By Don Baird
Published: April 17, 2008
Since I returned from London I’ve been staying mostly in the household of my best friend Joey in the lovely Noe Valley, where the fertile residents of this quaint neighborhood can’t seem to breed fast enough or enough, for that matter. Seriously, every Saturday on 24th Street it’s like a fucking baby fair – double strollers even, toddlers wearing outfits that cost more than one of my paychecks, mothers power-pramming, as they say in England, combining exercise with pushing a baby stroller (sounds like a good idea, looks disgusting and a bit cruel) and a general sea of proud reproducing parental faces smiling and happy and just itching to talk childbirth, pre-school waiting lists and infant movement classes or yoga for children. It’s frankly sickening, and I’m not totally sure why I feel this way, but I do.
It’s certainly not envy. I have no desire to reproduce at all and never have, kind of part of the whole being a homosexual thing. I just think I find it vulgar to create more people on a planet that is overpopulated and run by idiot war-mongers and gradually being depleted of its natural resources by civilization’s greed, the hunger for power and the unrealistic ideals and expectations society carelessly places on people and our environment. That means every stroller being pushed by new parents will usually evolve into soccer moms across America who all have to drive SUVs when everyone knows it is just plain going to kill us all in the long run, but they just don’t care.
That’s why I hate the constant baby parade, the status race of parenthood, the introduction of children into a world of classist stratification that will undoubtedly continue to propagate hatred and tension based on shallow concepts and superficial values, and money or the lack of it, and a total disregard for the bigger picture and the scary future they’ll be bringing their little trophy babies into.
At Joey’s place I’ve always enjoyed the fact that their household is sort of the complete antithesis of your average Noe Valley home. The chaos isn’t necessarily looming in the future as much as it is an everyday way of life there. There are basically four roommates in total, but due to extenuating circumstances, that number has reached more like six recently, with a plethora of interesting interlopers like myself dropping in at all hours of the day or night to take up part-time residence in the kitchen, the heart of the household. In order to do this one must clear a spot for themselves, usually by doing the dishes. This usually endears you to all of the roommates as the massive pile of dishes always seems insurmountable to people who actually live there. Clean dishes will always be met with a cheery smile and perhaps an invitation to hang out in someone’s room or even stay in someone’s room if they aren’t home.
Mr. A, one roommate hadn’t been present for almost two weeks it seemed, and since I have known him a long time, I was allowed to use his room to sleep or watch TV occasionally. It seemed Mr. A had not only been absent for awhile but had also failed to pay his rent for almost two months, causing everyone else to not pay their’s as well, as no partial amounts would be accepted by the landlord who would visit early in the mornings with angry threats to take action against them if he didn’t get the rent. Everyone knew that Mr. A wasn’t paying his rent because he had developed a horrible gambling addiction and would lose his money in casinos you had to take BART to get to. He also would not admit this to anyone, even himself. He was putting everyone’s tenancy in peril and was in complete denial, like a movie on Lifetime.
Joey is the master-tenant, and the brunt of this situation always falls on him. He has to be the bad guy, police man, the negotiator with the angry landlord, the one who finds a quick replacement for the tenants who skip out without paying. And should the household fall apart, he stands to be the one who has the most to lose, the one who will get an eviction on his rental history and likely never be rented to in this town again. Because that is how it works here in this soul-sucking city of San Francisco: one eviction and you are quite possibly fucked for life.
And people wonder why there are so many homeless people here. Many of the visitors like myself are often homeless, as it is not an unusual condition here in our fair city. However, the bulk of people stopping by this house of dreams seem to be visitors Joey meets on Manhunt.net, Men4now.com, and other online cruising sites. Having known Joey for almost 20 years now, I was aware of his “dating” proclivities but was rather surprised to witness first-hand the sheer numbers of gentlemen he entertained, and the number of times I would be banished to the kitchen whenever the doorbell rang, and of course, how many of these visitors were people I know. What can one say, he is definitely in demand, though this was during a period of separation from his boyfriend who is now happily back in the picture, and it’s not like the other roommates, Mr. B and Mr. J, who are a couple, don’t have a fair amount of visitors too, and some very interesting and unusual ones at that.
One such visitor, and I don’t know exactly which occupant he was visiting but I had met him before on the street one night and chatted with him until he started yelling at the voices in his head and I set off in a different direction, had pulled up a chair at the kitchen table where I was writing on a laptop computer. He began to tell me that awhile back his “girlfriend” (said and often repeated in that way to assert his heterosexuality in an arena where young “heterosexual” men have sex with other men based on who has drugs, cigarettes, a warm place to hang out and access to straight porn) stabbed one of his testicles with a syringe in a fit of rage and he eventually saw a doctor about his injury and the doctor told him that because of this wound his testicle would slowly start to break down and whither away to nothing and there was really little they could do about that. I questioned the doctor’s prognosis with a smirk, saying there should be something that could be done, and he continued to tell me that another doctor said that the only chance he had to save his testicle was to masturbate excessively. I burst out laughing and almost said to the compact and well-built street urchin that by all means he should start right now if it would save his precious testicle, but before I could stop laughing he continued to tell me that he could only really masturbate if he was on meth, so giving him some meth would save his testicle, and I guess provide a lovely floor-show right there in the kitchen. I was really almost rolling on the floor laughing at that point and hoping that someone in the house was overhearing this. I told him I didn’t have any meth and questioned his ability to masturbate without it. “Are you sure you can’t? If it were my testicle I’d sure as hell be trying to save it, drugs or no drugs, right now! I mean, what if this leaves you infertile?” I was cracking myself up now. He silently departed shortly after, but on another occasion did something considerably more than masturbate for a small amount of drugs with someone else in the household. This one has an unusual capacity for conspiracy theories, and as I said before, voices.
One night when I was on my way to Joey’s after work, I met a charming young man and we got to talking and found we had a lot in common. I wanted to invite him over but didn’t feel that was OK, as I am just a guest there at Joey’s. After mulling it over, I decided to phone Joey and see if it would be okay to have someone over. He said it would be fine. Mr. A was still missing, so I could use his room and all would be fine. So we went over there and hung out for awhile only to be told by Mr. B, in his charming and comical way, that he had a friend over who had just prior to our arrival made plans to actually turn a paying trick in Mr. A’s room. So we got dressed and retired to the kitchen to chat and Mr. B’s friend answered the door and quietly slipped his guest past us and into the room.
We stayed in the kitchen chatting and wondering if his friend had an hourly rate or what, because we were hoping to get back in the room for more fun, but they seemed to be staying forever. Eventually, Joey invited us in to his room, but then he had a creepy guest show up who we didn’t like so we left and found our original room unoccupied and carried on there some more. This guy was really nice and didn’t seem freaked out over the unusual household dynamics at all. In fact he quite took to it very well. Eventually he shared with me very matter-of-factly that he has a bipolar disorder. I give him credit for putting that right out there. In fact I much prefer that to the several I’ve met who didn’t reveal that for weeks or even months into knowing them. Everyone who met him thought he was great. Mr. B was being extra charming, hilarious, quick-witted and charismatic this night, a very cordial and engaged host. In fact much of the levity and humor in the household, even in its darker moments comes from Mr. B’s presence there. Later that day, Mr. B told me that the reason his friend and his trick took so long was because the trick recognized my voice and knew me and didn’t want to leave and be discovered, because I was sitting right there in the kitchen. I asked who it was, but like a good hooker, he never disclosed the trick’s identity. He still hasn’t.
At one point I left the Noe Valley house for a few days to give them a break from me, and when I returned there was a new interloper in the kitchen, a guy I knew a little bit from here and there. It seemed the plan was to move him in and move Mr. A out, and the new guy would eventually take over the room. In the meantime Mr. Chef, we’ll call him, established himself in the kitchen, both cleaning and cooking a lot. I felt a bit like I had been replaced, but not for long.
The new guy is very amiable, and I learned that he is from the same hometown as me, Medford, Oregon. We lived just two roads away from each other. We started sharing memories of home, like what grade school did you go to and stuff like that, and in a few days time we discovered a point in common that kind of chilled us both to the bone. It seems that a man my mother dated when I was about 10 or so until she learned that he was married and dropped him, was indeed the same man who brutally murdered Mr. Chef’s mother’s best friend. Mr. Chef said, “Lets not talk about Medford for awhile.” It was genuinely weird.
One of the hard parts of dwelling in the kitchen is the distinct lack of a place to physically lie down. I had been staying there for about five days and I was writing on the laptop and I kept hearing what distinctly sounded like workmen doing something on the roof, like re-tarring or clearing the gutters or something. A strong gust of wind seemed to produce footsteps across the roof of the flat at several points in the day. Just off the kitchen is Mr. B and Mr. J’s room, and they had a couple of guests over in their room and I heard the workmen again, and I said, “Hey Mr. B, is there some kind of work crew fixing something on the roof right now? Don’t you hear them? I’ve been hearing them for days.” There was a long pause and Mr. B replied, “No, but I think its kind of cute that you do.” There were audible snickers coming from the room and Joey comes in the kitchen and says, “Honey, maybe you better lie down and get some sleep OK?” in a wicked nurse kind of tone. “OK, you bitches.” I lay down in Joey’s room and got some much-needed sleep. When I woke up and rejoined the household activities Mr. J kept asking me about my new friends.
“What new friends? Who are you talking about?” “The ones on the roof,” he said. They still tease me about that.
At press time the entire unpaid rent situation had still not been resolved, and the landlord had seemingly given up trying to collect it every morning. The state of the household seems to be stuck in limbo, but the food is good, the visitors are amusing, the place is cleaner than ever and the number of current residents is…. hard to say, but I’ve found it to be a warm and nurturing place to visit for quite some time. Home is where the heart is, and in spite of the chaos and uncertainty, I heart this one and hope nothing but the best for it.