 Zach Hickson arrived in San Francisco to stay three years ago, at twenty-seven, because nowhere in America seemed more appealing at the time. The city was mild and fragrant.
It's more fragrant now than it was the last time I was there.
The streets on clear days had a liquid energy,
But you had to avoid stepping in the solids.
and seemed to offer opportunities that he hadn’t had before. “It was a place where I could do what I wanted to do,” he told me recently.
Depending on what you wanted to do, naturally.
He began to call the city home.
"... be sure to wear some flowers in yer hair..."
Hickson was brilliant.
Read on. Discover how brilliant.
He was brought up in a military family, on the gritty south side of Houston, with an I.Q. higher than both of his parents’.
I wuz brought up in a gritty Pennsylvania quarry town. I wuz brilliant too, back when I wuz a teenager. At sixteen I wuz brighter than both my parents put together, with one hand tied behind my back. On skates.
He struggled to fit in, got in some fights. When he was a teen-ager, he saw “Into the Wild,” the rugged adventure movie starring Emile Hirsch. “As long as I can remember, I just wanted to travel, and I was told it wasn’t possible,” he said.
He coulda joined the Navy, but he didn't like mops or paint brushes.
“I saw that movie and thought, There’s a way.” He left home at eighteen with his best friend, who had terminal cancer.
Brilliant move. Hit the road with the clothes on yer back, a guy on his death bed, and yer thumb.
 They hit the road, staying no more than three days in any one place, because Hickson wanted him to see as much of America as possible. When his friend died, everything went dark for a while.
Wonder what he did for pain meds there at the last? Wonder where Hickson hid the body?
Hickson kept travelling.
Why wait around for the inquest?
He visited all forty-eight contiguous states, and, when he realized that he’d mostly seen just gas stations,
Brilliant realization.
he visited all forty-eight again, camping in national parks.
See? I'm still even more brilliant than him. Say I started this afternoon, and I made it from Fenwick Island to, say, Annapolis, I'd look out the window all the way. That way I'd have seen the lower edge of Sussex County and all of Maryland's eastern shore. I wouldn't have talked to anybody but the guy who picked me up, naturally, and I wouldn't know anything about either locale but what he told me, but that's okay. I've lived in both. The hard part would come when we got past Hagerstown. I might have to hole up at a gas station in Cumberland to absorb some local flavor. Two or three days should have me a pretty deep understanding, I think.
Hickson was enterprising. He made money by hunting exotic minerals and rocks.
"What's that?"
"A rock. They call it schist."
"Brilliant. Go flush it. And wash your hands."
During the winters, if he wanted, he would get a job doing manual labor someplace warm. He would usually be hired as a stopgap worker, and, when employers saw his work, he was often asked to stay, and was sometimes put up in motels.
"That boy's really brilliant!"
"He stocks a good shelf!"
 Hickson is slender, not tall, with a dusty-brown Taliban farmer’s beard and vacant distant blue eyes—a boy’s gaze added to the visage of an older man. In time, he got two words tattooed across his knuckles: “life” on the left hand and “love” on the right.
I saw a guy once, it wuz in Virginia, it wuz. I wuz traveling, on the open road, y'see, kinda like Jack Kerouac, only more brilliant. I saw a guy with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on his left hand knucks, and "F-U-C-K" on the right hand. I dunno what he had on his toes. He had shoes on.
Hickson was interested in psychedelics.
That's one way to keep yer mind in top working order.
One day when he was twenty-five, he was taking L.S.D. under a tree in Cave Junction, Oregon, when a young woman approached and introduced herself.
She just sprang up right outta the ground, y'see. And she had four or five arms on each side, one for each head...
Her name was Elena Aytim, and she collected rocks, too.
"Wanna see some schist, Elena?"
"Like, wow, man! Can we smoke it?"
 They spent the next several days together.
"Can you get up?"
"No."
"Me neither."
"How long've we been layin' here?"
"Four days? Five?"
"Several."
“It got to be where we couldn’t get anything done, because we couldn’t stop looking at each other—everything disappeared,” Hickson said. “We would just lie in bed together and talk, and all of a sudden the sun would be going down.”
"Sometimes we'd be layin' there and I'd just count the heads on her shoulders. I never got the same number twice."
They travelled on together, and Hickson started calling her his wife. As they grew close, he learned that, as a teen, in Ohio, Aytim had got hooked on opioids after a car accident, and had moved on to fentanyl before kicking the habit. She confessed that she had recently relapsed with heroin, and she worried that Hickson would turn her away. Hickson said he wouldn’t; he himself had started drinking heavily after his friend’s death. “I was, like, ‘Hit me,’ ” he recalled saying. “ ‘If I don’t understand, I’ll figure it out.’ ”
Staying drunk always helps me think better too. Sharpens the mind. Why, I remember once... No, maybe I don't.
 He started using heroin with her.
Brilliant move. And we care in the least about this pair precisely why?
“I had control of it until she lost control,” Hickson said.
"That was why I stayed drunk."
“Then I’m, like, Fuck it, I’m getting high, because I can’t stand watching this.”
"What's a better reason than that?"
The addiction quickly turned into a workaday grind. Every morning, he’d wake knowing that he’d have to earn enough money for a dose; otherwise, he would collapse into a days-long flulike illness.
I remember what it was like. I'd wake in the morning, tired out still from the night before. I'd look in the mirror. I'd be haggard. Some mornings I was merle. I'd do what I hadda do—shower if I could smell myself, brush my remaining teeth, comb my remaining hair, get dressed, and earn enough money to cover groceries, gas, mortgage, electric, insurance, all those horrors imposed by society.
 That was when they decided to live for a while in San Francisco, which was known for its good public programs for getting people off drugs.
"My old man said it wuz purdy cool when he was there. Of course, he'd ain't very bright."
"Not like us," she agreed.
They couldn’t find an apartment—the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom in the city is now, by one estimate, about thirty-five hundred dollars—but they were used to camping and decided to make do. It was only after settling in that Hickson realized he had fallen into a bigger rut. He was now one of thousands of homeless people in the city living on the streets.
"Really. I never noticed until we got the tent. If I'd noticed, we'da gone to Santa Clara."
Homelessness afflicts nearly one in five hundred Americans.
Many of them people like Hickson and his winsome bride.
As a crisis, it’s insidious, because its victims rarely plunge toward the abyss; they slide. Maybe you’ve been couch surfing in between jobs and you overstay your welcome. Maybe you’ve been in Airbnbs while apartment hunting and the search is harder than expected. Maybe, like Hickson, you lived on the momentum of a private dream until you had a reason to put down roots. Camping, couch surfing, “digital nomad”-ing—all these things are seen as normal middle-class activities, so the line between being without a home for now and being homeless is thin.
It can happen to anybody, see? Not just schist salesmen.
 Like a hiker crossing from France into Italy, you often don’t know where you are until you look around, hear locals talking, and realize that you’ve entered another country.
Like a stroller on a city street, I always notice when I enter a zoo.
D., a punctilious woman with straightened hair, who had been living in San Francisco family shelters with her son for about ten months, told me recently, “We’re not some of those forever-homeless people—it happened, and it’s never going to happen again.” (She asked to be identified by her first initial because a lot of people she knows read this magazine.)
You see, there's only one woman named Darlene Flednarn living in San Francisco, and her friends would pick right up on it and she'd sure as schist lose her job as V.P. for Marketing at... Oh. Wait. Sorry, Darlene.
 D. had worked for years as a broadcast journalist,
"And now here's Darlene with Sports!... Darlene?"
"Sorry I'm late! I was having my hair straightened!"
and was living in Las Vegas when her son’s father
Which is not synonymous with "her husband."
got colon cancer and pegged out painfully died. Afterward, she went to San Francisco, where she’d gone to college. Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy.
Most people in San Francisco seem to have special needs...
But she struggled to find an affordable apartment.
No! Really? In San Francisco? Why didn't she get on a bus and go someplace cheaper, like... ummm... Las Vegas?
When I met D., her days began at 6 a.m., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach.
There are are several more feet of similar "journalism," or maybe it's prose. Read it and weep.
A Fred classic, kids 
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Zach Hickson arrived in San Francisco to stay three years ago, at twenty-seven, because nowhere in America seemed more appealing at the time. The city was mild and fragrant. 
Hickson is slender, not tall, with a dusty-brown 
They spent the next several days together. 
That was when they decided to live for a while in San Francisco, which was known for its good public programs for getting people off drugs. 
Like a hiker crossing from France into Italy, you often don’t know where you are until you look around, hear locals talking, and realize that you’ve entered another country.
D. had worked for years as a broadcast journalist,