By Terry Messman

Trent Hayward died nearly within spitting distance of the gleaming, gold-bedecked dome of San Francisco City Hall. On the evening of Friday, June 2, he laid his head to rest on a ragged patch of earth one too many times. He never arose from his final sleep. We close our eyes, a poet diesÉ. It was a lousy place for a great writer to die, a shabby, vacant lot on the corner of Larkin and McAllister that had become a last-ditch sleeping quarters for those who couldn't pay their way into even the worst slum hotel. Trent Hayward, an outspoken and prophetic writer who tried to right the wrongs of this rotten, corrupt system, slept on this street corner for months, a place where his dreams were invaded by the roar and toxic exhaust of passing traffic, his inner peace assaulted by the mind-bending chaos of street life.
The ultimate mockery is that he died in full view of the golden dome of City Hall, where San Francisco officials, in their ice-cold arrogance, invested hundreds of millions of tax dollars to build a decadent replica of the opulent Palace of Versailles, presumably so all the unsheltered, unfed, and, in too many instances, unliving bodies of homeless people sprawled on the unforgiving ground all around could be comforted by this multimillion-dollar monument to Mayor Willie Brown's ego.
Every night when he bedded down, every morning when he arose, Trent could see where the city had blown all its shelter money, its drug detox money, its mental health money - instead of wasting it on the destitute likes of him. On June 13, about 100 of Trent's friends gathered at the street corner where he slept, and dreamed, and died. We held a memorial service organized by Lisa Gray-Garcia of Poor News Network and Connie Lynch of the General Assistance Advocacy Project. As I offered flowers and a tribute to Trent, I wanted to say, "Trent still lives in our hearts and is resurrected in our struggle for justice."
But those words just wouldn't come out. His death seemed too sad for solace. All I could offer was a curse to the world of injustice where he lived and died: "Fuck you, San Francisco, for spending your money to cover City Hall in gold while your people live and die in poverty and misery on the streets all around it."
In my heart, Trent Hayward is absolutely irreplaceable, the finest writer to grow out of the homeless movement. I mourn his loss tremendously. He was the most passionate and dedicated writer out of the hundreds who have written for Street Spirit in the past five-plus years.
Trent was the one with the guts and the nerve, the one with the spirit and the sarcasm and the spunk and the style, the one who would not be silenced. The one who could rescue comedian Doug Ferrari from the oblivion of poverty by the sheer humanity of his writing. The one who could use that same pen to hurl thunderbolts at the agents of injustice in positions of power. It is heartbreaking that his voice will be silenced forever.
Andrea Buffa of Media Alliance and Lisa Gray-Garcia (Tiny) called me with the awful news after Tiny found the cops putting Trent in a body bag on the vacant lot where he died. That night I was shaken at his loss, remembering how vital and enthusiastic he had been in the days before his death, asking me constantly for new writing assignments, wanting to take on a whole world of injustice with his pen.

But as much as it hurt to contemplate his senseless death that first night, the next morning was far worse. I felt such a heavy sense of irreplaceable loss, a feeling I can't get over to this day. I felt then, I feel now, that a part of our hope has been stolen. In Trent's absence, many life-and-death stories on the mean streets of poverty will never be written - not with as much passion and outrage and investigative zeal as he would have mustered. On the morning after his death, it felt like the world was a lesser place, drained of vitality. I have not been able to fathom to this day how to make it right again. In spite of well-meaning platitudes, life doesn't always go on again, and not all wounds are healed by time.
Like a setting sun
Neil Young's haunting song of mourning and loss plays in my mind for Trent:

"I've seen the needle and the damage done,
A little part of it in everyone,
But every junkie's like a setting sun."

Trent's sun set gloriously. He was writing furiously for Street Spirit, Street Sheet, and Poor magazine. His powerful moral indictment of the mismanagement of Hospitality House came out in the June issue of Street Spirit the very day he died. On the last day of his life, when Trent was fading away and becoming permanently voiceless, the fates granted him this one last chance to be a voice for the voiceless. It felt like an unquiet ghost was still raising hell in our publication, disturbing the peace of the unjust. With Max Nolan, Trent had spent months researching this inspired piece of muckraking journalism that spoke out for all the homeless people and artists who got shafted by the agency. His first on-line column for the Guardian was reportedly in his backpack, the same backpack his mother Connie Connell wrote about in a farewell prayer:

Trent, oh Trent, my only sonÉ
You left this world with only a
backpack by your sideÉ
And as you laid down upon the ground,
Earth mother hugged you and cried.

At the June 13 tribute to Trent, it was overwhelming to see how many homeless friends, activists and media colleagues came to pay tribute to a fallen warrior. Connie Lynch read a beautiful, wake-up call of a letter that Trent's mother had written especially for the service (the full text is reprinted on page five).

Perhaps the most heartfelt tribute was paid by Doug (Dougzilla) Ferrari, a gifted comedian who had undergone a harrowing descent from the top of the comedy world down through the end-of-the-line slum hotels and emergency shelters of San Francisco.
When their paths crossed fatefully on the tough streets of the Tenderloin, Trent threw Dougzilla a lifeline, disguised as a pen. Writing in Street Spirit under the pseudonym Harpo Corleone, Trent wrote a vivid account of Ferrari's life story so that you could feel the exhilaration of Dougzilla's comedy career, and also the anguish of his addiction and mental disability. Trent made you see the hellish plummet into hellhole slum hotels. Trent's story in the May issue of Street Spirit lifted Doug Ferrari out of the silence of poverty and got him onto the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Kevin Fagan picked up the story, wrote about Ferrari's plight in the Chronicle, and enlisted Doug's old circle of comedy friends to come to his aid.
With his voice full of emotion, Ferrari said at the memorial service that Trent had saved his life by writing his story. Ferrari had been laid so low by poverty and disability that he had resigned himself to enduring the lousy, unspeakable conditions in slum hotels, and had resolved to never tell anyone who he really was, or ask for help. Then Trent stepped in, and even though he was busy battling his own demons, he found the heart to write an uplifting story about a world-class comedian struggling to survive. Despite his essential role in rescuing Ferrari, Trent's own rescue never came. In one of his last acts on earth, Trent - a bright spirit savagely eliminated from our midst - may have helped save another spirit from the brutality of the streets. This is how instant karma repays him?

Harpo Marx in the Tenderloin
Trent's pen name was Harpo Corleone, an uneasy alloy of two very different people, Harpo Marx and Don Corleone. Trent was an anarchic spirit, a Harpo Marx stepped down from the movie screens into the hard-edged streets of the Tenderloin, there to unleash the Marx Brothers' subversive, surreal attacks on the status quo.
Harpo, Trent's hero and namesake, was the most wildly imaginative Marx brother, a riotous and lawbreaking role model, brazenly stealing everything that wasn't nailed down from the pompous stuffed shirts, then outrageously mocking the police who came to bust him.
Trent was as free-spirited and out of control as his alter ego, Harpo, yet he was simultaneously something tougher: a raw-edged, blunt-spoken fighter for the rights of the poor. Harpo Marx's musical instrument was the harp; Harpo Corleone's chosen instrument was the harpoon, thrown with great relish and piercing accuracy to puncture the bloated egos and moneybags of the rich and powerful.
The needle and the damage done
"I know that some of you don't understand
"Milk-blood to keep from running dryÉ"

Trent was facing double jeopardy as a sensitive soul and a destitute street person. Blessed and cursed with the hypersensitivity of the artist, Trent was shoved out of society and onto the streets, there to face every dehumanizing hardship and soul-crushing indignity imaginable. He turned to alcohol and to an even stronger anesthetic, the "milk-blood" of heroin, to numb out the pain of the streets and to find shelter under that comforting chemical warmth. It's not just homeless human beings who fall prey to the death-trip of addiction. Countless creative artists, writers, poets and musicians have ended or shortened their lives because they turned to alcohol or drugs in stupefying amounts for solace or inspiration or numbness or unconsciousness.
A shield from the pain of life, self-medication with drugs and alcohol is one of the surest ways to be delivered from pain for all time. It's a relatively short journey from numbness to anesthesia to feeling nothing at all ever again.
"I watched the needle take another man,
Gone, gone, the damage done."

The heavy street drugs are natural born killers. They comfort in the short term and destroy in the long run. Once you're addicted and living on the hopeless streets, fighting your way out again is like frantically slogging out of quicksand. The harder the captive thrashes about trying to escape, the more powerful becomes the deadly pull downward. At the very moment one seems to be making it to the surface, the quicksand of addiction can suddenly pull one down into oblivion - all the way to nothing. Truffaut's film, The 400 Blows, shows how a series of hard knocks finally lands with the cumulative power of a knock-out punch and sends a derelict boy reeling right off the face of the earth - the final frame freezes on a haunting image of the youth running blindly into the ocean. So it was with Trent. Enduring the 400 blows of poverty is life-threatening. Many of his friends wondered at the timing of his death, for his life seemed to be on the ascent, his spirits lifting. But the stresses and burdens of poverty, substance abuse and disability aren't laid down so easily. Just when it seemed an escape hatch from homelessness had opened up, when Trent's writing career was taking off, one final, fatal blow landed. That's all it took.
That's what we did not see or suspect. Didn't Gandhi warn us that poverty is the worst form of violence? Didn't the 169 homeless men, women and children who died on the streets of San Francisco last year teach us that poverty is lethal?
Somehow we did not see it coming.
We lower our guard, a friend dies hard. We close our eyes, a poet diesÉ