Look out from behind that protective barrier of thick glass the next time you are on a bus passing through the Tenderloin . A fleeting glimpse of ragged beings is what you see; shake your head if you will because yes, it is tragic. The dichotomy of San Francisco, the ugly shadow a beautiful city casts, the untouchables of the Western world.
The crack heads, crazies, the infested, lurk through those dangerous grounds, claiming a territory undesirable to society (as we know it). Don’t expect that as a hopeful journalist you are immediately entitled to the goings on in such a twisted hellhole, or that questions will be answered just because you asked.
My confidence- Destroyed when a hard-faced officer (who refused to give his name) told me a story that took place sometime in the three years he had been working in the Tenderloin district. “ You want to know about my worst experience working out here? One of my best friends Isaac Espinoza was shot to death when I was on duty,” said the officer. Mouth agape, I stood staring, trying to salvage the situation anyway possible. Irritated and obviously rushed the officer began to walk off when he turned back around, hesitated and said, “The tenderloin is everything you thought it was. What do you want to know? There’s alcohol, drugs, crack everywhere on the street. Stabbings, shootings, it’s all of that, it’s everything you’ve ever heard.”
Slowly, the walk continued and the second I turned the corner I was solicited by a very aggressive drug dealer, “hey girl, stop for a minute, you want some of this? Best coke you’ll find, we got some good coke here.” The man shuffled alongside, hunched over under a filthy coat he leered up at me, “what, you don’t want no coke? What are you doing here little girl? Why are you here?”
Remarkable, the second time I had been asked that in fifteen minutes and I soon came to realize why. A white, clean [relatively drug free], and average looking girl comes as a bit of a shock in the Tenderloin area. Screeching homeless persons possibly coming down from a high and faced by the ugly reality or maybe looking for their next fix, fought and incoherently bickered at one another. The sidewalks were piled with sleeping figures resembling stacks of body bags that rarely moved. I am sure that up to this point, this description of the Tenderloin comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with San Francisco.
However, it was only when I asked a decent looking gentleman (around 12:30 a.m.) if I could interview him that I was rudely awakened to my own “journalistic” insensitivity and closed-mindedness. The man (who most definitely did not want to be named) asked what I wanted to know and I callously responded somewhere along the lines of “What’s it like living here, surrounded by all this.” He stopped, smirked at me and said, “Oh, I see… No I will not give you an interview.” When I asked why not he became infuriated, “Well lets see… what you are really asking me is ‘what’s it like living in a shit-hole,’ you are saying that where I live is bad, this is my home. Did I say your home was a shit-hole?” The wind was taken out of me and it was all I could do to stop from sitting down on the sidewalk right then and there.
Thing is, the man was right, if you look around the Tenderloin a little bit harder, and you get through that glass barrier, there is some good that can be found. Every now and then, a beautiful mural pops up on the side of a building, unnoticed until the effort is put forth to see it.
