"I'm One of the Good Guys!"
“Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.” - Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths
“I’m one of the good guys!” he told me, tapping his chest. “Ain’t but 6% of us in the whole world.”
One night in late 1997 I was stopped in the street by one of the denizens of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. He got right up to me, telling me about the men he killed in Hanoi.
It began when he asked me for a cigarette. I told him I don’t smoke and kept walking. “I’m one of the good guys!” he said. Breaking a cardinal rule for this frightening area – especially at night – I stopped, thinking I’d inadvertently offended him, that he thought I was lying about the tobacco and just didn’t want to bother with him.
He was drunk, but that wasn’t the reason for his mental state. He repeated his comments several times.
“I’m – I’m one of the good guys! Ain’t but 6% of us in the world. You can look everywhere and you won’t find but six. There’s only 6 percent. In six years there’ll be 3%, in twelve years – we’ll all be gone. It’s true!”
He had maneuvered himself into my path. His eyes became clear for a bit, and they looked… crafty, for want of a better word. Not clear, and certainly not calculating, but something seemed up. This is when he told me he’d killed seven men outside of Hanoi, and he moved right up to me to say this.
Damn straight I was getting nervous. He didn’t seem out of it anymore. I wasn’t going to make any sudden moves, and I wasn’t turning my back to him. It was early, not yet 8 PM, and people – people with homes or other destinations – were still passing quickly through.
So I listened, watching him, his eyes. I don’t know if he was thinking about getting violent, but through the mental cloud, he calmed down, and instead of anger, eventually all that remained was pain. Occasionally a wry smile.
He rambled. He repeated himself, and would circle back to stories he’d just told me. It all came back to “I’m one of the good guys.” Eventually, I pieced this much of a story together, though I’ve no idea how much may be true and how much delusion. Maybe all of it; or, maybe very little is fantasy.
He was in the ’Nam and one of his missions was freeing a dozen or more chopper pilots. The enemy (according to his story) had “strung them up”. They were being horrifically tortured. He wondered a time or two how anyone could do that to another person, but he never said more than “they were strung up” and he had to “cut them down”.
He said that Nixon presented him with the Medal of Honor, and asked him, specifically, “what the fuck were you thinking?” His answer was just that someone had to get them.
He had two dogs. I forget what he said they were, the breed. But he used to run them every day along a 3½-mile stretch of beach on the other side of San Francisco. Seven miles total. Every day. He raised them. He said when his wife divorced him, the court gave her everything, including his precious dogs. “It ain’t right!” He practically cried every time he talked about the dogs. “It ain’t right to take from a man what’s his!” He said he hadn’t cared about the money, house and car, only his dogs.
He told me a story about George Bush that he’d heard, about how he’d gathered a group of men at the White House, men who’d saved his life in Korea. (Though his Bush story was set in Korea, it would have been WWII, of course. He did invite surviving crew members of the USS Finback submarine to his 1989 inauguration.*)
He said he had a friend coming, flying out from New York. A lawyer. One of the pilots he rescued, coming to help him. This lawyer was going to help him sue and get what’s owed him, some money. His dogs were implied. (I really doubt this part of the story.)
He said he’s dying. He could feel it. He had his own little corner on the sidewalk where he’d been staying at the time. Sometimes he seemed almost happy to talk about these things.
And at one point he said again “I’m one of the good guys!” And he pointed to himself as always. His usual litany broke here and he said to me “You’re one of the good guys too, I can tell.” Then his usual script ran again. “Ain’t but 6% of us…”
I’ve tried to piece this together into a linear story, but it was spoken in fragments, out of order, and sections repeated many times before I got all of this. I began to maneuver myself around him. He smoked a rumpled cigarette. He bummed another cigarette from a different passerby. Finally, after half an hour or so, I told him that I needed to be somewhere. (Actually, I just wanted to get to the office and my pocket TV to watch Friends – at least, that had been my destination before I encountered him.)
He decided to walk with me. We stopped now and then. When I finally completed the two-block journey, he kept walking as I entered the building; even though he’d left his few possessions, he kept walking down the street.
He mentioned a little more, but that was the gist of it.
As I said, I have no idea how much of it actually happened to him – but that was his story; that was his life.
No – there was one other thing. He told me about his mom. When he was in Vietnam, his mother was dying. Reluctantly, the marines let him go. (Special Forces. I didn’t ask to see a tattoo.) He took care of her and was there for her when she died. I told him I understood, since my mother had died the previous year. He kept asking “Do you know what I mean?” in earnest, so on this point – and a few others – I answered affirmatively.)
And he told me his father came back from Korea in rough shape (practically hamburger to hear him tell it). His mother stayed by his side and nursed him, took care of him. One day his father told him “Neither one of us would be here if she hadn’t taken care of me. The best thing I ever did as a man was to marry her.”
And then he would cycle back to the dogs and his ex-wife and 6%.
It began scary but became a heart-wrenching encounter.
I hope I never forget it.
I originally wrote this down in 1997, a few nights after it happened. It's about an actual encounter I had in the San Francisco Tenderloin. I looked up the George H.W. Bush story online in 2024 and that held true. I tried to find him among Richard Nixon’s Medal of Honor recipients, but couldn’t find him in the handful of transcripts I found, so who knows?
Now, I never made a habit of being in the Tenderloin after dark (I worked there during the day, though - Century Theatres was still three months away from moving to their new headquarters in San Rafael). However, at the time I was technically homeless myself.
In preparation for the move of the corporate office, I’d planned to move to the area - or over the bridge in the East Bay, anyway; that's where I was looking. I had packed up and moved out of my old apartment in Daly City at the beginning of October - rents had just gone up an astronomical amount and I was not willing to pay it. I hadn’t found a new place yet, but I figured this would give me further incentive to find something quickly - hahahahaa!
Actually, I had found something at this point in November (an apartment in Richmond near Hilltop Mall) but it would not be available for another two weeks. I moved in to the bare apartment just before Thanksgiving and it was another couple of weeks before my furniture and other items would be delivered from storage.
So I was without a home for a brief while. I spent a couple of nights with a friend but another person was visiting from out of town and she ran out of room - and I think her roommates were uncomfortable having a man staying over, too. I spent one night in a motel, but it was so unpleasant I never went back.
The rest of that six week period was spent sleeping on the floor at the office. I'd come back late in the evening (when everyone was gone) and got up early (before anyone came in). Sleeping on the bare floor of my new apartment was a step up! I was very happy when my stuff arrived out of storage. And a year or two later I got rid of all the second hand crap and bought new furniture for the place. But I digress.
Anyway, this is about a truly homeless person I met during that period. It made an impression on me and the next night I wrote it all down so I could get everything straight in my head to remember it. A few years later I posted it on my old website when I read Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths.
Being fond of both the 1936 French film (Les Bas-fonds) and the 1957 Japanese version (Donzoko), when I stumbled across a copy of the 1974 paperback in a library sale, I pounced on it.
The Lower Depths is a 1902 Russian play set amongst a community of extremely impoverished people. I first heard of the play in 2004 when The Criterion Collection released two film versions in a single package. I collect the films of Kurosawa Akira, so the DVD set was already a must, but the brilliant Jean Renoir adaptation also shines through and made the acquisition even more welcome.
I have no clear favorite of the two films, as both present unique visions of the play with not only differing cultural standpoints from the Russian play, but filmed at opposite ends of WWII.
I'm drawn to this perhaps in the same way that I'm drawn to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (especially the BBC adaptation of it), through my understanding - particularly honed during my lengthy unemployment in the late 2000s - that it would take so little to push anyone into that situation, that it would take so little to push me into the status of abject poverty. I was clinging by my short fingernails when I read the play, but I've always been aware of it. Prolonged unemployment just made it easier to see, and causes one to dwell on the disturbing possibilities.
I think of that fellow from time to time. I can’t imagine he’s still alive more than 25 years later, but I hope he was able to find some peace in the disjointed life he had.