Have You Got a Dollar for Four Quarters?

by John Coetzee

This is a story from the far reaches of gender. It is about a place where spirituality, poverty, and tatty old sweaters intersect in a flurry of, uh, ambiguous nipples.

It begins with a hostel at the east edge of the Tenderloin, where I worked the front desk and encountered a variety of eccentric characters. Sure, the staff and guests of the hostel were odd enough, but the local panhandlers who frequented us were memorable on an entirely different level. Surrealist caricatures of human beings, they would stop in to beg for change, or, to merely exchange a pile of grubby coins for some hard-won cash.

We were located smack on the border between the 'Loin and Union Square. Surely the proximity of these two very different neighborhoods has much to do with Union Square's long-held status as the Panhandling Epicenter of the west coast.

Ah yes, the faces, voices, and smells are all coming back to me now. Especially the smells! There was a hunchback woman with a cane who resembled an abandoned grandmother. There was a fellow whom we dubbed "the dirtiest man in the world" who always looked as if he had just narrowly escaped some apocalypse of filth and would frantically scratch his head, and who's nose and chin had, for some, reason, grown extraordinarily large. There was Ben, who was actually quite functional despite his panhandling and would show us pictures of his daughter from time to time. His family in Stockton would come pick him up for Thanksgiving dinner, and return him to his chosen corner afterwards. He was incredibly sweet, and it was often mysterious to me how he ended up with that empty paper soda cup perpetually in his hand. There was one very angry fellow who scared my coworker for a long time by threatening her after she called the police on him when he broke into a neighboring store. I don't recall this man's face, just the fear he evoked. But, all of them pale beside the memory of The Goddess.

When I first met The Goddess, she appeared to merely be a particularly eccentric hobo of uncertain ethnicity. Clothed in very loose and moth-eaten garments, crowned by a sweater hurriedly wrapped around her head like a turban, black as night, she entered with no hesitation but instead an aura of supreme and maddening confidence. Striding purposefully towards the desk, she threw her hand up on it to display some coins, and announced herself with the following phrase: "A dollar for four quarters?" At this point I digress to say a little about her utterly unearthly voice. It seemed totally at odds with the rags and dirt she wore. At once both feminine and masculine, supremely sophisticated, her voice was like that of a wealthy old Brooklyn madam who had momentarily fallen on hard times, or of a reincarnated Audrey Hepburn who was being punished for some obscure sin in her former life. As for her question, I eventually learned that this was almost the only thing she ever said, a kind of mantra that had become her sole means of communication with the rest of society. But, I soon realized that the question itself was ambiguous, because she didn't really want to exchange quarters for a dollar, she just wanted some money. I don't know if this led to a lot of conflict for her or not, but no doubt her appearance made it clear enough what she really wanted.

It was her bizarre contradictions, her unearthly confidence at odds with her near total alienation from society, which eventually led us to see her as something mythic, an archetype, an obscure and indecipherable Hindu deity who appeared on earth as something like a photo negative of Krishna, or a new version of Jesus who, instead of being crucified, would slowly be degraded to death. It was these strange and powerful emotions, roused in us by her, that led us to christen her The Goddess and to worship her accordingly. We formed a tight-knit pseudo cult, which we carefully concealed lest our purposes be tragically misunderstood, or even worse, tragically understood. Late at night we would wrap white towels around our heads, speak the Goddess' mantra, and wait for enlightenment to enter into us (which it usually did, with the help of some alcohol that had been confiscated from a hostel guest and which found a happy home in our oh-so corrupt bellies). Jack, the night shift guy, even constructed a small idol of the Goddess so we could feel she was present at our ceremonies in spirit, if not in her actual gaudy flesh. True, the idol was in fact just a Ken doll with a washcloth loosely wrapped around it's head, but the important thing was that it could record what you said and repeat it back to you, and we of course programmed it to speak her holy mantra, in as close a likeness as we could muster.

I made a friend, Gary, who had grown up in the neighborhood. I found myself (who knows why) describing The Goddess to him, and was shocked to find that my friend knew of her and had been seeing her on the local streets since he was in grade school, several years earlier, when he saw her wearing brown paper bags for shoes while being thrown out of a TL restaurant. This led me to inquire into The Goddess' origins, and it turned out that night shift Jack had the most information about this. There were, of course, many rumors, but the most prominent ones claimed that back in the day she had been a Diva, known and admired throughout the Polk Street and Tenderloin transgender communities. Sadly, as so often happens with the beautiful admired ones, she fell prey to drug addiction, mental illness, and eventually entered a poverty-stricken street existence. But, somehow, despite her fall, she had preserved the elegance, grace, and poise of her former life! Or, at least, had preserved some fragment of it.

This brings us to the tricky issue of her gender. When I first encountered her I firmly believed her to be a man and did not perceive anything about her that was even attempting to be female. It slowly dawned on me that she had chosen to identify herself with the fairer sex, and so I shifted my pronouns accordingly. But, I continued to believe that, at least in terms of biology, she must be unambiguously male. Then, late one night on an outbound 38 Geary, The Goddess granted me a revelation not unlike the ones described in the bizarre final chapter of the Good Book. Somewhere around Geary and Jones, she boarded the bus, pushed her way past the people lined up to pay their fare, and marched to back of the bus, in the process giving all of us a view of the ragged shirt which had slipped down on her right side to reveal, wonder of wonders, a BREAST! Not an especially large or pretty breast, of course, but a breast nonetheless. This revelation left me illuminated and scarred, as I'm sure all revelations must, but I shall cherish my PTSD 'til the end of my days! An odd postscript: after she sat down in the rear of the bus and began her usual rounds of "a dollar for four quarters?" I'm sure I heard one of the drunk and lonely men back there hitting on her... a braver man than I, he most assuredly was. I feel sure that if she ever exposes her genitals in a similar manner, the universe will crumble, so I will be satisfied with assuming she is that her genitalia exist in a quantum state, forever existing simultaneously as both a pole and a hole, but not truly confined to either.

In truth I should not have been so shocked by the 38 Geary Revelation. Stories had long circulated about The Goddess and her encounter with a man outside a bar somewhere in the Loin. This man was with a group of friends, and after the Goddess' mantra drew their attention to her, one of the man's friends made a rather expensive wager that the man would not suck her black and mysterious teat. Who knows why, but said mantook it upon himself to sail into uncharted territory and won that bet. I assume photographs were taken, and that the Goddess was satisfactorily compensated, but I remain haunted by the thought of that man with that unearthly nipple in his mouth, all the thick and spicy smells of the Goddess wafting up into his nose.

The last time I saw the Goddess was in a small cafe', just beyond the northern edge of the Loin. I was sipping coffee when she entered, like a raptor on Judgment Day, or something, and began accosting the customers. The barrista began a futile effort to chase her off, but she of course utterly ignored him, knowing his status to be far, far beneath hers. But there was something that made this encounter quite different from all the others... The Goddess had a field of black bristles poking out across her cheeks and chin, facial hair! Surely, this was a revelation to rival that of the 38 Geary. What strange new journey was she embarking on now? Was she searching farther and farther up the unexplored coastline of ambiguous gender, seeking some Northern Passage to a private Alaska of restored and permanent Diva-hood?

It has now been many months since I have seen her. I don't know if she is alive or dead, but I certainly hope for the former. Truly, I think of her as something akin to a savior, a messiah in a ragged sweater turban, who demonstrated to me the immense and totally irrational dignity that one can still have, even when reduced to an inhuman extremity of squalor. I must admit, it would warm my heart and brighten my eyes to see her again, amidst her streets, adjusting her sweater-turban, reciting her mantra, displaying her iron soul for the salvation of all.

So, dear reader, I beg of you, if you encounter this unusual being, please give her some money, and then contact this publication and tell us where and when you saw her, and in what state of health and spirits she was. Surely The Goddess will reward you for this good deed in whatever version of heaven her ragged sweater-head one day finds its way into.

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