Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Tenderloin is not a Cut of Meat
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
I was raised in San Francisco, a few neighborhoods away from the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin is not a preferred cut of meat. More like human offal strewn into the alleys just a block or two from City Hall. The smelly, unwiped anus of the city.
Investigative journalists periodically perform a colonoscopy on the Tenderloin. The lab results are disheartening, discouraging, disgusting.
When I’m in the pulsing guts of the Tenderloin, I am surround-sounded by sirens. By guttered stink. By the pervasive desperate-despair of urban poverty.
In submission to the invisible rules of the street, my legs are tense, ready to bolt. My heartbeat quickens. My adrenalin pumps. I smell my own fear. I turn feral. My rectum tightens.
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. For no apparent reason, someone screams. For a scary few seconds, a dispute flares out of control. In plain view, drug deals go down. Bored lines of human hunger wrap around the block, waiting for a food charity to open. From inside a half-lit market, a grizzled man blinks into the bright daylight, clutching a priceless bottle of booze.
The fifty-square-block Tenderloin has jazz clubs, art galleries, restored vaudeville theaters and the city’s best neon (“liquors, wines, cigars, tobaccos, beer, groceries”), 400 National Registrar of Historic Buildings, public art murals, vintage shops, affordable food from Bangkok, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, Japan, New Orleans and Saigon. The venerated Mitchell Brothers Theatre is acclaimed for popularizing X-rated high-touch lap dancing.
In San Francisco, opposing change is as much a way of life as pretending to embrace it. Unneighborly neighbors in every section of the city fend off intruders: tech workers, gentrifiers, the poor, view blockers, roadbuilders, high-density developers. Each tribe safeguards its zoned identity while demand-expecting that the rest of the city do the opposite.
A weed is any plant that roots where someone doesn’t want it. In the dirt and grit of the Tenderloin, there are human weeds fighting to survive. Each one, a flower of Nature, gets watered and pruned with good-hearted but unintended and intended consequences. Social service agencies, soup kitchens, rescue missions, homeless shelters and single-room occupancy hotels keep the human undergrowth rooted in a ghetto far from the more genteel parts of the city.
The Tenderloin is treason against that most fundamental of American creeds: self-improvement, reinvention, a better tomorrow. To be an American means convincing myself that, against all odds, I have a scrap of control over my future. From the earthquaked ruins of my life, I’m expected to pick myself up, rebuild, start anew. The Tenderloin is what squandered talent looks like.
With my college degree, a bank account and a drug-free nervous system, I am as much a tourist here as I am in Mongolia or Uruguay or Azerbaijan. I am the newly-minted immigrant arriving in a foreign land. Ignorant of local nuances and norms. I dress different, I smell different. Even my native tongue seems like a foreign language. I am the Other.
