City Exposed
Formerly homeless man socializes with pet rat’s help.
A recent Monday, 12:30 p.m.: As the siren of a passing ambulance blares, Matthew Walker covers the sensitive ears of his companion, an albino rat named Fish, that clings to his shoulders. They had just made the trek across town to a pet store for rat food, and now they’re waiting for the bus to take them home.
“I don’t normally like riding the bus because people in general aren’t as friendly as you’d like them to be, but when you have to go somewhere fast you do what you have to do,” said Walker, 24.
When the bus finally came, it was apparent that Fish is the one providing support for Walker, not the other way around.
Walker sat in the back, trying not to be concerned about the people watching him nuzzle the rat on his shoulder.
“The first time I ever picked her up, she took to me. She just sat on my shoulder,” he said. “It helps me just feel comfortable. I’m a rare individual. I don’t like people, but I can’t stand being alone. I think she helps me be more friendly toward people. When someone engages with me about my rat, I can be friendly.”
Walker says his social phobias stem from a bout of homelessness that started when he was 19. For nearly five years he did what he had to do to survive. He worked odd jobs and often squatted in abandoned buildings.
Five months ago, with the help of connections to Larkin Street Youth Services and the Community Housing
“The first time I ever picked her up, she took to me. She just sat on my shoulder. It helps me just feel comfortable. ... I don’t like people, but I can’t stand being alone.
Matthew Walker
Partnership, he finally found stable housing in a newly renovated apartment complex South of Market with his girlfriend Apple Cronk, 21.
They met on the streets, and now share custody of the rat they found on a Craigslist posting in the free category. The rat offers them comfort in a world they sometimes find hard to navigate socially.
Walker said the building management doesn’t allow pets, but it does allow service and support animals if a tenant has documentation from a doctor or a therapist. Cronk is the one with the doctor’s letter, but she’s in classes most of the day at City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, so it’s Walker who spends the most time with Fish nestled on his shoulder or comfortably hidden in the hood of his
sweatshirt.
“It’s called reasonable accommodation,” said Tamarre Wilson, property manager at the building where Walker lives. “If it makes our tenants happy, I don’t care.”
After the bus ride, Walker ran into a former co-worker, Liz Konsella, who asked Walker if she could pet Fish. She smiled as she gently touched the soft white fur, trying not to run into the long nude tail that ran down Walker’s back. It was a line too gross for her to cross.
“It’s a very cute rat. It’s one of the good rats in the city. Well — only because it’s on his shoulder,” Konsella said. “In other places it would be considered a nuisance.”
Like Konsella, many of those Walker encounters are enamored of his little friend. On one recent visit to a coffee shop, a hard-hatted construction worker even thanked him for bringing along his rat. The man had owned a rat of his own once and seemed to be having a nostalgic episode.
Walker, however, said happiness is not always what he gets when people notice Fish moving around in his hood.
“Some people just view her as vermin. She plays in the gutters for all they know, but it’s not like that,” Walker said. “She’s like a best friend.
“If anybody ever said, ‘I don’t like you, and I don’t like your rat,’ then I would leave. It’s kind of like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. — if Sammy Davis doesn’t go anywhere, Frank Sinatra doesn’t go anywhere.”