I left my hotel and headed down Fremont Street toward Las Vegas Boulevard. Fremont throbbed with loud, drunk revelers carrying supersized beers and giant cocktails brimming over from clear plastic containers shaped like footballs.

The celebrants were waiting for the next lightshow, a pulsating, pounding, eardrum-piercing music experience shown on the hour throughout the evening—showcased on the world’s largest video screen, an arched canopy that stretches along three casino-studded city blocks. Nowhere but Vegas can you find this sort of mega-extravaganza of flashing, glittering sights and sounds. Think MTV on steroids. Think Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam and the Mojave Desert of lightshows.

During my walk down Fremont Street, I encountered two men in wheelchairs, each man missing a leg, as evidenced by the raw, mottled stumps that protruded from their chairs. My guess is they were in their late forties, maybe early fifties, though they could have just as easily been hovering around 60. They both wore green army fatigue jackets made of heavy cotton ripstop, worn and faded and tattered at the edges. The jackets hung loosely around the men’s sloped shoulders and folded into their bent legs and stubs.

One said something to me as I passed, his words so mumbled and shredded and hoarse, I had no idea what he meant or even what language he was using, but the wild glare in his eyes suggested it was best not to ask him to repeat himself. Or step too near to where he had parked his chair.

The other said nothing. He sat motionless, his clothes scruffier than the first’s, his hands so greasy and soiled, they appeared not have been washed in months. He stared at his boot with slitted eyes. I saw no perceptible movement his body or even a twitch in his face, as though lost in a reality so distant that returning seemed no longer possible.

I headed south on Las Vegas Boulevard until I reached a 7-Eleven. I waited in a short line at the counter while holding a pack of gum. The woman in front of me—30, perhaps, with scraggly brown hair and a scarecrow sagging face—tapped her foot, bounced from leg to leg, picked at the candy bars on the shelf in front of her, stopped, looked around, then started her movements over again. She finally grabbed a Snickers and dropped it on the counter next to her giant can of Foster’s. Her eyes darted nervously while she clicked her nails against the can. When it came time for her to pay, she dropped a five on the counter, along with a handful of coins, and mumbled, “Keep the change,” her voice shaky and throaty, like that of a tweaking frog.

She ran out of the store and across the parking lot.

If such events were rare, they would perhaps garner more attention from the press and the public. As it is, the streets are full of people falling through the cracks. I came across more of the same in Sacramento last week. When I was standing in Capitol Park, next to the California State Capitol and amid several homeless crashed out on park benches, a man with a dark beard and Medusa-like hairdo raced past me and shouted, “I’m getting me a Bud. I’m getting me a Bud.”

After he sped away, I slipped into the restroom to pee. Perhaps it was the suggestion of beer so early in the morning. Perhaps it was the pot of tea I drank earlier.

At the sink, a man who looked surprisingly like the Budweiser sprinter, was standing at the sink, mixing a Tang-like concoction in a Tupperware container while clutching under his arm a mini-box of Cheerios. He stared and stirred and mumbled into the container. I believe he spoke in anticipation of his orange-ladden cereal.

That happened the day after I arrived from San Francisco, a city chock full of folks who wonder the streets and talk to themselves and struggle to make sense of a world that by no measure can be judged as anything even close to sane.

At one point during my stay there, I was riding a bus down Mission Street. We stopped at a traffic light at an intersection like hundreds of other intersections in that town—full of people and trash and brick and concrete and shouting and glass. I noticed a young man leaning against an ancient building worn and tagged and ready to fall. He banged his head against the wall and pulled at his hair with a ferocious grip, as though trying to rip off his scalp. A look of anguish had settled on his face, a look that ran so deeply nothing could touch whatever terror he held inside.

Later that day I ran into a drunk guy up near Castro, about 50 maybe, give or take a decade or two. Between staggering steps and gasps for breath, he belted out an offer to sell his wife for 25¢. A mere quarter, he said, so he could get some beer. Obviously he meant more beer. And at such prices, who could blame him?

I’m in Palm Springs now. Yesterday a windstorm raged through here with gusts reaching 90 MPH. Sand blew. Trees fell. Tiles flew off roofs. Some hit my van, in fact, leaving a reddish scar many inches long.

Shortly before the winds began, a slight, bent-over man stormed down the sidewalk across the street from me. He screamed with a thick Mexican accent at the cars passing by. He yelled at them to go away, get off his street, leave him alone. He huffed and puffed, until the wind picked up and blew him down the sidewalk.

Later that evening, after the gusts had somewhat subsided, I was strolling past the Jack in the Box on South Palm Canyon Drive. A young man sauntered out of the building, holding a carton of curly fries and a Coke. He said hello and offered to share his weed with me. He spoke in a rambling, slurred, nasally, pothead sort of voice. I’m not sure he even really saw me. I declined and moved on.

This morning I was driving my tile-scarred van through Palm Springs—again traveling down South Palm Canyon Drive—after hiking part way up the mountain that overlooks the valley. A man wandered into the street, all the time staring at the asphalt several feet before him. A breeze fluttered through his long, thin, unnaturally yellow hair. He reminded me of a burnt-out, one-hit wonder from the ’60s, a man unaware of the traffic about to run him down, a man unaware of the fact that he was in the street at all—the way he weaved back and forth with an unerring stoner’s gate, glancing up for only a moment, as though to assure himself that his place in this world had been secured.

I can’t say whether he was high or drunk or tweaked or whatever. I can’t say whether addiction or substance abuse or mental illness was even a factor. The same is true for all the folks I encountered. Something is going on, though—with them and a hell of a lot of other people out there.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, nearly 20% of US adults—over 45 million people—suffer some form of mental illness, with close to 9 million of them are dealing with substance abuse issues. Then there are the homeless, 3.5 million in any given year, at least 20% of whom suffer from severe mental illness. In fact, the US Conference of Mayors considers mental illness the third largest cause of homelessness for single adults.

Given the state of our economy and our growing trend toward undercutting public safety nets—a trend with roots in Ronald Reagan but one that found an easy home with Bill Clinton and the George Bushes—we’re not likely to see the number of homeless and mentally ill and addicts diminish any time soon. In fact, I suspect the problem will grow much worse before the politicians and political pundits and the populace who put them in power take these problems seriously.

But if there’s one thing we’re good at in this country, it’s pretending that problems don’t exist, or if we do acknowledge their existence, we figure out a way to blame the victims for causing them in the first place. Perhaps if all the disenfranchised souls were to form a corporation—a friggin’ multinational conglomerate the size of Wal-Mart—they’d at long last have a voice in government. In fact, they’d probably receive more handouts than all the oil and tobacco companies out there.

At least that’s what the signs suggested.

I turned at the corner of Fourth and Main, where Main cuts between Lownsdale Square and Chapman Square, the two city parks that the Occupy contingent currently called home. Just then, the police hauled a man out from between the tents and ushered him toward the sidewalk, not far from where I was taking my stroll. I assumed that he’d been imbibing a bit, judging by his haphazard struggles and the bloated, bulbous, burnt-out look on his face, the sort of look you often find in this part of the city.

Once the cops got him under control, they pushed him against the sidewalk and forced him into a pair of handcuffs, while he shouted out protests that could have been accusations about police brutality or rights violations or needing to take a piss. Between his slurred speech and the fact that his face was in the ground, he could have been saying anything.

At one point, a guy standing inside the camp—another fan of all-day happy hours, judging by the look on his face—called to his handcuffed friend, “Quit resisting.”

“I’m not resisting,” the detainee shouted. “I’m not.”

“You are resisting. Just don’t try to resist.”

I left the encampment and headed toward the river.

Over the next two days, I passed by or walked through the camp several times. For the most part, the place remained relatively peaceful despite the number of tents and the mass of campers. Sure, music might have blared on occasion, and there might have been some yelling now and again, but these sorts of disruptions seemed to be the exception.

What struck me most was not the fact of the encampment or the gathering of all those young, self-styled, mostly white, mostly male revolutionaries with their prerequisite beards and carefully crafted hairdos and assortment of knitted wool beanies. We’ve all been there, after all. All of us.

What I had not anticipated was the large number of homeless and mentally ill and unsavory grunge-clad street folks who latched onto the movement like cattle to a watering hole on a dusty Oklahoma day.

It didn’t help that straw had been strewn across what little uncovered ground remained, giving the entire encampment a stable-like feel that swelled with the odors of unwashed bodies and beer-soaked sweat and the suspiciously acrid aroma of burning weed. The seedier members of the camp, the only ones I could really hear, spoke with that rough illiterate stoner slur that circled about in generalities and trendy clichés. I had the sense they could have easily landed anywhere that offered a safe haven and a place to have a good time.

It would have been easy at that point to walk away with the impression that the only thing the Occupy people had accomplished was to set up a place to party, this despite one of their signs explicitly stating that they were not there for that reason. Even so, it was difficult to see the political or social advantages of setting up an urban campsite that had been for the most part approved by city hall and at least to some degree taken over by outside forces, some of them in genuine need, others simply looking for a place to unfurl their skull-encrusted black leather bags.

That evening, however, I dropped by another city park—Jamison Square. The Occupy forces had marched there earlier that day and planned to remain throughout the night, despite threats from the same city hall that had given a wink and a nod to their semi-permanent encampment.

The gathering was small, quiet, peaceful. From what I could tell, there were nearly as many cops—on horses and bikes and feet—and members of the press as there were protesters. I’m not sure why the city decided to make such a big deal out of occupying this park, considering how accommodating they had been about the other parks, but the general theory being tweeted that day was related to the fact that Jamison Square sat smack dab in the middle of one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods.

I don’t know whether this really was the mayor’s reasoning for giving the protestors the boot. I don’t even know whether this part of town actually qualifies as one of the city’s most affluent. But I do know, or at least I suspect, that had the city not issued their ultimatums and had the cops not arrived prepared for a riot and had the press not shown up in droves, the sit-in (or whatever they’re calling it these days) would probably have gone unnoticed.

But going unnoticed is not the point of civil disobedience. And to this end the protesters got what they wanted. Many were arrested. Many made the news. Many tweeted till the cows came home. In the meantime, those who remained at the encampment had been all but forgotten.

And they weren’t the only ones. The city was full of the forgotten, people who had nothing to do with the Occupy movement—the amputee in his wheelchair, the kid asleep in the doorway, the vet looking for work, the panhandler with her two children, the man at the bus stop sitting for hours staring at street signs and clinging to his torn and greasy pack.

Then there was the other tent city, the one on Burnside set up for the homeless, shoved behind a makeshift wall built out of dilapidated rotting doors. No members of the press followed those campers around. No politicians pontificated on their plight. No one held up signs to remind us that these people needed our attention. They had been rolled into the folds of the city so thoroughly that most of us had forgotten they were there.

My last night in Portland, I visited the Occupy camp one last time. Across the street from the tents, a crowd was gathered in a small brick plaza, round and tiered like a mini-amphitheater. In the center, a man spoke to them in a clear, calm, defiant voice. I caught only snippets of what he had to say—something about sustainability, I believe—but I could still discern that this was an articulate, confident speaker, one who knew how to carry the crowds.

I had not seen this side of the camp until now, and I was relieved to know that people like him were part of the movement. I needed to see something here that gave me the same sense of satisfaction I felt when I watched the protestors gather at Jamison Square.

I’m not yet convinced that the encampments themselves are the best way to achieve the changes we need right now. They require resources and energy that could perhaps be better applied elsewhere. And that fat ugly rat I saw scurrying across the sidewalk toward the camp hardly helped to sway me in its favor. Yet I’m grateful that these people are here. I’m grateful that so many people across the country are willing to do something to make those changes happen.

Sure, there might be the opportunists who come straggling in, an inevitable consequence of any movement. And there might be the campers thrilled to follow the latest trend. Also inevitable. And propping up tents in the middle of the city might seem like nothing but a desperate measure. But we live in times that call for desperate measures. And in my mind, it makes more sense to pitch a tent in the middle of Portland than to sit at home and watch another night of cable TV.

Marie’s sits in the basement of an ancient brick building just around the corner from Christopher Street. When I first passed the bar, I thought it was closed. The windows were dark, the doorway hidden in shadow. Even so, I stepped inside and felt my way down the narrow stairs. But what I found wasn’t what I expected from a New York club. It was more like the basements I saw as a kid, with their low ceilings, exposed rafters, small windows, and dank musty smells that never let us forget we were in cellars.

But Marie’s is more than a hole-in-the-ground basement. According to local legend, the place opened as a prostitute’s den in the 1850s. By the end of that century, it turned into a boy bar that lasted through Prohibition. And now it has an upright piano sitting in the middle of the room and rainbow-colored lights hanging from the rafters. (This is the Village, after all.)

When I arrived, the room was already stuffed full of customers who ranged in age, gender, size, race, and sexual orientation. They stood shoulder to shoulder circled around the piano, all focused on these evening’s entertainer, a flamboyant piano player who was leading the crowd in a boisterous rendition of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.”

I worked my way through the throng to the plain wooden bar shoved up near the back wall. Glowing with a diffused yellowish light, a WPA mirror hung above the bar, filled with scenes from the French and American revolutions.

I ordered a vodka and soda, then found an unobtrusive corner, where I sipped my cocktail and settled in to listen to excerpts from some of Broadway’s finest, everything from Oklahoma to Chicago, Evita to Les Miserables, Wicked to Little Shop of Horrors.

I’m not sure when the event occurred—not until after my third or fourth cocktail, I’m sure—but suddenly I found myself stepping out from the shadows and into the rainbow lights, where everyone was singing “Tonight” from West Side Story. Without realizing what I was doing, I opened my mouth and the words flowed out and I found myself singing along, and not one of my comrades flinched or pulled back or looked at me askance, and before I knew it, my shyness and reserve had fled into the street—along with my diminishing sobriety.

So here I am, moving through one Broadway hit after the next, as though I’ve been singing show tunes with this crowd forever. And not only am I familiar with most of the songs, I seem to know most of the words. To think, all this time I’ve been a Broadway closet case and never realized what lay inside.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with show tunes. I like them plenty, along with all sorts of music, from classical to blues to jazz to folk to a variety of other sounds (though, admittedly, I’m not big on most of the stuff that hits the pop charts). It’s just that standing there, with cocktail in hand, singing out one tune after the next, I feel like another queer stereotype, one of the boys who’s found his Village voice, his New York nirvana, his bright lights and lollipops.

But then I think, Who gives a shit? No one around me seems to care. And I’m having too much fun with these people to worry about my latent musical preferences and sudden Broadway tendencies and the risk of Mama Mia playing on my iPod.

And what strikes me the most is that for the first time since I left Seattle, no one is talking politics or religion or morality. No one is making misogynistic or xenophobic or homophobic slurs. No one is criticizing the obese woman next to the piano or the queer male couple holding hands or the straight bi-racial couple sitting at the table or the drag queen with her crooked wig and pumped up tits and running mascara. We’re all here to sing together, enjoy each other’s company, have a good time. Nothing more.

And this venue is a hell of a lot lighter that what I found earlier today, when I walked around Lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center. Although there’s little there to see now—a construction site hidden behind fences and a lot of tourists trying to see through those fences—the memory of what took place nine years ago still echoed in the faces of everyone there, including me.

Yet part of that memory wasn’t just the falling buildings, but what happened after those buildings fell. For a brief time, there’d been a sense of goodwill and unity that could be felt throughout this country, when people came together to mourn the loss of those killed and those who sacrificed their lives. A moment when we realized that we are indeed all in this together. And regardless of our politics and what we thought brought these attacks about, we still shared in the realization that such violence was a useless and senseless wrong.

Even so, in the years to follow, a determined administration, cowardly congress, ambitious press, and indifferent populace allowed the opportunities that such goodwill and unity afforded to slip through their fingers, and what we have now, nine years later, is a country so angered and frustrated and divided that we seem incapable of agreeing to any actions other than those that serve our immediate self-interests, prop up our illusions of entitlement, and placate our propensity for greed.

Maybe that’s nothing new. Maybe we’ve simply returned to our old ways. Even so, we can’t deny what’s happening around us, the way lines have been drawn and the consequences that those lines bring.

Hate crimes have now reached nearly 10,000 a year, probably more, though exact figures are difficult to come by, and it appears that about half of those crimes are racially motivated. As for the rest, approximately 18% occur as a result of religious biases, 17% because of sexual orientation, and 12% as a result of ethnicity or national origin. The rest are based on such factors as disability or homelessness.

That’s especially disconcerting for the homeless, given that, on any given night, 750,000 people are living in the streets. At the same time, communities are passing laws that prohibit sleeping in parks, sitting for too long on benches, urinating on public property, panhandling, and eating out of trash bins—all the things it takes to survive on the streets.

But homelessness is not going away anytime soon. Nearly 36 million people in the US live in poverty, and of those, 13 million are children. And then there are those without adequate health care, such as the 50 million who have no health insurance or the 75 million with insufficient coverage.

Even the schools are not immune from our fragmentation. Almost 30% of students are victims of bullying. Every day, they face being hit, threatened, intimidated, teased, sexually harassed, or robbed. And the symptoms that result, such as tension and anxiety and depression, can last for years after the bullying has stopped.

For women, it’s even worse. One in six will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. That’s 17.7 million victims of attempted or successful rape.

After 9/11, we claimed to stand united. But all of us can see what has happened. And as the gaps grow wider, our politicians push for further division. Our wealth falls into fewer hands. The media profit by instilling fear and hate. And where do we direct that hate as we’re pulled further apart?

I finish my drink at Marie’s Crisis. It’s time I get back to my hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, though I’m not all that anxious to leave the camaraderie, the singing, the spirit of the music.

I climb the steps out of the bar. The streets are even busier than when I entered. I cross Seventh Avenue and stumble down Washington Place (or Fourth Street or wherever the hell I am) in search of the subway station. But the station is not where I left it.

I circle the area a couple of times and finally ask for directions. Several people help point the way. Such is the kindness of strangers.

As I descend into the subway, I’m humming “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha. In a place like New York, there’s nothing like a song to lift one’s spirits.

I step over to the cash machine to retrieve more quarters for the second load. I reach into my pocket for my wallet. My pocket is empty.

I race back to the front-load washer and look through the window at the sudsy water filling the tub. I see my shorts on the top of the pile. I envision my wallet sloshing around in those suds.

I try to open the door but it’s fused shut, so I rush over to the attendant. I ask whether there’s a way to stop the washer once it’s started.

She stares back at me with a look of both indifference and disdain, the kind of look that the bored and frustrated and powerless give those who are momentarily at a disadvantage, the kind of look that provides them with a temporary sense of vindication and superiority, that leaves them feeling something akin to satisfaction.

“No,” she says. “You have to wait.” She looks away before she finishes speaking.

I return to the washer and check how many minutes remain. Sixteen. I look at my shorts longingly. I watch them go round and round. I watch them take my wallet on a Six Flags whitewater river ride.

I step outside to wait out the rinse and spin cycles.

The laundromat sits next door to Guerneville’s only coffee shop. Together they form what constitutes the town center.

Here you’ll find the full spectrum of the town’s finest, residents and visitors alike, patronizing one, both, or neither of the businesses. They lounge in the chairs, hang out at the picnic tables, huddle around on the sidewalks.

Here you’ll find the eighteen-year-old mother with her three children, the aging hippy with her tie-dyed shirt and Birkenstock sandals, the volunteer firefighter from the station across the road, the queer couple celebrating their twentieth anniversary, the wasted teen who’s been smoking weed since ten, the suburban family with their 2.3 golden-haired children, the Silicon Valley bikers who just arrived on their new Harleys, the homeless man who carries his house in a plastic bag, the state-supported, heavily medicated, chronically ill SSI lifetime wards.

I sit down, more toward the coffee shop side of things. Next to me, a guy in his late twenties bums a cigarette from another man. The second one is older and taller and stringier, with circles under his eyes so dark I think he’s been punched in the face.

“I just got out of jail,” the younger one says. “I have no cash.”

The older guy hands him a cigarette. “No problem, man. I won’t ask why you were there. None of my business.”

“Wasn’t so bad.”

“Hope you didn’t murder anyone.”

The younger one shakes his head. “Nothing like that.  Parole violation. Only thirty days.”

“Get yourself straightened out, that’s what you need to do. Figure out your passions and follow them.”

The young man smokes. “I know what I want. I’m gonna be a farmer. I’m gonna raise chickens.”

“Chickens.”

“I can’t wait to eat my first one.”

“A chicken eater,” the black-eyed man says.

“I can’t wait.”

“When you plan to start all this?”

“Already have. My husband and I bought eight acres near Sebastopol.”

Decades ago, Guerneville was a popular family vacation spot—campsites, cabins, canoeing—all in the heart of California’s redwood country, next to a slow-moving bend on the Russian River. The influx of drop-outs in the late sixties and early seventies, along with their carloads of drugs, changed the area forever. The bikers showed up around then too—and not the Silicon Valley kind. Then the queers arrived, with plenty more out-of-control substances. There were also the wine connoisseurs, bouncing from winery to winery, swelling in rank every day.

Throughout all this, the families kept coming.

So what you have now is a bit of everything. That and the aftermath of an area that in the last twenty years has been hit hard by floods and failing economies.

I go back into the laundromat and check the washer. Nine minutes to go. I return outside and take a seat nearest the door. I listen to a man grumble about the state of the economy. He talks to a woman whose got that rich New Ager look, a cross between an astrologist and an heiress, with wavy blonde hair that cascades down to her waist.

The man’s probably in his fifties, with a short, thick body and hair that’s long and matted, dark brown and streaked with gray. At least half of his teeth are missing.

He tells the woman he can’t work because the Mexicans are taking all the jobs. “Try to earn a living,” he says. “Try to get anything done, and they get in the way.”

I take note of his teeth because of a previous visit to Guerneville. Several years ago I spent a few months down here, hanging out, writing, getting to know the region. On more than one occasion, people who lived in the area said, “You must not be from around here. You have all your teeth.”

Such is the nature of meth.

I step into the coffee shop to use the restroom. A sign hangs on the bulletin board in the hallway. It announces a meeting for Guerneville business owners to discuss the growing problem of homelessness in this area. The goal is to bring people together to discuss solutions that everyone can live with.

But the town is facing problems in which homelessness is only one of the symptoms. Many of the businesses have closed, buildings are falling apart, tourists are staying away in record numbers. But drug and alcohol use remains high. So does unemployment.

On the last three evenings, I strolled through town in search of a place to eat. Many of the restaurants were closed, the streets nearly deserted, not unlike a western ghost town in a Gary Cooper movie. Granted it’s the middle of the week, but this is still July, the height of the tourist season. I’ve been here in tourist season before. I know weeknights are slower. But weeknights in July should not be like the dead of winter.

The Safeway is busy, though, at least it was this morning. I stood behind two women in the checkout line. The first dug through her purse as the cashier rang up her groceries. After a furious search, she announced that she couldn’t afford all the food. So she handed back several items—candy bars, salsa, pasta sauce, Cocoa Puffs, a bunch of rhubarb. Once she got the amount down to what she could afford, she paid for the groceries, all the time apologizing for causing any trouble.

The next person in line, the woman in front of me, pushed a cart that carried a baby. All she bought was a tube of Blistex. She paid in cash, took her change, and rolled away. That’s when I noticed the case of blue sports drink in the bottom of the cart, hidden from the cashier by the baby seat.

A lot of the people who hang out in the makeshift town center have nowhere else to go and no money to get there. Jobs are in short supply. Businesses are struggling to survive. Relatively few tourists are coming and those who do come are not spending.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts California’s current unemployment rate at 12.4%, compared to a U.S. average of 9.7%. The state has lost nearly 245,000 jobs this past year.

Yesterday, I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has spent nearly $100 million on her campaign and might be donating another $30 million to the state’s Republican party. As Meg Whitman has discovered, power does not come cheap.

Republicans, not surprisingly, are salivating. Democrats, I’m guessing, are running with their tails between their legs.

I wonder whether any of that money will find its way to Guerneville. I wonder if the people who need the money the most will ever see it.

I return to the laundromat and wait out the last two minutes of the wash cycle. When the warning beep sounds, I open the door, pull out my soaked shorts, pull my soaked wallet out of my shorts, and pull my soaked money out of my wallet.

It might be the only clean cash left in California.

She stands at five-feet-four, minus a couple inches for her perpetual stoop. When she walks, she never lifts her feet off the floor. It’s more a sleep-walker’s shuffle—a mix between indifference and the result of a stout, squat body that no longer wants to move.

The café where Grace works—and perhaps owns and has done so for her century-long career—is a nostalgic gateway to Hollywood’s golden era. In addition to the years of grease and grime, the walls are covered with movie star posters that range from Mae West to James Dean.

My favorite is a large silver screen version of The Last Supper, with Marilyn Monroe in the center, Humphrey Bogart to her left, and Clark Gable to her right. Also at the table are Elvis, Cary Grant, Marlon Brandy, and several other Hollywood dignitaries from days gone by.

Though it’s only a few minutes past noon, I’m the only customer. I open the menu and try to read through the grease and food stains. That’s when Grace shows up, her pen and pad poised to take my order. She stares at the space across the table as she waits for me to decide. Old rock-and-roll music pours from the crackling speakers—currently an Elvis song, though nothing I recognize.

Grace dyes her hair a bright red-orange. Judging by the thick gray roots, it’s been a while since her last treatment. She has a bulbous nose that hooks down toward meaty jowls and sagging lips, giving her face a squashed look, as though years of gravity have caused it to cave in on itself.

She has a look about her of a person not fully in this world, an old woman biding her time, only partially aware that she’s still alive. It’s the look of someone who has watched too much television, someone whose eyes have been permanently glazed over by sitcoms, reality shows, and mouthwash commercials.

If she were of a different generation, I would suspect too many hours in front of a computer.

I close the menu and order eggs and hash browns and coffee. She writes down my order. I feel as though I participate in an ancient ritual.

Grace shuffles over to the counter and calls my order to the two Hispanic cooks. She speaks in a stilted, halting voice, as though she’s never fully learned how to use her vocal chords, as though she came from a place of cloistered silence and was dropped here on Mission Street.

When a few other customers trickle in, she smiles, greets some by name, takes their orders. None of them talk on cell phones or send text messages or work at computers or listen to iPods. I can’t remember the last time I was someplace where I could say that.

In between customers, Grace sits at the counter and stares at the stainless steel walls and the shelf full of hamburger buns and loaves of white bread. Occasionally, she squeezes behind the counter to take a customer’s money—cash only, rung up on a manual register unable to match today’s prices.

Grace lives in a world locked in ’50s memorabilia, free from the Internet and hand-held electronic devices—a holdout against progress and the gentrifying forces that squeeze in around her. Grace lives in a world of diminishing returns, a world that leaves her little space in which to retreat.

In some ways, Grace might be considered one of San Francisco’s more fortunate. She has plenty of food, a place to spend her days, and in all likelihood, a home of some sorts—though for all I know, it could be a back room in the restaurant.

Many in San Francisco are not so lucky. Any visitor to the city can quickly discern the severity of the problems associated with homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness.

Last night, as I waited for a bus on the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, I watched one man get into a debate with a garbage can, two men curl up on a blanket next to the curb, another two men yell drunken insults at a third man across the street, and still another man so bent and twisted and inhibited in speech that he could not formulate the words or gestures necessary to beg for money.

Anywhere you go in the city—outside the wealthier neighborhoods—you’ll find a wide range of drunks, tweakers, junkies, panhandlers, mentally ill, and homeless people so disabled they can barely move. Any night you find the disheartened, the discarded, the walking wounded. This is the San Francisco not mentioned in the brochures.

According to the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition, about 35,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area at any given time. Of these, 62% live on the streets during the night. In fact, San Francisco proper has the highest rate of homelessness of any U.S. city.

Yet San Francisco is by no means alone. About 800,000 people in the U.S. do not have a place to live—and as many as 20% of them have fulltime jobs.

There’s more. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20-25% of the U.S. homeless population suffers from some form of severe mental illness, yet only 6% of the general population suffer the same fate. In fact, mental illness is considered one of the top causes of homelessness for single adults.

Yet the U.S. spends only $2 billion a year on federal programs aimed at helping the homeless. Compare that to the $700 billion spent on defense. (That’s according to the Washington Post. Some estimates put our defense spending a lot higher.)

As I sit in the Mission Street café—trying to eat a slice of toast so saturated in margarine I can barely get through half—I gaze toward the display near the front window, a wide shelf covered in fake cellophane grass, the kind you find in Easter baskets. On top of the grass are hundreds of plastic animals and plastic flowers and plastic houses.

While studying a rather sick looking frog, I notice a woman out on the sidewalk, slouched against the building, so tweaked out she can barely stand. She appears to be in her mid-sixties. She wears a blonde wig. She wears lipstick the color of bing cherries. She wears false eyelashes so long her eyes seem entangled in spider webs.

She smiles at several men who walk by, perhaps attempting to turn one last trick. But they don’t acknowledge her. I don’t think they even see her. Many talk on cell phones. Many are plugged into earphones. Many are texting as they walk.

Many look as equally lost.

We are a culture of damaged and displaced and dismissed souls. But as long as we have our iPhones and Facebook pages and HD televisions, as long as we let ourselves be endlessly entertained and distracted and misled, we don’t have to look at those we leave behind. We don’t have to be accountable, feel responsible, take action.

I push my plate aside and sip what remains of the coffee. Grace comes by and drops off my bill. She says that I should jot down my name and phone number on the back of the check. She says I could win a $25 gift certificate. Then she smiles and returns to the counter.

When I pay my bill, Grace punches the sale into her ancient register. It rings and the drawer pops open and she counts out my change like a little girl playing bank teller.

I did not write my name and number on the back of the check. And Grace never says a word. She smiles and returns to her seat at the counter.