I’ll be homeless again, and soon, but I don’t bite my nails; I stay in my underwear, tap-tapping cigarette ash into one of the open bottles within arm’s reach.

In my sticky residential hotel this afternoon, it feels like someone cracked a frying pan over my head. My heartbeat pulses loudly, deep within my temples. Everything from my throat to my eyes is dry and I might be having an arrythmia, a jitterbug seizure, some sort of an attack.

The goal, of course, is to return to the prior state of intoxication as quickly as possible. Arrangements must be made regarding money, where to get it, and who to give it to.

In the end, I always must brave the wilderness. I sweep up yesterday’s clothes from the floor: a musty T-shirt with its crew neck stretched out, the jeans I’ve been wearing for a week, socks stiff from foot sweat and a little blood. The corners of my feet are smashed up so that toenails slice into their neighbors, and my shoes are worn thin around the ball of my foot, heel, and big toe.

My amygdala is boiling all the way to the liquor store, down impossible Market Street and across another.  I don’t want to think about what I look like: dripping sweat, knotted up and skittish as I mutter my requirements over the tall counter. The forced contact with the liquor store man is grinding. Not only is he a live person with judgements, but he happens to be beautiful, which makes his judgements all the more cutting. He takes a break from his phone conversation to hand me my two quarters. “Thanks, boss,” he says.

I run through red lights to get back inside the hotel as fast as possible. I am naked and must hide my body. I don’t trip, though I’m damn near blind, eyes pink and puffy from overexertion. I wonder if the liquor store guy is making jokes about me on the phone when I go in there. Like, Whoa! What happened to this guy? except in Arabic. He probably doesn’t even remember me by now, though; along with the homeless and decrepit, I have apparently become invisible. People only see what they want to see.

Hot water spewing from the tap starts to fog up the chipped mirror above the sink, distorting my reflection. The steam curls like smoke, an unfurling mushroom thinning as it rises. My used Styrofoam cup spits up overflow from too much pressure before I jam the knob back off. I shake out a congealed glob of crystals from a gunky container of Folger’s instant coffee and stir the hot liquid with my finger. I’m ready to drink now. With a swift crack, the plastic bottle of Taaka opens. I take back-to-back swallows using the coffee for chasing the vodka’s foul, unfiltered flavor away.

Breaths finally stop catching in my chest and come easier. I lean back in bed, able to think for the first time today.

I’ll have to drop some stuff off at my storage unit in the morning before I check out. The lighter I am on my feet, the better.

* * *

Evening.

I’ve just arrived at a creaky, classic three-bedroom flat in the Mission, and, after I caught him snorting some white powder, I’ve discovered someone who might like to party the way I do. “It’s only Neurontin,” he says apologetically.

“That’s interesting,” I say, producing a bottle of Dexedrine from my jacket’s inside pocket and putting it out on the table.

He says, “I’m Sean.” Sean snorts back a line after carefully shaping it with a BevMo membership card. “But you won’t remember that.” Snort. “Let’s be honest, you’re going to wake up in the morning and if someone asked you, you’d be like, ‘Who the fuck is Sean?’” He says it’s easier to remember him by his nickname. “My name’s Sean, I’m tall, and like in-your-face gay—” I observe his stretch-fit faded black jeans, torn sleeveless shirt headlining some forgotten indie glam rocker, and wiry handlebar mustache. This is Big Gay Sean. “So everyone just calls me that, it’s easier to remember.” He gets out his cellphone. “Girl, what’s your number?”

I was raised in a moderately strict household which cherished literal and metaphorical silence, and I believe this is why I now treat everything as if I might break it. Sometimes I can feel so deprived of sizzle that I overcorrect and end up swallowing firecrackers, and Big Gay Sean—B.G.S.—fizzes with such pop and spark that when I’m around him, it’s like being electrocuted with wonder. Those who are new to his gemmy brilliance, not yet acclimated to such a continual output of sass, snap into fits. He’s the one-man fag show of the evening. A burst of silliness and pep to awaken the excitable child within, he electrifies each room he twirls into with booming, blinding spectacle. Like an emcee chauffeuring those he encounters through his own odd world. All the celebrities rolled into one and showered with the strobe of paparazzi sensationalism. So glamorous. He glitters in an oddball, slapstick, endearing way so that my eyes are superglued to him, and I’m completely enchanted. I’m in a star-struck wonderland.

B.G.S. is the type who pretends to trip on the sidewalk and break his back, all hoping for a pop of Dilaudid in the emergency room. The way General Hospital works, he tells me, is they send electronic prescriptions directly to the in-house pharmacy on the first floor. It feels underground, a bunker in the thick of the building, past the reception area and information kiosks. Technicians point to blank lines on perforated carbon triplicate forms: sign here and here. “Easy,” he says to me on the phone after being discharged. Except that this go-around he suspects his records—tucked away electronically somewhere in a database that’s probably easy to hack into and full of misdiagnoses—are starting to overshadow his credibility. “This little whore in her little white coat handed me fifteen fucking Vicodin pills,” he says. “Not Percocet. Not morphine or fentanyl. Vicodin.”

For a whole day he’s loudly absent. It’s ten-thirty in the morning when he wakes me up with a phone call asking for money to pay for the refill. I have to go inside a Wells Fargo so I can withdraw exactly eleven-something dollars, whatever I can without going negative, and for that he slides me a few of the pills. I don’t feel dogshit from three Vicodin, but it’s not like I have anything on my calendar. Plus, hanging out with my new friend is like a thrill ride or a scary movie; I’ve got the flutters from not knowing what’s about to happen.

“Have you had to sleep on the sidewalk yet?” he asks me, right after inviting me to a sex party at the Armory. (“Best thing is, you don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to!”) I tell him I haven’t yet city-camped, haven’t yet arranged umbrellas and shopping carts for optimal protection, or splurged on a tent from a sporting goods store on a wet first of the month. I’ve never stayed in shelters either. I can fight off biting predators in the park and chatter through the freeze, but scuttling in line to reserve an infested bed every night? I’d rather reach for my rattling pill vial, slap some more amphetamines into my mouth, and prowl the shit-smeared streets until dawn, finally crashing on some grass under the crisping sun. B.G.S. agrees that this nocturnal routine is depleting, a daily burden producing bloodied feet and anorexia-thin limbs. It’s difficult to stay bathed and dressed in clean clothes while running around meeting people on their schedule all the time. I feel deprived of my human rights without a shower, forced to live in my own repulsive filth.

“Hey, girl,” he whispers between cigarette puffs. “I just got a badass idea.” His eyes are strained and bloodshot as he details the ideal scenario: the two of us teaming up to boost our chances of landing a room with the luxury of keys. The mere idea makes us giddy. With the last of our G.A. money, we begin to brainstorm ideas over cocktails in the Castro (“cocks” is what B.G.S. calls them) and we have plenty. In fact, we drink such dangerous amounts of alcohol that our continued breathing would baffle scientists. Screwdrivers and Bloody Marys for breakfast and boozy happy hour bars by noon or one or two, getting eighty-sixed, progressing to whole bottles before nightfall. I don’t even get hangovers anymore. Or maybe I do, but they’ve become so normal that I can’t tell if I’m in pain or not.

Between sips, B.G.S. introduces me around to dozens of his friends. That’s what he calls them. It doesn’t matter where we go or what part of the city, they’re everywhere, and something about this makes me slightly suspicious. Time slips past us languidly in the sweet, sticky summer steam. We get stuck in an Inner Mission/Mission Dolores/Upper Market constellation of venues, Muni stops, apartments defined by their rent and square footage, convenience stores lit up with yellow neon signs for beer, and dive bars that open at six a.m.

One of these blessed early bird watering holes, The Mix, has a back patio for smoking cigarettes. I’m introduced to a highly effeminate Asian person named Alex, who confuses androgyny with fashion. Under a tilted beach umbrella, seated on a stool circling the center table’s ashtray, he wears an Armani Exchange T-shirt and black Calvin Klein jeans frayed at the knee. Throughout our entire first conversation, I hear nothing he says; I am considering his sex. I determine it to be female but switch back to male pronouns when I notice B.G.S. is using them.

Alex is asking if anyone knows of any housing opportunities. He’s got a wad of papers listing different low-income apartment application sites, words printed in bold, deadlines in UPPERCASE letters, but I never get a chance to look through them. B.G.S. doesn’t seem too interested, and the Long Islands keep arriving, courtesy of the man in the group wearing too much concealer and winking at me like he has something in his eye. B.G.S. belittles Alex’s opinions, refuses to agree with him on anything, and rolls his eyes when Alex compliments his shirt, but later whispers in my ear, “How great would it be to look down and see your dick sliding in and out of those tiny butt cheeks?”

Unfortunately for the both of us, Alex is more interested in me. I let him give me a blowjob or two, only because I figure one of us should be nice to him. He isn’t actually homeless, though he is in a hurry to leave the gloomy basement of his homophobic parents’ house in Ingleside. He doesn’t like me to stay there with him. We’re both embarrassed by our situations, but we use each other for what we each require, and it doesn’t feel any more unethical than in any of my other friendships. His floor of the house is littered with unopened bottles of Kaletra, an HIV medication, and when I ask why he doesn’t take it, he recedes into himself reflexively like a turtle. He crushes his eyelids together, shoulders rolling, and starts to hiccup little silent sobs. He goes someplace most do not know exists, a place where I’ve endlessly waited on grim iron platforms for safety-bound trains which never arrive. I’m cross-legged on the edge of his bed, with my limp arm latched to his shoulder, saying, “It’s okay, man. It’ll be all right. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine,” because sometimes there’s nothing left to do but lie. I don’t exactly have the warmest feelings for Alex, but when I think about how B.G.S. and I made fun of him behind his back, I feel like I have a parasite in my guts. He tosses up junk from the floor searching for something to write on. Finding a piece of graph paper, he writes one large Chinese character on it with a Sharpie and folds it into my hand. I leave in the morning to meet B.G.S. at the park, knowing I’ll never hear from Alex again.

* * *

B.G.S. is flip-flopping around topless in cutoff jean shorts at Dolores Park, with each cottage cheese pock mark and inopportunely placed coil of body hair exposed to all. He’s leaping from one island of blankets to the next. We’re at the very top corner with the best view of the city, the one where all the gays hang out in speedos sipping champagne. The gays, they fake-chuckle at each other’s comments, adjusting Ray-Bans, flipping from stomach to back or up on their knees, shiny from sunscreen. “Gay beach” is what they call this part of the park, but I once heard my friend Jason say the “fruit rack” and so now that’s what I call it too. It’s where B.G.S. and I end up when it’s so sunny during these summer days. The go-go boys and spotlight nightclub dancers are practically naked while I’m dressed like it’s snowing, chugging Dewar’s from the handle. B.G.S. is strutting around and talking to random folks. What’s up dearest, how are you? I watch him forget the day of the week in a conversation and laugh it off. Some aren’t having it, but his what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude gets him way more smiles and way more attention than I get.

“Did you say Austin?” B.G.S. is asking the group of guys sitting next to us if he overheard them correctly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I lived in Austin for a few years…” and suddenly everyone’s in a circle pooling booze: splashes of Bacardi Silver in plastic cups with sun-steamed bottles of Blue Moon to chase it with. He recounts war stories from the glory days, even though he is only twenty-nine (according to the occasional low whisper, he has been for years).

“Did I ever tell you about the time my hand got bit?” he says, ready to spring into a new routine. “‘By what?’” he mimics incredulously. “What do you mean, ‘By what?’ By a human, that’s by fucking what. Bitch nearly took off my thumb.” He was sucking off a straight guy, he says, and the dude started to come when his wife walked in on the scene. Face soiled, B.G.S. made a big show of sweeping everything up with his index finger and letting it all slowly dribble into his mouth. He turned to the man’s wife, who was apparently frozen. “I said, ‘Now there ain’t none left for you, bitch.’” He stood up to leave. “Then she bit me,” and he nods with wide eyes at everyone’s contorted faces. “I know, what a psycho.” I hadn’t been watching, but now I spin to look at him. My eyebrow muscles pinch, and I must appear gray because I’m about to regurgitate my lunch of alcohol.

At Dolores, we meet and fall in with a lazy crowd of fag hags and hipsters whose home base is an ex-warehouse in the Mission called The Box Factory. It’s now a residence, a kind of commune, with industrial architecture, ultra-high ceilings, and vast, open space. The master tenant holds film screenings here, with projected images lending flashes of color to the largest white wall. She also throws hyperkinetic parties with noise and alcohol and cocaine in abundance, with no nearby neighbors to disturb.

B.G.S. is just now beginning his San Francisco stage career. He’s six-foot-three, but when formulating his drag persona, he selects a blonde beehive wig that boosts him to over seven feet tall. Getting ready before a Box drag show, there will be three or four queens and me, holding their bags and wardrobe accessories, and it’s all concealer, vanity mirrors, curling irons, and gaudy shades of lipstick. We drink wine from plastic cups while B.G.S. lip-syncs Whitney Houston ballads, clutching his mascara-streaked face as the wig shifts tectonically. Headfirst into the streetlamp-illuminated rolls of fog, jewelry clinking against the glass flask of vodka, the queens cackle at each other’s jokes while searching their secondhand vinyl purses for misplaced iPhones. As an entourage to The Stud we take up the whole sidewalk. Zip this up, baby? they keep asking. I try to keep up. Light this for me, hon? Heels slapping asphalt, B.G.S. scrambles up to club entrances and hugs the security. Our covers are waived at the door and red velvet ropes are unclipped.

I meet a fun, gawky guy named Fil at an epic drag queen lineup sensation event at the Factory. There’s so much glitter, it’s amazing any of us can see at all. It’s under my fingernails and in my underwear. Slight, little Fil wears skin-tight jeans, a snazzy olive jacket, and most notably, platform sneakers which make his feet three times bigger than they really are. He follows me around the party, docile from the booze but certainly not without intent. I don’t really know yet if I’m attracted back, so I don’t return much of his attention. But slight, little Fil is sweetly persistent. He tells me he wants me to go home with him to his apartment on Dore Alley, and stares at me for a response underneath all the noise.

During a particularly rough bout of kissing, Fil cuts his lip on one of our teeth and a few drops of blood land on my arm. When we realize what it is, Fil spasms in panic, hysterically swatting at the syrupy red liquid.

“We have to stop,” he says.

“Why?”

His composure starts to crack. “I have this virus in me. It’s in every drop of my blood. Okay?” He looks at me hard. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘Why?’”

Naked, I retreat to the bathroom and wet a rag, like it’s all I’m capable of doing.

* * *

In the sticky, overcast, mid-morning span of gray, we scuffle down the sidewalk, this large cement arc veering left as we head south on Folsom Street. Its rigidity makes my bones ache and ankles swell. I can’t wipe away the sweat fast enough from my face. B.G.S.’s scratchy voice is hammering out meandering, meaningless sounds.

“I told that motherfucker he could suck the shit out of my goddamn ass, is what I did. See this?” He points down to the ground. “This here’s the sidewalk, he doesn’t own it. He was in my way; I don’t care if he had a walker.” He itches his nose and says, “James?”

“I need Tylenol,” I say to him, but what would really fix me is a drink.

“Know what?” he continues. “I thought you were kind of a dick when we first met.”

I stare at a bush sprouting from a cement-framed square of earth in the sidewalk ahead of us. “What?”

“Then we got shitfaced together. I yakked, but you were like, totally fine.”

“So?”

“So you’re the only person who can keep up with me and not die or get arrested. You always make it back at the end of the night, even if you can’t remember doing it.” A look of panic slices through his eyes. He’s let a secret slip, but quickly swerves back into control.

“That’s what you like about me?” I say again and swallow a ticklish string of spit creeping down the back of my throat. Is this even meant to be a compliment?

“Honey, you should list ‘binge drinking’ as a skill on your résumé. I mean, you can drink more than me.”

I already know this. I assume I can outdrink anybody because I’ve always been able to. A wave of suspicion rushes in and I look up at him. “Is that the only reason we’re friends?”

His reaction time is long even for being intoxicated. “No, but I mean, you know, it helps,” he says while looking for something to look at. The musty stink of urine steams up from the cement.

I lift an eyebrow, but don’t push it. “I’m just so fucking nervous all the time,” I admit with so much resignation that I almost start to cry.

“Don’t have to be Freud to spot that one, boo. I don’t know what bug got shoved up your ass, but I bet it’s got a stinger.”

I ignore his attempt to humorize the situation. “I’m not like you. Meeting new people… it isn’t that easy for me.”
“The first step,” he says as he lights a cigarette and inhales, “is opening your mouth.” He winks at me and emits a stream of carcinogens that ghosts into the breeze. I lurch on, envious of the smoke’s ability to make itself disappear.

* * *

They verify the check at Wells Fargo, of course, and I can’t blame them. I wait patiently, whistling in my head, as the teller phones the lawyer group listed in the upper left-hand corner of the check, or whoever. Got to make sure I’m not just some wacko off the street with a criminal career of forging paperwork. It’s very San Francisco, where nobody accepts credit cards or lets you use the bathroom without buying a six-dollar scone. But I have nothing to conceal. I stand taller and with more confidence than I have in months because I fucking earned this measly bullshit, I overpaid for it with my mind’s and my body’s pain. My family members can’t trust me, and perhaps shouldn’t; over two-thirds of my friends don’t want anything to do with me, and the few who remain by my side are strained and stretched thin. For fucking up my life, this check for just under seven thousand dollars certainly doesn’t cut it. But I’m hungry, and it feels like winning the Mega Millions.

Last year, when the dust settled after my big neuropsychiatric meltdown, I found myself, above all, broke. I found out about a class action lawsuit against the drug company who makes the pill I took. I forgot all about it: the mailed packets of paperwork, letters from doctors, prescription records. Finally some of that hoop-jumping from long ago is paying off. I discovered an oasis inside my P.O. Box today… what might happen tomorrow? (Especially since I have cash?)

B.G.S. says he knows of a residential hotel, a place on Sacramento Street in Nob Hill. He says he knows the manager and that the place is alright. The manager’s name is Anthony, and when we get there, his eyes scan me as they would an intruder. When he turns to the till, I know he can still see me. I can’t tell if he’s picturing me naked or dead. He scribbles some jargon onto a perforated receipt from a pad and extends me my room key.

“I got next week,” says B.G.S., and I don’t really care if I believe him or not. I don’t even care that there’s technically no overnight guests and that we’d have to sneak around. I don’t care much about anything except the liter of vodka in my backpack. We settle into our new ten-by-fifteen-foot home, and I immediately toss back half a dozen shots using an empty prescription bottle as a glass.

B.G.S. leaves to go to the Power Exchange and probably fucks somebody who doesn’t have a name. I’m happy to get some space. He comes around every other day or so, between binges. And every other day or so, there is a noticeable amount of prescription pills missing from my backpack. Which is great—how do I accuse my friend of stealing medication behind my back? It’s too saddening to contemplate, being taken for a fool by someone I can supposedly trust. When he is around, at the end of the night we observe the twin-size bed and mentally strategize before climbing in. With two bodies so close, the soupy heat in the building makes it impossible to sleep, and B.G.S.’s hands keep trying to pull my dick out of my underwear. I mentally cringe and push him away.

After making a little too much noise at The Cinch this evening (mostly B.G.S.’s hoarse growl demanding more Kamikazes from the bartender, who had cut him off), we retire to my accommodations with a welcome liter of Smirnoff. His hand behavior is unusually grandiose. He alternately shrieks unintelligibly and groans over his knees, one palm wrapped around his forehead. He takes forever in the bathroom, which is communal. It’s next door to our room, so I can hear grunts and curses and something hitting the pipes, like he’s slamming himself against the porcelain.

This morning, which is actually this afternoon, he isn’t jammed up against me in bed. He isn’t in the room at all. I call his cell phone and listen through the wall for it to ring. It doesn’t ring, though; it goes straight to voicemail.

Someone knocks at the door. I wipe the dots of sweat from my face with the tummy of my undershirt and confront the door’s peephole with suspicion. It’s Anthony.

“That friend of yours can’t come around here anymore,” he says when I open the door. “I had a tenant call the cops really late last night because she found him drunk in the hallway.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Were you aware of that?”

“No.” I sleep super heavy, so all this is actually news to me.

“Well he can’t come around here anymore. Not even supposed to be having overnight guests.” When Anthony’s shrill, twangy voice trails off into silence, his eyes—little, nystagmic stones set deep in his face—caress me for too long of a moment. He’s not pulling off the menacing landlord act well from a foot below me. He has his knuckles on his hips, and he’s pushing his chest out to reinforce the concept that police visits at three a.m. are frowned upon.

“Absolutely, I understand. My bad. Sorry, Anthony,” I say, squirming. I think for a beat. “Was there any damage?” Maybe I could owe him some money if it isn’t too much. A payment plan perhaps. It feels like I shouldn’t burn bridges with someone established in San Francisco decades more than B.G.S., who (now that I think of it) seems to have just breezed in.

His hardness softly morphs into curiosity. “No, no damage.” I don’t know where to look, so I close my eyes and count to three (a panic move) but before I get to three, Anthony says, “Are you okay?”

It’s sort of a stunning question. Most people couldn’t give half a nasty fuck about me. That, or they think Jesus hates me and I should be eradicated from Earth, tossed into Hell’s kiln. I slow down and try to analyze what’s being asked of me. “I guess,” I say, a bit dazed. I remember what B.G.S told me: The first step is opening your mouth. Out of nowhere, an automatic reply gets pushed out of my throat like vomit. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “That’s the way it works, right?”

He inhales slowly through his nose. “If you’re lucky.” His eyes wince right after he says this. “I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. You seem like a bright kid, just apply yourself. Plus,” he continues as I break eye contact, “you must have family.” He looks me over one last time. “Checkout is tomorrow at eleven, drop the key on my desk.” The hallway’s wood flooring creaks under each step as he walks off to the stairwell.

I accidentally slam the lightweight door because the window is open. Around me, the floor is a battlefield in the aftermath of combat. Orange prescription bottles lay still like dead bodies, leaking stale, back-washed vodka. I consider the bottles through a haze, a hangover that’s not a hangover anymore. Anthony’s word family is buzzing in my ears. I think about my parents. Right now, mom is hearing dad open the front gate that screeches and bangs like a tambourine. I can hear it everywhere. Maybe they’ll mention my name over dinner tonight. That would be nice. Maybe they’ll say, “I bet Jim’s up to something these days that’s going to work out great for him. I just know it. Something’s clicking with that kid right about now.”

I should try to be as light on my feet as possible by the time I check out tomorrow, so I start packing a reusable grocery bag to run over to storage in the morning. I stop to look out the window at the late, golden afternoon. I’m sweating from its heat. People are getting off work, the sidewalks are getting busier with passers-by on their way home. I spot a gay couple smiling and walking hand-in-hand, both attractive, about my age. They turn off Polk and buzz themselves into an apartment building, which I imagine anchors their perfectly happy lives.

James Giffin is a multimedia consultant, emerging writer, and proud uncle, holding a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. He believes literature has the power to progress cultural values regarding homosexuality, homelessness, mental illness, and substance use. He resides in San Diego, California.