BROWN, NOSING THE HOMELESS

BROWN, NOSING THE HOMELESS

by Josh Brandon

Irish Rose, bartender at the Dubya Hotel, a high-class watering hole pandering to people with money, power, and celebrity, gave Jim Phinn, the man with 12 million pig cells in his brain, his double scotch.

“Any side effects yet, Phinn, from that xenotransplant for your brain hemorrhage a few years ago?” asked Irish.

“Nope, other than a craving for table scraps now and then. I still can’t stand the smell of ham and eggs.”

“How’s your new job working out, Phinn?” Business was slow and Irish Rose enjoyed talking to her regular customers. Her regular customers sometimes didn’t enjoy the conversation as much as she did.

“Stupid question, Irish,” he said. “I work for San Francisco’s Homeless Coordinator, so you know I deal with people who are a sandwich shy of a picnic and this one is coordinating the picnic basket. With some difficulty, I may add.”

“So, what is it that you do?” she asked, interested because, after all, he had been on Oprah five years ago and only about 300 people in the world had had a xenotransplant. She wanted to know how nine carrot-sized pig fetuses, missing their heads, would affect someone’s work after being inserted in their brain.

Phinn sighed, shook his head, then downed his drink in two gulps, placing his empty glass softly on the bar. “I work for a formerly homeless man who now makes over a 100 grand a year, thanks to an appointment from His Williness. He has no power over any homeless program, so he has to do something. For the past two years, he’s been counting homeless people. My job is to help him do that by developing and implementing a $750,000 computerized central database called a Homeless Management Information System.”

Irish Rose raised an eyebrow, thinking that perhaps she missed something. “So you are being well paid to do what your even better-paid boss has been doing for two years, counting homeless people when everyone already knows that there are many more homeless people than houses for them, except you are using computers?” as she reached for the glass to refill it.

“It’s worse than that, Irish Rose,” he continued. “I’ve got to sell this project to the Board of Supervisors like a carnival barker shilling suckers and marks who expect to see something they have never seen before out of their money.”

“And they haven’t seen this before?” she asked.

Phinn took a sip of scotch before answering. “Three times before,” he said. “San Francisco spent $12 million in federal monies for a centralized intake system for substance abuse treatment and, after five years, it was called a failure and its funding was cut deeper than the pension fund for ENRON employees.

Then we spent $4 million on fingerprinting public assistance clients, and, after the ink dried, ended up with finding only a dozen dunderheads who were double-dipping. And, to top it off, we are now spending $500,000 a year on a centralized intake system for homeless families.”

Irish Rose, looking up from washing some glasses, said, “Let me guess. That’s not doing so well either, is it?”

“We don’t talk about that,” he said, “but, between you and me, that system only places four families in the four shelters it manages... each week. The other 150 families are put on a waiting list that grows faster than our mayor’s nose any time he gives a speech.”

She pondered that for a minute.

“You’re doing the devil’s work, Phinn, the good Irish man with a good Irish heart that you are, aside from that pig part of you. That money you are spending on a new wheel that doesn’t roll should be going to those families waiting outside so that they can get inside.”

Phinn sighed again. “I know, I know. But it’s even worse than that. It’s why I’m drinking this scotch, and, yes, I’ll have another, because now Supervisors Newsom and Hall, as well as my boss, are coming up with more bugwit ideas for me to do that are so bad they make my good Irish heart break and my pig brain squeal.”

“You’re getting maudlin, Phinn,” while handing him another double scotch.

Phinn squinted at Irish Rose, to make sure he was speaking to the real one and not the ghost double. “You would too, if you were me, and getting drunk, and wondering what is wrong with people,” he said. “Listen to this. Rumor has it that Newsome and Hall, who are pushing for this system, are willing to fingerprint any homeless person who goes to any shelter or drop-in center as part of this data collection system, you know, so that we don’t count them twice when we give this information to the feds, who are funding my project.”

“You find that wrong, Phinn?” she asked.

“As wrong as the day is long,” he answered, or thought he did, because he had actually said “as long as the day is wrong.”

“Look,” he continued, “what do you think a homeless person will do when he believes that people are out after him and when he goes to a drop-in to use the bathroom, the first thing that happens to him as he enters the door is some stranger asks him a bunch of personal questions about his past, his education, his work history, his health history, how much money he gets, where he has stayed for the past year, and other personal stuff, and then asks for his fingerprints, too, while we’re at it, thank you very much, now you can pee.”

Irish Rose nodded, saying “That poor soul will be so shook up, he will know that they are after him and he will never go back again. He won’t trust them.”

“Yeah,” Phinn said, “and he will be joining a whole bunch of other people with the same problem. If you think our streets are already clogged up with too many homeless people, wait until that happens.”

“Or the other thing,” he added.

“What other thing?” she asked.

Phinn looked over his shoulder, turned back his head toward Irish Rose, leaned closer, and whispered, “Metal detectors.”

“That’s your last drink, James Phinn,” she said.

“No, no,” he fumbled, “I mean yes, this is my last drink, but, no, this is a real rumor. My boss wants to put in metal detectors in the shelters, and drop-ins too. He thinks it will make the staff feel safer. Besides, His Williness wants them.”

“Why does he want that?” asked Irish Rose.

“His Williness believes San Francisco is the American homeless Eden and every homeless person in these United States will travel hundreds and thousands of miles so they can collect a public assistance check of less than $100 a week, live in doorways and alleys in the cold and rain and fog, and lead the good life, in between dodging the cops and the Public Works trucks that take and dump what little they have that they can call their own.”

“You might have a point, Phinn. I’ve read that Mayor Brown doesn’t really hate poor or homeless people because he and his friends need waiters and waitresses to serve them.”

Phinn shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “that’s the public pablum he feeds the masses. He wants the metal detectors or some X-ray machine to prove that they are aliens because they don’t come from here, even though 95% of the people who live here didn’t come from here. Did I say that right?”

Irish Rose shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “A lot of what you’ve said doesn’t make much sense, in a way.”

Phinn slowly stood up, his feet gingerly touching the floor as if to make sure it wouldn’t move out from under him. After a few drinks, whether you are rich or poor, he believed, the whole world became just a little bit sneakier and would try to trick you.

“You just don’t know,” he said. “This Homeless Management Information System has to be ready by September of 2004 in order for cities to receive any of the millions of dollars of federal homeless money. San Francisco will have at least 20 programs participating in it, all of them sharing all this personal information from the same database I’m setting up, fingerprints and all, with labels called “drug user” or “mentally ill” or “HIV-positive” attached to each person who looked for medical help for a medical problem when they went through a rough time in their life. Homeless families will be afraid that social agencies will find a reason to take their children away from them. Immigrants will believe what is collected will be given to the Feds and they will be deported.

“And you are right, Irish Rose. It doesn’t make much sense. This system won’t result in an accurate count of homeless people because a lot of homeless people don’t use the system, many more newly homeless people will be afraid of it and avoid it altogether, and those who used to use it will stop.

Instead of complicating the system to make it harder for homeless people to get housed and then get other help, they should be expanding the services they need, like job training, homeless prevention, more mental health and substance abuse treatment, all of which are, sadly, either being cut or never got enough money to make them work the way they were designed in the first place.”

“I’ve called a cab for you, Phinn,” she said. “It’ll be here in a minute or two.”

Phinn handed her a ten-dollar tip, but Irish Rose looked at it, looked at Phinn, then picked it up and gave it back to him, saying “Why don’t you give that to that homeless panhandler that works the corner where the cabs come, Phinn? From what you just told me, he is going to need it.”

“Oh,” said Phinn, “he might just use it for drugs or alcohol.”

She smiled and said, “What do you think you just did? And there’s no ‘might’ about it, either. It’s why I cut you off and why you are staggering to the cab I called for you.”

Phinn thought about that, then nodded his head, and tiptoed toward the door like an elephant balancing on egg shells he didn’t want to crush, just to make sure the floor wouldn’t quickly move out from under him.

“And by the way, my friend,” she called out to him, “why don’t you tell your boss and His Williness to just keep their noses out of people’s butts, because not only would they see things more clearly, things would smell better.”

“Oh, that’s wild, Irish Rose,” he said as he disappeared into the night.


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Originally published in STREET SHEET
A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco
468 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
415 / 346.3740-voice • 415 / 775.5639-fax
streetsheet [at] sf-homeless-coalition.org
http://www.sf-homeless-coalition.org