Shouters

The Preamble: Here's my thesis tonight: for the San Francisco Bay Area, Ronald Reagan's most vivid legacy is not the corporatists and yahoos who now run our country, but rather the shouter.

As Governor, Mr. Reagan slashed funding for the state's mental hospitals, casting into the street thousands of patients, many the casualties of the previous decade's experimental excesses, for whom a lifetime of medicated, institutional restraint was clearly indicated. As such, the sidewalks of early 1970s San Francisco and Berkeley filled up with a subspecies of the homeless distinguished by oratory fervor -- Tourette's-like declamations on any range or topics, though more often on no topic at all.

The Shouters: There was a gentleman known as Serge, who anyone who attended the University of California, Berkeley in the late '70s and early '80s will remember wandering up Telegraph Avenue in his tattered green army jacket, uncut, unkempt, unwashed red hair reined in only by a large half-circle of styrofoam tied to his head with a rag.

Rumor had it that Serge had been a fellow at the Rand Institute until he burned himself out on acid. He now spent his days staring fixedly at the ground 30 ft. ahead of him and muttering, "at which point they went to operations and performed in-out reverse loop procedures over time defined by certain sequences and parameters fourteen fifteen sixteen eighteen twenty-seven times any previously indicated bi-metallurgical route established by convention with consideration of the subassigns," as he cut a swath through the crowds of students by dint of his sheer stench.

But I've gone astray. Serge wasn't a shouter. Serge was a droner. Your shouter...your shouter may drone, your shouter may mutter, but only as preamble to a forceful exclamation, sometimes accompanied by a jump, thrashing action, or other violent gestural activity.

For my brother the paradigmatic shouter is the African-American gentleman he saw lurching down Market Street in a raincoat one day, a large hood draped around his head, saying "I AM NOT....CHICKEN! I AM NOT....CHICKEN!!!!

Robert was my all-pro shouter: Robert had a guitar, some kind of rasty Gibson clone, an electric with no amp. He spent his days "on the Ave," Telegraph Avenue, in a rarified, Hendrix high, cutting chops that only he could hear. He'd walk a few steps then stop to gyrate, drop to his knees, play the guitar behind his head and generally get, you know, down. "Voodoo Child" was blasting in his headphones 24/7. But of course there were no. . .headphones.

There was, however, vocalization. "STAND UP NEXT TO A MOUNTAIN," he'd yell, and that was all you heard for a while, because he was crouched over his guitar, coaxing forth a solo well beyond your range of hearing. Then he'd jump out of a doorway, "IF I DON'T MEET YOU NO MORE IN THIS WORLD THEN UH I'LL MEET YOU IN THE NEXT ONE MMMMM --"

Sorority girls would scream, Blondie's pizza slices flying into the street.

Like Serge, Robert wasn't on the street with anybody else. In his world, there was only him. And, it appeared, Serge.

But Robert wanted to be alone.

As he outwieghed Serge by about 75 lbs, that was a problem for Serge. It may have been his only problem, aside from establishing quadrant sector coordinates in the logistics bay and proceeding within the bifractal time-period procedures established by previous loop reversal cycles. Many was the time he'd be droning up of Telegraph with Robert making right for him -- "HEY!!!! GODDAMN MOTHER SHOW YOU DO THAT KIND OF MOTHERFU -- MOVE OVER ROVER!!!!!" and simply adjust his course for the other side of the street without missing a beat: "...modeling a categorized subassign without reference to previous substantive operations during which in-out loop procedures loop procedures loop procedures could be generally classified over the seventy-three-four-five point five point five point five aspect ratio of a scalar uptake continuum..."

Anyway, you just don't really see the good shouters anymore. Oh sure, there are a few at Powell and Market, and some MUNI lines have their resident shouters...sometimes I think they should rename the bus lines, in fact. The 38 DIETETIC GODDAMN HOUSECATS...the 5 FUCKING SON OF A BITCH!!!...the 42 YEAH THAT'S THE DEVIL'S SPOON ALL RIGHT -- YOU WANT IT, YOU CAN PAY WHAT HE'S ASKING. ME, I USE A FORK.

But in general, the shouters have pretty much either died or been forced out by a more mercenary, addictive class of professional homeless. Though I can't imagine where to.

Ross? Blackhawk? Manteca? I'm not seeing it.