It was 7:45pm and I was just getting back to my apartment at the end of the work day. This was before the Daylight Savings Time switch so it was 100% dark at this point, and both my front and rear bicycle lights were activated. As I decelerated onto the sidewalk in front of my place, my bulbs illuminated a thirty-something man hunched over the stoop at the base of the stairs.
When he first growled something, I didn't totally understand him and figured that he was probably asking for money. Honestly, my first reaction was to tell him to get the hell off of our front porch. I have no problem with beggars but I'd prefer that they don't loiter in front of my place of residence -- we have a hard enough time convincing friends that our neighborhood is non-sketchy.
It turns out that he didn't want money at all: he was asking me to call an ambulance. You see, he explained, he made a very bad decision earlier in the evening. He knew better than to take drugs: they were the reason he was living on the street in the first place. And he had been sober for quite some time, definitely a few months. But that day he decided to smoke some crack cocaine, and now his feet hurt so badly that he couldn't even walk. He asked me, please call him an ambulance so he can detox and receive the treatment & rehab that he really needs.
At first I was a bit apprehensive. My next (completely, entirely non-judgmental) thought was that this would be a pretty clever lead-in to punching me in the face and stealing my cell phone. I went upstairs to fetch Ari to be my second pair of eyes in case this man had nefarious intent. Then we called 911 and arranged for an ambulance to arrive in ten minutes or less.
So we chatted with this guy to kill time until then. It turns out, Kevin (as his name turned out to be) was an extremely nice guy. Or at least as nice as somebody could be while going through a drug relapse. His eyes may have been pointed different directions through the whole conversation, but he wore a fat grin and generously shared the details of his life and how he ended up on the streets of San Francisco.
Eventually the paramedics came, put Kevin in a stretcher, and took him to the hospital. And that was the whole encounter; maybe fifteen minutes at max.
When I started writing this post I wasn't exactly sure how I planned on ending it. Originally I was going to write more extensively about Kevin's past and the tough breaks that led him to the situation he was living through. But even though his story is actually very compelling, it's not my business to spread it. I also thought about comparing the minutia that consumes our days in the San Francisco tech world (viral coefficients and mobile gaming platforms and such) to the suffering of real human beings in the very same city, but that would be patronizing and predictable.
As such, I think I'll just end with this thought: I really, truly, fucking love this city, and I'm trying very hard not to slip into that sort of milquetoast apathy that people get once they're too jaded to remember how fortunate they are to live in a place like this. And that means keeping my eyes open -- not down at my phone, or the sidewalk, or blankly staring off into space pondering god-knows-what.
And that means being grateful. Because we're quite lucky on two levels: one, that we don't often suffer the way Kevin did last week; and secondly, that we're crammed close enough to actually help the Kevins of this world when they need it. If we're paying attention.
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