Windspirit now has a 7-day bed at Next Door, which she calls a huge improvement over a Woman’s Place and the cheap hotel she was staying at before.

Born in Pasadena and raised in East LA, her mother took her to England when she was 9. She lived there until the age of 14, when her mother passed away. She and her siblings came back to the States to live with aunts. “Nobody knows what happened to my father.”

She was married to an electronics engineer for 30 years, and ran her own landscaping business. “After that, I started making herbs and going the Navajo way.” Her husband didn’t like that. “I came home one day after signing a contract with Wild Oats to buy my ear cones and medicinal goods. There was a note: I haven’t left you. I’ve gone to look for work.” He never returned.

Now she laments, “I wish I could have done more when I was married to him, like learn how to balance a checkbook. He was dead set against me learning anything.”

Her business ground to a halt when she became sick with bone cancer. Her 36-year-old daughter asked her to come to San Francisco so Windspirit left Portland, OR, where she was living and studying science and photography in school. When she first arrived, she stayed with her daughter, who lives in a one-bedroom $1800/month apartment in the Castro with three other people. She knew she couldn’t stay on the couch for too long. There just wasn’t room, and who wants their mother around all the time anyway?

She’s looked at studios and rooms, but the rents have all been too high, and though she knows she could find something cheaper in Portland her daughter doesn’t want her that far away.

So far, she’s received better advice from other homeless people than she has from hired staff. “You go to so many people and after awhile you get so discouraged. You go from building to building and they tell you, ‘No, not here.’”

Right now, her work is trying to figure out how to get into permanent housing. She has to check in with the housing wait list everyday – either in person or with a phone call – or she’ll lose her spot. Her bed at the shelter is only for seven days, and though she has a case manager, “I really haven’t seen her. I’m supposed to go and wait in line and every time I do she says, ‘Oh, I’m so busy. Can we do it tomorrow?’ They can’t really help me. All they can do is give me a list for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, but there’s nothing left there.”

Last Tuesday she was scheduled to visit her doctor, during the 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. clinic hours. She had to take the Mobile Assistance Patrol van to get there because she didn’t have any money for bus fare. The van didn’t show up until 1:30 so she missed her appointment, at which the doctor was going to sign off on her application for an alternative medicine pilot program at UCSF. Now, everything has been delayed even longer. Windspirit isn’t too keen on traditional western medicine. Four years ago a doctor told her she was going to be dead by April, but she’s managed to get her bone cancer into remission without chemotherapy – and she’s looking forward to healing more with the free acupuncture, homeopathy, massage, and yoga that UCSF is offering her.

Windspirit identifies herself as Irish Navajo, from the Bear Clan. In her purse she carries a small St. Anthony and a cross on a chain, which she’s had since she was three months old. On her left hand she wears an elegant turquoise ring, handed down from a relative. “It’s a sign of protection,” she says, looking at it. “Whenever you feel really, really down just look at it and remember you’re just a speck.”

“That’s kind of the way I’ve survived,” she says. “One day I just threw up my arms in front of a sagebrush and said, ‘Mother, I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing.’ Since that day I’ve been totally protected. I’ve been nurtured. I’ve had to work for it,” she admits.

MIKE

I meet Mike outside Glide Memorial Church on a rainy Monday morning. We’re both investigating the contents of our bagged lunches. “I didn’t want to wait in line,” he says of the never-ending queue for a hot meal that starts in the basement and spirals up several floors of the Glide building. “Besides, I like the lunches ‘cause you get these,” he says, pulling out a Kashi cereal bar. I give him mine, and hand the two sandwiches to another person standing nearby.

Mike’s been living in San Francisco since 2000, and over the years he’s hopped from neighborhood to neighborhood, like many young people do. He had a room in a single-room-occupancy hotel -- the All Star at 16th and Folsom -- for 2 years, but lost it last year when he fell behind on the rent.

He bartends for a catering company, working gigs at large venues like City Hall and the Asian Art Museum. The months following the holidays are slow -- this January has only brought him four days of work.

Tall, thin, and twenty-something like me, Mike looks like he just stepped off a college campus. He tells me he’s been living at Sanctuary since last June, and just keeps extending his stay as needed. “Some of these places it’s just a mat in a gym,” he says. “It’s somewhere to crash. You can’t go there until late and then they kick you out really early in the morning.”

He’s stayed in many of the city’s shelters and can enumerate their pros and cons, especially when it comes to eating and where to find a wholesome nutritious meal when you don’t have the place to prepare your own food. “Breakfast at Sanctuary is kind of lacking. It’s better at MSC South. Dinner is better at St. Anthony’s and Hamilton. It’s better for nutrition. Martin de Porres is excellent,” he says. “It’s very peaceful. You don’t have to stand in line.”

He says Sanctuary isn’t bad and because he has a CAAP/GA bed and doesn’t have to leave at eight in the morning with the one-nighters. “Days like this,” he says, gesturing to the drizzle, “You can just stay put and read a book.” When he has to work, he can hang out until it’s time to make his way up to the Mission, where he keeps his tuxedo in a storage unit, safe from damage, wrinkles, and thieving hands.

“I’ve gotten a little comfortable staying at Sanctuary,” he admits. “It’s like summer camp for adults. Most people would rather stay outside if the weather’s decent” but not him.

He describes his housing process as “just basically waiting in line for an SRO,” and his chances aren’t that good. “The problem is I was evicted from Tenderloin Housing Corporation, and it’s one of the biggest groups the city works for. I can’t get back in there unless I pay what I owe them,” he says. He doesn’t even want to know what it is. As for housing prospects, he has a GA appointment once a month. “I’ve been looking on Craigslist. The rent is outrageous. This month I’ve only worked four days. I’m looking for other work, but this happens every year. By the time I find something, the catering season picks up again.”

HENRY JONES

Judi Iranyi, a volunteer for the Homeless Advocacy Project, which provides legal services and counseling, tells me she sees many cases where people get evicted for the behavior that got them into supportive housing in the first place.

Henry Jones is one such case. He suffers from seasonal depression, the 64-year-old tells me. We’re sitting on the pavement under an awning on Turk Street. He’s wearing a camouflage poncho, and is perched on a large duffle bag he lugs with him every day as he works the reservation system. I can’t tell if the wet skin behind his glasses is rain or tears as he describes how he has seizures and had strewn clothing around his room for him to fall onto should one suddenly beset him. He lost his spot at the Ambassador Hotel for not keeping his room clean.

He thinks they should have separate shelters for disabled people and the elderly, “where you can get away from all that bullshit, people acting strange, acting weird.” He likes staying at Providence, even though there are too many stairs that aggravate his disability, but it’s near his old neighborhood and there’s almost always an open bed at some point – and that security is important. The anxiety of not knowing where he’ll be staying is what bothers him the most. And when he gets stressed, he drinks. “The place I go I know I have a bed at 9:30, so I don’t trip.”

CHARLES PITTS

If you go to Shelter Monitor Committee meetings, you’ll run into Charles Pitts, sitting in the gallery, taking in the action. Sometimes he rises and addresses the 13 members of the committee during public comment. “I hear you all talking,” he said, the first time I saw him at a meeting. “But what are you going to do?” His question was met with silence.

He’s given up on shelters. “I’m in a quandary. I’ve been through it all. I’ve been in the SROs. I’ve been in the shelter system. You don’t have any rights. They manipulated the rules so I got evicted,” he says. He’s found a quiet, safe, and dry place to sleep outside, where he’s been staying for several months. “If anything that’s a testament to how badly I’ve been treated at some of these places. I’d rather stay outside. I can get into any shelter that I want and I will sleep outside in the rain.”

A purple knit cap rests gently over the black curls on his head. He often wears an oversized yellow fleece jacket, khakis, and sneakers. He carries a Toshiba laptop in a hard silver briefcase, along with a hardbound notebook of poems and scribblings. His business cards, which he keeps in an attractive leather holder, identify his business: Poetry/Sales.

The system isn’t working for him. “They’re really not trying to help you advance. They’re trying to break your spirit,” he says of the rules and regulations at the shelters. He couldn’t stomach curfew. “I’m a poet, hanging with musicians. They don’t see me. They just tell me to go to rehab. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I don’t have time to do drugs!” he exclaims. The shelters wouldn’t give him a late pass to go to work, presumably because they think poetry isn’t a legitimate job.

I recently ran into two of my poet friends, Diamond Dave Whittaker and Charlie Getter, who’ve been working the open mic poetry scene in San Francisco for years. I ask if they've heard of Pitts, and they know him well, but haven’t seen him around in a while. Pitts tells me he’s scaled back a lot, and focusing on the “sales” aspect of his work, selling gear at the Mission flea markets. One night, though, I see him read at an open mic at Martin de Porres. His rhyme is rhythm, the repetition of words and phrases, his thick, strong voice the punctuation. His poems are about love and talk shows, exotically hysterical.