I Am No One
There are some moments in life that you never forget. Things that happen that forever change your perspective on things, your behavior, how you spend the rest of your life. I have many of these moments - random encounters with random people, brushes with death, run-ins with the law, watching people die.
Recently I’ve been thinking about my hyper productivity. This is a complicated thing for me. Often the urge to make art and write feels to me like a “do or die” situation. Or, more specifically “do or don’t exist.” I don’t make art and write because I am compelled to be famous or even be considered a “real” artist or writer”. I do it for two reasons: 1) a need to take what’s inside me (which is A LOT) and externalize it, and 2) to make myself visible. It’s kind of like a constant affirmation of me saying I’M HERE. I’M ALIVE. I AM NOT INVISIBLE. Let me explain by telling you something from my life.
Those of you who know me or who have been reading me for a while know that I spent my entire teenage years on the streets. Let me make something very clear, when I hit those streets, I became invisible. I was a no one.
Shortly after I turned sixteen, I dumped my first pimp Richard, got clean from heroin and detoxed with a couple of friends/criminals. Then, I decided to go the streets alone. I got a room at the Baywood Motel on 9th and Harrison, and I lived completely on my own with absolutely no human connection other than the tricks I turned to earn money and the few people I ran into at the punk club the Mabuhay Gardens where I would go at night to lose myself in music. All these people were fleeting and none knew who I was or gave a rat’s ass about me or my life.
At this point in my life, I was just surviving. I was a sixteen year old girl doing her job - walking the streets and working the lunch crowd - to keep my body alive and a roof over my head, even if it was just the roof of a tawdry room in a South of Market motel. I hardly used drugs. I smoked a little weed. Drank a little bit at the club, but really I was just earning pay to keep me moving forward because I had nowhere else to go except being this being who propelled herself forward, and backwards would only land me in an early grave.
One of the interesting things about my life on the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco is that my dad was actually working city blocks away from where I was walking the streets, but he never came to look for me. To him, I didn’t exist. My mother never tried to find me. I had a fake name, no fingerprints on file anywhere. In fact, I didn’t exist for anyone.
I lived in my motel room with a handful of clothes. I rode the bus up to the Tenderloin to work during the afternoon. I walked the dark streets back to my room alone at night.
I did learn some important “tricks of the trade” (pun intended) to help keep myself alive, healthy, and out of jail. One of the most important rule is that the streetwalker never names the price. As soon as you name a price, you can get busted for “soliciting.” So turning tricks involved hard business deals, a savvy and often exhausting game of cat and mouse. It often meant driving around in cars with strange men while we both bantered until I got the trick to name what he wanted and for what price.
One day, a man picked me up in a little Toyota. I thought, “Great. This guy is going to be a cheapskate.” The man had shoulder length brown hair and a mustache. He wore non-descript brown work clothes. He looked like an accountant or some other dull office worker. I got in his car, and the game of cat and mouse commenced.
I talked sideways, attempting to ask him what he wanted and how much he would pay but not directly asking the question. He did not answer directly either. He kept driving, and the game went on and on and on. He would not name a price, and neither would I. We must have spent 30 minutes driving in his car until we ended up down by the railroad tracks near Hunter’s Point.
I looked out the window at how far away I was from my working grounds - the streets of the Loin. I saw how much time I had wasted with this guy. Out of exasperation, I finally just named a price.
The minute the dollar amount came out of my mouth, the man flipped out his badge and said, “I’m going to have to take you in. You’re under arrest.”
My heart sank. My stomach fell to the floor. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I started sobbing. “You can’t arrest me!” I pleaded. “I have no one to call. Please don’t take me in. I’ll never get out.”
He asked, “What do you mean you have no one to call? Can’t you just call your pimp?”
I cried, “I don’t have a pimp. I have no one!”
The man looked at me hard, and something must have gotten through to him. He saw a sixteen year old girl all alone in a city that could eat her up and spit her out.
“You really have no one?” he asked, his face softening in resignation and a kind of sadness.
I gulped down my tears and nodded.
He reached across my lap and opened the passenger door to the car. “Go on. Get out,” he said. “And be careful.”
He let me go. I was stuck down by the railroad tracks and had to walk back to the Tenderloin to earn enough money to keep my room for the night.
I was shaking with fear and with something even more huge. In that one moment, I realized how invisible I was. I really was no one. If anything happened to me - if I were arrested or killed -- no one would know claim my body; no one would know who I was. No one would be there to name me. I was a no one who had no one. If a violent trick murdered me, I would have been dumped like so much garbage, never claimed, never named. And this is how I spent my teen years. It is a feeling that has never left me, this sense of utter invisibility.
Recently my therapist asked me, “Didn’t anyone ever come looking for you and try to help you?” I gave one simple answer. “No.”
It is hard to explain what that feels like to be no one and to be so young. But it affected me deeply. The man said, “Be careful.” I don’t know if I was careful or lucky, but at age 19 I finally made it out of the sex work business and tried to scrap together a life for myself. I put myself through college, fought my demons (which were and continue to be huge), got sober, became a mother, and made a lot of art and wrote a lot of shit.
Since I left the streets nearly 33 years ago, I have incessantly produced art and writing, much of which I have shared on my blog here. I realized lately that I really don’t care what happens to my art and writing. I have stacks and stacks and stacks of art in my house. Tomes and tomes of words I have written. I do these things as a kind of primal scream to say I EXIST. So yes, it is manic. It becomes insanely over-productive. I sacrifice other things in my life (mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms) to produce art and put a face on my face. I have hurt the ones I love by being so self-absorbed in my own need for self-affirmation that comes from a place that is really hard to explain, and the fact that I have to explain it hurts.
After my dad died, I realized that I also produced as some kind of unconscious attempt to gain his approval and recognition, this man who worked city blocks away from me while I was a kid walking the streets. It is complicated. Even though he rarely saw my art or writing, in the back of my head, I think I did it to show my dad that I was worth SOMETHING. When he died, I suddenly felt like I never wanted to do anything again. In some way I lost my point of reference for all my creative output which is so deeply connected to the continuum of my life, of which my dad has always been a huge part - both negative and positive.
Being invisible makes for a complicated adult life. I know that sometimes my manic overproduction leaves the people I care about in the roiling wake of my hyper productivity. I’m often not as sensitive to others as I should be because I am so busy trying to make myself not invisible.
Lately, I’ve kind of turned the corner in which invisibility is sounding more and more attractive. I have visions of just fading away, all my art and writing dying and turning to dust like so much ephemera. The junk of dreams of being visible. The ashes of my past left to rot in a garage.
The bottom line is I am tired. I have lived and survived a hard life. I have climbed out, screamed for life, and made myself heard. I feel so done. So tired of holding on. Yet, I am so hardwired to produce that I know I will produce until I die. I want to be invisible, but I’m scared not to be visible. I know what it feels like to really be no one. In the end, I guess I really am no one, but I have created this legacy of words and art to attach materiality to the no one I have always been.