Fear and Loathing in San Francisco

By Kyle Davidson Down and Out Press 2025

Posted up at 3 a.m. on a sidewalk, hallucinations.

Tripping walls,
rainbows dripping from around us
in a vision of newness.

Two teens sit quietly in the dark.
Immersed in the shimmering iridescence of a new world,
I began tapping into myself—
finding a piece of my perspective on life.

I am frustrated.
My childhood was stolen,
drowned in Adderall and abuse.

They tried to make me fit inside a box.
Boxes were never meant for me.

I was never normal,
obedient,
or subservient enough.

Looking out towards the homes
that stretch out endlessly,
identical adobe box after adobe box
fades into the darkness.

Kindly, someone whispers into the night:

“I know I will never be like the people
who are comfortable with society,
who don’t value the differences.
Spending all their time in a box,
not seeing the reality of the outside world.”

The voice is mine.

What good is a rose
if you only see the thorns?

When I refused to conform to authority,
authority, in its great wisdom,
labeled me broken.

Dirty kids don’t fit in the boxes.
They don’t fit anywhere.
They just drift—
they just are—
forever calling the open road home.

A streetlight goes out,
exposing the diamonds stashed within the night sky.

Her hand takes mine,
assuring me I won’t travel this path alone.

Saying we won’t unravel like a loose thread

falling out alone and holy different from the cloth.

A voice touches my soul:

“What do you do when you see past the façade?
What if you can’t see reality from the box—
all you see is walls,
built to keep out any and all things different?”

There must be something more.

Josephine just sits there with me,
listening quietly,
assuring in the night.

Waking up, I found myself on the ground alone.
Surrounded by glass cathedrals of isolation.
Ages had passed.
I was far from the LSD peak on the sidewalk,
far from Josephine’s cure for my alienation.

What should have been San Francisco’s oldest park—Buena Vista—comes into view. The Vista is blurry. My eyes are swollen shut and red. Polka dots protrude from every segment of my body. Massive, blurry redwoods and oaks, iconic to the California coast, loom overhead.

My crotch. “Holy shit.”
My crotch is red and swollen. Arms, hands, ass, face, throat—damn near every inch of me—burning and inflamed. I struggle to breathe.

“A spider?” I ponder.

Maybe that explains the quizzical situation of my red testicle.

The city fruitlessly reemerges from the wilds of the park. The most powerful group of people in the world pass by. Skyscrapers stretch toward the heavens like the castles of old.

I am nothing below them, an insignificant speck on an insignificant planet. A peasant is of more use to the debutantes than the beggar. But even peasants can hike to the top of Buena Vista and be equals there with the kleptocrats whose inhuman rituals run our day-to-day lives.

Suddenly, in a flash, I’m about to shit my pants. It’s time. To descend into the city.

The Bay has become the box. And the unlucky bastards left with no box to shit in, only poison oak to hide in, with nothing to eat and little to own—we understand each other.

It’s a short walk from Buena Vista Park to Haight-Ashbury. A solitary coffee shop is the only place that allows the poor to relieve themselves.

Coffee to the People is like a bird sanctuary— but a human sanctuary in San Francisco. The walls are covered with art and stickers supporting peace, anarchy, and creativity. Piles of free books and chessboards lie scattered about. Real culture and truth are sewn into the fabric of the environment.

Where other businesses would call the cops if a homeless person wanted to eat, the Vietnamese family who has owned Coffee to the People for generations provides comfort, coffee, cheap food, and a smile. The porch out front constantly billows with cannabis smoke and cigarettes. Conversations about art, psychedelics, and philosophy fill the air.

There is one modest requirement for patronage at this fine establishment: the purchase of a 25-cent banana.

John—an older man I met the day before while getting a ticket for smoking on Hippy Hill—is standing outside. He takes one look at me and says with a hint of amusement:

“Looks like you slept in some poison oak. The county plants them in the parks to keep the homeless out.”

I wheeze back, “Fuck, that makes sense,”

peering through the one eye open enough to see the joint he’s trying to pass me. These were a dying breed, the last of the real hippies. To them, the 1960s never ended. Gray-haired, dressed like acid heads of old, they spent their lives on San Francisco streets.

They remind me of my father, a teacher in a maximum-security prison for 30 years:

“I feel more at home with those at the bottom, because we are all equal there.”

Feeling grounded like the coffee beans in our cups, but still blind, suffocating and red, I had to leave. The city was choking me.

I said goodbye and struck out toward Golden Gate Park.

Just days ago I was in the Tenderloin—no parks, just smog and death. Addicts, veterans, families, migrants, the disabled. Many people a combination of all those things that society leaves on the sidewalks, in the parks, in the gutters. While they sleep in castles in the clouds, they look out at us the untouchables.

Tents occupy the sidewalks. And between the contrast of the two, I can see clearly now. From one sidewalk at 3 a.m. to the next, I knew what it meant.

Was it a dream? A hallucination?

Truthfully, it was a nightmare. Or a bad trip. But there was no brown acid at this show.

How can humanity be this blind, this selfish?

If you're a romantic, the terms for people like me are: gypsies, drifters, travelers, hippies. Or if in your vista we are seen in negative way it is often vagrants and vagabonds, hobos, homeless, losers, degenerates, drug addicts, lazy bums?

Dirty kids is the proper term in our community. We are not romantics living a life of luxury. We live with work, struggle, and risk. I never spend more than a few days in one place—it’s too dangerous when sleeping outside is a crime.

I had missed out entirely on the acid peak of 1960s San Francisco. This San Francisco was dirty—the elite’s filth falling from skyscrapers like a shimmering waterfall of crap. The rocks at the bottom made up of $500 tie-dyes and fine art galleries, pawn black-and-white photos of Hendrix, Garcia, and Joplin—musicians who once played in the streets of the city for free out of love of music and the people.

Now those photos sell for hundreds of thousands. No music or love included just a moment in time packaged and sold like a cheap souvenir.

With the turn of the millennium, the world whitewashed those who fought for peace and equality. Jerry and Janis couldn’t fit in the box, so they were packaged and sold posthumously—held up as gods.

Their community is gone. Replaced with a sad generation and happy images used to escape the cold reality of where we were and are.

The flowers of love and civil disobedience no longer grow in the cracks of the San Francisco sidewalks. Trampled under neoliberal progress and capitalism. If they try to grow, the pigs give them loitering tickets and grind them under there hoofs for their insolent ideals trying to linger too long in a place they don’t own.

The flowers remain to this day — like us but only where society permits them.
Little boxes on a windowsill.
Or in the glass house of Golden Gate Park.

Hustling and begging were my only means of survival. With no wealth, no home, and no one. I’d spent the last of my cash on a bus out of L.A.

Survival required a couple hundred handshakes, cleverly disguising the exchange of green for greenbacks. Out of both cash and green, I panhandled in a city with little mercy.

The scenery changes, but the sidewalk stretches on endlessly. I stand there alone. Box after box, extending toward infinity, containing lives of those who once were part of the world, not just their world.

I look toward the vast expanse at the entrance to SF’s Golden Gate Park. My mind is filled with wonderful things.

Used needles rest like lily pads on a still pond. At the Head of Golden gate park a crown of thorn adorns the city.

Police harass the boxless and rent-a-box people alike. Freedom—financial or otherwise—is something only a select few can afford.

The rats are still freer than most of us, feeding on the waste falling from the swollen plates at the tables of the kleptokings above.

Like the rats, I exit quickly. To avoid extermination, you stay unnoticed. You keep moving. You sleep in the shadows. Out of sight out of mind.

After a few miles, I see a man in his fifties. Boxless. A red backpack. A small banjo. The banjo belongs to another Traveller and we all meet up heading into the Heart of the City.

After some small talk, he gifts me a bag of weed for which I am always grateful. The herbs represent a healing of what has been done a peace offering an exchange of kindnesses not grievances.

His name is Mike. Nothing special. No addiction. No problems. No worries.

“I don’t want to oppress others. All I need is a sleeping bag and a joint,” he says.

Mike spends most of his time in the richest neighborhoods and grandest parks in the world without paying a dollar.

Mile after mile we all walk north while our companion plays the banjo belting some unheard folk song of uprising and revolt. There isn’t much to say. A quiet understanding exists among those at the bottom—a sense of community lost to the cutthroat world above.

It feels like home, but with more advertisements, more consumerism more yuppies.

Waiting at the northern tip of San Francisco—just past the Golden Gate Bridge—is where the 1 meets the 101, continuing its cruise along the coast of California.

My ticket out of the shitslide of elite society and poison oak.

I walk on, backpack full of dreams, toward the Golden Gates.

There’s something about bridges. Making the impassable, passable.

The Golden Gate is no exception. It stretches past skyscrapers, past ghettos.

Mike looks down from the structure:

“Even the nets don’t help. There’s always fresh corpses.”

What drives someone to reject the most basic function of life?

Now, I don’t question it. I struggle not to follow them.

I don’t know if our will to survive was suffocated by the air inside the boxes, or the stench of self-obsession that chokes our culture.

Crossing the bridge into Sausalito, I feel hope. Something new and different waits on the other side.

Mike and I part ways. We both prefer to travel alone.

Alone again, eyes swollen shut and itchy balls, I ponder what waits along the Pacific coast.

Always knowing: this is not the end of struggle. From town to city, I will never find a box I can fit into.

Despite thousands of miles and states, I know more suffering awaits. But I made it out of San Francisco without

“cutting off my arms and legs to fit inside boxes never meant for me.”

No one jumps off the Golden Gate and makes it out alive. But then again, no one crosses it without dying someday.

I jumped the waters once myself, hopeless, and was pulled back by some invisible hand. Today I hope I won’t return to those waters till I’ve crossed the bridge again many more times.

Crossing the bridge, there was a shimmer. A mirage of humanity. Of something new.

Sometimes life feels like a slow walk through a park —
and other times,
it’s sudden and abrupt —
like hitting the water beneath the Golden Gate.

May there always be a bridge between us and the future.