Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 7
Tenderloin Walking Tours, in sum, did not hit their stride right off. But Del kept walking and talking, talking and walking, while developing his look of panache, from fedora to pocket square. Initially, he bought most of his clothes secondhand, some emitting a distinctive consignment store whiff. Still affected by many nights outdoors, his frame consistently lean, he sometimes wore two layers of trousers when the weather was chilly.
His natural gait is loose, his lope long, but tourists may not realize the many stops along the route, where Del points out various landmarks, are also rest stops for him. Smoking crack, Del claimed, took out 90 percent of his lung function. Whatever the accurate statistic, there is no doubt he especially pauses during uphill walks.
Initially, he was also impeded by toting a heavy briefcase. The battered brown carryall, featuring an I [heart] Tenderloin sticker, held brochures and more. “I started carrying my whole office in there, stapling guns and everything.”
The tours vary, depending on sites Del decides to include (best hot dog in the Tenderloin!) or to avoid (recent crime scenes). As an introduction, he often asks people where they are from, gauges the group’s interests, and makes whatever connection he can from the answer. One day, before leading a tour for some fifteen mostly Mormon college students, Del launched into a short speech about San Francisco homelessness, a frequent topic.
“Right now, we have undocumented nineteen thousand homeless folks in the forty-nine square miles. They have documented seven thousand, but that’s nowhere near the actual amount.” Other informal estimates put San Francisco’s unsheltered population at about ten thousand, while the city government estimates some twenty thousand people seek shelter at some point in a calendar year. After running down some (later outdated) statistics about city money spent fighting homelessness, he put on his fedora and said, “Let’s walk through my neighborhood. This is not just about homeless. We’re just a normal community that has a higher degree of homeless than a lot of communities. But I think we’re unique in the way we serve and help people.”
What other neighborhood, for example, had a storefront (that day’s first stop) offering free storage, so people like Del in his unhoused years could safely stash their belongings?
He led the group to Boeddeker Park where he greeted people he knew “from way back.” (The park, which takes up about a quarter of a city block, was named for Father Alfred E. Boeddeker, a Catholic priest who advocated for a place where people without homes or much money could relax and sleep and maybe play checkers—one of Del’s innocent pursuits). Onward the group walked, to gaze up at a former United Methodist Church that had contained a dormitory for single women, then to a free tech center at the multifaceted St. Anthony Foundation. People behind the sign-in desk cheerfully welcomed Del as a familiar visitor, also from way back. He used the center’s computers, he told the group, before owning his own laptop.
Across the street, the group visited St. Anthony’s famous free lunch site, which according to its website serves two thousand to three thousand meals a day. Del had often eaten there too and praised the nutritionists’ efforts, if irked about a recent dessert. Why offer apples to people who were often missing teeth?
Former St. Anthony’s employee Karl Robillard, who worked in the education program, remembered Del as one of the regulars. “He looked like a homeless person who had come to a free dining room when I first met him, his face having that very weathered, kind of drawn-in look. It’s interesting when someone discovers who they are, because now when I think of Del, I think of a very well-dressed man, very put together, immaculate.”
The two men, now friends, share a humorous acknowledgment of their differences. Karl has blond hair and a gymnast’s sturdy physique. “We both happen to be men. It kind of ends at that,” he said. “I’m a very openly pridefully gay man who’s happy to joke around. Del is extraordinarily open-minded,” having overcome homophobia long ago. When Karl and his boyfriend, Bob Thornton, decided to marry in 2021, they asked Del to be the officiant. He accepted the request, plus a rainbow lei as part of his attire. Nowadays, when Karl jovially calls him “Girl!” Del just shakes his head and smiles.
Today, before leaving St. Anthony’s, Del gathered his tour group to look at lobby photographs, including a 1970 dining room scene of “mostly white folks.” They were Irish Americans, he said, who had lacked documentation and schooling. “No different than other cultures. Lack of African Americans [at St. Anthony’s then], because in the ‘70s we were a prime force in San Francisco. We operated the shipyards. We had major trades. We had a lot of housing and had ten times more population than today.” And, he emphasized, “African Americans culturally at that time were based on family.” In short, they did not need St. Anthony’s free meals.
With that, Del launched into an unusual and long riff about work culture lost to drugs and how he was trying to turn that culture around. Then he returned to tour guide mode. The Tenderloin, he announced, as he often said on his tours, had been the city’s theater district. Now he indicated where some theaters used to be and showed where others still existed. A favorite stop was the Strand, a Market Street theater expensively renovated by ACT, the American Conservatory Theater. The building had been “a complete wreck,” he said. Not merely a strip club, it wasn’t X-rated; it was “maybe Z-rated,” a “really terrible place. I was in here every night, so I know.” (“No, I wasn’t; yes, I was,” he played.)
Depending on how he assesses the tour group, he might also point out a repurposed theater whose marquee reads “Power Exchange.” “Couples go in together, but don’t stay together,” he’ll say with a laugh.
At some point in the tour (up until Covid), with no advance notice, Del would take a group into the darkened side entrance of St. Boniface Catholic Church. Chatter immediately stopped. A few seconds of vestibule darkness led, on the left, to the front of the church, with its handsome domed ceiling, stained glass windows, and several rows of graceful wooden pews, in which sat a few parishioners. Del tried to arrange his visits before or after Mass, but sometimes the group entered during a service. Priests have been accommodating. Here tourists are a minor matter, for on the right, separated by a few yards of space, was the sight that caught visitors off guard: pew after pew after pew of people stretched out, sleeping.
“No photos,” Del whispered to his stunned tourists. Take a picture of anything on the left if you want, the altar and so on, but not the people on the right. During this intimate trespass, it was difficult not to stare or to ignore the mingling aromas of bodies and incense. So many bodies, most adult men, most bedraggled looking, but in this sanctuary welcome and safe, presumably after having been awake much of the night outside, where both safety and sleep are elusive. (St. Boniface reportedly was the first church in the United States to offer its pews to people in need of daytime sleep.)
Del’s tour group, animated, peppered him with whispered questions. One, about abusive priests, prompted his nearly inaudible answer and addendum: “I’m ex-Catholic, so I got authority to talk.” And, no, he said to another question, the Catholic Church did not donate this space. It came from the fund-raising work of the Gubbio Project, named for St. Francis’s hometown in Italy, for what it calls “sacred sleep.”
Gubbio was run by Laura Slattery, an anti-war graduate of West Point inspired by Jesus and Gandhi. She served in the US Navy’s Medical Service Corps, later receiving a master’s degree in theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley before deciding to become a doctor and enrolling in the University of California at Davis School of Medicine. Laura met Del when he introduced himself and asked her permission to bring his tour groups inside. He said he wanted to show them the situation, not exploit anyone.
“I was impressed,” she said. “He’s doing his due diligence.”
When tourists walked out of St. Boniface, they generally seemed subdued. Laura understood. “[Del] always talks about the church being the highlight of people’s tours.” She finds the moment bittersweet. “On the one hand, how beautiful that that church is doing this, and, on the other hand, how tragic that that church in the United States of America has to do this.”
OF ALL THE ORGANIZATIONS that opened their doors to Tenderloin Walking Tours, the most rewarding and helpful was the Piano Fight nightclub, being remodeled from the former Original Joe’s, where Del had once long labored. “I would always keep an eye on the place while it was vacant,” he said. “Then I started seeing these guys in the doorway, smoking cigarettes.” Del and “these guys,” a trio of owners, talked almost daily. Del led his tours past the place too. One day a member of the trio, the gregarious Rob Ready, offered the site as tour central. Del happily accepted, stashing his briefcase and ending the tours inside the newly burgeoning spot, symbol, after all, of a creative Tenderloin. There, Rob offered a spiel to the captive audience about Piano Fight’s (often) zany programs. As both hoped, some people returned that evening. The tours had walked full circle.
Yet Del increasingly faced a major obstacle: drug dealers. Responding to them would change his life and those of many others.
CHAPTER 9
“I’M YOUR UNCLE”
AT A THEATER ROOM IN PIANO SPACE, twelve new recruits sat scattered in the bank of raised audience seats, Del onstage below them, leaning backward in a chair. He taught the first job readiness classes himself, then ceded instruction to volunteer teachers. The transition proved challenging: “letting my staff get deep into it without me hovering over them like a butterfly.” Sometimes he let loose. Today was one such occasion. At ease and expansive, Del looked up at the students, people of various ages, most youngish, all Black save for a jittery white male.
“When I started Code Tenderloin,” said Del, launching into a version of a familiar story, “this particular block we’re on now was the heaviest crack block in the Tenderloin and was serviced by young African American women. I knew all of them, because at one time I was the biggest dope dealer on this block. I sold drugs with their moms.” So out of respect for the ‘hood (“‘cause this is their block”), he did not take his walking tours past the dealers.
When the tours came close enough, though, dealers noticed and confronted him. In this truncated version of the story, Del concluded, “If there’s anything I’ve done in the last few years I’m proud of . . . the number-two girl [dealer] on the block [got a straight job through Code Tenderloin].”
“That’s what the original concept of Code Tenderloin was and will continue to be. To repurpose young folks [and] old folks; our oldest guy was sixty-three, so we have no exclusions at all. And we’ve been very successful. Of the last class of twelve people, six got jobs right away, three decided to go back to school, and three are interviewing right now.”
Jobs are out there, Del emphasized. Two “great restaurants with bars” were opening on the corner of Sixth and Market. “We also have connections with the tech community. Before you say, ‘I can’t program’ and ‘I can’t code,’ [tech] companies have jobs like any other company. They have jobs in central receiving. They got reception. They got customer service. They got billing. They got meals. You do not have to be a technical person.”
Minority representation in high-tech companies is “nowhere near” where it should be, he continued. “But that’s our job to make it right. I’ve asked the tech companies, ‘Why aren’t you hiring people in community? These underprivileged people?’ They say [applicants] haven’t been able to pass the so-called interview. That’s why we started this.”
Although the job readiness course takes weeks, “If I can find you a job today, I will hire you today. We’re not just going to send you to a place: ‘Go on, man, good luck.’ My job is to go to that company and find out exactly what the job is. Find out who the guy is that’s going to interview you. Find out as much about him as I can.” One interviewer might not like people who talk fast, because the job’s for customer service. “More or less, I’m trying to find what he doesn’t like.” That might mean an applicant having unpolished shoes, green hair, or an opposite personality. “I went to a job [interview] once where after about five minutes I said, ‘You know what, sir? This ain’t going to work. Thank you for your time.’” Del said he and the potential employer had actually begun arguing.
“Most people that open up to Code Tenderloin know what we’re about. We’re dealing with marginalized people [who] can’t generally walk in the door and get that job right off. People like myself. I got fourteen felonies. Other people in Code Tenderloin have as many or more. Some people have never had a job. That makes it hard to go in to do an interview.”
He told the class, “Let me say this first: This is the only day we use the word ‘interview.’ From here, we call it a business meeting. We feel you are equal to that guy you’re going to talk to. You’re trying to see if your resume will fit his job needs. It’s an across-the-board business meeting, that’s all.”
Del also elaborated on his students’ need to master the meetings. “If you’re still scared after weeks of classes, we’ve done nothing. We show you how to dress. We show you how to comb your hair. We show you how to speak. But if you’re basically afraid of the concept, you’re going to waffle.” He called his Interview Readiness Program, as it was known, critical. “You can’t get the job without the interview. Our job here is to get you acclimated. You walk in that interview with your head so high, you’re up in the clouds. Not arrogant but competent, because you’re not going to be afraid of anything that man asks you.” When an interviewer asks why a previous job ended, do not, said Del, think the interviewer wants to trip you up. “If he had any intention of tripping you up or discriminating against you, he wouldn’t even have invited you.”
A person in human resources at Google, Del said to a rapt audience, is not looking to see how skilled you are (“as far as the product and training and programming”). “His job is to have no nuts come into the company. He gets paid to keep people out.”
Del told another class a related story they loved, about a “Twitter lady HR person” he knew. “[She] had a guy in for an interview; she scheduled one hour. The guy talked for fifty-seven minutes about himself, nonstop, then said, ‘So what does Twitter have to offer me?’ And she said, ‘Sorry, your time is up.’”
Del laughed. “Yeah, you’re the top coder in the United States, but you’re a jerk.”
One aspect of Code Tenderloin preparedness is the carefully crafted resume. “We don’t lie on our resumes at all. I can take the worst person out there and get a resume out of them. A resume is what have you been doing. A lot of people would love to have a person who’s never had a job before, to mold the employee into someone they want.” Del has bigger ideas, though. “We’re trying to give you a career. So we break it down to what do you do well and what do you like doing? It would be nice if those things are the same, if a guy said, ‘I’m a great welder and I love welding.’ But 90 percent of the time we get, ‘I’m a great welder, but I hate that shit.’ We switch over. ‘What do you like doing?’ ‘I like truck driving.’ ‘Okay, let’s tear that welding resume up and start all over.’”
“It’s been working well,” Del said, adding that job seekers now fill out applications online. Thus, he seeks donated cell phones and computers.
Code Tenderloin job applicants, reworked resume in hand, learn what to ask and to show eagerness to learn. “We teach people how to go in and become one in that interview. It works so well.” If job applicants are not only scared but also shaking, the person hiring has probably already decided against them.
To help marginalized applicants become more “socially able,” Del tries to open their worlds by getting whatever free passes he can, whether to Giants baseball games or the Asian Art Museum. “I’m a hustler. I’ll go get tickets to whatever.” He wants job applicants to step up their social game, as he put it. That includes changing their lifestyle. “You can’t continue to hang in front of the liquor store once you’re employed. You got to start getting into the arts and live a decent life. I won’t say ‘normal/abnormal,’ because people that go to theater might be just as crazy as we are down here but just [living] a different life. So when you’re doing your job, you can discuss Porgy and Bess, or who won the Giants game, because as you advance in jobs, that’s how they look at it: Are you socially able?” If Code Tenderloin interviewees get asked during an interview about a local event, such as a Warriors basketball game, they are expected to indicate they are familiar with the outcome but for now prefer to discuss the job opening.
Code Tenderloin training has been so successful, Del said, that at one point graduates got an almost 80 percent placement rate. But some students, he mentioned privately later, he will refuse to send to interviews. “We have one guy in here, he’s nuts. Very intelligent white guy. But he’ll start talking about Star Wars in the middle of the conversation. ‘Can you give me how many years you’ve worked there?’ ‘Well, I was on Mars.’ I cannot send him to a job.” A woman Del hired to help run the program told Del the man had a right to a job interview. Not under the mantle of Code Tenderloin, Del insisted. “They’re going to say, ‘Is this the kind of person Code Tenderloin thinks is job ready? I want nothing else to do with them.’ This guy will never be ready for a job. He’s mentally ill.” Del added, “He needs to be in a program that offers employment to the mentally ill. Until I get a pipeline there, I can’t help him.”
People with other unacknowledged problems show up as well. “We had a guy come not too long ago. Irish guy. Real sharp-looking, suit and all. He came with this great resume and says, ‘Look man, I don’t need to go to class or anything, I just need you to put me to work.’
