C4 Palin Plan

Billy Wild made his way to Montgomery Street and walked through what was once called the Barbary Coast, and now was called the Financial District.

The Financial District was always safer for people like him. The homeless were afraid of the world of big finances, a world from which they had been disinherited.

Billy had worked here for twenty years.

Billy spent more time here than he did with his family. He passed his favorite lunch place and his stomach groaned in agony. He felt miserable. His joints were on fire. His back was aching. His head was throbbing. He had to urinate, but there were no alleys along Montgomery Street. And the penalty for public urination was now five years in prison.

Prison building had tripled during the Palin Period. People were sentenced to the simplest crimes. The prison system had been privatized. Schools were privatized.

Billy hurriedly pushed his shopping cart down Montgomery Street, hoping to find a small park with plenty of trees, not far from the Transamerica Pyramid.

The street was lined with the skyscrapers of financial institutions, but there wasn’t another homeless person in sight. There were said to be fifty million homeless now, but nobody knew what to believe about government numbers anymore.

They lived in tent camps outside the city. They migrated to remote landscapes, hoping the ills of urban life wouldn’t follow, and tried to live off the land. The cities were overflowing and provided the least resources. Others were prepared to freeze to death elsewhere than be subjected to the brutalities of the city.

The hundreds of thousands who wandered through city streets were either too infirm or lacked the strength or simply didn’t care enough to make the effort to relocate.

And there were those who didn’t trust the relocation buses to take them anyplace safer at all. Once they had boarded a relocation bus, there was never any word to say where they had gone.

All these problems began with the Palin Plan.

The Palin Plan was introduced in a sentimental video about the Great Depression. Americans were depicted as being happiest during the Great Depression. The video was called “Happy Days Are Here Again!”

In it, President Palin stood in an elementary school classroom, running a PowerPoint presentation that included sepia photos and sentimental footage from the thirties. Everyone was smiling in the course of the presentation.

“Heck,” President Palin said. “If everyone could be wearing a Sarah Smile in 1930, why can’t we?”

She then declared that God saw fit to bring this economic collapse on our country because its people were becoming too alienated, the family was falling apart, people had fallen into sin and drugs and sodomy.

This was God’s way of cleansing us and sending us back to our American roots so everyone could experience that same love and happiness that came with complete humiliation.

The networks ran a loop of the video for six months. It was the only show on television.

Then the Palin Plan unfolded, with the first major cut being most of the public education system. Americans were only guaranteed a sixth-grade education now.

When President Palin introduced this plank in the Palin Plan, she campaigned across the country, appearing in Town Halls and local media points.

She was always portrayed as smiling when she declared that cutting back on educational levels hearkened back to an easier time. “Let’s face it, folks,” she liked to finish up her speech. “Plenty of school kids got no schoolin’ back in the old days! But you don’t see any unhappy faces in these pictures I’ve shown you here tonight when kids were just bumming around and having a good old time, because there wasn’t any work. Heck, I hated going to school! I envied all those poor dumb kids who dropped out in the eighth grade after they turned sixteen! Tell your kids to go hop a freight train. Hop the rails and see America! Take those trains and head across the country. Who knows, you might never see them again!”

And then she would break into laughter to the point of tears. The camera had to be turned off because she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.

Only the extremely affluent could afford anything more than a sixth-grade education now. Schools closed. Colleges closed. The schools that remained open no longer offered scholarships. The demands for a professional class grew smaller and smaller. The markets were in China and India now. American labor was cheap. People fought for menial jobs at minimum wages. There was no longer any need for most Americans to be educated beyond the needs of manual labor.

“We must get back to being the men and women who built this country. The people who busted their backs for us! Those people who worked for nothing! We’ve become a nation of crybabies! Now Americans can get back to the good old days and work their way up the ladder. If the collapse of the economy has brought us back to Depression times, let’s celebrate the positive side. Families were closer. Neighbors helped each other out. People relied on each other. Those who couldn’t find work were happy being hobos. Just think of the fun the kids and bums can have hopping trains again! Get out and see America! See the sights that have made this country so strong in the eyes of God.”

But Billy had already lost his job long before any of this began, lost his house, lost his wife, lost his kids. He lost his savings. He lost his retirement fund. He lost his car. He lost his boat. He lost the vacation house.

He thought of the hours he put into having those things. He thought of the life that had never been lived as a result of his needing to have those things. And now, from the sight of him, no one would believe that he ever had anything.

But he was not Oscar McBain by then.

He was Billy Wild.

He was Billy Wild, a new life form that could not survive in

Oscar’s world anymore.

Oscar McBain was a memory he called upon now and then to

remind him how far he had fallen.

After Chauncey Gibbons sent him that pink slip on Christmas

Eve, he would come back to the Financial District and have lunch with his colleagues or just sit alone in his favorite coffee shop.

But all that faded when he no longer had the cash for such indulgences.

And it wasn’t too long before he saw the colleagues he once lunched with living on the streets themselves.

By then they were free to ignore each other, and head in the opposite direction at the sight of one another, as if complicit in hid- ing each other’s shame.

Some dressed like Billy was at first. They paraded themselves in the Financial District in a business suit and their best shoes.

Then the winter rains began. The suits turned into rags and the shoes were full of holes. What illusions of respectability they might have maintained were simply a vapor no one else could witness.

There came that inevitable moment when nothing of the old life was left, and there wasn’t a chance in hell of restoring it.

That’s when suicide set in.

So many were committing suicide now from one loss or another, or a surprising series of losses that mowed them down like a blade of grass.

Billy stopped at a red light and rested on his shopping cart. The public monitors on each corner of the intersection were frozen with a single image: a cozy fireplace and Christmas tree, with piles of gifts beneath it.

There were no cars in sight, but the lights continued running the same as they would in the day. It was the only legal way he could stop and rest on the street. Homeless, by law, were required to remain in motion, no matter how slowly or feebly they moved.

When this regulation was first introduced, the government brought out a slew of doctors to support the notion of what seemed like a harsh penalty for the homeless. They declared it was a healthy thing to do because the exercise made depressed people happier. It kept them trim. It kept their body heat at a level where they would not die from exposure on a cold rainy night.

Billy took a deep breath, hoping to create enough strength to get him home. To get him to the Dugout and his collection of pre- prescription bottles. He found them in Dumpsters. He found them on the sidewalk. He found a couple of bottles left open beside a homeless woman who lay dead on the sidewalk. Billy grabbed them and ran.

He had been debating this for quite a while now. This was his Christmas present. It was the rational thing to do. To take your own life instead of being killed by humiliation and hunger.

The light changed, and Billy slowly pushed his shopping cart across the street.

The skyscrapers were lit up with Christmas lights. Christmas trees blazed in the lobbies. The security guards inside watched him warily when he passed.

He felt like a criminal now.

He felt like someone who could be seized at any moment and stripped of his rights.

By virtue of becoming Billy Wild, he had become someone suspect for even being alive.

Billy lifted his head and lost himself in the fog surrounding the street lamps all along Montgomery Street. There was an illusion of snow blown against the golden glow of the lights. It took him back to Vermont, back to his senior year in college when he and Isabel first began dating.

The car had broken down on a country road. The snow was coming down so heavily that they thought they might become marooned in the car and never get out. They hurried down the road to a small covered bridge and took shelter there.

Billy was glad to see Isabel so frightened. It stirred a strength in him. She fell so easily into his arms, seeking protection from the dangers of the world that he felt he could hold her forever.

As they looked through a crack in the covered bridge, they could see the small stream beneath them covered with ice and snow. He pulled her closer when she shivered, and she snuggled against him.

“I want to tell you something,” he said to her after a while, “but I don’t know how to say it.”

“Oh, don’t be afraid,” she said to him. “It just us and some little old snowflakes here. You can tell me anything.”

“But I’ve never said this to anyone, Isabel. I don’t know how to say it.”

“Well, just give it a try, sweetie—are you gay, are you an ax murderer, how many banks have you robbed behind my back?”

“I—” he began, but stumbled.

“Oh, come on, silly. Don’t be afraid to tell me you slept with your mother.”

“I—”

“Or was it your sister?”

“I love you, Isabel.”

She stopped kidding. Her eyes grew moist. She buried her face

in his neck and started crying.

They were married four months later.

Billy was grateful to come to another traffic light. He tried to

look beyond the street monitors that reminded him of where he was. He tried to look beyond the street lamps that reminded him of where he’d been.

But as he stood there, waiting for the light to change, he couldn’t hold it anymore. He couldn’t hold the pee back. He pressed it. He squeezed it. But he couldn’t force it back. He had lost control.

The warm water ran down is leg. The warmth was comforting for a moment. Heat. But then it started cooling off.

The legs of his tattered pants were covered with it. Then he squeezed it tight and held what little was left, as if he might be pre-serving what little dignity was left.

But he had done this many times. Anyone who lived on the street had done this many times. That’s why he wore the cape—to shield passersby from the identity behind the stench. He had no idea how badly he smelled now.

There used to be a free shower once a week at the YMCA. But the YMCA was gone now, converted to condos in the Tenderloin.

The Tenderloin was where the majority of homeless people lived. Billy felt safer there during the day, hidden among his own, perhaps protected by sheer numbers and the even odds that violence was most likely to happen to someone else.

The light changed from red to green.

Billy pushed his shopping cart across the street and headed toward the Transamerica Pyramid, a San Francisco landmark that reminded him of an anorexic pyramid.

It reminded him of a lot of things.

He had worked there. Chauncey Gibbons and his investment company Eagles Fly occupied the top five floors. The building came to a point at the top. At the tip of the point stood a fierce-looking eagle. Its beak turned down, it seemed ready to pounce on some prey below.

Billy came to a clearing in the fog. The fog seemed to part in front of him for a moment. Unconsciously, he stopped his car and stood there looking up. There was no fog at all at the top of the Transamerica Pyramid.

He saw a light in Chauncey’s office. Everyone knew where Chauncey’s office was. Everyone was afraid to go near it.

Billy stood there looking up. Of all things, he thought to himself. He had come across Chauncey Gibbons on the last night of his life. Chauncey Gibbons who had driven him to the last night of his life. Chauncey Gibbons had sent him an arbitrary pink slip on Christmas Eve.

It struck him like a bolt. It always did.

They called it the Billy Wild Dance back in the Tenderloin.

Out of nowhere, a storm shook his body. His limbs moved uncontrollably. He flailed his arms. He wagged his legs. His muscles moved uncontrollably. Higher forces were in control as he spun and whirled and waved his arms in the air, like a whirling Dervish on speed, all the time his knees knocking against each other, and knock- ing away from each other, each time he leaped in the air.

Billy was hardly aware of what was happening.

He felt like a ship whose hull and stern and bow had been shattered by a pod of whales that had raged up from the ocean floor and splintered his mind.

He felt like some fallen eagle dropping out of the sky, its wings broken, and spinning downward toward a disastrous crash.