by Jason Albertson
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jason Albertson, a clinical social worker and long-time homeless advocate, died on October 25, 2025. Jason was well known to go to bat for unhoused people, stand up to injustice and engage in nonjudgmental care. His work led countless humans off the streets to have an opportunity to recover and thrive. He was so important to San Francisco and will be dearly missed. Below is a story of Jason’s that Street Sheet originally published in the April 1997 edition.
Place and time, says the writing instructor. Set it down the way it was. Just the facts. Haight Street, up by Golden Gate Park end, cross of Stanyan. Matrix II time, Mayor Jordan’s cops got the big push to clean folks without a roof outa the park. I’m there some by myself with a video camera and some with StreetWatch, riding the park on a motor bike, trying to spot the cops in their vans and Hondas before they start digging out the encampments.
One of these early evenings I go back to Stanyan to catch up with the others before I go on another sweep and this woman, no, girl, dressed in boots and leathers, skinny as hell, stumbles out of the bushes and falls flat on her face. She can’t be more than 14. I’ve seen her around these past four weeks and go over to her, help her up. She’s shitty as hell from the dope, pupils pinned, head lolling around like she’s an unhinged doll. She can’t stand so I prop her against a tree and her tribe comes up, says they’ll take care of her. I turn around, fulla fury, and ask them, “Who gave it to her? Which one of you got her high?”
I know damn well she didn’t put in her arm herself; her arms’s unmarked except for one or two spots. It takes time to learn how to hit yourself, especially when you’re as thin as this gal. They don’t answer at first. One of them steps forward and says he didn’t, that it was her boyfriend, who’s older and not around.
I look at her and the tribe, all boots, spike hair and leather, things dangling from their necks, dirt ground into each pore, and now I’m no longer angry, and I ask them quietly, “he gets her high, and now look at her. Why do you call him ‘friend?’”
There’s no response. There isn’t any answer, and I don’t know which is worse: for her to crash code blue into an OD and respiratory arrest some night from the dope or to wake up some morning, boyfriend gone, and realize she’s pretty sick and that the needmo’ is big, and wants some breakfast.
I walk away from them in their spiked hair and leather armor looking for all the world like a flock of exotic birds, all huddled around her. There’s some places so grim that they turn black and white behind your eyes minutes after you leave.
But I still wonder why she called the guy who shot her up “friend.”
* * *
I’m at a party in the Mission, at a friend’s house, rode over on a Saturday night for conversation and maybe meet someone. This gig’s near Capp Street, and just before I ride the Suzi up the curb, I notice the women on the corner, holding themselves out for the cars as they go by. I’ve known some of them for years. I go inside and up three flights. I’m not really jumping yet, and I strike up a conversation with a young woman and get the wake-up tingle, hey something could happen, it might be nice.
She starts talking about heroin and Kurt Cobain, and I know where this conversation’s going even when she comes out and says it. She wants to know about dope and how to get it and use it and what it all feels like. Really, what she wants from me is to go score for her, this cute woman, maybe 25, and instead, I give her the rap.
“Let me tell you about dope,” I say, “Let me ask you this question because maybe it’ll help you make up your mind about whether you should get involved with the stuff in the first place, and maybe if you know the answer, you’ll save yourself a whole lotta trouble trying to find out later.
“See, you’ve heard of the monkey that rides around on your shoulders if you’ve been putting the stuff into your arm long enough to get a habit?” Being a good, little girl well steeped in the vicarious, romanticized junkie culture of William Burroughs and Lou Reed, plus a whole lotta others, she nods. Yeah, she’s heard of the monkey.
“Some people,” I continue, “can meet the monkey hitchhiking on the road and pick him up, give him a ride for 40 miles or so, and then tell him to get outta the car— and the monkey does, just opens the door and leaves, says thanks for the ride, salutations, goes back to the thumb until the next one.
“But some people, well, they ain’t so good at telling the monkey to get outta the car—in fact, not longer after he gets in they realize it’s the monkey that’s driving, and now they’re riding shotgun. The monkey’s put some floorwax down on the bench seat and takes the corners real fast, what we call a C.O.D.—“Come Over, Darling—so you find yourself snuggling up to him. And the monkey, he likes to drive real fast. What you realize then is that if you gonna get out, you gonna do it at speed, hit the ground hard, forget about the car and anything you might have in it. The monkey’s gonna eat all that.”
I give her the rap like that and finally look at her, as she cradles the beer in her hands on the couch.
“Now I gotta ask you, are you the kinda person who can tell the monkey to get out of the car in the first place? Have you ever put anything down that was extremely pleasurable but was also bad for you?
She doesn’t answer, and a few minutes later gets up and says she has to go to the bathroom. She never comes back and later dances with a guy who probably doesn’t ask her those kinds of questions. They leave together.
I don’t deny that some people can use drugs recreationally. If you can, more power to you. But I see people every day who are consumed by their addiction, by the getting and using, by the needmo’, and I wonder what would have happened if someone had asked them the question I asked the hip, young woman at the party. If you can’t put it down, you shouldn’t take it up—and each of us knows the answer to that deep inside before we ever take a hit.
