Josh Brandon has, he explains, carried out a detailed marketing analysis and chosen the perfect site for his new start-up business in the heart of the dot.com capital of the world. So far his financial returns have exceeded predictions and overheads have been kept low. He is optimistic about the future and foresees, like many others in the SoMa (south of Market Street) district of San Francisco, steady growth.
But there is one crucial difference between the busy young dot.comers hurrying to work this morning with their take-away lattes in their hand and Josh Brandon. While the former will head at night for their loft homes or the Mission cocktail bars, Brandon will be spending the night on a mattress under the Bay Bridge. Brandon is a panhandler, a word with a more defiant feel to it than the more literal beggar: he is one of a vast army who now populate the centre of San Francisco as the city experiences the boom of the dot.com world. Estimates vary on how many thousand now live rough and hustle on the street but everyone would agree that they are now as much a feature of the city as the cable car and the Golden Gate bridge.
"I've been drifting off shore for quite a while now," says Brandon who explains, rather chillingly, that he used to be a journalist. "But I feel as though I'm swimming towards land." Originally from Olympia in Washington state, he had worked for a while for the San Francisco community paper the Tenderloin Times and then for the department of public health. But he had been laid off, the residential hotel where he stayed had been burned out, and since last year he had been living with his "troll-mates" under the Bay Bridge in a spot where neither the highway police nor the transit authorities could find him. Now he stands with a nearly empty cardboard coffee container hoping some of the dot.com millions will trickle down his way.
"A lot of the young dot.com workers are very generous and sympathetic," he says. "I never ask for money, I just greet people and I have this game I play with them where I try and guess what their occupation is." In the SoMa area, guessing that the passers-by are dot.comers is a pretty safe bet. His afternoon patch, outside the Museum of Modern Art is less productive. "The ones that come to the (e-commerce) conventions are the worst, they're not a good crowd."
"I did some kind of business and marketing analysis before I moved here," says Brandon, who is 51 and dressed in battered leather jacket, baseball cap and jeans. "It's a question of location. location, location. I make about the minimum wage of $5 an hour if I'm lucky. I've been told by other pan-handlers that I'm doing well. Occasionally you get what we call "blessed" - someone drops a big bill, $20, $10 - but that rarely happens."
"Hungry. Anything helps. Thank you," says Philip's hand-written sign. Dressed in a ripped donkey jacket and with flowing dreadlocks, Philip is also very conscious that he lives in the capital of e-commerce. "I use e-mail all the time," he says. "A lot of people thinks it's odd that a homeless person has an e-mail address but that's how we all keep in touch with each other." He is able to use the computer at the library to receive and send his messages before he settles down at his patch outside Borders bookshop near Union Square. Philip is a sweet-faced 20-year-old high school drop-out from Spokane, Washington, whose home is a sleeping-bag under a bridge in Portrero Hill. Kicked out of his home, he says, by a step-father at 12 he has hitch-hiked and jumped trains across the country for the last few years. He has been on the street in San Francisco for a year but hopes that - thanks to a friendly young web site designer who took pity on him and helped him make his own site - he might find work one day in the industry that has made millionaires of young men his age.
"My passion is artwork and writing and now I can make a basic website. If I can get on to a multi-media studies course I might be able to find work," he said. "Nine out of 10 people ignore me completely but I'm pretty numb to it. I've only had one person kick my sign but my friend has been spat at. I don't think I'd take that."
His mother was worried about him, of course, but he sent her art works and kept in touch by email. His most generous clients? "No, it's not all the people who've made money here. It's usually people who are poor or have been in the same position." Male panhandlers heavily outnumber women, he said, although he had a woman friend who lived under the freeway. The highlight of his day, he said, would be to be able to have a coffee or tea and a read - he had a copy of Clive Barker's Weaveworld in his tattered bag - in the Baghdad Cafe. "I live on tea, and if I have enough money some granola."
Playing the flute nearby and soliciting donations in a Drum tobacco tin is a musician from Atlanta who introduces himself as Sir Rico Diablo. "I went to college," he says with a smile. "I even graduated out of computer school and I look at Silicon Valley and what's happening there, but I've been a wild person all my life and I love the streets." Now 50, he had played in a band for 15 years, he said, before hitting the streets and playing "everything from Mozart to country and western.
"I live everywhere now - like an angel. I know that a lot of people make a lot of money here so I call myself International Panhandling Inc. A good day for me is $15."
Perhaps the most appropriate tune for Sir Rico, Philip and Josh would be one written in 1932 by Yip Harburg, called Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Years later Harburg told the writer Studs Terkel why he wrote it: "in the song the man is really saying: 'I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends?'_ It's more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn't reduce him to a beggar, it makes him a dignified human, asking questions - and a bit outraged too. As he should be."
