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Outside my door, I know the corridor is filled with the second contingent. Wet towel’s tucked under the door to stop the teargas. My mattress is outside, blocking the landing. Folks packed in like sitting sardines, arms locked and waiting. Police’s got to drag them out one by one. Then finally, there’s us. The last thirty tenants, each one sitting in our rooms, waiting. That’s the plan.
What am I thinking? That they never get this far. That this time, like the other times, they give up and go away. Drive their cars with lights and guns and clubs away. Trot their horses back to Golden Gate Park. Go home to their families and children. Go home to TV and dinner. Let me stay here and live the few more years I got to live.
"The last tenant is being escorted from the hotel. He wants to make a statement."
I am crippled, and I am deaf, and I am very old. I am alone here, and they put me in the street. I want freedom, the principle of American democracy in the richest country in the world. Do you think our mayor has a place for me? No. No. Because I was happy here.
"Although the mayor promised to provide housing for the tenants after their eviction, there is no one here offering housing to anyone. There are no promised buses or housing assistance."
"A contingent of tenants can be seen walking away down Kearny. They have no place to go. Where will these suddenly homeless people go?"
"It is eight a.m., and the Sheriff has handed over the I-Hotel to the Enchanted Seas Investment Corporation."
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if gay lib protestors were bourgeois degenerates, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we fought and spent our youth.