If you live in San Francisco’s fog-slapped Outer Sunset neighborhood, perhaps you’ve heard whispers about the “Sunset Raccoon Man,” the mysterious apparition that hunts for recycling by the light of the moon — usually on Thursdays, which is garbage night.
Sean Silk, an artist who lives in the Sunset, reported on an encounter he once had with the furry phantom.
At 3:00 a.m. one night, I stepped outside to smoke a little spliff and eat a quesadilla. I look over and see this guy in a dirty old bathrobe, elbow deep in garbage, with raccoon ears on his head and a tail. I say, “Hey, man, don’t make so much goddamn noise. My girlfriend is trying to sleep!” He hissed at me and took off; it was then that I noticed he had an actual raccoon with him that was holding empty liquor bottles.
I’ve even seen him twice since then, and I swear to God he has a raccoon that follows him around.
I knew then that I had to make contact with the elusive legend. I decided I would go deep into Golden Gate Park and search for his lair. I downed two forties and kept the empty bottles in my bag as an offering.
Half an hour into my search, I got lost beyond all hope and gave up; after hours of going in circles for a while, I stumbled across a park ranger named Sandra, who, as luck would have it, actually knew the Raccoon Man quite well.
I got the impression that the diner was just another casualty of gentrification, crushed under tank treads and pulverized like one of those skulls in the opening sequence of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
She told me she would leave him a large pack of hot dogs on the same hollowed-out log every week. In return, he would leave handwritten letters on scraps of grocery bags—stray diary entries. This was a rare glimpse into the Raccoon Man’s mind. The park ranger pulled one from her fanny pack and read it to me.
Tuesday, not sure what the date is; after a long night of can ranching, Rudy and I went to our favorite diner, the Lucky Penny. We ordered biscuits and gravy, and they were so-so. The service was terrible as usual. We drank coffee until the sky started to lighten; then Rudy and I began the long journey back home to the park. Thank you for the hot dogs.
The park ranger told me that the Raccoon Man went to the Lucky Penny often and would complain about the service at great length in his letters. I decided to take the bus down to the diner myself to see if I could spot him.
Turns out the Penny wasn’t so lucky after all—it had closed, permanently, on Christmas Eve of 2015. It was slated to be replaced with a seven-story condominium development. The diner was just another casualty of gentrification, crushed under tank treads and pulverized like one of those skulls in the opening sequence of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
It was then that I started to suspect that the Sunset Raccoon Man, like other locals who lived on the fringes of the city, was losing his habitat.
In the wild, the average raccoon lifespan is around two to three years, though in captivity they can live up to 20 years. Urban raccoons are most frequently killed either by automobiles or odd “alt-poachers” who sell their pelts to bourgeois schools of taxidermy.
With the rise of boutique taxidermy shops in San Francisco, reports of urban poaching have skyrocketed; among these urban poachers, a raccoon carcass that hasn’t been run over can sell for as much as $150 dollars, or a big bag of weed. The raccoons tenderized by car tires will generally get you five dollars or a Starbucks gift card.
During the next week, I was back in the park searching, although this time I drank three forties; this was, of course, to strengthen my resolve to make contact with the Raccoon Man.
I did not find him; instead, I stumbled across something even stranger: a clearing in which 20 programmers were sitting in camping chairs or lying on cots, on their laptops, which were connected to yards of extension cords and car batteries. I stopped still. The only sound in the forest was the chattering of keyboard keys.
I crunched a leaf, and alas, they saw me. I was held at crossbow point and blindfolded. They held a powwow (their word) over what to do with me and then argued for 45 minutes about whether their use of the word “powwow” was appropriative. Eventually, they decided that they would let me live and led me out of the park.
I have, since then, heard other reports of techies living in Golden Gate Park as part of an attempt to avoid paying the city’s rising rent for housing and start-up space. Now they were just another invasive species displacing the local wildlife.
The weeks passed, and my interest in the Raccoon Man waned. I had moved on to my next story — about the underground world of “extreme improv,” where comedians shoot up heroin and perform improv in abandoned theaters in the Outer Richmond.
Then, out of the blue, I received a text from the park ranger, who dragged me back into the thick of the Raccoon Man saga.
“Hi, Kelly, it’s the park ranger (Sandra). Since we talked there has been a development with the Raccoon Man. I’m saddened to tell you that I just received my final letter from him. When and where would you want to meet? Also, don’t get the impression that this is a date. You are gross. Sorry — Sandra
We agreed to meet at a bar called the Blind Cat. (The bar really did have a blind cat that lived there, and every few minutes it would walk into a wall or knock a drink over.)
Sandra arrived, ordered a tonic water and joined me in a crooked booth. She rummaged through her backpack and produced one of the letters. I pulled out my reading glasses and unfolded it.
Dear Park Ranger,
I’ve finally saved up enough from collecting cans and bottles to purchase a large plot of land in Coos County, Oregon. On this land, I’ll build my raccoon ranch and oyster farm. I’ve had enough of San Francisco. I can’t go a day without some LSD-addled yahoo seeking me out for wisdom. On top of that, there’s been encampments of techies encroaching on my domain, leaving cans of energy drinks and whippit canisters all over the place.
I swear to God this city is so up its own ass right now. You can’t even get a decent biscuits-and-gravy for under four bucks anymore. The very reasons I dropped out of the man’s world have been coming back to haunt me. Rudy and I’ve had to be increasingly wary of strangers; there have been complaints to Animal Control about our living arrangement. I’m aware you can’t legally have a pet raccoon, but what they fail to comprehend is that Rudy is my life companion, and it’s his choice to be my friend.
He described how he met his pet raccoon.
“Five years ago, when I had walked naked into Golden Gate Park, it was Rudy that found me, eating pine nuts and foliage. Despite our language barrier, he showed me the way to live a free life—prowling at night, foraging in garbage cans, sleeping in the day, rubbing things in water, eating biscuits and gravy. Rudy showed me the way of the raccoon.”
I skipped ahead because he went on and on about biscuits and gravy before he started describing his life before he became the Raccoon Man.
Before I went wild, I was a successful software developer. I created a successful app called Toot and Boot, which allowed users to rent out their bedrooms to people who just want to have sex in it. We made money hand over fist! I bought three Victorian houses in San Francisco, two to use just as a bathroom and the other as a coliseum of debauchery.
My millionaire friends and I chartered a private plane to Burning Man. We literally did lines of cocaine off the pilot’s hat as he was flying. When we landed, we jumped into a pile of drugs like Scrooge McDuck and did not emerge for five days.
But on the third day, I got food poisoning from some bad hummus. I can tell you, being gravely ill and incredibly high on designer psychedelics is a horrible combination. I remember throwing up on myself and seeing a vivid apocalyptic landscape on my stomach that would make Hieronymus Bosch faint.
For the next two pages, he described waking up covered in garbage alone on the Playa, his friends having left him with the plane. He hitchhiked and then trainhopped all the way back to San Francisco. When he returned, he found himself a changed man; he withdrew his fortune from his various banks, burned it all in a big dumpster and never looked back.
It’s been months since the last Raccoon Man sightings, but in his absence new animal people have sprung up all around the city. There’s the Pigeon Man of Geary Boulevard and the Cat Lady of the Excelsior; but they all pale in comparison to the mysterious aura of the Sunset Raccoon Man.
Half a year later, I was reading through a marijuana-culture magazine called The Humboldt Hashbrown. I had submitted some cartoons to them, and I was making sure they actually remembered to print them this time. Well, sure enough, they didn’t — but I did come across a short piece of intrigue, a letter to the editor entitled “Raccoon Ruckus”:
I had just put the kids down for bed, and I stepped into the garage to smoke ganja and found the entire place overrun with raccoons! They were stealing all the beer and hot dogs out of my mini fridge. The garage door was wide open, and a man in a bathrobe stood under the door, waving around a staff; he had wolf ears on (or something) and a raggedy old tail hanging from his ass. He sees me, so he whistles, and the entire pack of raccoon leaves with armloads of my beer and hot dogs.
It made me smile to know that the Sunset Raccoon Man was still out there, living on the edge. Godspeed, Sunset Raccoon Man, wherever you are.
