Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Tenderloin is not a Cut of Meat
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
My name is Noah. I was raised in San Francisco, a few neighborhoods away from the Tenderloin. These days, when I’m not in the classroom teaching high school, I roam the city on foot—partly for exercise, mostly for entertainment.
The Tenderloin is not a preferred 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.
Investigative journalists periodically perform a colonoscopy on the Tenderloin. The published lab results are disheartening, discouraging, disgusting.
When I enter the pulsing guts of the Tenderloin, the invisible survival rules of the street kick in. I turn feral. My legs are tense, ready to bolt. My heartbeat quickens. My adrenalin pumps. I smell my own fear. My rectum tightens.
I am surround-sounded by sirens. By the pervasive desperate-despair of urban poverty. By the guttered stink.
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 at a phantom only they can see. 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 emerges into the bright sunlight, clutching a priceless bottle of cheap booze.
If I look for them, 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”). Four hundred structures are on the National Registrar of Historic Buildings. Public art murals, vintage shops and affordable food from Bangkok, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, Japan, New Orleans and Saigon rub shoulders with the Mitchell Brothers Theatre which popularized X-rated lap dancing.
In San Francisco, opposing change is as much a way of life as pretending to embrace it. In every section of the city unneighborly neighbors fight off intruders with protests, lawsuits and appeals to politicians. Each tribe safeguards its zoned identity while demanding that the rest of the city do the opposite.
A weed, they say, is any plant that roots where someone doesn’t want it. In the dirt and grit of the Tenderloin, there are human weeds. Each one, a flower of Nature, gets watered and pruned with good-hearted 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 away from the more genteel parts of the city.
The Tenderloin is what squandered talent looks like. This place, this underbelly of the city, 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 and against all evidence—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.
With my college degree, a bank account and a drug-free nervous system, I am as much a tourist here as I would be in Mongolia or Azerbaijan. I am the newly minted immigrant arriving in a foreign land, ignorant of local customs, nuances and norms. I dress different, I smell different. Even English seems like a foreign language.
I am the Other.
