My sorta friend, White Man, was ecstatic at San Francisco’s growing Asian population. Chuckling in anticipation of a Tiananmen-like purge of the hundreds of metropolitan irritations besieging him, White Man would say, “When the Chinese take over, and it won’t be long now, all the bullshit will be over!” bringing his arm down like a guillotine after each word. “You hear me? No! More! Bullshit! When! The! Chinese! Run! The! Whole! Goddam! Show!”
White Man, a retired merchant seaman, split apoplectic time between Boonville and The City. He owned a couple of buildings in the Mission District. He said he was in a constant battle to prevent his Latin tenants from destroying his investment. While White Man’s sinophilia left no room for detailed investigations of San Francisco’s many other ethnicities; he seemed to regard blacks as either comic or menacing, Italians as “a bunch of crooks,” Jews as “Italians with brains,” and gays as “pathetic but great tenants.”
No, White Man reserved his fiercest racial opinions for Hispanics, pegging those opinions to his perceptions of the housekeeping habits of his very narrow sample — the occupants of his two exorbitantly lucrative tenements. White Man said that he could walk past a building anywhere in the Mission and know at a glance the national origins of the inhabitants: Nicaraguans were messy and tended to duck out on their rent; Mexicans were scrupulously orderly indoors, total slobs beyond their own portals. White Man said Mexicans felt no compunction about simply airmailing their trash out their windows and into the street. He said Cubans never failed to pay their rent on time but could be dangerous in ways he did not specify. Colombians were a total no-go zone. “They won’t pay their rent and they’ll kill you if you ask them for it in the wrong way.”
White Man also claimed to be a Marxist, and he was a gun guy. Need it be said that here was a citizen utterly without irony, a walking contradiction?
“I’m always packin’ when I go around my buildings, you can be sure of that,” White Man would say, apparently thinking that I’d be reassured that one more crazed individual was walking around the city with a couple of loaded guns down his pants. The only hint of mental illness in his appearance was how fanatically neat he was. He was a little too neat — precisely maintained white hair, cleaner than clean Levi’s, ironed shirt, shined shoes. (In Boonville shined shoes are seen only at funerals, if there.)
White Man’s teeming manias were perfectly concealed by this respectable visual he presented. Just looking at him you’d never know behind that benign, grandfatherly facade the guy was all bombs bursting in air and the rocket’s red, red glare.
He’d been married several times. “I just couldn’t live with her,” White Man would say about his apparently interchangeable wives. “She was totally unreasonable,” the man wholly without reason would invariably add whenever he mentioned his love life. More likely the wives had been wafted out the door on White Man’s incessant gulf stream of one-way rhetorical gusts.
When I knew him, White Man’s love interest was a multi-substance abuser who kept herself in a perpetual chemically-induced catatonic state. One day, eating lunch at Libby’s Philo restaurant, the drug lady suddenly asked me if I had a Muni fast pass. “I need to go to Macy’s.” That was all she said in the hour I shared her company. Union Square by bus from Philo is an all-day adventure. I guess she thought we were in the city somewhere.
You won’t be surprised that White Man was the kind of guy who got very angry when you disagreed with him, even mildly disagreed, as in, “I’m sorry but I don’t see it that way.”
White Man would go right off.
“Then you’re an idiot,” he’d say and stomp off.
He was a difficult friend.
White Man liked to drive out to the Coast with me while I delivered papers, and I should say here that I made a sort-of living as editor and publisher of this fine publication, and I should also say our friendship, such as it was, probably arose from our shared vintage and, less than more, the same general frame of psycho-social reference as it played out between 1945-2000. To me, the guy was like muzak. I half-listened to his monologues, only tuning all the way in for the uniquely crazy stuff, like the day he said, “You know what my shrink told me?” I hadn’t known he had a shrink, and I didn’t know whether to be scared or relieved, so I answered, No, comrade, what did your shrink tell you? (I always called him “comrade” to see if I could rouse the Marxist in him. I never did stir that beast.) “She said I’m on more Prozac than anyone else on her entire caseload!”
What do you say to a confidence like that? Congratulations? Way to go, White Man?
White Man read the New York Times cover-to-cover every day. I’ve never known a true political nut who wasn’t a devout Times reader. I was not surprised that White Man seemed to need the paper even more than he needed his Prozac. He cited it endlessly as the last word on all current events. I once mentioned to him Chomsky’s recommendation that the best way to read the Times was upside down, the last paragraphs first because that’s where the truth was buried, if there was any truth at all anywhere in the story.
“Chomsky’s full of shit!” White Man yelled. “I need the goddam facts, not a bunch of bullshit like you put out in your paper every week.”
One day I was arguing with him about fascism, which White Man said had already taken over America. I said it hadn’t, and cited the more obvious reasons that the fascisti hadn’t yet made their move in the incompetent, deteriorated, haphazardly-policed corporate fun palace we actually do have in this country. Hysterics have been saying that America is a fascist state since at least 1961 when I first parted the political fogs to emerge as a half-assed socialist myself.
I told White Man that while it’s true that there are lots of natural-born goose steppers loose in the land, we’re not even half-way there. Yet. Anyway, I said, White Man old boy, given your imagined Chinese takeover of San Francisco’s municipal management with its No! More! Bullshit! bugles and gongs patrols and summary executions of people who don’t pay their rent on time, aren’t you kinda fascist-oriented yourself?
“The trouble with morons like you,” White Man had said the day of the fascism seminar, “is that you’re unable to make simple distinctions; the Chinese aren’t fascists; they’re orderly.”
I hadn’t said anything about the Chinese as a people; I’d said China looks more like a fascist state than a communist one.
The day after I’d told him he didn’t know fascism from fajitas, here comes White Man with a whole box of books on fascism.
“You assholes” — a visitor to the office was startled to be included —”think I don’t know about fascism? You think all these books are just for show?”
I expect any day now to pick up the Chron, and right on the front page there’ll be a story about a 65-year-old white guy who went nuts in the Mission, gunning down twenty-five random Hispanics and three Chinese millionaires who got caught in the crossfire. The sub-hed will read, “In Boonville They Called Him White Man.”
” … the wives had been wafted out the door on White Man’s incessant gulf stream of one-way rhetorical gusts.”
Hahaha! Hilarious. I think many of us know a White Man or two. I’ll try to remember to answer with that in the unlikely event of being asked about the repeated abandonments.