looked down at his desk and then back at me. A recovering alcoholic himself, he had lost an eye somehow and had had it replaced with an artificial one that was larger than his real eye. The new eye appeared magnified, and I never knew how to look at him without staring at it. So I focused on the knot in his tie.

“I wouldn’t do it,” he said, finally. “You’d learn something, but for the cost all you’ll get is a certificate. So what? You already have a college degree. Spend your money on grad school.”

Gypsy finishes his joint, puts on his shoes. He writes a check for his rent and includes a note giving thirty days’ notice. He knows the manager of the Cadillac will keep his damage deposit. Someone will clean his room, clear out his clothes, and toss everything else. He feels an odd lightness followed by a brief flash of apprehension.

He leaves the Cadillac and walks toward Leavenworth Avenue. He will cut through Civic Center Park, cross Market Street, and turn down Seventh. He knows everyone who hangs out in the park, just as he knows about every street person in San Francisco. They’ll give him shit because this time he won’t be generous with his change and smokes. He understands what’s coming. He knows he’ll go through his cigarettes and money soon enough. They won’t know until later. Then they’ll understand.

The Ozanam Center’s board of directors interviewed me for shelter director along with seven other candidates from outside the agency. I didn’t get the job. I was disappointed but also relieved. I knew I wasn’t ready. In 1986 the position opened up again, and this time the board hired me.

About a week after my interview, I saw Gypsy waiting to sign into detox. He sat in a corner chair wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a navy-blue stocking cap. His face was lined with dirt and his clothes smelled of wood smoke, as if he’d been camping. He refused to look at me. Tears streaked his grimed face. I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing.

I look back at that moment now and think that Gypsy had no sense of himself. His emptiness was complete. Just as it was that morning he walked me to the bus stop; uncertain, walking one way and then the other, no options. He was the number of extension classes he had completed, the amount of text he had memorized. When that failed to earn him a promotion, he had nothing, and, worse, nothing mattered.

Gypsy was admitted to detox but walked out the next day. I never saw him again. Perhaps he got on a Greyhound bus and left to start over elsewhere. I hope so. I don’t want to remember him as I do Little Stevie, Rocky, Alabama, Eddie Conover, and the dozens of others I admitted to detox who drank themselves to early deaths.

I prefer to remember the last time I saw him sober. I had arrived for my job interview at 8 a.m. wearing a suit and tie. A few of the staff whistled, and I couldn’t help but laugh despite my nervous state. Bill gave me shit about my college degree, but wished me luck.

An Ozanam Center board member stepped out of a room on the mezzanine and called my name. I stood, rubbed my sweating palms against my pants. Halfway up the stairs I glanced down and saw Gypsy emerge from the drop-in. I wouldn’t know until the next day that he had completed his final shift and delivered his resignation letter. He was wearing a leather jacket, plaid shirt, jeans, and polished brown boots. Hair slicked to one side, his gunfighter mustache trimmed to perfection. He raised a hand and I waved back.

The board member gestured to me and Gypsy nodded encouragement. I continued up the stairs. I looked back one last time to see Gypsy push open a side door and turn right, toward Sixth Street.