There were a lot of homeless people at the beach.
Most of them were your stereotypical homeless.
Shaggy beards.
Ripped t-shirts.
Dirty hair.
Most of them delivered papers and did construction under the table for forty dollars a day.
Some would wonder why they didn’t save up and buy nice clothes to get a job.
The truth is, forty dollars a day didn’t buy shit in San Diego in 2000 and probably buys even less now.
The money went to eating a cheeseburger at Jack in the Box and the rest went to booze.
I remember one homeless man who collected cans on the beach.
When you were on a San Diego beach, you would just throw your beer and soda cans on the beach so the homeless wouldn’t have to sift through the garbage to get them.
I remember an old, almost dead Chinese man who was wearing the traditional blue Mao Communist outfit.
He had built a yoke out of a plastic pipe and attached two huge garbage bags to the ends.
He carried it down the beach with no emotion at all.
I doubt he had time for emotions.
He would put his yoke down and pick up some cans and put them into one of the bags.
Then pick up the yoke again and walk down the beach.
I sat and watched that.
It was real and could not be denied.
CHINESE FOOD AND URINATION
I was in downtown San Diego one day in 2000.
I was hungry and looking for cheap food.
I stumbled upon this Chinese food cafeteria that served a Styrofoam bowl of one food item for ninety-nine cents.
I went in.
It looked like it had booths from a closed down fast-food restaurant.
It was bare.
Not even one of those pictures of Hong Kong on the wall.
Walked up to the counter and picked out three items for three dollars.
Then sat down and ate.
There were a lot of homeless there.
There were perhaps more homeless in downtown San Diego than on the beaches.
The homeless all had cuts and bruises.
Most of them were crazy or had chosen, through the sick and brutal contingency of experience, that it was better to be drunk, on crack, to drop out.
That to face the rigid routine and institutions of work, family, romance, and upholding false notions was too much for them to bear.
That to be drunk or on drugs, and without those institutions, existence was better and easier to face.
I always gave the homeless a dollar or two and bought them cheeseburgers.
I didn’t give them money and food because I thought it was my duty or some form of charity.
But because I understood. I had traveled two-thousand five-hundred miles to San Diego to escape my life.
I knew what drove people to escape, the causes that make it very possible for a person to just say, “Go fuck yourself, world. What good have you done for me anyway!”
It wasn’t charity.
It was solidarity.
A oneness in the understanding that the shit of life never ends, and that we are all victims of a mass hysteria of stupidity.
I left the cafeteria and walked down the street. While walking I saw a homeless woman covertly pull down her pants and piss on one of the big bank buildings.
I laughed and walked on.
WE THE PEOPLE
While I lived in San Diego, I stayed in a small boarding house.
I lived in a decent-sized room with Tom, the kid from New Zealand.
The room had two single beds, a closet and a sink with a small mirror, and a television with cable.
We had to share a kitchen and a bathroom with the other renters.
Through this sharing I met the other people who lived there.
The person who ran the boarding house was named Alex.
He was an ex-marine who fought in Vietnam and got shot.
Then he was a cop and got shot there too.
Then for someone reason got involved in doing drugs and got shot twice while doing that.
He loved to show people his bullet wounds.
He was very proud of them.
Alex also had an obsession with weapons. The office he worked in had ninja swords, guns, bows, and knives all over the walls.
He would show Tom and I his real expensive guns and swords all the time.
He was also obsessed with buying shit off of eBay like gold rings, necklaces, and tons of golden shit. That is also where he got his guns.
He would buy really expensive shit every day, which didn’t make sense to Tom and I because he lived so cheaply and was so white trash.
We asked him about it one day and he said that back in the mid-nineties, he threw a bunch of money in Microsoft stock and made a shitload and immediately pulled it out.
Alex would sit all night in his room and watch porn.
And I mean all night.
The boarding house didn’t have air-conditioning, so the windows would stay open all night.
Alex’s window was on the first floor.
Every time Tom and I walked by his window at night, we could see porn on his television through the window.
There was a guy who everybody called the Chaplain.
Everybody called him the Chaplain because he claimed that he was a chaplain in the Navy for twenty years.
No one believed him though. He was completely insane.
The Chaplain had no job. Like most people in the boarding house, he got money from the government for being nuts.
The Chaplain would always start talking about God to you while you were cooking in the kitchen, not Christian Republican God talk, but his own cracked version of it. It would usually go like this: “See, God is like a flower.
“Delicate and beautiful.
“God, you know, made the universe from rocks and dust from an alien spaceship.
“Sometimes when I touch myself I feel that God wants me to.
“God doesn’t want me to go to the mall.
“He knows how drunk I get when I become the Godhead and swim the thousand oceans of the devil and slithering snakes of shit and gargoyle breath.
“My brother once jammed a stick in my anus and God told me He did that to test me.
“God sent birds to attack my mother.
“God is going to return and take me to heaven to sit beside Him on the throne.”
The Chaplain was insane.
At night he would sit at a desk till five in the morning, working.
Tom and I assumed it was on some strange long manuscript that resembled the word salad schizophrenic shit he would tell us while we were in the kitchen.
It gets weirder than that.
The whole time he worked at night, he wore a t-shirt pushed back on his head, kind of like a nun’s habit.
The Chaplain was a madman.
With no apparent purpose but to do nothing and annoy people.
He was completely nuts and no one wanted him around.
There was an Islamic black girl named Fatima.
She wore soft dresses that covered her arms and legs.
She also wore a hijab that covered her hair.
She was attractive and very strange.
Fatima was married to some guy Tom and I never saw.
Fatima said that her husband had another wife and that he spent most of his time with her.
His other wife had the kids and took care of the nice house.
You got the impression she was his hot young wife that he supported and fucked for fun.
Fatima had no real problem with that.
Her husband paid her bills and gave her spending money.
I assumed Fatima took that deal because she was so fucked up in the head she couldn’t work anywhere without getting fired within two weeks.
So it was like SSI without having to fuck around with the government.