“In October, a schizophrenic homeless woman threw her three young sons into the San Francisco Bay. The mother, Lashuan Harris, had been living with her children in an Oakland shelter, and had stopped taking her medicine because she believed she was cured. But voices, she later told police, told her to throw her sons into the water. Relatives told the press that they had sought custody of the boys, but that social workers had failed to act. Less than two weeks later, a homeless man, Johnell Kirk junior, died after being set on fire by another drifter, who was said to suffer from schizophrenia.San Francisco has struggled to deal with the many homeless people who come to the city for its temperate climate and generous welfare programmes. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco�s mayor, has made the issue a priority. His controversial �Care Not Cash� initiative, which offers homeless people services rather than welfare cheques, took effect in May 2004, and there are signs of success. The programmes have reduced the street population by 28% and housed nearly 1,500 people…But the city has a lot more work to do.”
—The Economist

“You heard what she did? Three little kids. They struggled, man. She had to work to do that. That took hard work, harder work than she’d ever probably done before in her goddamn life. They found one of ‘em, but I don’t know if they’ll get the other two, tides and all. Filthy water. Can you imagine? She just walked away, pushing a fucking empty stroller like no big deal. Said she heard voices. Said the voices told her to push her three little kids into the San Francisco Bay and hold them down until they drowned.

“And you know what’s going to happen to her, right? You know, right? She’s not going to jail. She’s going to go to some psych ward and get the medication and the good food and the gym and the therapy. She won’t do a day in jail. And she’s going to sit there, her and her voices, you and me paying for her doctors, and she’s not going to pay for squat. Not for rent, not for her dinner, not for her occupational therapy, not for her doctors, and sure as hell not for what she did to those three little kids.

“Know what I’d like to do to her? I’d like take a manhole cover—nice big round one—and explain to her how the voices told me to chain it to her ankle and roll it off the pier, right there in front of the sea lions. Or—no, wait—I’d put her in a giant microwave. Rig it up in Giants Stadium so she could sit there in her chair in her giant microwave, and I’d set it to High for as long as it takes to drown three little kids. Multiplied by two. And I’d bring the whole city out to watch her cook, so they’d get the idea it’s not smart to listen to the voices. Or, know what I’d do? I’d stake her out, tie her down, so she couldn’t move a muscle, and I’d pour sugar syrup over every fucking inch of her. And then I’d bring out the fireants, man…Real slow, that’d go. Wide awake.

“You know they don’t even use the electric chair any more? Said it was inhumane. It took a whole five minutes to die. And they’re doped up with valium, having sweet dreams. Oh, what a crying shame, to take five minutes to die, after you probably tortured someone for three weeks. These people with the prisoners’ rights, man. You give up your rights when you take someone’s life, all right? I’ll give ‘em rights: hang ‘em with an American flag. That’s their right. It’s God’s job to condemn, not ours, but let’s just go ahead and arrange the meeting, you know what I’m saying? Fire up Old Sparky, cut the crap.

“I hear they tried to rape Scott Petersen already. I hope he’s getting it good, after what he did. Know what I’d do? I’d let five of the largest, strongest relatives into that cell, armed with baseball bats and let ‘em blow off some steam. Or maybe a very large, sexually-deprived silverback gorilla…”

The train slowed. A woman stuffed headphones into her bag, stood up, and excused herself. He jumped to his feet, head bowed, voice soft.

“No problem, ma’am.”

“You’ve been pumping a lot?” his friend asked when he sat back down. He pushed up a sleeve, examined a bicep and frowned. His scalp gleamed.

“Eighteen inches. But I want to get it to twenty. It’ll take a lot of work. A lot of focus._ I wanted to get to the gym tonight, but my little guy has a soccer game, and it’s important to me to be there. Sends a message. My dad never made it to my soccer games. I know he was working to put a roof over our heads, so it’s not like I mind. But I’m going to be there for my little guy at his games. It’s the kind of role model I want to portray.”

He squinted at his bicep again.

“Takes a lot of work to build up the right dimensions. But it’s fun to have the size. Especially in bars. I am not a violent person. It’s part of my credo. I’m very controlled. But I get some guy in a bar, someone inappropriate, maybe being a jerk to some woman, and you know what I say? I say, real quiet, “You’re going to apologize. Or I’m going to break your arm.” Total control, total calm, total polite. And my friends say, ‘Uh, yeah, he will.” And then you just get to watch this asswipe back down…”

He folded his arms in satisfaction.

“Only bad thing is it can make it hard with women. You meet these women who just like big guys, that’s their thing. Makes it hard to tell. They can be fine as a person, quality people, but they’re not necessarily candidates for a serious long-term relationship if they’re only with you for size. I’m seeing a woman right now, she’s a quality person, but she’s not over her divorce, she’s just getting used to dating. And she’s really into the muscles. Likes the big guys.”

“Not over her divorce? Fuck that shit, man. Get divorced, move ON.”

“Right. Move the fuck on.”

They looked out the window. Palo Alto passed.

“Karl Rove. You know what’s going on there? You been following it? Karl Rove is guilty of treason. He deserves to share a large, smelly cell with the most horrible inmate…”

Let the Nobs stay up on their hill and the hipsters stick to Hayes: Visitacion Valley is the most evocative name in the city, and as a neighborhood, it’s preserved, for now, by those nose-wrinkling write-ups. It’s the last stop before you leave San Francisco for the cubicles of Silicon Valley. Perched above it, on the San Bruno Expressway, a cocked martini glass invites commuters to stop for one for the road at a Russian cocktail lounge.

Some neighborhood history is written in the streets: the Mexican names, the boarded-up restaurants that used to sell Louisiana chitlins, the Indian Baptist Church, the Chinese and Vietnamese-language dailies in the newspaper vending boxes. It’s half Asian now, and most of the residents were born in another country.

On Leland Avenue—storefront churches, nail salons, and lunch shacks—I dithered over what to eat. Fried chicken or beef pho? It turned out that the Sunflower Blues Cafe, with its improbable indoor picket fences and yellow gingham table cloths, wasn’t opening until next week, though Marcus, the owner, was proud to show off how good it looked already. Everything made from scratch, he said, and healthy ingredients, salads and grilled stuff, though of course they’d do fried chicken, too; no sense being extreme. He’d started his family young and brought them over to Vis Valley from Bayview. They were grown now, though he didn’t look more than forty. He owned a few properties in the neighborhood, and his wife ran the beauty salon up the street. Julia here used to work for her, he said, and Julia was the best. Could I figure out how to get her to come on board with him?

Julia shrugged and giggled, not yet convinced.

At the Vietnamese place next door, my beef pho came with tripe and tendon, and a bush of basil leaves. The fish sauce was given out without asking. I ordered ca phe sua da and thanked the waiter in dredged-up Vietnamese. I was proud, but he was baffled until I gave in and pointed to the number on the menu. The broth was as good as Hanoi, and the decor very nearly worse.

A gnarled Chinese lady, bent low, haggled in the 99 Cent Store. I paid full price for a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, some Chinese birthday cards, hair clips, and a flashing bike reflector.

Up the road, in Portola, there’s an old cinema that’s a Baptist church now. I’m a lapsed-Catholic-aetheist-Buddhist, but even I’d go to a church with a drum kit behind the Hammond organ. A nearby diner looks untouched since the 1920s, apart from the laminated waffle menus in the window. But in keeping with the neighborhood changes, those red vinyl booths and swivel stools are now wiped down by owners who got here from Seoul four years ago. It was closed, on a Sunday morning, and on the store window next door, a poster warned residents to be wary after several recent attacks.

In the supermarket, frogs squatted in their tank, eyelids heavy. Sunday must be frog night, because they were stacked halfway up each other’s backs like toppled dominos. Three aisles over, you could choose from six brands of canned quail eggs, five kinds of canned rambutan, and a fridge full of sticky drinks. In the checkout queue, with an armful of mangosteen jellies and Vietnamese espresso, I almost wept at the sight of a box of durian fruit inside the front door. In deodorized America, it’s stinky, oozy, primal, pheromonal durian I’d like to offer instead of Altoids.

The other day someone asked me if I still had the travel bug. Truth is, I never did, even—and especially—when I wore a backpack for a year. I’m a homebody; at most a reluctant daytripper, and sniffing a durian on San Bruno Avenue is all I need before heading back to my rocking chair to look down over the city.

I’ve been re-reading George Dyson’s wonderful essay on Google, “Turing’s Cathedral“. You should read it.

Few know how to ask good questions—of computers or of each other. And fewer still know how to listen, in a culture that babbles or sits slack-jawed. John Battelle has some free advice on the subject for the MacArthur Foundation.

A woman jogs down Flatbush, beaming and punching the sunshine. Her legs, in shorts, are peculiar. Slack, velvety folds jiggle, like a Sharpei, and it takes a moment to work out that this is the extra skin she must have grown to contain pounds and pounds of fat, now melted. This is her day.

A block behind her, a middle-aged woman sprints off the course and in behind a dumpster on State Street. A moment later, another follows, and they squat side by side, round white backsides bared. They’re already running as they hike their shorts back up.

I have whippety friends who finish the New York Marathon in under three hours, but the born-to-run amateurs bore me as they piston past, looking comfortable and determined. It’s the mid-pack runners I go out to see every year, with their strange gaits and unsuitable bodies, and all the fear, doubt, and bewildered joy that comes from their audacious try.

And New Yorkers respond like proud parents, lining the whole route and cheering until the Sweep Bus rolls through. When volunteers try to hand them leaflets for Freddy Ferrer’s doomed mayoral campaign, they are too busy urging to take notice.

At Lafayette and Cumberland, a couple has hired a DJ to play on the steps of their brownstone. They pass out party food and Fort Greene dances to songs for apartment-dwellers:

Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe, if the answer is no…

“AwRIGHT, Wendy, that’s what I’m TAWKING about,” hoots the DJ as a Bridget Jones trots through in a spangled bra. English women like to run in lingerie, bless their wobbling butts. Italians wear serious running gear—CoolMax everything, coordinated in green and red. Irish runners wear baggy cotton t-shirts with makeshift flags pasted on the back, or bright green soccer jerseys and Leprechaun hats. The French frown, seemingly puzzled by strangers screaming “Go PhilLIPPE!”

A woman with a carefully liplined mouth hoists a blue banner with a message in Korean up a lamppost, then climbs up after it and scans the pack for her person.

Some of the runners want to stop and join the party. They wiggle for a minute or two, dazed and thrilled at running through New York City in the sunshine, where pretty girls dance at them and the cops give them drinks.

Eight miles in, some runners are already walking. A passionate Brooklyn woman in a baseball cap makes it her mission to coax every runner. She crouches in front of them, backing away and yelling encouragement as if these were their very first steps outdoors. “Come ON, Mario. You know you can do it, baby!” Mario doesn’t look so sure.

“RUNNING FOR PAT,” the t-shirts announce, or “LEUKEMIA SURVIVOR.”“Jennifer’s Mom” and “Cathy’s Daughter” run side by side. Some want to SAVE THE RHINOS. One woman is 50 TOMORROW. Another knows what it means to MISS NEW ORLEANS.

Other stories aren’t sloganized, but you can guess at them all the same:
I’m So Over You, Dickhead.
Three Years Sober.
My Sister’s In Iraq.

As the sweep bus arrives, Fort Greene turns its back on the stragglers and faces the DJ booth to do the Electric Slide. By now I’ve danced for two hours on this street corner, but as soon as choreography is called for, I concede that I’m a white girl, and saunter off to Sunny’s Bar.

Our Limerick neighbors have a second home in Fahamore, Co. Kerry, a windwashed scrap in the shadow of Mount Brandon. It was there that my mother met the sheep, as it skittered past the French windows followed by a barking dog.

    “I thought the dog was worrying the sheep,” she confided. “So I went out to save it.” My mother is scared of dogs, but she has a very good heart. “I went out the door, and somehow I got between the dog and the house, and next thing, in the sheep went into the hallway, and me outside with the dog. So I made a dash back for the house to get him out, and he’s standing on the hall carpet, filthy dirty. It’s good carpet, they brought it down from their other house, and it’s still a good carpet. He has a terrible sheepy smell.”
    “I suppose he’d smell sheepy, right enough.”
    “I wave at him to get out, and instead off he trots down the hall and into the bedrooms. Bringing his sheepy smell all over the house.”
    “The carpet was sheepy once. He was probably reuniting with his granny.”
    “So I had to climb over the bed to get on the other side of him to herd him back out of the house. And he’s in no hurry, mind, to get back out there to the dog, but eventually I give him a shove so that he runs back out to the hall, bleating away. And there’s a young farmer lad standing outside the door beside the dog, with his arms crossed. And it dawns on me… “
    “Oh dear…”
    “So I say, ‘was the dog trying to herd the sheep? ‘”
    “You were sheepish, like?” She ignores this.
    “And, oh, he’s not impressed at all, this lad. He says—he’s real Kerry—“Well, ma’am, he was tryin’.”

Beauty salons were the best, better than restaurants.The lapdogs were tied to the railings, yippy and shivery, and mad that they weren’t getting their own $200 facials. It didn’t take much to scope them from across the street, then walk past and slice the leash, or even unclip it. He could pretend to be a dogwalker, not that these things could walk. If the dog was wearing a fancy coat, he’d shove it into his own coat, one hand over its muzzle to shut it up. Down here, on Park Avenue or Madison Avenue, they hardly looked at a Latino kid in a black jacket and jeans. Some thought they saw a bus boy on his break, but most saw nothing at all.

The lapdogs were smaller than the squeaking cuy that people in Guayaquil would roast for Easter. Who knows, maybe you could fatten them on alfalfa for a few weeks, shove a stick up their asses and roast them pink and crispy over charcoal, like the guinea pigs. But instead he’d keep them for a few days in a box in his room, feed them leftovers and treats, then scout Central Park for the reward posters.

F.Scott or Babette was worth more than an Easter guinea pig. Some tearful rich lady would make up posters, and she’d send someone out to plaster the lampposts in the park. Sometimes the posters begged the dogs themselves to come home, as if they could read; as if they’d run off with some guy from CBGB’s or Spanish Harlem just to piss off mama.

So he’d call from a payphone. “Lady, I think I found your dog.” And he’d take a kid from downstairs, or down the street, six or seven years old, and give him a dollar or two to come with him and cry as he handed over the dog.
“Don’t cry, Papito. Maybe we’ll get you another puppy some day,” he’d say, crouching down to the kid’s level. And then he’d turn to the lady and look up from petting her dog and his fake little brother. “He just needs a minute to say goodbye. He was so excited when he found your dog by the ice rink. He always wanted a puppy.”

He knew what to do because he’d been the fake little brother once. That’s how tricks got passed on. Sometimes the ladies were suspicious, but others, you could see it never even occurred to them that you could steal a dog for a reward.

Only once, he’d taken a dog and no one had put up a reward poster. He searched the park, even the block where he’d taken the dog, and there was nothing. He searched for a week, then two. Maybe the lady had been bored with it already, and happy to see it gone. It yipped furiously in the box beside his bed, un mamao. He thought about setting it free, but it was so stupid and helpless that the pigeons would eat it within an hour. Eventually he took it to the pound.

Twenty years later, he sometimes thought about that Chihuahua.

My lower lip is bruised from biting down on the cannibalistic urges that Liam De Luce brings out. That fat, sweet arm would burst like bratwurst, if only I could get at it. Caitriona watches closely to make sure that doesn’t happen, but she admits she wants to bite her son too. Only women confess this to her, she says. Apart from Swift, men don’t seem compelled to bite baby flesh, even though it’s as silky and springy as kneaded dough and smells better than baked bread. At least this strange love is reciprocated. On Saturday morning, I was jolted by six sharp teeth nipping my big toe, and a cross-eyed, adoring smile.

At ten months old, Liam tiptoes delicately if someone holds both fists, and he can stand alone for a few moments, swaying on magnificent columns of pudge. His eyes are such a dark blue that they look brown in indoor light. As soon as he wakes, he gets down to the business of playing and singing, and banging on his Fisher-Price music table. Nothing would please him more than to hurl himself off the bed, but he’ll settle for the fun of being hauled back from the brink over and over. Loud, farting belly-raspberries—given and received—also entertain him. He eats like a farm laborer, and has better table manners than me.

Feelings colonize his face. He throws his being into each dramatic emotion, then lets it pass. I wish I were as wise as Liam, who trusts the universe to provide, and finds that it does.

My old friends show me baby pictures and wedding pictures on their cellphones. Many are quitting Vindigo and birthing new lives. Google and Condé Nast scoop them up, and are lucky to get them.

James has to jet. “The baby,” I say sympathetically, but no; his wife is delayed at work, and so he’s going to take over her personal training session. He’s sweet when he’s sheepish.

I cross the bar to talk to David and Jason. They’ve resumed the jokey, syncopated rhythms of a friendship that became business for a while, and they’ve started running together again; on Riverside Drive, not in Central Park, now that they’re both downtowners. They’re discussing their personal trainers. David is trying some new stretching thing. Jason says his trainer never even talks about stretching. David says that in that case, his trainer is a jackass. Jason begs to differ.

I give them shit about personal trainers. I’m only half teasing, even though my Thoreau streak has never played well in Manhattan, and especially not with these two logic addicts. But when we outsource the movement of our own carcasses, what’s left of our lives?

Candy comes over to say goodnight. She blinks and shakes her head, and says how weird it is to see us all together again.

Outside, on Eighth Avenue, the rain sluices down. In a green and democratic city, rain falls almost equally on rich and poor, and after a week of filthy weather everyone is sick of it. New York is not at its best.

My mouse-sized room at the Hudson Hotel cost nearly 200 times more than a night at the Hotel Italia in Bolivia a few years back, and made the carry-on bag wedged next to the bed look huge. For another ten dollars, I got a shaky one-bar wireless connection. On the east coast, the Interweb is still a privilege, not a right. In spite of the the honking on 8th Avenue, the close wooden walls and drafty windows put me in mind of my log cabin days. That suits me, but I’m still horrified at the expense.

“The city hasn’t turned the heating on yet,” said the very nice woman at front desk when I called to tell her I was cold. Was this Leningrad with Louis Ghost chairs? In the Library bar downstairs, people drank cocktails to Thriller, same as five years ago, except the New Yorkers have moved on and these are out-of-towners now. The cafeteria was furnished with heavy benches, like Hogwarts.

In the boom years, my friend Lee would call me for Priceline slumber parties on her work trips to New York. I’d meet her at the Ritz, the Waldorf, or the Royalton. Sometimes we slummed it at the Paramount, which was all sharp edges, tight corners, and tricksy fittings. We sat up late telling secrets over thirty-buck club sandwiches.

At the time, my ex was plagued by phone cards calls from would-be investors in his new business. (1999 was an odd year.)
“You don’t understand,” one specimen hissed, “I can introduce you to the business development group at Acme Corp.”
“As it happens,” said Jason, reasonable as always, “my wife is in a hotel room with the head of business development at Acme Corp right now.” Lee and I were trying on one another’s clothes at the Royalton.

Slumber parties aside, I don’t like the learned helplessness of hotel life. Doormen worry me. So do bellhops. I’m too cheap for room service, even—and especially—when I’m not paying, and too often I find myself sitting alone above a city, dithering over a mini-bar Toblerone that would have bought five nights at the Hotel Italia, and longing for a nice cup of tea.

At a Vindigo reunion on Tuesday night, Jason gave me a fat manila package. He’s clearing house for a big trip and a new marriage. On the cab ride back to the hotel, hundreds of photos tumbled into my lap, all different sizes, some dog-eared. Spain, college parties, and a visit to see Pat. Our last night in Dublin. Group shots from a Wall Street training course—the names are long gone, but I remember their Myers-Briggs scores. A holiday in San Francisco. Drinks to celebrate quitting jobs. Visits home; visits from my parents. A wedding; our wedding; more weddings. New Orleans. My desk at Vindigo. Our little millennium party, propping up a listing Christmas tree.

My own face looks out most of them, sometimes fat from college beer, sometimes thin from New York stress, with worse or better haircuts through the years. These snapshots are artless. They tell you nothing.

I have a running joke with Keith Yamashita, who hired me through these pages, that this “Dervala” is a fabrication. That my real name is Debbie, and I was a Wal-Mart greeter from Festus, Iowa. I’d stored up years of fake smiles and silent dreams there, until one night I sneaked into a traveling production of Riverdance, and was inspired. Night after night I sat in Festus with a book of Celtic baby names and a DVD of Angela’s Ashes, planning my escape to the big city. It took months to work out the back story for this Irish yuppie-drifter, who has bounced around too often to keep track of. Maybe I overdid it. This Dervala character, she’s a little implausible, Keith says, but it works, except when the accent slips and he can hear Debbie loud and clear. I tell him I couldn’t possibly do a worse Irish accent than he does.
    “Welcome to Wal-Mart,” he sing-songs behind my desk. “Pampers? That’s Aisle 6.”

When the taxi pulled up, I slipped one photo into my pocket. J. took it on my 29th birthday, and it catches me as I’d like to look but rarely do. I was too vain to resist this one trophy for my upcoming crone years, but I stuffed the rest of the photos back in their interoffice envelope and left them on the back seat with a pat goodbye. I like the idea of my past circling New York City in a yellow taxi, waiting for the next Debbie who needs it.