Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 1
For Del and every person in his orbit
CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER 1 The Approaching Fall
CHAPTER 2 The Tenderloin and a Good Night’s Sleep: A Contradiction
CHAPTER 3 The Birth of Code Tenderloin
CHAPTER 4 Successes and Setbacks
CHAPTER 5 The Offer
CHAPTER 6 Graduation Day
CHAPTER 7 The Reluctant Draftee
CHAPTER 8 First Steps
CHAPTER 9 “I’m Your Uncle”
CHAPTER 10 Welcome (Not) to the LAFD
CHAPTER 11 Tweeting High
CHAPTER 12 A Double End
CHAPTER 13 Bad News
CHAPTER 14 Pimping
CHAPTER 15 The Daughters and the Aunt
CHAPTER 16 Prospects of Murder
CHAPTER 17 An Admirer
CHAPTER 18 Gambling Man
CHAPTER 19 A Detox Detour
CHAPTER 20 Hustling
CHAPTER 21 The Sump Pump Connection
CHAPTER 22 Adventures in Criminal Justice
CHAPTER 23 Differences of Opinion
CHAPTER 24 Inventions
CHAPTER 25 A Business Address
CHAPTER 26 An Ally at the Hilton
CHAPTER 27 Confrontation
CHAPTER 28 An Eviction and a Stabbing
CHAPTER 29 The Search
CHAPTER 30 Quitting: A Two-Sided Tale About a Dealer
CHAPTER 31 Beware the Spark, Avoid the Snake
CHAPTER 32 A Free Suit, a Free Room
CHAPTER 33 How to Stop Homelessness
CHAPTER 34 A Psychiatric Evaluation
CHAPTER 35 Pam’s Song
CHAPTER 36 A Different Direction
CHAPTER 37 Filling Needs, and More Needs
CHAPTER 38 A Recruit, Recruiting
CHAPTER 39 Top Ramen
Acknowledgments
Notes
PREFACE
ONE CHILLY EVENING some three decades ago, in an industrial section of San Francisco, I saw a man curled in a doorway. The sight so alarmed me, that having just heard a prediction the weather would turn bitterly cold, I rushed up, tapped the man on the shoulder, and gave him the warning. He looked at me blankly, in retrospect perhaps a gracious response considering I offered nothing more than words.
I walked on—and over the years, on and on—as such sights amid others more distressing, became familiar. Never again did I tap a stranger on the shoulder. Instead, I often looked away.
Then one morning on a sidewalk in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a neighborhood often described in published accounts as “seedy” or “gritty” (ciphers for filthy and drug-infested), where I usually walk quickly, my steps slowed. A stick-thin woman lay on her back, legs spread, appearing unconscious. Because the Tenderloin is where about half the city’s officially tallied 7,754 homeless people live,1 the sight of someone in her condition had become common. This time, though, I looked closer, noticing that her T-shirt moved slightly. She’s breathing, I thought. Several other people sat on the sidewalk near her, chatting. They must know her. They’ll call 911 if necessary. Again, I walked on. My later shame came in realizing why I had paused, if only briefly.
It was not because of a fellow human’s distress. It was because of the single word printed in capital letters on her T-shirt. It read RESPECT.
The plague of homelessness is soul-robbing to us all.
Indisputably, it also overwhelms us.
How in the United States could some two-thirds of a million people (the latest abominable statistic as of this writing is 653,104) have no home, something beyond a car or tent or friend’s couch?2 The question of what well-funded federal and private institutions could and should do for them has morphed into the discomfiting question of what we individuals with a home could and should do.
For years, I took the question personally but defensively, rejecting options I felt incapable of following, such as inviting a stranger into my home. Other options felt like puny bandages: awkward gifts of a little money, a little food. For a long while I considered using my oral history experience (and my wariness about stereotypes) to interview a countrywide range of homeless people, now commonly called unhoused or unsheltered people, then publishing the results. But, feeling daunted by the very idea, yet compelled by it, I wavered.
In 2015, amid this dilemma, my husband reserved tickets to a friend’s play in the Tenderloin about its drug scourge. The theater also offered a pre-matinee walking tour of the neighborhood for a $15 donation. Why not? We signed on. At the appointed hour outside Cutting Ball Theater on Taylor Street stood a gaggle of white people, including us, and a tall, lanky, energized “light-skinned older brother” as one of his friends describes him. The man, who several times did a head count and checked his watch, dressed with urban elan. He wore a fedora, a suit, polished dress shoes, and a T-shirt advertising Tenderloin Walking Tours. This was our guide, Del Seymour, then sixty-eight.
Soon he led us down Taylor Street while saying, in a manner that suggested the retelling of a familiar story, he had spent many crack-addicted years in the Tenderloin but had gotten clean. We nodded and followed. At the intersection of Turk and Taylor Streets, he pointed out a block that once was a drug trafficking hub. To help stem the problem, he said, cars may no longer park there. The stretch looked like any scruffy urban street to me, but in Del’s memory a different picture clearly prevailed. Gesturing toward the few pedestrians, he said he had often slept where they walked, then added, “I could have gotten a PhD in sidewalks.” That sentence, ablaze with pathos and humor, launched this book.
Our friend’s play was great but now of secondary interest. As soon as I got home, I did basic internet searches and from a few newspaper articles learned more about Del Seymour: success as a young contractor and electrician, then longtime addiction and homelessness, then not only recovery but also steps toward what resonated as redemption. He planned to start an organization to give free job readiness classes to help marginalized people get out of or avoid homelessness themselves. Clearly, Del knew the subject from—the phrase is inescapable—the ground up.
I phoned him. We met for lunch in Berkeley, a sociological midway point between the Tenderloin and my then home in Marin County. He rejected the restaurants I’d eagerly scouted—Turkish, Burmese—and opted for the plainest, where he ordered soup. Soup kitchen familiarity, I thought. (He later reproached me for using the phrase “soup kitchen,” which I had not known to be objectionable. “Dining hall” is more respectful.) Over minestrone and crackers, I told him my plan, to write a book about homelessness from the point of view and experiences of one person: him. “Okay, sure,” he said.
Slow-forward nearly a decade, many years longer than I thought this book would take. Del’s inchoate plans for a free job-training program he called Code Tenderloin kept evolving as he did, catapulting him from the type of street person I once avoided to a community leader dubbed Mayor of the Tenderloin.
In those years, in many ways Del never changed—sending me emails at three in the morning, for example. His opinions on some matters evolved, but his basic outrage about people who take advantage of others never wavered.
This project was not without hurdles. Soon after our formal interviews began, I learned Del considered certain subjects off-limit. “I don’t do family,” he said. He emphatically did not want to name his father or brother. Then I learned something that gave me pause. One article described Del as “an ex-pimp.” Prostitution long has so upset me, I had to convince myself pimping was not only part of Del’s past but also informed his present and related to homelessness. Unbeknown to me at first, pimping is clearly a source of anguish to Del. In person, phone calls, and emails, he vehemently voiced concern and anger. “What’s the salvation part of this?” he demanded. I attempted to explain my wanting to get a complete picture of him. Finally, as we both agreed he was trying to help a generation of young at-risk women, in effect daughters of the prostitutes he pimped (“the girls I ran,” he sometimes put it), we tiptoed on.
Through Del, the Tenderloin became in my eyes an intriguing, wrenching, hopeless, hopeful, lively, and sometimes dangerous place (although I never felt threatened there). I write these words days after eight people were shot and wounded on the Tenderloin block where Del pointed out his PhD in sidewalks.
Neither of us expected the interviews to take so long, in years or minutes.3 “Last question,” I once announced after an hour-plus session. “Hallelujah,” he replied. Yet I could always learn more, and Del seemed willing to expound, if not on all subjects.
I interviewed two of Del’s daughters, as well, plus a variety of people from his past, including his last crack dealer. The only person who stood me up was one of Del’s former prostitutes. When I told Del she never showed, he said she had some “issues.” “Such as?” I prompted, annoyed at the wasted time. “Federal indictments.”
Del’s years of homelessness proved a tangled skein the farther back he reluctantly reached. He preferred to talk about his post-homeless era, being understandably proud of it. Were his memories and recollections accurate and truthful? From what I could check—and there was much I could not—they mostly were, if with caveats. Del tried to help with fact-checking, but at one point his filing system was a pocket of crumpled money and random business cards, among other effluvia. He produced no work resumes. Furthermore, his accounts often included hyperbole: that city is “100 percent white?” I noted minor contradictions too: When homeless he “always”
A friend of Del’s told me with a raised eyebrow Del’s memories could be “fluid.”
Finally, though, I believe Del meant to be truthful, partly for his own good. He also relished being contrarian, which to me implies a certain honesty. Rather than utter the politically correct phrase “housing first,” for example, he maintained such policies could be unfair to landlords. (Housing with supportive services was another matter.) Yet wherever we drove or walked, he would say something like, “See that parking lot over there? That could be housing.” One day, when I joined him in a church effort to hand out sanitary supplies, he pooh-poohed my admiration of “tiny homes” as an interim approach. “Would you want to live in one?” he demanded. Beats curling up on the sidewalk, I thought, but his mood silenced me. Years later, he posted on Facebook an article touting tiny homes as a response to homelessness, adding, “SF let’s do this.”
When I finished my first draft of this book, I went way against standard practice and encouraged Del to read the entire text for errors. He accepted the offer, went over the pages carefully (“like an outside reader,” he said), cited only a few mistakes or omissions, both mine and his, and never suggested any sugarcoating. Even pimping stayed.
Apart from questions about veracity that I could never answer, I often wondered what stories Del withheld. My sense is, many involved women. Others, considering his praise of hustling, must have involved money. Others certainly included unsavory aspects of his addicted years; during a videotaped panel discussion, he mentioned waking up in his own waste. He never told me that, nor did I inquire further.
My major journalistic frustration centered on Del’s inability to pin down dates: by year, decade, even century. “I don’t do dates” proved a mantra similar to “I don’t do family.” One file I labeled “Timeline” lists more than thirty incidents, with my printed-out pages marked by arrows moving each event from its first presumed year to another. Had he had this engineering assignment in Bangkok before that one in Minnesota? When did he live in the refrigerator box? When was he invited—once clean—to this or that corporate board? I do know when he quit one, because it happened in our own timeline. He told me he refused to be in any organization that did not give second chances.
To many questions, Del shrugged. Crack, he said more than once, does not help memory. Rap sheets he provided confirmed his slim body (6 feet tall, 135 pounds) and dates of San Francisco arrests from 2000 to 2004. Typically, he later lost his copies of these and asked for copies of mine. Stymied by attempts to answer a basic journalistic “W” question, “When?,” I abandoned a traditional biography. Instead, I opted to write about this unconventional person in an unconventional way, crafting Del’s dramatic life in scenes, arranged in a narrative that replicates much of his life, slipping forward, sliding backward, stabilizing.
It is my hope these scenes comprise an inspiring whole: conveying the life of Deleano Joseph Seymour while providing a guide to how people—homeless or not—can help battle this societal horror. I also hope housed readers will ponder: Who is that person sleeping in the doorway? As Del said over and over, sometimes able to hide his tears, “That old Black man could be me.”
CHAPTER 1
THE APPROACHING FALL
DEL WENT DOWN HARD.
One day in or around 1986, while living in Oakland, working for Bay Alarm Company or as an electrician or maybe both, Del drove into San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
Until then, Del said, he had never been in San Francisco at all, other than a single trip years earlier to visit a Chicago childhood friend. This time his plan was less specific.
“For some reason, I came over to the Tenderloin. That was it. End of story,” he said and laughed. The some reason, he elaborated, was partly curiosity and partly attraction to “the party life, the freedom to do whatever the hell you want to do, to live a completely wild lifestyle, because basically, up to about that time, I was a firefighter. Military. I was pretty straight.” Yes, he had been a party guy too. “Socially party. Not criminally party. I was working the prostitutes and all that. It was just fun. It’s gangsterism.”
The appeal of what he also called “the street life” included a cliché he deemed accurate: “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Let’s put it like that.”
Putting it like that, however, lacked detail Del later divulged to a male podcast host. “When I got out on Turk and Taylor [an infamous Tenderloin intersection], I’m thinking they’re shooting a movie because there could not be a neighborhood like this in the civilized world. Where’s the sound trucks? Where’s the camera? People walking around naked, people walking around doing sex acts on themselves, people with needles. . . . People in drag and people smoking dope and people hitting people in the head with pipes. All within two or three minutes, I saw that whole thing. By eight o’clock that night, I was in that movie. Within twenty-four hours I was a blown-out drug addict.”1
At the cusp of forty, Del Seymour’s drug of choice was singular: crack cocaine.
To characterize his fall, Del typically invokes either of two honed statements. “I put a crack pipe in my mouth for eighteen seconds. It took eighteen years to get it out of my mouth.” The other is, “I drove into San Francisco on Highway 280, and within thirty days I was living under Highway 280.”
Because Del has mastery of cadence and because the dual misery of addiction and homelessness is central to his saga, both of his statements warrant a dash of deconstruction. Did it take eighteen seconds for his first hit? An initial crack high can be almost instantaneous. Perhaps it was slower for Del, and perhaps he really was counting off the seconds. As for the eighteen years parallel, his fateful drive into the Tenderloin seems to have happened in 1986, although Del has also mentioned 1989. If, piecing together various accounts, the year he finally got clean was 2010, his addiction and homelessness may have lasted a more alarming twenty-four years. But “eighteen seconds and eighteen years” has a memorable ring.
What about the timing of his descent under the highway? Del also said the transition to homelessness took three months, but “thirty days” may stick in one’s mind better.
Why not lean on cadence? When Del took his plunge, he likely did not consult a stopwatch or a calendar. Then there is the matter of memory. He has insisted he retains little memory of his childhood and said he has even fewer memories from addiction. “It’s like being in a blackout.” Details of the years being “Del the straight-up dope fiend” are gone. “People never in heavy addiction don’t understand anything I’m talking about. You don’t remember names, places, anything.”
Yet the central assertion stands: crack controlled his life for eighteen years, at least.
“A typical crack user will take a hit of crack maybe fifty times a day. Minimum. If you stand here long enough,” Del noted, while overlooking a Tenderloin street, “you’ll see somebody come and take four or five hits right here, within five minutes. Soon as you take the first hit, you’re technically on a run. That run’s not going to stop until you have exhausted all means of money or you’re just exhausted and fall asleep. That’ll be days later.”
Do not believe anybody about getting “dope sick” from stopping crack, he said. “That’s a particular term for heroin use. No other drug causes dope sickness.” Practical Recovery, a treatment services program, echoes Del. It states on its website, “Withdrawal [from crack] usually causes more psychological discomfort than physiological discomfort, and is rarely, if ever, medically serious.”2
Crack users do not even talk about withdrawal, said Del. “Just addiction. [If] you go to jail, you don’t have it, it’s no big. You just go to sleep. And wish you had some.” You would not be twitching. “Not at all.” You could, though, be broke. “I may start off in the morning with three hundred dollars,” he continued. “I’m messing around with girls or getting high or whatever and wind up at noon, have no money. Then I run into some kind of hustle and have another two hundred dollars. By the end of the night, I’m sleeping in the tent. And went through two thousand dollars.”
With few exceptions, all Tenderloin hotels (in particular single-room occupancies or SROs) condoned crack use, Del said, so he often stayed at one of them. But if he had enough money to be more comfortable, he rented an upscale hotel room, perhaps at the nearby Hilton. “Mostly, it was probably to get high, to get into a nice room so I could do my drug thing.” Never with a man, he said more than once, but with “whatever girl I was with at the time.”
