The ride from my apartment to the Mission is a choose-your-own-adventure, scenic and shifting, flat or hilly in either or places. The sky is a blanket of blue, showing all its glory, sharing all its sun with the dispossessed, displaced, and distraught addicts, bums, panhandlers, and drifters wrung around the shelter waiting for the sound of church bells and a five course meal catered by a five-star Chef. It’s a good day to volunteer. You can tell when you’re close to the Mission, the streets go from clean to crowded, from green lawns with built in sprinklers to yards with potholes and men curled up around light posts, asleep. Houses become storefronts and cars pack streets like Vienna Sausages pack canisters. Hustlers, strategically placed on corners, corner the market, prey on the disabled and disfigured, slide from one side to another as if pawns on a chess board. In which the rules of the game haven’t changed, a pawn is as mighty as its king and as slippery as its queen if given room to move, if given lungs to breathe death into the life of every knight and Bishop living for today a little lower than angels. There are stop signs many ignore, as many as there are fire hydrants placed on commercial blocks in front of people with their arms spread out and their mouths closed standing in front of a federal building waiting for smoke signals and firefighters. There’s a man with Parkinson’s disease pop-locking up a hill, and there’s a woman with a face red with Night Train tumbling down. She smacks the wheel of a mini van and laughs. She has no teeth.
