Hate Man was one of the Berkeley street characters I sorta knew when I lived and worked there. We had only a few conversations, but we waved middle fingers sometimes, or pushed shoulders over a newspaper or a Coke.
I didn’t know him well, which was entirely my fault and my mistake. I rarely get to know anyone very well. Introvert here, capeesh?
My mantra is “Leave me alone,” so mostly I admired Hate Man from across the street, on Telegraph Ave or at People’s Park. Even talking with him only rarely, though, I knew him well enough to know he had some things figured out.
He explained to me twice — he told everyone this, if you tried talking to him — that he never trusted anyone until they’d told him, “I hate you.” That was his standard greeting for friends or strangers: “I hate you.” People who didn’t understand might get angry, but once you understood, it was beautiful.
His thinking was, if you’re being nice that’s almost certainly fake — you’re trying to get something from him, trying to get him to like you, trying to drag him to church or into a shelter, and Hate Man wanted nothing to do with such bullshit. If you wanted him to take you seriously, you had to confess that you hated him.
I probably only told him twenty or thirty times that I hated him, but it should’ve been more.
Hate Man was homeless, though he preferred to say that he lived outside. With some people who live outside, if you exchange even a few words with them, you can tell that they’re ‘off’. Hate Man was different. He made a harsh first impression, but if you gave him what he wanted — a sincere “I hate you” — and then engaged in even the briefest conversation, you could tell he was ‘on’.
At the top of the page, I mentioned “pushing shoulders,” which needs an explanation for anyone who didn’t know him: In Hate Man’s philosophy, “please” and “thank you” were artificial and superfluous; if you wanted something, the correct way to get it was to say, “Push me for a smoke,” or “Push me for that paper.”
When anyone pushed against Hate Man, they’d lock shoulders and push, aggressively if the dispute was serious, but when he and I pushed it was a mere formality. The first person to stop pushing lost, a concession that meant, You must want it more than me, so you can have it.
When Hate Man pushed for my newspaper, he always got it. Actually, when I worked on Telegraph, I saved the Tribune or Examiner under my table, in case he came by and wanted to push me for it.
He’d been in the Air Force, then the Peace Corps, and worked as a reporter for the New York Times, before relocating to Berkeley, California. He’d say it was a better life he’d chosen, living outside, flipping strangers the bird, pushing pals for smokes, and greeting everyone with “I hate you.”
He was mentally well, one of the few certifiably sane people I ever knew. Sadly, he flipped his final finger in 2017, though I only learned about it today.
Rest in hate, Hate Man.
11/25/2021
Republished 5/19/2025
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