Thread by @Sharkyl

When I moved to SF I was homeless. Slept under park benches. My first “home” was a room @ Civic Center Hotel. I eventually got a job, & was the night clerk for 5 years. Saw a lot of crazy stuff.
My memory is ~88 rooms?
I am very happy to see this transformed into *500* units.

https://twitter.com/myrpressoffice/status/1287795078572859392

The phone system was a 50’s switchboard, and I’d manually patch the calls to the rooms. There were 3 phone lines for the 120+ people who lived there. On busy nights I’d struggle to keep up and residents wanted to kill me. Not hyperbole btw, they literally threatened to kill me.

The phones in the rooms were ancient & periodically stopped working. Huge problem in a pre-cell phone era. The manager asked if I would repair them. Sure, why not. I’d take the phones apart and the cause was clear: they were filled with dead cockroaches which corroded the wires.

The rooms were (are?) tiny: 6x8 feet with a sink. Shared bathroom in the hall. The maintenance guy in charge of the bathrooms was a Vietnam vet, but still young! Maybe 45? It was absolutely the worst job, but he was remarkably calm about it. We were all really nice to him.

Oh yeah back to the phone repairs for a second: they used direct voltage, so I was constantly electrocuting myself testing them. It was impossible to avoid, and would cause me to drop the phone spilling cockroach parts all over the floor which I’d have to vacuum.

I lived there in the early 90s. I paid $210/month for my room. That was pretty difficult to come up with as I made $5/hour working as a night clerk.
There was an old man who had been living there over 30 years. He paid $25/month and I was very jealous of him.

There were incredible characters. One guy used to be in Big Brother and the Holding Company, but got kicked out before Janis Joplin made them famous. He looked like John Cazale. He spent his days drinking, and then worked the night shift at an artificial limb factory.

There was a garbage chute and a laundry chute. They both spilled out into a big room behind the front desk. There was a lot of drama around them.
The hotel washed the sheets. I don’t know why. I had to gather the sheets and put them in giant baskets for laundry service.

Handling the laundry sheets was a really bad idea. We had no gloves. I was a 20 year old kid. I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I had no girlfriend, money, or social life, so I was really surprised when I got crabs. I started using a shovel to handle the laundry.

Ricky looked like Forrest Whittaker in Ghost Dog. He wore a green army jacket 24/7. He had a lot of mental health issues. He would toss pizza boxes down the chute that were covered every square inch in hand scrawled ransom demands for women he was kidnapping (in his mind).

One day the gay couple that lived in the room next door called. Ricky was telling in the background. Call the police they said. I did and went upstairs to see what was going on. Ricky has a punched a hole in the wall between their rooms they told me when I arrived. I looked in.

The hole was in the wall, and Rocky’s arm was still sticking through the hole, waving a knife around randomly while he yelled in the background.
He was still doing it when the police arrived. The police took him away and I had to lock up his room.

Every square inch of his room was sloppily plastered with porn clippings. Even the sink. The sheets had not been changed in a long, long time.
I can’t remember if he got evicted. It was difficult to evict people so the owners tried to keep new people from reaching 30 days.

One of my coworkers had anger mgmt issues. He wanted the trash cans in the trash chute to be manually compacted so they didn’t overflow. But I didn’t like to get that close. One day at the shift change he lost it, grabbed the shovel & told me he was going to beat my head in.

He chased me around the office a bit before settling down. I complained to the manager but he didn’t get fired. Finally a year later his drinking got so out of control he started missing shifts and they finally let him go.
He was a poet in North Beach, and wore a beret every day.

There were quite a few families sharing these little rooms. Parents who did manual labor. Sometimes managing significant addictions. You’d hear the arguing & yelling in hallways but also incongruities: the angry drunk singing songs with his wife while strumming on his ukelele.

We charged $5 per visitor after 9pm. In hindsight that was a lot. People really resented this. I was the night clerk so I got the brunt of it. They would throw things at me, smash the lobby windows, or shake the jail bars at the clerk window, sending dust down from the ceiling.

One guy pointed a gun at me. By this point I didn’t care anymore. Nothing phased me. I called the cops, but it wasn’t very exciting. He left by the time they got there, but they came pretty quick and grabbed him under the overpass. He had a bunch of warrants & went to prison.

Most people lived in the hotel, but we’d get a couple nightly visitors on the weekends when everything else was sold out. One night a trucker couple came in, and parked their semi in the alley. They were just there for one night.

There were a couple 20 something *artistes* who lived in the hotel, and they got their hands on some acid that night. The civic center hotel is not a great place to take acid. They took too much and managed to lose track of reality. These two guys took off all their clothes.

The hallways were giant squares. You could run laps. They started chasing each other in laps, naked. Residents complained.
One of the guys had this flash of insight that if he jumped through the window at the end of the hallway he would become transformed and enlightened.

So at full speed he smashed through the window, cleared the fire escape, and fell four stories, smashing through the windshield of the semi truck in the alley.

Amazingly he lived.

The other guy freaked out, ran down the stairs, and out the front door. The cops picked him up, stark naked, in SOMA, and he spent the night in jail.

He later became the bassist for my band Creeper Lagoon, which came from the nickname I used for the Civic Center Hotel.

The other guy recovered in the hospital in a couple weeks. Brilliant guy, I could never beat him at chess. I brought him a book on the teachings of Buddha. Figured he needed it more than me. He moved back to the Midwest. Never saw him again.

I could easily fill up 1000 tweets with all the stories and people I remember from there. It’s deeply influenced my life in countless ways.
But I’m not sad to see it go. The housing that goes up there will be a million times better. Anyways that’s my walk down memory lane. END

Alright fine, a couple more: calls complaining of gasoline smell on the 3rd floor. Oh shit I thought. If this catches on fire it will be a huge tragedy. Lots of people with mobility issues and the elevator was just big enough for 3 people. You had to swing a gate shut to use it.

I grab the stick (you never went into danger without the stick) and raced up the stairs. The smell was strong but the hallways were empty. Where was it coming from? I did a complete loop, nothing. It seemed strongest near the hall bathroom. Didn’t see anyone on first glance.

Started checking the stalls. In the last stall I found the source: an old man, white beard like Santa Claus, was passed out by the toilet. One arm was around a red gas can. He had flourescent orange suspenders, holding up baggy red polka dot shorts. He was wearing roller skates.

I poked him with the stick. He grunted. “Hey man, you gotta go” I said. He groggily woke up. “Come on man, you can’t stay here”
He picked up his can, stumbled to his feet and moved slowly to the elevator. We rode down in silence together. We got to the lobby and he skated away.

1am Sat night. Three motorcycle bikers show up and rent a room. Leather chaps, vests, badges, etc. but very skinny. Two guys, one girl, all very high on meth and can’t keep still. The girl’s pants don’t fit - she has to hold them up w one hand.

They can barely talk but they have the cash, and they rent one of our “suites” - it comes with its own bathroom!
They spend the next few hours lugging stuff up there but I’m not paying attention, just buzzing them in and getting annoyed: I’d usually crash for an hour around 3am.

4am - 7:50am all quiet. I’m getting ready to leave my shift: I worked midnight to 8am.
One if the bikers comes downstairs. He’s meth skinny, acne, goatee, and still very high. He comes to the window “that guys crazy man! That guys crazy!” he keeps saying. I’m like ok, whatever.

He suddenly bolts out the door. At the same time the entire 2nd floor starts lighting up the switchboard. Everyone is trying to call at once. Uh oh.
I answer one: “call the cops!”.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, it’s bad though”
“Well what do I tell the cops?”
“I don’t know!”

Right then, the second biker comes down the stairs. He’s shouting, can’t quite make it out. He starts doing goose steps in circles in the lobby, shouting “Sieg Heil” and making Nazi salutes.

He has a rather large knife sticking out of the side of his neck. Blood is everywhere.

Ok, definitely time to call the cops.
While I’m waiting the girl comes down. Her pants still don’t fit. She’s yelling at the guy, but I can’t tell if it’s accusatory, commiserating, or completely unrelated. It is, even by my standards, a very weird scene.

The cops come, and an ambulance. They take them both away. Now I have to check on the room. My shift is over but my replacement is a no show so I’m going to be doing a 16 hour double shift. This is my problem now. I grab the room key, and walk down the hallway to this dark room.

I open the door. It’s dark because the only light is from a window facing the airwell. Every square inch of the floor is covered with debris. I look closer: it’s purses. Probably two dozen. All of their contents dumped out. Kleenex packets, keys, driver licenses... everywhere.

The room is a complete disaster, except for one thing: they brought their own TV. They brought their own VCR. They had carefully hooked them up. And on top of the VCR, stacked very neatly, a couple feet high, were two giant stacks of porn videotapes, still in the original boxes.

I think about the care they showed their porn a lot when I recall this story. Why was that so special to them? What was the fight about? Did the other guy get away? Did knife in the neck guy live?
I’ll never know.

This thread is just popular enough that I get to say a fun thing: I actually have a SoundCloud. If you like Elliot Smith, Leanord Cohen, The National, or Bon Iver you might like. I already had a music career so I’m over that, it’s just fun to share.
m.soundcloud.com/sharky-laguana