Misfit Island.

He came in the evening and knocked on our door with a darkened eye and a shirt pressed against his face which he had filled with ice. He asked me for any quick remedies to help reduce the swelling and explained that he came out of the blue knocking him off balance as he was walking home. Because he was able to speak he knew that his jaw may not be broken or even fractured but my guess assumed that it would swell up pretty badly by morning and knowing exactly who had done this to him it may even be slightly knocked off center requiring a medic to put it back in place.

To help the inflammation I suggested that Ibuprofen would work better two-fold compared to Hydrocodine to reduce the swelling before his next job, tomorrow morning. To ensure that this wouldn't happen again while he was in this safe sanctuary of his home I could only offer a smile, a hope to God that it would stop, and the number to the Tenderloin Police Station, a few blocks up the street, in case he encountered him ever again.

This isn't the first time that he's put hands on someone. A few months ago it was the partially blind man living upstairs helping my grandmother in kicking him out of the building when he had trespassed through the front door. He knocked him in his good eye and now the poor man constantly looks over his shoulder and shivers after every shadow that passes. My grandmother got pushed to the side by his forceful hands in the same ordeal and something in me burned a new hatred for this man. He's dangerous, offensive and a monster when he's coming down off his withdrawal. With nothing to feed his appetite he fuels his body with violence using his aggression and size to his advantage. He's seen loitering outside of the building and has called me by every wrong name in the book. At first I'd take part in yelling back and flashing forward my aggression now I just walk past and save my breath for something worth value.

Just this afternoon she came down and asked what could be done to get him to stop coming to the building. He only comes here to visit one person and this person seems to be just as terrified of him as everyone else. Yet, the drugs and the addicition seem to drive them towards each other so parasitically that they can't stand to be apart, talk about a Bad Romance. He'd been 86'd from the building months ago but finds his ways through the front door, in through the fire escape and even climbs up walls using the trees to leap into open windows, jumps across roofs and walks about the second floor freely away from the security cameras. No one and nothing is safe in his way and nothing or no one is stopping him. "He takes doors off hinges" one tenant describes to me. You can see the fear in her eyes as she is one of the only females that choses to live upstairs where he storms around through the corridors in the dead of night feeling like a king as everyone else bolts their doors tightly.

Someone once compared this shit hole of a place to the island of misfit toys in the Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer TV special from 1964. And the analogy holds true. The minds of the people living here aren't quite working the way a normal human brain should and their body parts seem like they've been put together in entirely different ways and not by God but by demons from the deep realms of hell. Most of their limbs revealing scars of all sorts from crack craters to stab wounds, diseased skin and damaged beyond repair hair that falls out in chunks daily from a scalp that has been battered from the constant abuse of dirt and filth, flaking and dehydrated like the desert. At times it can become like a Sci-Fi movie in here. People walk up and down the hallways, linger in the thresholds or corners of the bathrooms seeming to be in a different world. Tripped out and stuck in an alternate reality that no one in their right state of mind can ever imagine. They can't see you anymore and just continue about their day, living and barely breathing waiting for the substance to subdue their body like it has their soul. People stay here because they are lost. They've been lost for years. All those frightful stories you hear about on the Channel 7 News of kids and celebrities dying from heroine or cocaine overdose is almost pleasant to watch compared to being in the constant struggle that drug addiciton has brought them to make this place, their home. And I, inside my home, am the constant spectator of such wasteful recreational use of poisonious drugs and human deterioration.

Every day I walk to school and I hang out with my friends all of whom are full of laughter, we tell stories and we eat most of the time. I take the BART to the airport and fly away to relieve my city life stress and take refuge in the country or friendly regions of California. I spend the day locked away in my office at work or being the hostess stand greeting the elite upper class of San Franciscans as they prepare to dine on the finest, most-expensive Indian food within city limits. Almost every evening on the end of every vacation I still make my way back to this home. Trudging up the escalators of Civic Center Station and dragging myself up the stairs into the less than heavenly gates of the Tenderloin.
And so I'm sitting here now and it's a seemingly quiet night except for the cops that came by an hour ago along with an ambulance. So I'm going to delve into a good book and sit here trying to read as many pages as I can tonight because it's usually never this quiet here. Ever.