Though now I am living with my father in a hellish, rural part of Northern California, for some time I lived on the streets of San Francisco. I miss The City.

For awhile, I was feeling low; the depression had been a real bitch to shake. I was starting to get the feeling that I was coming to accept my then current living situation as being interminable, as that being okay. It was a species of giving up, that it had all become too much for me and I might as well give in rather than fight against that feeling.

There was one ameliorative aspect of my temporary hotel room where I was existing then: there was a healthy peperomia plant outside my window which I watered. It was such a surprise to find it there.

Since I had no money, I needed to be creative to maintain my smoking habit. Every morning, on my way to TARC (Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center-http://www.tarcsf.org/w ww/public/home.html) for coffee and snacks, I started 'snipe' hunting. A snipe is a discarded cigarette butt. Most people when they hunt snipes try to find something that has enough left to be re-lighted and smoke that with no regard as to the health or lack of health of the previous owner when that snipe was a cigarette-fully grown and not reduced by use.

On the other hand I and a few others would pick up any stub of any size or shape-smashed was fine-because I would empty the tobacco out of them and roll them into brand new grown-up cigarettes-resurrected from the sidewalks; phoenixes arisen. If I was out of cigarette papers, newspaper would do-the San Francisco Examiner is the best for rolling. Of course, I ended up with a strange blend of tobaccos which I liked to call 'San Francisco Special'. A lot of our citizens smoke Newports or Marlboro Lights.

Learn more about this author, David Whiting.
Click here to send author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about 'Street people' - Who are they??
We want to hear your view. Write now!