San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
IN FICTION, MUNI IS MORE THAN BUSES
She walked up and down the aisle, getting her bearings, trying to meet everyone’s eyes with a smile. Her first job was to identify anyone who needed help, which wasn’t very hard.
NNothing could ever change the 38Geary. Not two years of ’rona. Not a whole year of uprisings against the acting interim U.S. president. The 38 stayed true to itself. Outsize and awkward, its bendy waist looking like a tattered accordion between cars, the bus prowled one of the city’s widest streets. Starting South of Market, it charged through the Tenderloin and the Richmond — until its square, ungainly ass made it all the way out to Ocean Beach. It was like a force of nature. Cruz couldn’t have asked for a better route during her first tour of duty as a Muni Social Support Specialist.
It was 6 a.m. on a moody October morning when she climbed on board at Union Square, shedding her jacket to reveal the regulation Muni red tie and blue shirt. Cruz was tall and wiry, which her mother always said came from the Haitian side of the family. On the Mayan side, everybody was short.
Rasheed was her driving partner today, which was a stroke of luck. They’d been friends back at Mission High, so she didn’t need to do a long introduction. He was still the same guy with a goofy smile she remembered from American Democracy class, though he’d grown his hair out into a natural look that was pretty hot.
Despite Rasheed’s grin and her weeks of training, Cruz had to admit she was a little nervous. “It’s my first day, so go easy on me.”
He shrugged. “Never know what’s going to happen. Might be one of those days when you need 10 edibles after work. Might be quiet.” Then he closed the door and her shift started.
Outside, the sky was starting to glow a faint blue around shreds of cloud. Cruz could tell it was going to be a gorgeous sunrise after the rain last night. She walked up and down the aisle, getting her bearings, trying to meet everyone’s eyes with a smile. Her first job was to identify anyone who needed help, which wasn’t very hard. You could tell who rode the bus all day because it was the only safe, dry place they had; you knew who was too drunk to be around people; and it was usually pretty obvious when someone was having a mental health crisis. The hard part was what came next: getting some help for the Person In Need, or PIN for short.
That’s what made Cruz a new kind of Muni worker. Of course, individual drivers did try to help riders in distress. But that wasn’t sustainable; it was impossible to do constant interventions and keep to a bus schedule at the same time. Now, Cruz and the other Muni Social Support Specialists were changing all that.
At this hour, there were only about 10 people on the bus, mostly sleepy commuters getting off the night shift. But there was one woman she flagged immediately as a potential PIN. She was an elder, white hair stuck to her pale forehead, with a tattered raincoat hanging off one shoulder and three canvas bags slumped at her feet. As Cruz passed her seat, the woman began talking and gesturing. “They are all dogs,” she said. Her voice got louder. “They are dogs and killers!” Surreptitiously, Cruz checked to see whether the PIN had an earbud. Negative. She was talking to herself.
It wasn’t necessarily a sign of distress. Lots of people talk to themselves without realizing it. Still, Cruz made a mental note to keep an eye on the woman, looking for signs of escalation. Part of her training involved mental health interventions, and the rule was to leave people alone unless they were overwhelmingly disruptive — or a danger to themselves or others. She took a seat behind the potential PIN, trying to beam a chill vibe directly into her brain.
They reached Gough without incident and Cruz started to relax. It felt good to have a job again. Supposedly 2020 had been the worst year ever to graduate from college, but for Cruz it hadn’t been so bad. With her degree in data science, she managed to land fulltime employment as a contact tracer. While her friends struggled to find work, she spent her two pandemic years on the phone at her mom’s house in the Mission, talking to people who were having complete meltdowns.
Those days were over. Now that you could buy personalized vaccine patches printed with images of your favorite Kpop bands, contact tracing sounded positively quaint. Cruz got laid off in 2022, just as most of her college friends were finally finding jobs.
After a depressing interview at Facebook for a gig analyzing “truthiness in posting,” she saw one of those clipart ads on a 14Mission bus stop. JOIN OUR TEAM! SEEKING SOCIAL SUPPORT STAFF FOR MUNI RIDEALONGS! It sounded intriguing.
A QR code on the poster took her to a shabby governmentmade website for “New Muni,” announcing postrona bus routes, and describing how the city was planting a garden path along the old JChurch tracks. She had to swipe through several menus before she found job listings. According to the “SFMTA Vision Statement,” the transit agency was one of several city departments that received funding to provide social services after San Francisco rebooted the Police Department in 2021. Now they needed people who could help distressed transit riders find the resources they needed.
One thing Cruz had learned from her contact tracing days was that she was really good at calming people down and helping them get the resources they needed — even when it seemed like there were no resources to be had. She impressed the Muni recruiter by listing the location of every San Francisco homeless shelter and free clinic from memory. To be fair, there weren’t enough of them to make memorizing their addresses much of a challenge.
And today she was here, trying to help people on the 38Geary.
A Black woman in a nurse’s uniform got on the bus at Masonic, and the PIN in front of Cruz got agitated. “Your dog is killing me!” she screamed. “It almost bit my face!” Ignoring her, the nurse walked to the back of the bus and sat down with a sigh. The PIN was just getting started, though. She screamed again. “Call off your dogs!” A few of the sleepy commuters woke up, and one moved to a seat farther from the PIN. The woman continued to yell about dog attacks. This was officially a disturbance.
Cruz sat down next to the PIN and tried to meet her eyes. Looking into people’s faces sometimes helped to orient them. No luck. The woman stared straight ahead, shaking. “Do you see the blood? Do you?”
Gently, Cruz put her hand on the PIN’s arm. The distressed woman’s raincoat had fallen off, revealing that she was wearing nothing but a sleeveless dress on this cold fall morning.
“Hey, I’m with Muni Social Support,” Cruz said. “Do you need some help? We can find you a warm meal or a place to sleep tonight. Or we can get you a doctor if you are hurt.” The woman turned to Cruz, face distorted by rage or confusion
— maybe both. She glared at Cruz’s hand, brown against her white bicep. Cruz thought about how the PIN had started really losing it when the Black nurse got on board. Was this going to become a thing? Was this woman going to pull a Karen?
She braced herself.
After a moment, the woman’s face cleared. “Is that you, honey?” she asked. “Sonia? Are you back from the hospital?”
Cruz felt a twinge of sadness. So many people had lost their loved ones in the second wave. People called it the Millennial Spike because it hit 30somethings the hardest. And that left a lot of elders on the street, because their kids weren’t there to pay for care facilities anymore.
She met the woman’s eyes finally. “I’m not Sonia — I’m Cruz. What’s your name?”
The woman looked at her blankly for a second. “Where’s Sonia?”
“I don’t know. Can you tell me your name? I’d like to get you some help.”
“Heather Green. That dog — that dog bit me.”
Cruz took Heather though a series of questions, slow and easy, trying to figure out where she was living and whether she had someone to take care of her. Without doing a lookup on her ID, it was hard to say for sure whether Heather was homeless. But she did have a nasty wound on her other arm that was seeping through the newspapers she’d wrapped around it. Definitely one for the ER.
Muni Social Support was part of a new network of social service providers in San Francisco, which meant they had a slightly clunky app for interagency business. Cruz swiped through it, typing in what she knew about Heather to get this PIN a slot at the CPMC hospital on Van Ness. By the time Cruz had Heather’s case all sorted in the system, they were zipping back up Geary, past Japantown. At the Van Ness stop, she handed Heather off to a guy from the San Francisco Street Team — another social support group that the Board of Supervisors had spun up from the old police budget.
The Street Team guy glanced at the app on his phone, and looked up brightly at them. “Hi Heather — I’m Quifan! You can call me Ken if that’s easier.” One of the main benefits of the app was that everybody in the chain of support knew the PIN’s name in advance, which generally made the person in crisis feel a lot safer.
Cruz helped Heather down the front stairs of the bus, and handed her three bags to Quifan. “He’s going to take you to the hospital.”
“Will you tell Sonia where I am?”
“I will if I see her, Heather.” Rasheed nodded at Quifan and Cruz from behind the wheel. “Thanks for handling that.”
Cruz climbed back on the bus, where a person with purple hair and a cane propped between their knees smiled at her. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before. You’re with Muni?”
“Yes I am. I’m part of the new social services team.”
The person shook their head wonderingly. “I’ve always liked Muni, but that was above and beyond. Really cool.”
It was almost 7 a.m., and the sky was turning blue and gold. Cruz walked back up the aisle, nodding at the passengers. Suddenly, she could feel the light hitting the graffiticovered windows all the way inside the atomic structures of her cells. She’d actually helped somebody today. Maybe it wasn’t a permanent fix. Maybe Heather had a hard road ahead. But she wasn’t going to scream on the bus, in pain, waiting for someone to hear her. Somebody had finally heard.