San Francisco

When I was fifteen, my family did the Coast to Coast thing.

We were in San Francisco, having lunch outside the car. This meant turkey sandwiches, just to make things clearer. We didn’t go to restaurants, except those inhabited by the clown. This—and excuse the side note—was a major part of my development as an adult, this idea that I didn’t go to restaurants as a kid. Now, I talk about how much I owe my parents for taking me abroad and expanding my mind, or at least allowing me to expand it on my own, but it is a fact that we didn’t go to restaurants. It wasn’t a money thing; maybe it was my dad being a Homer Simpson, which meant my mom was too embarrassed to take him out because he would get lost in the menu, chat with the waiters, and the way he ate… just short of licking the plate after a good meal. He was an army man; what can you expect? So my mom didn’t want to take him out, and we didn’t go to restaurants. I grew up not knowing the proper way of using a knife and a fork, not to mention chop sticks. As a result, I am now like him. When I go to restaurants I get lost in the menus, I make jokes with the tired waiters, and I eat like a Neanderthal. No big deal. At least I don’t eat in McDonald’s anymore. And I’m a vegetarian.

So we were in San Francisco eating turkey sandwiches, when I saw a homeless man dragging his leg. Now, this was ’88, and what I knew from various random sources was that in the US there was a thing called AIDS that affected gay people and people that used drugs. I didn’t know how it affected them; I just knew it did, before killing them. I also knew that in San Francisco there were many gay people and many people who did drugs. Could this be one of them? I turned to my only source of knowledge at the time, a know-it-all filled with trivial knowledge about types of clouds and military history: my dad. I pointed at the man and asked, “Why is he limping? Does he have AIDS?”

“Probably,” he said.

It took me a few years to realize that being homeless and having a bad leg doesn’t equate having AIDS, but at the time I didn’t care to find the truth from other sources. Here I was, facing a man with the latest buzz word: AIDS. In the news in Israel they were talking about a far away place where interesting things happen, where people died because they were addicted to drugs and because they were gay, and here I was, a fifteen years old kid at the center of the world.