Nairobi Dreaming - Complete!

Chapter 18: Shifting Tides

I didn't go back to sleep or my bed. I got my phone and sat in the kitchen reading up on heroin addiction. As someone who lived in the Bay Area I had seen my share of junkies. While it is absolutely not true that all homeless people use drugs or are specifically using heroin there are so many homeless in both San Francisco and Oakland and the number who do use heroin is high enough that it is impossible to live in either city without having seen hundreds of used needles on the streets and homeless people shooting up in broad daylight

One morning, recently, at around six am I took the subway from Oakland into San Fran. The station I got off at - Civic Center, which is in the literal heart of the city - was lined with homeless men and women sleeping up against the cold, dirty tile walls surrounded by their things - bags, carts, weathered backpacks. There was a path a few metres wide for commuters to pass through but I had this feeling that if I were to drift too close to either wall a hand would snake out and claw at my ankles. It was a stupid thought that casually and conveniently reduced the humans before me to monsters; but it captured the gray surreality of the moment, the sense that I was participating in a moment that looked more like it belonged in a zombie movie than in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. I watched one guy wake up, half stretch, his arms never quite fully extending before flopping back down, and then, his eyes still glazed over with sleep, jab a needle in his neck.

I had no idea where the needle had come from or if it was even in a vein. The action had been so familiar and so casual it had caught me off guard. His eyes started to slip closed again, the needle still in his neck and because he was not watching me I stared until I realized the people on either side of him were looking at me with the same unabashed directness.

I heard something, the sound of flesh scraping against fabric, that made me look away from the needle just long enough to realize that one of the homeless guys nearby had his hand in his pants and it was moving up and down. He licked his lips at me.

"Too bad you're ugly," He snarled. "But you'll do."

I left, walking quickly, and ascended the stairs that took me out of civic centre into the cool daylight, my mind churning.

Where was the disruptive tech entrepreneur trying to find a way to help these people? Why were all the best minds making useless apps or trading stocks on Wall Street? How could it be that the wealthiest nation in the world could let something so obviously unfair persist?

I spent the next hour or so like that until I found my way into the Marina, on the other side of the city where the homeless people had been replaced by bright-skinned twenty and thirty somethings in designer yoga gear burning cash on bottomless mimosas and brunch. I was there to do pretty much the same thing: 90 minutes of yoga followed by an aromatherapy massage and an extended lunch hour with a view of the ocean.

My anger dissolved, replaced by a carefully unarticulated conviction that what I had seen in the subway was inevitable. The result of some messy, complex combination of rising income inequality, a shitty, elitist healthcare system, lack of care for veterans, wage stagnation, mental illness and a hundred other things. The kind of problem that was a gorgon knot of complexity and could not be easily undone.

I had also carelessly assumed that heroin was not a problem I would ever really have to deal with up close. Like any other privileged rich kid I had friends of friends who had gone into rehab. I knew people who had issues with coke or alcohol. But not heroin. Heroin was the hardest of the hard drugs. Things had to go very wrong in someone's life for them to decide that sticking a needle in their arm and assuming all the risk that came with it was worth it.

If I thought back the only real impact that subway trip had had on me was to make me take more Ubers.

I had almost forgotten it till right now.