As the first month in SF rolled on, we started to explore. We had to stop eating out, which had become regular fare in Denver. Whole Foods was nearby. So was Trader Joe's - a new market delicacy to us with our gluten-free diet. Trying to manage a gluten-free diet through Whole Foods in SF without a job put me quickly on the welfare path. It was my first time dealing with the government in that realm, except for when I was a participant under my mom's care as a child.
If you schedule online, the interview is quick and painless. We waited about twenty minutes in a large room with homeless, teens, and some transients. It was just a taste of the bizarre characters that inhabited the city. We got a big spoonful of transient-living while browsing apartments. Homeless were everywhere as Turk met Market Street in downtown SF. I originally heard about the area from a bartender at the Rickhouse. One of the many California bar recommendations my friend Randy Layman (bartender at Steuben's & Ace in Denver) liked on his visits. Randy crafted a cocktail for me out of Navy Strength Gin, Green Chartreuse and St. Germain's that has not been perfected by anyone else since, and is one of my favorite drinks to this day, aside from well-vodka on the rocks if I'm on a budget.
The tender at the Rickhouse was a stout, blonde-bearded Irish guy. He recommended the Tenderloin for the price, but even a guy of his size was uncomfortable with chances of crime there. I felt the need to look into it, how bad could it be? Studios in that area were still $1400ish, but didn't seem to have the demand other neighborhoods did.
Walking into the area of the Tenderloin I was immediately uneasy. Aside from the name sounding like how a surgeon would refer to my sliced open calf on an operating table, the place was caked over with years of dirt. Parts of the sidewalk were lost to an infinite blackness composed of who-knows-what. There were so many homeless people around the base of the complex I was scouting that one man resorted to sleeping on his arm against a parking meter. It was as if small pockets of this territory were eternally caught in some drug hangover - but no one told them the party stopped 30 years ago.
I knew right away the area was too unsafe for Liz or I walking home late in the evening. I decided to check the interior of a few places anyway. The apartments were around 400 sq ft in one room, sometimes it included a small tag-a-long kitchen area with an old electric stove. We wanted a spot on Mission Street near 24th, if we could find one. I scoured Craigslist daily to find anything (if you weren't doing this, you would ultimately never find anything). One place opened up, right off 24th, in a three-story former old-time hospital setup.
I knocked on the black doorway and in the distance I heard some muffled voice. The man ambled from the backroom cast in dark shadows caused by mid-day sun. He was a grumpy, 70-something African-American man, missing one eye, but stared on with the mannerisms and composure of a bulldog.
"What do you need boy?" He said.
"I'm here about the Craigslist ad."
He shuffled his hands into his pocket to retrieve a set of keys. He gave me specific instructions to find the room he was unable to walk to anymore, with his age. I immediately forgot what he said as I headed into the adjacent building trying to take in how I imagined his past life brought him there. I wandered out back, found a young guy smoking a joint and he pointed me to the room number I was looking for.
The room was big but there was no closet, only a row of kitchen appliances on one side, a window, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle green painted on every wall. At the end of the hall was a shared toilet and conveniently for me, the exit. Having no other leads and running out of money fast, I decided to tell him I wanted it on a last-minute whim.
"It is just you?" He asked.
"My girlfriend and I."
"You better get her to come see it, first before you make that decision, boy."
"Yeah - you're probably right."
I didn't go back. I decided that night instead of sitting on the computer, I was going to start reaching out to people the next day. If they didn't want to meet up, I was just going to explore the city and take pictures. What did I have to lose? The only way I knew how to get where I was going was through the random encounters and friends who pushed me along the way.
Rain or shine, which mostly it was rain, I started saddling up my gear and hitting the streets. I walked around most of the city in the first week I was there. I went to Union Square, Golden Gate Park, all the way to the northern docks to see Alcatraz in the distance, from the Castro and of course around Potrero Hill. I had some sense of direction from visiting two times before, but also found many familiar places friends had taken me as I ventured up and down giant streets. One of the nights that week, Liz and I ventured back to a restaurant we went on a double date at, the first time I took her to the city, before we moved.
We met up with photographer Cole Rise. I StumbleUpon'd his work, as more than a stumblers did, blown-away by his conceptual self-portraits and landscape photographs. I had reached out before my flight about possibly doing a portrait, expecting no response from such a popular artist. Within a few days, to my surprise, he responded saying something along the lines that he checked out my work and was excited about the idea. My confidence boosted, I shot him and his girlfriend Kate on Ocean Beach in 2011. We lost touch before I moved back and after a few attempts to leave messages, I assumed our paths were too far apart now to expect a hangout.
One trip to Union Square though got me thinking differently. I had walked most days with my camera around my neck so I could capture anything happening in the moment. I got stopped at a street light across from the square and a well-dressed man named Dario Smith (pictured on the header) asked if I would snap his photo, with his Canon. I obliged.
I shot a couple of snaps and he thanked me and walked away. I caught myself before he got too far.
"Hey man, I feel like I could take your photo better with my camera. Why don't we exchange info and I'll email you a shot?"
He agreed. We started meeting up nearly every week, discussing local fashion and his entrepreneurial dreams of becoming a Men's fashion consultant with his friend D'Angelo; a business endeavor they called The Bellwether Project. He connected with Liz and her aspirations of tackling the SF fashion scene for her own styling track.
From that point on I started emailing agencies, wandering streets, and shooting in one of the rainiest and windiest cities I'd been in.
