Does Caring about Domestic Violence Make You a Karen?

A disturbing experience in San Francisco

Photo by Sneha Sivarajan on Unsplash

Coffee shop/bar down block from hotel

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The madness started that night in the San Francisco hotel.

But before we get to that, let me pull in the backstory.

My wife Britney and I, as many of you know, are planning on moving to Spain. Madrid. We’ve been psychologically preparing for this for over a year-and-a-half at this point. When the plans began my father—RIP—was still alive.

Since then, it’s been something like a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of Kafka’s The Castle. Forms upon forms upon forms. Technical turnabouts and strange, unexpected U-turns. I lost count of how many times we had to go to UPS to send forms, get things notarized, ask questions when tracking wasn’t working, etc.

And then there was the fingerprinting. FBI, CA DOJ; dumbass alcoholic former Michael, it turned out, has a record. All from 2003, when I was 20 years old, not yet old enough to even legally drink at a bar. DUI. Drunk and Disorderly. Resisting Arrest. Minor in Possession. You name it. All misdemeanors, no felonies, and all “destroyed” by the Ventura Superior Court and also expunged and yet…still there somehow.

This meant more forms. Back and forth between the CA DOJ, the CA Secretary of State, an extra, more detailed fingerprinting of every digit on both hands, etc. Forms to send. Forms to receive, get apostilled and/or notarized and sent back. Copies made. More copies made. Still more. At one point the California Secretary of State lost my apostilled criminal background form. Then they found it. They sent it late. We almost had to cancel our appointment. But then didn’t.

Anyway, then we had this appointment with the Spanish Consulate (BLS) in San Francisco Jan 24 at 10:30am. This would be where we’d hand over all the forms we’ve been compiling for months and months and months, the culmination of all the forms and fingerprinting, etc. (We have been working with an immigration lawyer from the start.) The BLS rules recently changed for NLVs—Non-Lucrative Visas, which we’re getting; basically living on passive-income and not working in Spain while we live there—and so we didn’t know exactly what we’d be getting into. We’d heard horror stories of one missing document sending people back months since they’d be denied and have to start over and get a new appointment, then backed up.

~

We landed in San Francisco around 12:30 in the afternoon. It was gorgeous out, sunny and 65 degrees, perfect weather. I lived in the Bay Area from 2008 to 2018 and instantly the memories seeped in. I felt that warm, rich blossom of nostalgia I always do when returning to somewhere I know as intimately as this city: Ojai, Ventura, Oakland, S.F. When I first moved here in 2008 I’d just turned 25; I was two years shy of hitting bottom and getting sober, and I experienced some of my most powerful transformations here.

We caught an Uber and got dropped off at food (incredible Venezuelan) and then walked the 20 minutes to our hotel—which shall remain unnamed—around Sutter and Powell Streets (many hotels around this area) in Nob Hill/Union Square/Financial District/near the Tenderloin area. (Close to Lori’s Diner.) A tourist area.

The hotel looked fine. A hundred bucks a night. Nice woman behind the desk wearing about 75 pounds of makeup. We got our keys, walked the stairs to the second floor, and entered our room. The room was romantic in a sort of Beat, Jack Kerouac kind of way. Tiny. Cramped little bathroom. Window overlooking the ratty roof and a sliver of blue sky. It felt like the perfect place for a 23-year-old Michael who was thumbing around America to sit down, drink and write.

But I was not 23, nor drinking; I was 42 and sober over 14 years. Yet still the myth glows and warms my gut sometimes.

~

Our appointment at the Spanish Consulate (BLS) was the following morning. I had suggested we go see comedy at a place 300 feet away from our hotel. She liked the idea but we realized we wanted to have an early night because tomorrow was an important day. We didn’t want to screw anything up.

So, instead we walked under the bridge into China Town and then North Beach, where, romantic writer that I am and always have been, we walked along Columbus Ave where I used to spend buckets of time around 2008, 2009, 2010. Back when I was drinking still, obsessing over the neighborhood where the Beats had hung out in the 1950s. Ginsberg. Kerouac. Ferlinghetti. We started with food at a delicious Italian place (this is Little Italy, after all) sitting outside and enjoying the pizza, pasta, people-watching and warm evening which, in late January, felt like summer.

After dinner we walked down Columbus to City Lights Books, Ferlingghetti’s famous bookshop, another place I’d spent countless hours, and where, upstairs, I’d once gone to literary readings. Amazingly, I didn’t buy any books. (Lord knows I didn’t need more books!)

After that, I showed Britney The Saloon, the shitty, delightful hole-in-the-wall blues bar where, on the night of 1/23/2010, age 27, I had my final drink. Haven’t had a sip since then.

Then, again going at first under and then over the bridge, through China Town once more but now in the dark, we walked back to the hotel. I don’t recall exactly what time we got back to our tiny romantic room but it must have been around 8pm.

City Lights Books

~

I awoke at some point in the middle of the night to the sound of a plaintive girl’s voice, in a room very close by, half-yelling something like, STOP!!! Don’t!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING??! The girl’s voice was far too loud for the middle of the night. I came into more wakefulness. Looking to my right I saw Britney was already awake. We gazed at each other.

Somehow, in my mind—and this seemed to be confirmed when the girl kept saying STOP and DON’T and LEAVE ME ALONE—it sounded like a 10 or 12-year-old girl. What I thought was, Ok, some parents traveled here with their pre-teen kids and the kids have their own room and it’s like 2am and they’re fucking around and being kids. A sister and older brother, probably. They have zero respect for others trying to sleep, but that’s par for the course with kids these days. The sound, to me, was coming from our left, when facing our door from our side.

Britney stood up and walked to the door, eyeing through the tiny, cloudy peephole. She couldn’t see anything. She was worried.

“It’s just two kids being annoying,” I said.

She scrunched her face at me in that disbelieving way she does as if to say, What the fuck are you talking about? “Kids? That’s a fucking woman and her boyfriend and shit’s going down.”

I shook my head. I didn’t believe it. “C’mon. It’s just kids. Let it go. They’ll calm down.”

“Michael you’re crazy; those aren’t kids.”

Then the yelling wound up again and it got heated, and suddenly I realized Britney was dead-right. It was a woman and a man. Young, probably drunk, angry. The woman was clearly afraid.

I stood up. Britney was at the door.

“Let me see,” I said. I walked naked to the door and peeked out. I couldn’t see a thing. They’d gone quiet again.

I paced around. What should we do? What should EYE do? I was the man, right? Didn’t that mean something? Should I rip open our door, walk over there, pound on their door and tell them to knock it off?

Britney said due to the accent and some of the language she was pretty sure it was a Hispanic couple. So we got a young, angry, probably drunk, potentially violent man in a room very close to us. What if the guy has a knife or a gun?

*(We never found out the truth (if they were Hispanic) here because we never actually laid eyes on them. For all we know they could have been white. Clearly, plenty of white men are violent against women. It strikes me that probably the vast majority of women-beaters are lower income, which means it likely scans more Black and brown folks broadly speaking because a higher proportion of these demographics are lower-income, but of course also low-income and working-class whites, and also some (of all races, very much including white) who are middleclass and wealthy, etc.)

The screaming suddenly erupted again and then I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment.

“If it gets worse I’m calling the cops,” Britney said. I knew she meant it: She had a cop-calling habit which I’d witnessed before. I wasn’t far off from her position at this point anyway.

Just then we heard footsteps and then the voice of the friendly Asian female hotel employee, meekly knocking on their door and then when it opened asking kindly that they keep the noise down. Some blurry words were exchanged—I couldn’t quite tell exactly what was said—and then the employee left and walked back down the stairs.

There was a few minutes of quiet and then the arguing again. Low at first, then louder, and finally becoming straight up yelling, becoming loud and desperate, the worst it had so far been, and she was saying again STOP and GET AWAY FROM ME and DON’T DO THAT and STOP again and then a run, a string of words I couldn’t grasp in some blurry wild form, and then the voices rose even more, to a comic TV-like surrealistic level and then we heard a loud crack which could only be understood as a hard slap to the face and then the woman’s angry, emotional voice saying, Do you feel like a man now?

Holy fucking shit.

Britney called the cops, as promised. I was on board now. A big part of me still wanted to go out there and confront the guy but: What could that turn into? What if it got out of control? That seemed likely.

The police dispatch lady answered:

“What’s your emergency?”

There’s domestic violence going on.

“Can you describe the incident.”

Britney described it.

“Where are you?”

Britney said the hotel’s name and the cross streets.

“What room are you?”

Room 205.

“Where is the room the sounds are coming from?”

Very nearby. Probably next door to us. Don’t know the number.

“Is the room to your right or left when facing your door.”

(Right, I said to myself. It was clearly coming from the right of us.)

Left, Britney said confidently.

(Really?? First I’d thought it was two dumb kids and now I got the direction wrong, too?)

“Did he hit her?”

Yes. We heard it happen.

She kept Britney on the phone taking info for another couple minutes; before she hung up she said cops were on the way.

She got off.

Less than five minutes later—six or seven at most—we heard boots clomping up the old wooden twisty stairs. Britney looked through the peephole. Black cop, she said. Britney didn’t care about the cop’s race, she was just giving demographic data. I cared about the cop’s race only for one reason: I found that it complicated the traditional leftist narrative of Bad White Cop Interrogates Innocent Black/Brown Guy.

The cop knocked loudly on the door of the couple. The door was answered. Some words were exchanged. Another cop came up; there were probably two or three of them. We heard the abuser’s voice, deeper and loud, answering questions. Then the cops took the guy and walked him downstairs. The cops all went down with the guy. Five minutes later the initial cop came back up the stairs. He knocked on the door again. It was now just the cop and the woman. She answered the door. He told her the boyfriend was downstairs. He asked her if the fight was solely verbal or also physical. He added that he saw she had a mark on her cheek. We were surprised at how much genuine care seemed to emanate from the cop’s mouth. He asked her what she wanted to do, and asked her about her cheek, very gently and kindly. Perhaps he’d encountered this before with a younger sister.

She quivered, sounded weepy and emotional.

“If I say it was physical will he be in trouble?” she said.

“Yes,” the cop said affirmatively.

She hesitated, sounded very emotional again, and said, “It was just verbal.”

“Ok,” the cop said.

I knew then they’d release the guy. I couldn’t believe it. But what could the cops really do? If this were Nicaragua or Venezuela—if the cops there even cared about domestic violence—they could just beat the guy and take him to jail. But this was America. We had rules. Laws. Rights.

The cop explained that they’d bring the guy back up but said if they had to come back again he was going to jail. She said she understood.

For a moment I panicked: Surely the couple had heard me and Britney talking and calling the cops and pacing around and worrying out loud. What if the abusive shithead knocks on our door, threatens us. What then?

But, thankfully, after the cops walked the guy back up and left and the door to the place was closed and locked, it remained dead silent. We didn’t hear a peep.

Full of racing adrenaline, we settled awkwardly back into the bed, turned off the light and tried to sleep. It was impossible for a while. Finally I passed out.

Ohhhh City Lights in 2025

~

The next morning all was loud but civil: the walls were so fucking thin that every time anyone coughed or spoke or, worse, flushed a toilet, it felt like the thunder of God was raining down upon us. And look, this was a decent hotel. Good ratings. Union Square. Popular tourist area. Solid online reviews. We weren’t staying in a shithole.

We did our routine: Went down the block for coffee, tea and food, showered, made sure we had all our documents, organized our stuff into our bags, and were out the door by 9:45.

Downstairs we asked if they could hold onto our bags until around 1pm, after our appointment. They smiled and said yes, taking the bags and handing us a yellow stub.

We headed out on the 20-minute walk to the Spanish Consulate. We were both tired—Britney had barely slept a wink; I’d caught a few hours—and vaguely anxious. Britney had tirelessly gone over the documents endlessly. Mine were two inches thick. (DOJ reports.) We’d left so that we’d arrive early, which was highly recommended. Finally, we were here. I snapped a photo of the outside of the consulate.

When we opened the tall, thick, massive, castle-like wooden doors there was an older bald man behind the counter to our left and a security guard in black uniform to our right. We told the bald man behind thick glass that we were here for an appointment.

“Appointment?” he said, scrunching his brows, confused. “For what?”

Britney and I eyed each other in panic. This appointment was the culmination of a year-and-a-fucking-half of work. We’d flown from Portland. I’d had to take time off work. We’d disrupted our lives. There was no way we’d fuck it all up now.

“For our visa applications to move to Spain,” Britney said.

The bald man informed us that we were at the wrong place, that we needed not the Spanish Consulate but the BLS building across town.

Fuck.

While the bald man repeated multiple times that this was our own fault and we hadn’t read the email on our forms which clearly stated where the building was—we later discovered he was correct; it had been our fault—the security guard, god bless the man, told us where the BLS building was and said we should get an Uber but he thought we’d make it. He handed us a little form with the address of the BLS on it.

We thanked the security guard—fuck the other guy—and ran out. (The Spanish bald man had been a serious prick. While the security guy helped us the Spanish guy told him repeatedly to NOT help us!) Britney was doing that thing she does where she panics and starts to lose her cool. So many things had gone wrong over the past three, four months regarding Spain and prepping for it that we couldn’t take rejection simply because we missed our goddamn appointment. If we had to sprint there we would.

Using her phone she got us an Uber and it was one minute away but we jogged fast up and down Sutter Street, between Franklin and Gough Streets, Britney’s face red and her eyes nearly black with terror, trying to find the car. It said it was there. We couldn’t find it. I half-yelled for her to hand me the phone so I could help but she was running, wild and panicked, in semi-meltdown mode, a wild deer in headlights, one notch away from exploding into crazy weeping. I felt the anxiety deep in my core. Godfuckingdamnit. I wanted to scream, throw something, punch someone.

Fuck.

Finally we spotted the car. We ran and jumped into the back, sweaty and breathing hard, exhausted. It was 10:15; our appointment was at 10:30.

The guy rushed off. He was nice. We told him our predicament. He said that the wisest thing to do would be to have him drop us off down not far from the BLS on our side of Market Street because he couldn’t cross Market directly; he’d have to maneuver around going up and down, back along one-way streets, and we’d lose minutes.

So we did. He dropped us off by the San Francisco Library. We ran across Market Street. It was a mad urban blur. We’d felt yesterday as if we were visiting a European city, Naples maybe, or Berlin, everything feeling foreign and big-city after Lompoc and then suburban Portland. Downtown Portland was tiny and mild compared to the urban anarchy of downtown S.F. (Much of Market Street down here around 6-9^th Ave was a shithole.) I’d lived in New York City, San Diego, even San Francisco itself but it had all been years ago. I wasn’t used to it. The racing cars and junkies and homeless and spastic blur of people and sirens and honking and chaos galore. I liked it. And I didn’t, all at once. It felt too much like my inner life.

We found the BLS building, entered, asked for help from the man behind the counter, took the elevator to the 4^th floor, and walked in. A young Spanish man smiled, asked our names, and told us to take a seat. No one else was in the waiting area. We were eight minutes early. We’d made it.

In the end, due to one family ahead of us already talking to the BLS lady before we arrived, we didn’t do our appointment until noon. All that rush for nothing. Minus a few minor hiccups—we had to buy new cashier’s checks after our appointment because the “new rule” was $151 and ours were for $152 and they wouldn’t take anything other than exactly $151—everything went well. We had all our necessary documents. Everything looked solid. But this all just meant that our documents and passports would be sent to Madrid and then they would make the ultimate decision whether we were allowed to live in Spain or not. The kicker: We wouldn’t get an answer for up to 3 months. Yeah.

But we did it. We were done. We’d completed everything we could to this point. We’d jumped through endless bureaucratic hoops, leaped over hurdles which felt placed there just to test our limits and willingness to keep sloughing through. I was proud of us for all the hard work. All we could do now was wait.

More City Lights

~

After the appointment (and cashier’s check replacements a la the USPS four blocks away, then returning) we walked to some tasty Mediterranean food, ate, emailed our immigration lawyer about the appointment, and then made the slow walk back to the hotel—I’d forgotten all about the horror last night—to grab our bags. By now it was around 2pm. We’d promised to be back by 1pm, but surely it was fine. Our flight didn’t leave out of SFO until 6:45pm. We had time.

We arrived to the hotel. Behind the counter was an Asian man, likely Filipino. He had black thick wavy hair, warm dark eyes and a relaxed demeanor. He wore a loose, baggy black sweatshirt with a gold 49er’s logo on it.

I told him about our bags. He grabbed them. I handed him the yellow stub. I apologized for being late and he waved it off with a smile.

“So,” Britney said, and I knew what she was going to say. “Anything happen with that couple that fought last night?”

I saw the woman with too much makeup who’d been behind the desk yesterday; she sat alone at a small table just off from the front desk. She was lazily eating something I couldn’t see, chewing.

The Filipino man shrugged. “Naw, they just settled down.”

“It was pretty wild,” Britney said, her eyes widening. “We heard her yelling and then a loud smack sound and then it got quiet…”

“It was definitely a slap,” I added. We heard it loud and clear and then she said, Does that make you feel like a man”? I looked over and saw the woman eating, her eyes on us and her ears perked up now. “Pretty fucking crazy.”

And then the Filipino guy said something that shocked me, totally floored me.

Shrugging, half-grinning, he said, “Yeah, you know, it’s hard. You don’t want to be a ‘Karen.’ You don’t want to get into another man’s business, his private affairs.”

What?

I couldn’t’ believe it. Was this man—a hotel employee, maybe in his early, mid-thirties—saying that, basically, Sometimes a man’s gotta hit a bitch? That I should look the other way, avert my eyes and ears, accept that it was “another man’s business”? Were we living somehow in 1950?

But it was the Karen comment that really got me. So, wait. Let me get this straight. Because we’re white, giving a shit about a man slapping his girlfriend around is out of bounds? Because, what, it’s “White” to care about violence against women? To care about domestic violence? Was this a racial thing? An ethnic thing? A cultural thing? A class thing? All of that and more? Where did one draw the line? Was I supposed to be worried about the abuser? I should be more concerned that the Black cop who confronted him might, what, shoot him or something? (Contentious as it may be the data shows this almost never happens.)

I stared at the Filipino dude for a moment and I think our eyes communicated much more than our words. He shrugged again and I laughed and looked away and said, “Yeah. Ok.”

Britney and I thanked them for the stay, shrugged our bags onto our shoulders, and walked out onto the street.

As we looked for a coffee shop I thought about what the guy had said. Karen. I thought about the Amy Cooper “Karen” Origination Story in Central Park in May, 2020, how the media had lied, distorted and left out key elements of that story, including that the Black man who accused her, Christian Cooper, had a history of violence and had gotten physical with another Black man in the park not long before and had many of these “incidents” on file, and the fact that Amy Cooper had a past case of sexual assault which no doubt added to her fear that day. Read the more accurate, honest and in-depth analysis here.

Was being a “Karen” really a thing? Did it just mean being white and calling the cops when violence occurred? The strange mixtures of Wokeism, progressive dogma, racial obsession, class and culture all wafted through me like heat out of a warm street vent.

We found a coffee shop. We sat and charged phones, glugged caffeine, and diddled on phone and computer. Later we caught an Uber to SFO.

By 8pm last night we were back in our car, rolling home, in Portland.

It felt like we’d gone into a fourth-dimension wormhole, some other universe for 24 hours, and now we were back.

Life is fucking strange, man.

And if I’m a Karen, I wear that badge with honor and pride.

The Saloon on Grant Street off Columbus in North Beach. I had my last drink here on the night of 9/23/2010