For nearly a century, San Francisco’s Tenderloin district has been notorious for its squalor, prostitution and drugs, and crime in general. I first made acquaintance with it in October of 1982. Oddly enough, I still romanticize that neighborhood to this very day. I’m even nostalgic for it. In my 1993 anthology, Misery Loves Company, I committed that first impression to print.
Back in ’82 I was an insecure kid of 24 with a buried gender issue and an affinity for the dark side. Times Square in 1976’s Taxi Driver appealed to me far more than the whitewashed “normality” of suburbia, whose desperately unhappy denizens do their best to keep up a good front. Downtown is a place where the pretty lies get scrubbed away, where you can confront the truth of the world and then find your way to make a place in it and, hopefully someday, transcend it. For me it was always best to start from the truth instead of an illusory lie.
“Concrete Jungle” [Misery Loves Company, 1993, all rights reserved]
I knew such places existed, had seen their likes depicted in Hollywood melodramas, had driven past them with windows tightly shut against whatever stench or bugs might lurk in the air, but nothing could have prepared me for that first walk through the rotten core of the Tenderloin. I had driven here for an electrician job at a gay disco in the center of this urban no man’s land. If I got the job I’d have to scurry through here for at least a week. I should ask for hazardous duty pay.
The parking lot was a forbidding alcove off the street, three one-way lanes skulking through a canyon of dilapidated concrete and brick edifices that might have been stately forty years ago but were now pathetic, reborn as piss-in-the-sink hotels and apartment blocks of hovels sheltering those who’d nowhere else to go. The lot itself was a weathered, stained stretch of asphalt, rustling with windblown trash and tinkling with discarded booze bottles, like cynical whispers and titters at the entire predicament.
No sooner had I left my car, I was assaulted by an odor rife with desperation, a mélange of rot and stale piss and other things dreadful. Walking toward the street, I placed every footfall with the care of a soldier in a minefield. Each step took me another hundred miles away from my well-scrubbed suburban upbringing, from the way the world is supposed to be. I half-expected to see a movie crew shooting.
Condoms lay here and there, clearly used, and though most of them were dessicated several were obviously of recent vintage. Dried splotches of what looked like veggie stew revealed the source of one mysterious odor. Far more benign was all the glass, broken and intact bottles of every size and brand of lowbrow hooch—half-pints to quarts, malt liquor to rotgut vodka—the primary anesthetic of the impoverished in means and spirit, a respite from their tragic lives.
And then there it was, lying on the sidewalk, in BROAD DAYLIGHT, an insulin syringe tinged with clotted blood, a emblem of unconditional surrender to this awful world and one step removed from the permanent final solution for one’s earthly troubles. It’s stainless steel needle seemed to wink at me in the midafternoon light. Was it letting me in on the joke? Was it beckoning me? Was it cautioning me not to be smug, because it could have me too?
I reached the street and gratefully noted the club was only four doors away, with only two people between it and me. The first would give me no trouble, a man crumpled semi-fetal on the dirty sidewalk and snoring moistly, all wild hair from the neck up, his threadbare denims soaked with urine and a yellow, acrid rivulet running from him to the gutter. Ignoring the wino and me was a fortyish woman—but she might have been much younger—her fishnets were ripped, her high heels clacking purposefully as she clutched a black leather purse to her short rayon dress. Her overdone makeup said she was a prostitute but there’d be no Pretty Woman ending for her.
Finally safe in the club doorway, waiting to be admitted, I turned and regarded this godforsaken neighborhood. I had never been in a place so far removed in aesthetics from my middleclass hometown. For that reason alone I nearly fell in love with it—a living, breathing, stark repudiation of the bourgeois fantasy called “the American Dream”—and never imagined I would one day call this place Home.
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