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In 1981, Peter and Helen left, too, buying a home in Millbrae. There was more room now for big holiday dinners, birthday parties, and lots of company. Shortly, it became the house where neighborhood kids congregated. Helen liked it that way. She liked children, liked to play.
During family vacations to Reno, Helen would buy rolls of quarters, but not for the casino slots. She preferred the arcade, playing carnival-style games with the kids, trying to win stuffed animals.
"She was our best friend as well as our mother," says her son Nikos. "We were very lucky."
Everyone who passed through the Pinecrest more than twice knew who Nikos was. He was the son who graduated from dental school last year. He was the son who had just moved back to the Bay Area from Southern California. And everyone knew about Andrew, too, the son who is an apprentice plumber. Helen talked about them constantly at work.
They seemed to do everything together -- Greek festivals and organization functions, high school football games, and church activities. Even a trip to the grocery store was an adventure, as Nikos remembers:
"We would be on the way to Safeway or something, and she would see one of my friends and start to wave -- 'Look, there's your friend Dave. Hi, Dave!' "
Helen was in the habit of sharing even the most routine occurrences of her workday the moment she walked through the door of her home -- who stopped by the Pinecrest, who'd borrowed money from her, the prostitute she saw chasing a john. But her sons and husband say she never mentioned a word about the poached egg incident.
Peter retired from UCSF in 1993, but his wife wouldn't leave the Pinecrest. It had been a long time since Helen had worked for the money -- she worked because she liked being there. She told Peter she would leave when she turned 50. That would have happened at the end of 1999.
Hashem Zayed lived simply for nearly 15 years in a 12-by-16-foot room in the Dalt Residence Hotel. One of the biggest in the building, his room had cream-colored walls and blue carpeting and a bathroom. He had a view of the live theater that plays daily on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin. And all of this was just $175 a month, the reward of long-term occupancy in San Francisco.
Home didn't mean much to Hashem. Honor. A man's word. These things were important to him. Often he and Robert Boyd, who used to work at the Dalt, would have long discussions about what these things meant. He wasn't close to many of his 177 neighbors, most of whom are mentally ill, disabled, elderly, or all of the above. But he was kind to them, just as he was generous to the Dalt's manager, Ruth Clarke, and her staff. Often, Hashem would bring Clarke lunch, a hamburger he had cooked before leaving the Pinecrest for the day. She liked hamburgers. Sometimes he would leave money, and tell the staff to go buy lunch. He repeatedly asked them to come to the restaurant, but they rarely did. It was an inconvenient walk to Geary Street for a weekday lunch. There were also gifts -- a music box, earrings, perfume, a Chivas gift set at Christmas. To the people of the Dalt Residence Hotel, Hashem was a charming, unassuming, nice guy -- and a bit of a flirt. If you didn't know Hashem, you wouldn't notice him here. But once you knew him, he made it a point to greet you.
As a tenant, Hashem was ideal. His room was neat. He was quiet, kept pretty much to himself, paid the rent on time, and followed the rules. Hashem often worked more than one shift at the Pinecrest and then did odd jobs at a Market Street strip club in the evening. He kept an autographed picture of the dancers in his room (along with some pictures from the restaurant and a photo album of his family).
In Hashem, the mixture of kindness and pride could lead to odd results. For example, Clarke says, she took ill not long ago, and Hashem happened to know about it. She needed some aspirin; he went to fetch it from a store down the street. On his return, Clarke noticed that the aspirin he'd bought was old, long past its expiration date. Hashem was so embarrassed, she remembers, that he went back to the store and yelled at the clerk, threatening to report the store owner to the Health Department. The store clerk came by the Dalt the next day and apologized.
If Hashem was kind to his neighbors, they returned the favor.
Neighbors remember that Hashem had a heart problem of some kind about a year ago, and paramedics took him to the hospital. Money was a problem. Clarke and another friend tried to help him sort out the hospital bills that continued to come in the mail. And helping him understand those doctor bills was no simple matter. It took a few months to straighten out and pay off the bills, in part because Hashem could not read English. He had tried a couple of times to learn, so he could pass a citizenship test, but the words, in written form, seemed to elude him. Immigration status seemed to be a continuing problem for Hashem; Foundas recalls having testified on Hashem's behalf to immigration officials a couple of times. Once, the Greek restaurant owner remembers, Hashem needed help with the INS after marrying a 75-year-old woman.
Piecing together Hashem's personal life is an ambiguous undertaking. He appears to have relatively few strong or longtime friends in San Francisco. And most of the people who know him know only fragments of his life. Friends and neighbors, for example, agree that his first wife went home to the Middle East about 15 years ago. But some remember four or five marriages since, and others don't remember any.
