4th and King
By: Richard Mehlinger
Tags: Homelessness, San Francisco

San Francisco, 4th and King. Source.

If you’re looking to help, please consider donating to the Coalition on Homelessness through https://www.gofundme.com/safer-embarcadero-for-all.

In July 2017, I was lucky enough to start a job as a software engineer in San Francisco. I was well-paid, working with great people at a great company with (no lie) great food. The only real catch was — is — that I live in Sunnyvale, roughly forty miles south.

So every morning, I took the Caltrain to San Francisco, 4th and King. One of the first things you notice about 4th and King is how ugly it is. It’s a low slung, squat concrete and steel structure that offers the barest protections against the elements. There’s a Subway, a small food and liquor kiosk (you can drink on the Caltrain), some ATMs, a big clock. And there are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, always nattily dressed and armed with pamphlets in ten different languages. But then you notice something else.

At any given time of day, there is a small congregation of homeless folks at 4th and King. It offers some of the only free public restrooms for blocks and something approximating shelter from the weather. Perhaps most importantly, it has constant streams of commuters, any one of whom might just look on one of those poor souls with kindness, maybe buy them a bowl of soup, a bagel. Mostly though, they — we — fix our hundred-foot stare and get on with our day, getting away from that station as quickly as we can.

A vignette: It was December 2017. My friend and I had just stepped off the Caltrain at 4th and King. We were on our way to my company’s holiday party at the Palace Hotel. I was wearing a three-piece suit, she was wearing an elegant dress, and both of us were wearing that hundred-foot stare that anyone going through 4th and King knows too well.

We heard shouting, which we ignored, because it’s 4th and King. Ignored, that is, until we heard the words, “Someone call 911, he’s gonna die.” I looked over to see a black man wandering around, dazed, half of his body covered in blood. I can no longer remember if it was the left or the right half — only that it was as if someone had drawn a line down the middle, and one side of that line was red. He had apparently stabbed himself, for reasons that I never learned.

I had just read an article maybe a week or two before about the bystander effect, and how one is more likely to get someone to call 911 by pointing and telling a particular person to do so. So I announced loudly that I was calling 911, and did.

It was only when I got off the phone that I realized that the man covered in blood was holding a butcher knife. I had just called 911 on a mentally unwell black man with a knife, and all I could think was, “They are going to shoot him.”

Luckily — incredibly luckily — the man set down the knife and wandered away. I was able to dash over, grab it, and dash back away without him noticing me. Somehow I did this without getting blood on my suit. A man around my age who turned out to be a veteran called me over. He told me to put the knife on the ground and stay with him while we waited for the police.

The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics started treating the bleeding man for shock. A police officer took my statement, and the knife. I washed my hands at some point. Then my date and I got in a Lyft to the Palace Hotel.

We walked into a scene reminiscent of Versailles. A pair of models in red gowns stood in banded hoops from which one could pluck a champagne flute. There was food, dessert, wine, music. Dancing pandas. Live bands. A silent disco. Women in gowns, men in suits and tuxedos. A casino, with the buy-in going to a local charity. The night glittered. This time next year, I whispered, our heads will all be in baskets.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It was a delightful party. I certainly can’t fault a company for giving its employees a lavish evening. And yet, I never did find out what happened to the man. Did he survive the night? Did he get the help he needed? Is he still on the streets? I don’t know, and I never will.

After that night, I looked at 4th and King differently.

Certainly there are worse places than 4th and King. Caracas. Kandahar. Skid Row. But there is something uniquely awful about the juxtaposition of the wealthy professionals off to another work day with the homeless that they — we — walk past without a second glance. To see such affluence next to such desperate poverty, such totally unnecessary suffering… it’s one of the purest expressions of hell that I’ve ever seen. It seems perfectly engineered to destroy our compassion. It wounds the conscience if you stop to think about it.

Which is why we don’t, for the most part. We armor our hearts, because otherwise they might break. Otherwise, we might actually have to do something.

A year later, I transferred to the Mountain View office, a short bike ride from my apartment. Having become involved in activism in Sunnyvale, it was no longer tenable for me to go back and forth to San Francisco every day. And that’s true. Even with no driving, spending three hours a day commuting was utterly grueling. But if I’m being honest, I think part of it was that I just couldn’t bear 4th and King any more.

I read some live-tweets a couple nights ago about a meeting about a proposed new Navigation Center — a homeless shelter — located on the Embarcadero. A group calling itself “Safe Embarcadero” had started a fundraiser to hire a lawyer to block it. Angry residents shouted down city officials, yelled at Mayor London Breed to go home, and filed out of the meeting chanting, “We live here!” Just reading about this sad, cruel spectacle almost brought me to tears. All I could think about was the bloodied man at 4th and King.

I still go up to San Francisco once a week. I put on my hundred-foot stare, tell myself for the thousandth time that I already donate, and walk through 4th and King. I feel the blade scraping against the armor. I am afraid that one day it will find its way through. I am even more afraid that it never will.