An apartment fire is one of those self-announcing neighborhood catastrophes: A pile of burned mattress, melted wastebasket and assorted tchotckes lies out in the street in front of the Bethany Center on Capp Street.
A reporter, passing by, stops to take a picture. A bicyclist wheels into the frame and begins poking through the charred debris. He pulls out a plastic claw — like the kind you buy at the zoo — and begins brandishing it at the reporter in what seems like a playful manner. Until the mood mysteriously sours, at which point the cyclist begins screaming, “Don’t take my soul! Don’t take my soul! I’m going to sexually harass you with this claw!” Just another morning in the Mission District.
“That’s Troy’s apartment,” says a neighbor, looking past the charred coils of the mattress and at the fan of scorch marks above a row of broken windows on the ground floor. “He’s the man who is always on the corner, handing out candy to the little kids. Good guy. There are some really sweet people there. Or maybe there are all kinds, but I only meet the sweet ones.”
“Is Troy OK?” a reporter asks. Behind the scorch marks and the broken windows, the ceiling and walls of the room look like a sheet of white paper that have been rubbed vigorously with a charcoal pencil until the white is almost gone.
“You should go in there and ask,” says the neighbor, who is, upon closer examination, half in and half out of a wetsuit. “I’m going to Ocean Beach. The waves are only this high today,” he says, holding a hand up about four feet off the ground.
Inside the burned room, a woman with a bucket is briskly mopping the floor. Outside the door is Jerry Brown, the director of the building.
“This actually went very, very well,” he says, with the slightly wired firmness of a man who has been up all night managing the after-effects of a fire at a senior citizen complex. “It’s a good thing that Troy was here on the first floor. He doesn’t have any neighbors — those are offices on either side of him. And these walls are mainly concrete.”
It will take about a month to repair the apartment. In the meantime, Troy will be staying in a vacant unit elsewhere in the building. “It’s not good for him to be outside of here,” Brown says, his tone becoming slightly worried. “He’s older. He has memory loss.”
He snaps out of it. “Really, we haven’t had a fire like this in 20 years. This went very well.”
The fire started between 11 and 11:30 the previous night. “The alarm went off and the fire department got here right away,” says Brown. So did Brown and the staff. “The fire department really did a great job. They really care and they take care of our residents.”
“Especially Troy,” says a man standing next to Brown.
“Especially Troy,” says Brown. “They know Troy real well.”
On the way out, a man in an electric wheelchair whirrs past. He looks old, and kind, and like he might be the sort of person who hands out candy to kids.
“Are you Troy?” the reporter asks. He nods. “What happened?”
“I was burning one of those scented candles,” he says. “I got up to go to the bathroom and knocked it over on the bed.”
“I’m glad you’re OK, but I’m sorry to hear that,” says the reporter.
He looks up, sadly. “I’m sorry too.”