When the clock strikes six in the evening on a Friday, San Francisco’s downtown is a bazaar of the bizarre. On weekends and past 9pm, the sidewalks of Market Street are empty except for the homeless. At the hour I was emerging from the Muni station it was bustling like a Morocco side street as professionals, tourists, shoppers, and nightclub patrons formed a perfect storm of contrasting humanity. I was trying to figure out the policy dynamics that allowed for the Muni to refuse to accept a fucking dollar bill thereby forcing a million person public transit customer base to be running around like freshmen dorm students with rolls of quarters in their pants.

About the time that I was visualizing the dickhole meeting that reduced Frisco’s economy to bags of florins, a homeless man with no legs flew off his electric wheelchair and landed face first in front of me. He had been moving at a pretty good clip when the chair had very abruptly stopped, causing him to land right on his damn face. Absorbing the fall entirely with his face, he was pretty dazed when I went to help him upright.

While he was collecting himself, I found the loose jack that had caused the chair to suddenly lose power and tucked it back underneath the seat. The chair itself was in pretty bad shape with the cover missing from the joystick and a fair amount of corrosion on the battery. I don’t know how long this guy had been with this wheelchair, but it was definitely 100,000 miles past warranty. After he was ready to get back up, we tried a couple times awkwardly to get him back in the seat to no avail. Already surprised no one else had helped us, I looked up at a guy who appear strong enough to help and asked, “Hey man, can you give me a hand to get this guy back in his chair?”

The guy looks at me, looks at the legless guy on the sidewalk, and then looks back at me right in the eye and does the little pussy self-important headshake that comes standard with Californians and says, “Nope.”

The conviction of his delivery was the most basic offense I have yet witnessed. He had not merely declined to deliver the trivial effort it would require to help a legless man get back in his chair; he did so with pride. He was walking away with a special satisfaction from the opportunity to deny charity. The singularly detached expression on his face while he spoke will always be easy to remember.

The legless man wasn’t asking for money. He wasn’t asking for food. He wasn’t even asking for help. He just needed to get back in his fucking chair.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes of standing appalled, a Russian tourist came to lift him back in his chair. The legless man, clearly embarrassed, quickly said thanks and sped off. As he was scuttling away, I tried to imagine what condition a man must be in to behave such a way. What level of base selfishness would be required to say no on that street at that time? What instrument of astronomy would be needed to measure the egocentrism of a man capable of such detachment?

I haggled half-heartedly with the 7-11 cashier over change in quarters as this stirred in my brain. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the insignificant life one would have to lead to think that was alright. I tried to imagine how superficial his relationships must be, how completely mediocre his life story. A man incapable of compassion is incapable of friendship in any meaningful sense, let alone love. And once something like that is gone – once the sense of duty and love for someone else is absent, I’m not sure how it would ever be found again.

People are not born this way. They are not born wanting to do this. Something in this town breeds human disregard. Something as fundamental to this city as Rice-a-Roni and cable cars took away that man’s humanity. This town is in the business of buying your compassion.

The rent may be more expensive in London. But the cost of living in San Francisco is more than any human should pay.

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