Embarcadero Plaza

Often I wonder where the time has gone. Saturday it was beautiful out, so I walked to the Embarcadero to finish some reading, as well as people watch. The little farmer's market that was set up on the pier was just concluding, but there was still a huge crowd out, this bizarre mixture of yuppies and street people. I had just finished a story when a fight broke out next to me in the park. It was a homeless couple, with the woman initially getting the best of it, that is until her boyfriend flipped her over, pinned her arms to the ground, and began a vicious barrage of punches to the face and neck. At a certain point it was preposterous because all these people walked right by them, either completely clueless (not likely) or just afraid to get involved. Perhaps they just didn't care. I found the whole thing disturbing, as domestic abuse just makes me uncomfortable. I started to walk over - thinking I would pump some fear into the guy and get him to quit (as I once saw my father do when I was a kid), but as I approached it was clear the man was much bigger than me, and extremely belligerent. I had this image in my head of trying to be the good samaritan, and then getting shanked in the process (I could see the headline in the Chronicle), so I stopped short and decided to find a cop. I wandered through the Embarcadero plaza, as there are usually police all over the place, but it was just my luck to not see one when I really needed it. I returned to the park and the boyfriend was now choking the shit out of his woman. It seemed like time was of the essence so I ran back to the plaza and found a security guard, quickly summarizing what I had just witnessed. Initially he looked at me like, hey buddy, I only patrol the mall, the park is outside of my circuit, but then he decided to come with me to see what was happening. We returned to the park to find the couple now in each others' arms, the abuse over. The security guard pointed to them and said, that couple? - as if I was out of my mind. I said they were just fighting a second ago, but he rolled his eyes and said, okay, I'll take care of it. When I continued to follow him he said, please, I've got it, so I took off. I watched him from a distance as he stopped short of the loving couple, observed for five seconds, saw the tenderness in the air, and then returned to the plaza, convinced that I was in fact the deranged one, not the abusive boyfriend. After that, I decided I didn't want to be out in the world anymore - at least for the rest of the day - so I returned to my flat to watch the third season of The Shield, which I just purchased used for $30 at Rasputin's.

It's funny because I came to the city to see the craziness, to walk the streets and see what's really going on out there, but at a certain point it's just too much. For forty years San Francisco has welcomed the homeless with open arms, and my heart goes out to them, but at the same time you realize that there are a lot of sick motherfuckers out there, ready to attack at a second's notice, and you think my god, how does this stuff just go completely ignored? Why is this behavior par for the course? How do you get dressed up and go to some swanky place for dinner and just tune out the guy taking a shit next to you in the alleyway?