reporting300YD

I took Obama on his challenge, put my action where my anguish was and volunteered to help count homeless people on Jan. 27, 2009, as part of a nationwide count of people living on the streets, in cars, encampments, boxes and shelters. More than 400 people had volunteered here in San Francisco. After our brief training, my team tramped up and down a less than 10-block slice of the city that from one street to another, and sometimes on the same block, encapsulated some of the city's most opulent hotels and restaurants, smart boutiques and nightclubs, restaurants and art galleries and, simultaneously, skanky single-residence hotels, humble ethnic restaurants, and darkened buildings covered with graffiti and the grime of the city.

We didn't know whether to count the black transvestite who hassled the throngs of fancy people on their way to dinner or the theater, trying to get four quarters. Maybe she wanted them for the bus. It wasn't clear. "I've got the dollar," she kept saying, her skinny legs naked on a very cold night in San Francisco. Our instructions an hour earlier had been vague. We weren't to ask anyone if he or she was homeless. Sometimes it was obvious, possessions stuffed into a black plastic bag, a shelter of sorts created in an alcove of a Muni station. Sometimes, as with the transvestite, how did you know?

A block further, an even thinner woman, skeletal really -- no teeth, a clump of snarl for hair, clutching a thin black coat around her caved-in frame -- begged money for food. "I'm starving," she repeated plaintively as people rushed by.

In less than two hours, we counted 82 homeless people -- huddled in small groups, shivering in wheelchairs, passed out on the concrete, selling dumpster trash and stuffed in a sleeping bag or singing, playing the saxophone, screaming "Shut up! Can't you play anything else?"

The transvestite was ignored by two businessmen engaged in conversation outside Kuleto's, an upscale Italian restaurant in wood and glass where the wine flowed generously and the veal chop cost $37. A few blocks away, tourists waited for the cable cars at Powell Street while the lankest, most pitiful human -- man or woman, I couldn't tell -- hawked the Street Sheet, a newspaper created by homeless to address their issues and concerns. It didn't look like anyone was buying. Was the person homeless? I thought so but where to put my checkmark: male or female?

Where I lived on Octavia, most of the homeless were white; here, they were eight to one black and their appearance and health appeared so markedly worse than the homeless I'd encountered daily in my previous life in San Francisco that I thought several might be dying, especially the toothless woman pleading for food money.

Later, after I'd left my group and headed back to Market Street, I retraced my steps past the upscale Hilton San Francisco with its ornate lobby outfitted with two-ton chandeliers, its penthouse suits and the rooftop Starlight Lounge with a million dollar view of San Francisco. Chauffeurs were depositing guests or packing up their expensive luggage and purchases into limousines with darkened windows. Guests hovered on the sidewalk in long wool coats, in fur, shivering nonetheless in the brisk air, while the wraiths of the neighborhood trolled for soft sells, anyone with a handful of spare change.

I was watching all this when I heard a man in a handsome leather coat over smart trousers tell his equally well dressed companion that he would be in Killington next week. The word Killington reached into my head, tired and overwhelmed with the clash between those who were guaranteed graciousness in our fair city and those for whom the word graciousness, never mind choosing between premier and king-sized, was irrelevant. Killington was a ski area near the Vermont city where I live part-time. When I asked, the man said he'd "just bought a sweet get-away home there, in the woods. Deep in the woods."

Just then, the skinny woman with no teeth wandered our way. She still clutched her stomach "Please," she whined. "Please, can't you spare something? I'm awful hungry." The man and his woman friend scurried quickly into a cocktail lounge packed with other spenders.

And later, on the J-train home, I let my eyes explore the body of the woman sitting next to me. She was big. She smelled badly of drink. Her face and hands, the only parts of her body not swathed in clothing, were covered with sores. She cleaned her filthy fingernails with a Swiss Army knife then juggled an avocado. Her hands were never still as, over and over, she checked for the papers stuffed in a pocket, her keys, her knife, the avocado.

The woman got off at my stop. I started to follow, to see where in upscale Noe Valley she might live. But the woman crossed 24th Street and headed downhill. I was hungry, tired, and I needed Daniel, my sweet Maltese dog. My own tiny rooms, crammed with the things that give me comfort -- books, plants, music, art -- awaited. And when Daniel gave me a thorough face washing in praise of my return, I hugged him gratefully.