Author and Artist
Tenderloin is Not a Cut of Meat
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
Harold and I met about a month ago when I stopped to tie my shoe. Stooped over, I found myself eye-to-eye with his hunched, rag-wrapped body. He had implanted himself on the pavement—a weed in the sidewalk crack. One foot trailed in the gutter.
When I’m not in the classroom teaching high school, I roam San Francisco on foot. I live a few neighborhoods over from the Tenderloin.
This fifty-square-block district has jazz clubs, art galleries, restored vaudeville theaters and the city’s best neon (“liquors, wines, cigars, tobaccos, beer, groceries”). Historic buildings awaiting restoration. Fast food from Bangkok, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, Saigon. The X-rated Mitchell Brothers Theatre lap dances the night away.
In the throbbing guts of the Tenderloin, I walk a gauntlet of junkies and beggars, pimps and prostitutes, drunks in piss-stained pants, underdressed women, cops and crazy people. Tattered blankets are piled against the lee side of sheltering buildings. I am surround-sounded by sirens.
I turn feral. My legs tense, ready to flee. In my sweat, I smell fear.
The Tenderloin is not a prime cut of meat. It’s more like human offal. Squatting just two blocks from City Hall, it’s the smelly, unwiped anus of the city.
Someone screams at a phantom only they see. For a scary few seconds, a dispute flares out of control. In plain view, drug deals go down. Waiting for a food charity to open, silent lines of bored human hunger wrap around the block. From inside a bodega, a grizzled man emerges into the sunlight, clutching a priceless bottle of cheap booze.
Occasionally, investigative journalists perform a colonoscopy on the Tenderloin. The lab results are invariably disheartening.
I could save them their time. I could introduce them to Harold.
Harold, the same age as my students, is what squandered talent looks like. He’s every student I failed to inspire. Each “F” grade a mark against me.
To be Harold living in the Tenderloin means convincing yourself that—against all odds and against all evidence—you have a scrap of control over your future. From the earthquaked ruins of his life, Harold is expected to pick himself up, rebuild, start anew.
A weed, they say, is any plant that grows where someone doesn’t want it. In the dirt and grit of the Tenderloin, human weeds get watered and nurtured by social service agencies, soup kitchens, rescue missions and homeless shelters. Seemingly by design, the City’s unwanted human undergrowth stays rooted in a poverty ghetto far from the more genteel parts of the city.
Every sleeping vagrant I pass recalls my first exchange with Harold.
Tightening my shoelaces not five feet from his bent body, from habit I utter, “Hello.”
Quivering like a bunny ready to bolt for a nearby warren, Harold nods.
“I’m Noah,” I add. After a guarded pause, he replies, “Harold.” I smell his heavy breath.
“Are you in school?” I ask.
He doesn’t say a word. I feel beyond stupid. It’s eleven in the morning and the answer is obvious.
“Headed to work?” I probe.
A longer pause, then he mutters, “No, I want a job.”
“What kind of job are you looking for?” I smile my best teacher smile of encouragement.
A much longer pause.
“Anything.”
