The Message — Grandmaster Flash
#365Songs: December 13th
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
They broke ground on a new high rise condo building at 8th and Harrison in San Francisco right around when I started my Airbnb job in 2014. I walked past this construction site, twice daily. That was one of the ways I marked time: days and months passing by as the building grew taller.
The other way I marked time was by the three men who lived in two tents beneath the 101 underpass, steps away from the short alley I walked down, where I flashed a badge at a sensor to open a door that welcomed me into one of the most beautiful office spaces in the world, inside a building where it was warm in the winter and cool in the summer, where hundreds of people smiled at me and said hello, where a full culinary team prepared and fed me fresh, restaurant-quality meals multiple times each day, where I got to do what I loved while supporting my small family.
The first time I saw these men, back in July 2014, they were hosing down the sidewalk beneath the underpass. They’d connected the hose to a faucet attached to one of the buildings in the alley, and sprayed the fence that separated their 5x5 stretch of pavement, their home, from a parking lot. They sprayed their tents, inside and out. They sprayed parts of the alley, and sprayed their toilet — a small plastic casserole dish sitting up against a concrete pillar, a makeshift bathroom still visible but at least slightly more hidden from the passing traffic.
These men cleaned once or twice a month, on no set schedule because when you’re unhoused I don’t imagine time matters much. They took down the home, placed their few belongings in a rusty old shopping cart — one of the guys had a torn-up stuffed bear, which I’d spotted on a few occasions. I didn’t acknowledge them simply because they didn’t acknowledge me. This was their home, and they seemed to take good care of that tiny concrete space beneath the underpass. I walked by each morning, each evening, and gave them the privacy they deserved. I don’t know if it was right or wrong, what they wanted or didn’t want.
I didn’t stop thinking about them after I passed, especially after the all-too-frequent meal when I’d portioned too much thoughtfully-prepared food onto my plate, or when I’d caught myself composting a barely-bitten piece of bread. I thought about them on my way back to BART each night, even as my eyes studied the pavement for piles of human excrement, those sad streets the only place where so many in that town called home, those commuting streets that double as the only available toilet in town.
It was always the same three men. Sometimes I overheard them talking. Put this here, put that there. Move over, come here. Once, I saw one of the guys smile at the other two.
The last winter I saw them was cold, wet. An El Nino was brewing up historic ocean temperatures. I hadn’t seen the men clean in quite some time. And though they’d always been gaunt, as one would expect, they seemed so much more broken, less active. Thinner, ill. I hadn’t heard them talking, either, hadn’t seen them out of their tents much. The last time I saw them it was 38 degrees when I walked past them. I kicked around slush piles of hail a few days before that.
Towards the end, before they disappeared, I marked time by how those three men faded away.
That was also the year the Bay Area hosted Super Bowl 50. San Francisco cleared the streets, ushered thousands of unhoused to who knows where, cleaned the streets, put on a show. I never saw those men after that.
I think about them a lot, even now. The stark contrasts of American life, an accumulation of wealth and power in cities where the educated solve all the wrong problems. I thought about those men the day George Floyd was murdered, throughout the pandemic, and again today as I read about Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely.
Broken glass everywhere
People pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away but I couldn’t get far
Cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car
Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to lose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
Let’s start with Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused man and former Michael Jackson impersonator. When he was 14, his mother was murdered by a boyfriend, her body eventually discovered on the side of a highway. Jordan was called to testify. Years later, as time passed in those subway stations, he fell into major depression and major PTSD, began exhibiting schizophrenic symptoms, and was arrested many times — mostly for petty crimes. He begged for help.
Nobody came.
Then there’s Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old Marine who boarded the same train as Neely on May 1st, 2023. According to others on the train, Neely was screaming that he was hungry, thirsty, in need of a job, unafraid of prison or death. He threw his coat to the ground, and garbage around the train, but never touched another passenger. That’s when Daniel Penny jumped in, putting Neely into a chokehold for at least five minutes. By the time the train reached the station, Jordan Neely was dead.
Standin’ on the front stoop hangin’ out the window
Watchin’ all the cars go by, roarin’ as the breezes blow
Crazy lady, livin’ in a bag
Eatin’ outta garbage pails, used to be a fag hag
Said she’ll dance the tango, skip the light fandango
A Zircon princess seemed to lost her senses
Down at the peep show watchin’ all the creeps
So she can tell her stories to the girls back home
She went to the city and got so so seditty
She had to get a pimp, she couldn’t make it on her own
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
Four days ago, Penny was acquitted of murder. In an interview with Fox News, he said, “The guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt.” A stark reminder that to Penny, and his cheerleaders, Neely was not someone, less than human, unworthy of compassion.
In the most predictable move, incoming Vice President JD Vance invited him to the Army Navy football game as his special guest — a moment reminiscent of other vigilante right winger heroes like Kyle Rittenhouse and the Jan 6th insurrectionists.
Listen, this is nothing new. What we deem right and wrong, the way we mistake villains for heroes. How we dehumanize those whose struggles are so public. As our culture continues to darken, so too do the lines between who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s a martyr and who’s a criminal.
In a move that inched him closer to the title of world’s worst person, Elon Musk recently said, “Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet. What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”
My brother’s doin’ bad, stole my mother’s TV
Says she watches too much, it’s just not healthy
All My Children in the daytime, Dallas at night
Can’t even see the game or the Sugar Ray fight
The bill collectors, they ring my phone
And scare my wife when I’m not home
Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station
Neon King Kong standin’ on my back
Can’t stop to turn around, broke my sacroiliac
A mid-range migraine, cancered membrane
Sometimes I think I’m goin’ insane
I swear I might hijack a plane!
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
In 1981, Ronald Reagan passed the deinstitutionalization act, which in turn left thousands of mentally ill patients on the streets without care. The hero of the modern Republican Party, this was the same man who ignored the AIDS crisis, thus ensuring that the epidemic maximized suffering, death, and generational loss. The same man whose failed “war on drugs” imprisoned non-White drug dealers and users while ignoring the rampant cocaine use on Wall Street.
And it’s not just Reagan. We’ve had 20 years of Democrat Presidents since then, and none of them have done nearly enough to address our systemic inequities.
My son said, Daddy, I don’t wanna go to school
Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a fool
And all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper
Or dance to the beat, shuffle my feet
Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps
Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny
You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey
They pushed that girl in front of the train
Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again
Stabbed that man right in his heart
Gave him a transplant for a brand new start
I can’t walk through the park cause it’s crazy after dark
Keep my hand on my gun cause they got me on the run
I feel like a outlaw, broke my last glass jaw
Hear them say “You want some more?”
Livin’ on a see-saw
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
A few years ago, I learned that at least one of those unhoused men I passed each day had died. He was younger than me. A former engineer, he became addicted to opioids, and eventually heroin, after a difficult surgery. Though it’s been proven they knew the dangers, and pushed the drugs anyway, none of the Purdue Pharma executives — those who greenlit the mass consumption of Oxycontin — have been convicted of a crime. None of them are unhoused.
Though I vow to find hope in all this darkness, I struggle to process these events, how we continue to canonize the worst behaviors at the expense of empathy, humanity, and progress. Where do we go from here?
It seems that now, a decade after the first time I walked alongside that makeshift home beneath the underpass, I pass time by counting injustices. Waiting, pleading, screaming for some change, some semblance of collective sanity.
A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smilin’ on you but he’s frownin’ too
Because only God knows what you’ll go through
You’ll grow in the ghetto livin’ second-rate
And your eyes will sing a song called deep hate
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alleyway
You’ll admire all the number-book takers
Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money-makers
Drivin’ big cars, spendin’ twenties and tens
And you’ll wanna grow up to be just like them, huh
Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers
Pickpocket peddlers, even panhandlers
You say I’m cool, huh, I’m no fool
But then you wind up droppin’ outta high school
Now you’re unemployed, all non-void
Walkin’ round like you’re Pretty Boy Floyd
Turned stick-up kid, but look what you done did
Got sent up for a eight-year bid
Now your manhood is took and you’re a Maytag
Spend the next two years as a undercover fag
Bein’ used and abused to serve like hell
Til one day, you was found hung dead in the cell
It was plain to see that your life was lost
You was cold and your body swung back and forth
But now your eyes sing the sad, sad song
Of how you lived so fast and died so young so
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under
~
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