Of course, to the people who had been living in the Mission before we got there, the poets and performance artists who came in the 1980s, the Latino families who came in the 1970s, when the Mission was still an Irish neighborhood, a character it had almost completely lost by the time we moved there, Victor and Alex and I were money, but we didn’t see it that way. We were living on graduate-student stipends of fifteen thousand dollars a year. We bought our clothes at Thrift Town and ate ramen, sometimes with egg and sometimes without. We were cold in the winter and we thought we’d earned the right to resent people who had more than we did.
Still, I suppose you could say: we were another world. We were the wave, washing away everything that had been there before we arrived. Our blindness to this is, I think, what would get us all in trouble later on.