UNITED STATES—Graydon saw the solution. They were on a road trip driving by a chain store, and the sheds were viewed from a freeway in Portland: so many thousands of garden storage sheds that could house the unhoused roofless. The idea would be irresistible, filtering down from the great green Northwest corner of the country, then making a pit stop in San Francisco. The nagging issue stuck with him throughout the revitalizing trip to the Northwest. Back in Los Angeles there had already begun an effort to force the hotel and motel owners to open the doors to get the people off the sidewalks, where they were viewed as lepers.
Graydon was witness:
Their tents were scooped up. The giant vacuum cleaners came and took them away. And it was heartbreaking, a tearjerker, cliffhanger… suddenly where there’d been clumps of tents, there were clear clean bare sidewalks. After years. The only tent spared was the camouflage tent; the disappeared accrued invisibility… When traveling through Sebastopol, as Graydon would later say in a speech at a campaign event where, one friend and a single reporter showed up:
“It was in Sebastopol, not Russia, but northern California, that I immediately saw the need for more sidewalks and public garbage cans. The Russians had reached here: it was an emblem as of a landing by Martian powers. The people who walk and leave the least ecological impact on the environment are punished by having to go miles and miles before they can find a way to cross the other side of the street. And you are forced to become a scofflaw, because any sane person says to themselves, I am not going to trudge any further by this speeding traffic. Why should I wait to find a trash can?”
The heckler yelled from the corner, “Go back where you came from. . .!”
The heckler was his reporter friend. Graydon did his best to muster a smile.
Landlords were not going to be happy about the turn of events, but those are the risks you have to take—he steeled himself. The parallels were blindingly bright after the author’s researches into Bananaland, the fallow earth depleted, scorched, abandoned… Lay waste for generations and look at all the zombie buildings in Hollywood and downtown. All the empty space, when all one craved and needed was a place to lie and rest, scarcely larger than a telephone booth.
“What’s a telephone booth?” heckled the friend.
Graydon was tongue-tied. He meant to say was a tiny space is easily heated by that perpetual heat generator, the human body. It was one of the ideas Miller would weave into his radical simple manifesto, which would come to embody stiff fines for sirens, and jail time for anybody who tossed food on the street.
It reeked havoc on the dogwalker and never did he want to wrestle a chicken bone from his dog’s jaws.
Subconsciously, Graydon was guided by the kooky ideas of the Russian professor who had predicted the break-up of the contiguous core of the United States, which in speeches Graydon would refer to as the Untied States of America (due to a kind of verbal dyslexia that Sigmund Freud might have found veddy interesting). Graydon wished to pursue an aggressive program to provide the streets with more waste cans and frequent crosswalks. Lower Concordia would be among the first municipalities to restrict sirens, limited mainly to ambulances, and then to a volume much kinder to the human ear.
Ought to be a plan to turn Market Street into a river, in Frisco first, not L.A. It was an idea to tuck away… To buck the tide and start by being a prophet nearer to his own land.
To be continued…
