Can’t hear their words through the door, but I can hear the tone, and I heard the words before closing the door and turning up my music. Pike treats his girlfriend lousy, almost like they’re already unhappily married.

They’re both Archie Bunker, but I don’t think either of them is even twenty years old. How do people get so aggravated, so young? She’s yelling back at him, but ‘yelling back’ isn’t quite the right term — it implies that one of them started it, but I don’t think either of them did — arguing is just their natural state.

But mostly, I don’t care. I just want them to shut up.

I’d rather sleep alone 365 nights a year than have whatever romance those two have. They’re lovebirds on the couch sometimes but nightly it’s verbal karate, and it’s depressing, man. And if it’s depressing for me, what is it for them?

For me, it snuffs out any lingering daydreams of falling in love. If that’s love, I’d rather live my life absolutely alone.

Well, if Pike & Terry ever get violent I’ll bean ’em both with a frying pan, but so long as they’re only yelling, I’ll turn my music a little louder, as loud as it gets. I’m not a marriage counselor, or a UN peace negotiator.

♦ ♦ ♦

Clouds inside, but outside at last it was a day of sunshine. Ordinarily I’m an indoorsman, and wouldn’t much care about the weather, but when I’m standing in it, working in it, dry is better than drenched. Today I even went without my jacket under that silly cape, handing out flyers as insect-face.

My spiel, though, as I try to get people to take the shop’s flyers — “Delightful new shop upstairs.. exotic gifts… unusual apparel… reasonably priced… up the stairs…” — seems to be getting stale. Fewer people are going up the stairs. Fewer people are even taking the shop’s flyers when I try giving them away. Even had a guy this afternoon recite my whole shtick to me, before I could say it to him.

After work, I spoke with LeeAnn and Stevi about their flyer strategy. Seems to me, nine out of ten people on the sidewalk in front of the shop are very local — meaning, they live or work in this neighborhood, so by now I’ve handed them the flyer, and they know there’s a shop on the second floor. If they’re interested, they’ve already been upstairs.

The flyers would bring better results for the shop, I suggested, if I was flyering on Castro Street every day — bigger crowds, only a few blocks away, and I wouldn’t always be re-flyering the same people. LeeAnn and Stevi said they’d think about it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Something else about working on the sidewalk on Market Street — I’m getting to know the local homeless, by face and demeanor if not yet by name.

There’s a sad old woman who never says a word, just walks up and down the sidewalk all day — northeast, and then fifteen minutes later southwest, sometimes on the shop’s side of Market, and sometimes on the other side of the street.

There’s a black guy who walks in traffic instead of on the sidewalk, almost asking passing cars to hit him.

There’s a ranting man, babbling incessantly, sometimes about movies. He smiles at me now, because last week he said something about Sergio Leone, and I responded by screeching the opening notes from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

There’s a young white woman, pretty and clean enough that you might mistake her for an ordinary dyke in jeans, if she wasn’t always muttering to herself and walking nowhere in a hurry and wearing the same shirt as the day before, and the day before that.

And of course, there are more. Always more homeless people. It’s the American way.

Hope I have the green-cape job long enough to get to know more of them. When I lived downtown, I knew several beggars and bums, and most of them I liked. You get less bullshit from someone who lives on the street, than from someone who wears a necktie.

Haven’t yet seen many homeless folks in the neighborhood where I’m living now. It might be too rough for them there, and nobody on my block has any spare change to be begged.

Walk a block or two toward Mission or Valencia, and you’ll see the homeless there.’Forgotten men’, they called them in My Man Godfrey. Always thought that sounds kinder and more poetic than ‘homeless’.

Pathetic Life
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