Tenderloin

We are a rootless people, Americans, but many of us know it and seek our roots, and if you ever doubt this, just watch my wife track, ferret out and unearth her own ancestry.  Mine?  Well, I have a different feeling about it.  I'm bothered that no one seems to recall my grandmother's sister's name.  She died in a Nazi gas chamber, and the least I could do, it seems, is to know how to address my deceased great aunt.  Still, I will admit this issue, if it is that, only occasionally drifts through my mind.  What is more constant is the notion of not forgetting honoring and personalizing the people who made us.  Which brings me to the San Francisco Tenderloin.

My wheelchair brings me there on a regular basis.  The theaters, cabarets, restaurants, all thrive at the edge of the City's Tenderloin.  In fact the boundaries between the upscale and the downtrodden blur totally in this part of town.  Parking valets usher patrons into hotel lobbies with one hand, shoo away the homeless with the other.  The Tenderloin starts across the street.  Or maybe it starts at the hotel's property line.  In any case, it's over there, which isn't here but isn't far.

The Tenderloin is full of disabled people.  Wheelchairs abound.  Along with walkers, canes and crutches.  Many of the people I see on the streets there have the weathered, prematurely aged looked of drug abusers.  Many do not, and I also see people who are simply driving their wheelchairs up to the local Walgreens to buy milk and a loaf of bread.  That's one of the problems with San Francisco, the shortage of supermarkets. 

On the way to Walgreens, my wheelchair brethren roll through one or two cantos of Dante's Inferno.  Alcoholics with the odd running sore, prostitutes beyond retirement with running make up, schizophrenics doing the Thorazine shuffle in someone's running shoes, with a running commentary about the End of Days from someone yelling at passersby and looking remarkably apostolic for 10 a.m.

The thing is, I have a sort of link, like it or not, to the woman in the motorized wheelchair rolling up Jones Street.  She isn't wearing makeup, and her hair is not well combed, but there's nothing wrong with her, except that she happens to be stuck in this part of town.  Actually, I have no way of knowing if she is stuck at all.  God knows the Tenderloin is centrally located.  The City houses people who need assistance in residential hotels in his neighborhood.  What's a residential hotel?  What's it like inside these places?  What's it like to live here, getting around in a wheelchair, rolling around the aggressive panhandlers and trying to maintain the prescribed level of cruciform vegetables in your diet?

It means that in the morning, on your way out and into the world, you open your door and glance up and down the hallway, ever so casually, revealing not a hint of worry or concern.  Just want to make sure that Spander isn't off his schedule, off his meds and off his moorings.  Spander, a.k.a., expander usually sleeps half the morning, but you never know.  He might just hear the rattle of your door enough to rattle his cage and, feeling rattled, come to talk to you.  Harmless is the word most often applied to him, but it still feels like harm, the general effects of hearing about the enemy agents trying to crawl in through his window at night, the finger pointing and handwaving, not to mention the hyped up air of insistence and implied familiarity that goes with his harangues.  Coast is clear, however.  You pull the door shut, then you lock the deadbolt, then you lock the other deadbolt, the latter installed by your reluctant landlord after repeated phone calls from your social worker that you have been ripped off several times, your possessions rifled, the careful order of your disabled world disturbed.  And who needs it?

Ramish on the front desk gives you his nod, which is as much as he gives anyone.  Which makes you someone, and recognition being in short supply, your heart ever so slightly swells.  Outside, on the street, it's all fog and wind and relatively less need for alertness.  No one's going to do much of anything in broad daylight.  Walgreens.  A few things to get you through the day.  And the night.  Until next week when the social services van comes to take you to the Safeway.  Canned chili, a few apples, and at your age that's all you need.  Housing is going to talk to you in two months.  An accessible studio apartment in one of the new City housing high-rises.  That's your dream.  For now, you're not even looking at what's ahead on Leavenworth Street, for that, if you give it any thought at all, is your nightmare.

It is important to remember that I was once on food stamps, received public assistance and was generally a welfare case.  This was part of the program of California's Department of Rehabilitation, at least for me.  I was a student, and this was my life.  I handed the food stamps to a cashier at my local Safeway, feeling somewhere between embarrassed and grateful.  My checks arrived every month, and I cashed them.  Once I got a bonus for my seeing-eye dog and cashed that one too.  No, I didn't have a dog, but I had a checking account and figured there was no jail that could hold me.  Or there was no jail that wanted me.  The late 1970s.

I was a student on the way up.  And now, aging and on the way down, I could easily find myself living a more marginal life.  I've done well for myself.  But I've also been very lucky.  I could be making my way across Geary Street to a Walgreens with a pharmacist behind a screen and a slovenly security guard at the door.  I could be stuck in a rented room, with few options for keeping up with the cost of living in one of the world's most expensive cities.  I have worries.  I also have a life.  And I have many reasons for gratitude.