Armistead Maupin I ain’t. Nor do I particularly wish to be. Even if every Millennial brat is working on his novel, my years around downwardly mobile bohemians in denial are too raw to fictionalize, and I find the upwardly mobile sort of San Franciscan too narrowminded and ideologically extreme to examine closely. Besides, I’d rather be the William Faulkner of Tacoma, not because there’s any taste in being such a writer, but because there isn’t any. Pierce County is a place whose dysfunction has gone surprisingly unexamined in American literature and film despite its having sheltered a mentally ill and ultimately murderous police chief (David Brame), a notorious killing spree duo (John Allen Muhammad and Boyd Lee Malvo), a disgruntled father who immolated himself and his kids in their house (Josh Powell), and an Army neurosurgeon (Dr. Dennis Geyer) who used a metal thermos to vent his road rage on the head of a man named, I kid you not, Robert Speed.

If Tacoma isn’t the anti-Seattle, it’s close. Actually, the Parkland-Spanaway-Graham corridor on the east flank of Fort Lewis is the real anti-Seattle, and a fairly awful place. My mom is right that it has too many nail salons. There are reasons why commissioned officers and those of us who associate with them often have bad things to say about the enlisted and their hangers-on, just as there are reasons why some of the common epithets for military wives (“dependent whales,” “commissary cows”) verge on being unprintable. To be clear, the dysfunction goes much deeper than limited education, intelligence, or finances. Fat women in the Nordic countries and the culturally Nordic parts of the Pacific Northwest don’t have that defiant slovenliness about them. Nor is the proliferation of jacked-up crew cab pickups with pristine paint jobs (or, as I like to call them, shlengtheners with room for the general staff) around JBLM a sign of poverty, even if the drugstore cowboys who drive them are in debt for the honor; I’d have to sell my trusty old Civic several times over to buy one, and the fuel bill on those things is obviously a bitch. These people aren’t lower-class; they’re classless. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the myriad pathologies that keep Pierce County social workers busy. One can travel in an arc from Lakewood through South Tacoma and back up the left bank of the Puyallup River to the edge of civilization without really leaving the gnarly shit. Actually, there are some pleasant agricultural districts and old villages up in the hills, such as Eatonville; there are also some picturesque but disturbing ones, such as Yelm, which features a gun shop in an old clapboard church. The northbound leg of this arc has a lot to do with generic West Coast ghetto culture, but the southbound leg, into the woods, is more readily explained by the kind of people who get dredged up for military service these days. There are exceptions, but as a rule these are not the kind of troops who incline me to support our troops, and I have backup from a family friend and Army captain who explained my disturbance about all the thugs on base quite simply: “Those, my friend, are the enlisted.”

You don’t read about these places in the tourist pamphlets. They’re a huge bummer. But as much as the Chamber of Commerce and some of our politicians would like to pretend that they don’t exist, they do. Contrary to popular (and aggressively propagandized) belief, they are not just a problem in and around big cities, either. For example, crystal methamphetamine, which tends to turn its addicts into pathetic wrecks, is largely a rural and small town problem. I lived for a time on the edge of the tweaker ghetto on the west side of Eureka, CA. One description I heard of the commercial strip a few blocks west of my apartment went like this: “If all anyone from out of town saw of Eureka was Broadway, no one would ever come back.” Most of Eureka’s residential motels are clustered along Broadway. These are exceptionally vile, dilapidated properties. Their tenants include tweakers whose five-year-olds stumble into the crank stash and get fucked up, as well as a rogue’s gallery of other gross dirtbags. It’s an accidental sort of truth in advertising, since 101 runs along Broadway and has made this skid row the main southern portal for tourists on their way to visit the quaint Victorians downtown. Only the locals know to detour through Henderson Center if they’d like to avoid the nastiness.

Many locals do not, however, have an inkling of how awful some of the city’s biggest landlords are. They don’t all have their heads in the sand; it’s just that they don’t rent or hang out with people who rent. They may live not two miles away and drive by these slumlord ratholes all the time, but the tenants aren’t doing silly walks out front with their pants on the ground, so the disorder and evil are a lot harder to notice.

I was recently told one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard about urban disorder in an unexpected place: Santa Rosa. Santa Rosans have always struck me as an exceptionally well-mannered and functional lot. It seems that I just hadn’t met the dregs because they don’t leave town.

My source for this story was a woman who described herself as a former “mental health token” in Sonoma County social services lobbying (“I was young and could string a sentence together, so they hired me”). She told me that she had several meetings with Nancy Pelosi in this capacity, and that she found Pelosi thoroughly unprincipled.

This woman does de facto social work on Santa Rosa’s “welfare block.” (The only neighborhood nickname I like more is the Pork ‘n Beans, the nickname for a housing project in Miami that is a staple on The First 48. As you see, it can be useful to watch too much TV.) This term apparently isn’t so much an epithet used by disgruntled neighbors as a matter-of-fact name used by its residents. Asked where they live, they consistently say, “I live on the welfare block.” They don’t know their own home addresses or even the nearest intersection. Second-graders from the block can’t spell their own names. When residents invite friends over, they often tell them to go hang out on the welfare block and wait until they show up. Social life with the neighbors is largely an informal affair determined by who happens to show up on the block at the same time. Gang rivals see each other out on the block, head out for a fight, then go back home a few minutes later. The term I favor, however, is “yard,” because this is exactly the sort of thing one hears about in prisons. In no neighborhood where the usual custom is to work outside the home is the standard for social interactions among working-age adults nothing but a series of chance encounters with friends and enemies out on the street.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of escaping the welfare block. Going to prison seems to be mainly a matter of changing yards for the time being, of mixing it up with a different set of homies on a different block before returning to the original block and mixing it up again with whomever isn’t off at one of the many big houses at the moment. With luck, if one can call it that, there might even be some continuity of residents between the welfare block and prison, kind of a poor man’s version of having buddies from the neighborhood at boarding school.

The woman who told me this story said that a lot of the adult residents resent her for hanging out with their kids and supposedly being arrogant because she has her life together. These are often the same parents who are too drunk to drive their young children to school functions or medical appointments.

I met this woman on a train that I was taking to San Jose to get a copy of my birth certificate for employment purposes. It was a short-notice, short-turnaround trip. On the train back north to Salem the next night, the crowd seemed dirtier and more disreputable. My main company on the trip back north was a grizzled transient en route to Portland who was dressed like Robin Hood and prone to wax eloquent in some of the most pretentious quasiphilosophical language imaginable about unfortunate rifts in the oneness of humanity. His type is legion on the West Coast hippie circuit. They’re the losers you see hanging out on business district sidewalks in Huntington Beach, Arcata, Ashland, and Portland, usually with a guitar and a puppy, the better to establish street cred as starving artists with poor animals in their care. They are the undeserving poor. They ruin the reputation of the homeless for the majority who aren’t like that and who didn’t choose to be such lowlives, the homeless who try to be discreet, keep themselves clean, and be productive members of society against stacked odds. Some of them aren’t actually homeless, but successfully act the part as their occupation. These include the trustafarian university students who used to panhandle at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Few of these losers, however, speak in the affected English accent that my buddy on the train used. At first I suspected that he was from Continental Europe, since there was something slightly off about his accent for an Englishman, but it was much more English than any continental accent I’d ever heard, and it seemed to change into a slightly American accent from time to time. When I asked where he was from, he very matter-of-factly told me that he had been raised mainly in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast. After that, I noticed a mild, generic drawl crop up in his speech when he got animated.

Robin Hood was smart for heading to Portland at the start of summer. It may not be consistent with a belief in the oneness of humanity to milk some of America’s most guilt-ridden yuppies for walking-around money, but it’s good business, and as closely as I can tell that’s his line of work.