I Left My Heart in a Donut Shop

Comments (0) By Hiya Swanhuyser Wednesday, May 7 2008

Iggy Scam, famous among Mission District punks as a 'zine writer, musician, and activist, has grown older. He changed his name back to Erick Lyle, for example. He hasn't changed much else, though: His book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, is pro-junkie, anti-cop, and maintains a number of other attitudes that would drive any self-appointed responsible adult into a frothing fury. Drawing material from Lyle's 'zine, Scam ("The Epicenter of Crime: The Hunt's Donuts Story" is reprinted in its elegiac entirety), as well as the infamous Tenderloin newspaper, the Turd-Filled Donut, the book chronicles life in San Francisco in the 1990s from the perspective of a welfare-getting, needle-exchanging, SRO-hotel inhabiting punk. It's not your typical dot-com story, to put it mildly. It's not your typical self-involved wasteoid memoir, either. Lyle's writing is brilliant, as sparkly as broken glass and besotted with a deeply egalitarian, big-hearted love for a San Francisco most people don't even like to look at. Special bitterness is reserved for Gavin Newsom's "Care Not Cash" billboard campaign, in which (in case you don't remember) bitchy-looking yuppies held cardboard signs bearing anti-homeless slogans. Lyle's the guy who spent a little time replacing the intended messages with this kind of thing: "I am a totally selfish asshole who doesn't care if homeless people die as long as it doesn't happen on my doorstep and no tourists accidentally see it."

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The book's release party is huge, and features guest speakers Paul Boden of the S.F. Coalition on Homelessness, Antonio Roman-Alcala of Alemany Farm, and Mary Howe of S.F. Needle Exchange; art by Sara Thustra, Ivy Jeanne, and Heather Renee Russ; and music by Shotwell, the Judy Experience, and Black Rainbow.
Wed., May 14, 6 p.m., 2008