Portrait Of A Neighborhood: Part One
Community, tragedy and art in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
1.
It’s the dead of night, and the streets are alive. Motorcycles are gurgling. Two dogs yap hysterically at each other before being swallowed up by a fire truck’s screech. A woman cackles down the block. Security gates open and close. Drug dealers whistle. Addicts howl. A stereo blares reggaeton, then R&B, then Mariachi music. A bottle shatters. Noises rumble and collide and then disappear, but something still vibrates in their absence. The quiet is only temporary. Even when you’re isolated, you’re never alone. This is what it’s like to live in the Tenderloin.
From my apartment I’ve heard the distant, romantic echo of trumpet players and the boom of fireworks. I’ve heard the unshakeable wail of a Chihuahua and run downstairs to see his small white stomach in the middle of the crosswalk, flattened, unmoving. I've heard a car radio announce that rapper XXXTentacion was shot and left to die in his BMW in Florida. I’ve heard strangers chant “Warriors!” at the top of their lungs after watching Golden State win the championship. I’ve heard people drive through these streets listening to the same songs that I listen to. I’ve heard cell phones, harmonicas, cat-calls, fights, drunken rants, crying.
I’ve heard a lot for a person who wasn’t even trying to listen.
2.
”Do you see what I have to deal with?” the man asks after a woman, drunk or high or both, stumbles into his liquor store seeking money and cigarettes. The woman is hovering between a newspaper rack, flower stand and self-serve coffee bar with five different dispensers.
He tells her to get out, that he gave her money last week. After waving his hand in disbelief, he looks back at me from across the cash register. “These drug addicts. You know when she started coming here she was in school? Now she has six kids. And because she was—” he mimics injecting his arm with a needle “—when she had them, they have problems. She has sex with men in the alleyways for money. Four dollars. Six dollars. Two dollars. One night she almost ODed in front of my place. The police took her to the hospital. I told them, ‘Why can’t you have her fixed?’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s illegal.’ I said…”
The woman wobbles back into the store.
"Elaine, Elaine,” he warns.
I pay for water and cookies as the owner shoos her out. She lingers under the fluorescent lights. Her hair is ashy, her skin so pale it is nearly translucent. Elaine is unsteady and moves in slow, exaggerated movements, as if she’s spent her entire adult life wading through a current. As if she is a shining ceramic bowl caught in the slow process of falling.
Across the street, colored bulbs on the Mitchell Brothers sign glow yellow, red and orange. The theatre’s provocative posters boast that this is where the wild girls are. But when I pass by, only the lights of the lobby are visible, dimmed by a set of tinted glass doors.
3.
We find art, and art finds us.
Four years ago, when I moved to the Tenderloin, art found me. It was unavoidable, really; on the first Thursday of every month, the neighborhood explodes with it.
At the San Francisco First Thursday Art Walk, colors pop. Energy flows. Conversations brew and continue long past midnight. There are fresh starts and new ideas and good vibes. There is style and talent and passion.
At six o’clock in the evening, the area is abuzz. Shops like Fleetwood, The Family Room and Tilted Brim keep their doors open late and their walls decked out in original work. A taco truck pulls up outside of Kung Fu, and bars everywhere entertain a bigger crowd. Between the streets of California, Golden Gate, Polk and Taylor, there are galleries and restaurants and boutiques to welcome souls aching for inspiration. There’s an atmosphere of camaraderie and creativity, a feeling that everyone surrounding you, deep down, is a kindred spirit.
It’s the sense that anyone can be a local here, no matter where you’re from. It’s the sense of belonging. It’s home.