Legality Is Invisible

De mil heroes la patria aqui fue

It is a sleepy day in the Mission District. A slight breeze whisps by, seeming to mimic the sound of the underground BART trains leaving the 16th Street station. Latinos in collared flannel shirts wipe their hands on dirty rags slipping from their back pockets in the repair shop halfway to The Panaderia—the bakery. Others shuffle by in typical Latino clothing—cowboy hats, Western-style ties around their necks, heavy belts—and keep their heads down aside from a brief nod and quick turn of the eyes as they quietly wish me a “Buenos dias.” Two women stand huddled together in front of a cookie-cutter ramshackle apartment that shares a wall with a Mexican market. The shorter, fatter woman turned her head upon eye-contact and puffed her cigarette facing the edifice. The sleek, younger woman kept her eye on her daughter—a small, tan girl with pigtails, sporting a pink shirt and worn purple windbreaker. A table sits on the very edge of the curb with hand-me-down Barbies, toy cars and little ornaments in the shapes of animals, with a low price scribbled on hardly-visible blue stickers stuck all over the treasure trove. A block down, after stumbling over haphazardly strewn bikes on the sidewalk outside of an obnoxious yellow coffee shop that charged $2 for a medium coffee while patrons sit cross-legged, obsessively heaving over iPhones, an elderly Latina sits behind a table of handmade necklaces of blue, red, green and yellow stones. Her head slumps as the wrinkles on her brow make her eyes appear half shut. Her wrinkled jaw line quivers. I turned my head as I crossed the street to get a better look. A van proclaiming the word of Jesus covered her entirely.

The bakery huts from the corner with its lackluster white façade. The Flower Vendor sits in his usual place on the two dirty steps leading up to a clear door with a barren frame that must be chained closed lest it remain jarred open like a tired mouth. There is a stain of dirt on the right side of the door, where the Flower Vendor sits, due to his frequent stops in front of the panaderia. The bell stuck between the door and the crack above jingles a sad tune. “Buenos dias,” says Maria, the woman behind the counter. She has a sweet smile on her face. She looks like Mama. Her lips are full, but dainty little roses painted a bright pink upon her tan face. Her hair flips out on the sides, with a slight blonde hue painted in to give her a glow. She was like an older version of Mama’s wedding photo.

“Is Jaime here?” I asked in Spanish. “I’m curious about the bakery.” She raised an eyebrow and looked around to humor me before frowning, obviously upset with the news she had to give me.

“Ay, señorita,” she sighed. “No esta. Nunca esta aqui los viernes.” (“Oh, little lady. He’s not here. He’s never here on Friday”)

I gathered myself for a minute. He forgot we were supposed to talk today.

“Puedes esperar si quieres. Hay pan si quieres comprar,” she said. (“You can wait if you want. There’s bread if you want to buy some.”)

I smiled and decided to wait for an hour while I peeked at the cabinets of sweets that were available. The colors and smells were all like Mexico. One clear case closest to the window glimmered with cupcakes drenched in vibrant sprinkles, all one color, never mixed. The names of each bread were scratched onto cards covered with flour in rustic yellow letters. They were all in Spanish. A few blondes wandered in and tried to make sense of the pricing, inquiring about each bread simply by pointing instead of trying to pronounce the name. Maria stood straight and patient at the counter the entire time until she is approached. After a few awkward moments of trying to start conversation between the sharp interruptions in English courtesy of the two blondes—one of which forgot to take her sunglasses off in an obviously dark room, only illuminated by drooping shells covering weak lightbulbs. It was quiet once they were gone.

“¿Porque quieres platicar con Jaime?” Maria asked.

“Estoy hacideno un articulo para me clase. Quiero platicar con el de la inmigracion,” I answered to her dismay. (“I’m doing an article for class. I want to talk to him about immigration.”)

    “Oh!” she chimed in with a laugh. A thundering slam echoed from the back room where the rest of the bread was being made. There were a few inaudible comments that echoed deeply throughout the back. One woman emerged in the doorway. She was short and chubbier, with a hat keeping her long hair back and out of the way of the bread. She had a defined face, round with sharper bone structure, except for her nose. Her nose was a little blub on her face, as her eyes curved into what looked like little tadpoles.

“¿Estas aqui para trabajar?” she asked, enthused. (“Are you here to work?”)

     I shook my head. “No señora.” She opened a cabinet closest to the window and set down a tray of bread cut into ovals, with a vibrant red filling in the center that looked just like an egg. Coconut flakes covered the edges. She sighed.

“Ooo,” she howled. “Yo pense que viniste para el trabajo. No tenemos suficiente empleados.” (“I thought you came for a job. We don’t have enough employees right now”)

     The silver tray slammed and made a piercing echo throughout the bakery. They called the place Victoria. Victory.

“Pues, Jaime no esta,” Maria said with another sigh. “Puedes esperar por un ratito si te dijo que iba a venir.” (“Well, Jaime isn’t here. You can wait for a little be if he told you he was coming.”)

I spent 10 minutes rummaging through day-old bread and staring contemplatively at sugar-glazed puffs of bread while my head told me Jaime was never going to show up. Maria eyed me as the Headmaster who asked me if I was there for a job paced back in forth in the baking room. Maria had a sympathy to her eyes, which I had come to associate with my mother. I swallowed impatiently, as I didn’t know what I could say that would make Jaime come or if she would know anything that could help me. I knew how much it annoyed me when strangers assumed my mother was the bank of information on all things Latino. Would it be rude to ask her where she was from and how she got here?

“¿De donde eres?” she asked. (“Where are you from?”)

     “Los Angeles,” I quip.

“¿Y tus papas?” (“And your parents?”)

     “Mi mama es de Morelos” (“My mother is from Morelos”)

     “¡Mexico!” she smiled.

I went on a tangent about my dad’s American-ness and the lack of Latino blood in him. I said some random drivel about having an accent when I spoke Spanish because I grew up speaking English more because of my dad, and made little references to my mom’s side-conversations when dad was within earshot, but not willing to contribute to what we had to say. She smiled the whole time. Maria fled Mexico around the same time my mom did in the early 80s. Mom didn’t flee. She came to learn English to earn her Master’s. But Maria fled in the hopes of a better life, like the old adages go. She hails from Jalisco, a state that wraps around my mother’s home. Jalisco is No. 3 on the list of Mexican states immigrants in the U.S. are from, behind Michoacan and Oaxaca. Her daughter was a different story.

“Mi hija va al UNAM,” she said. (“My daughter goes to UNAM.”)

     My mother always told me about UNAM. It is the most prestigious school any Mexican citizen could ever hope for. The admissions process is a systemic web of tests and applications, much like anything in Mexico—getting a passport, getting a visa—and to be on the other end of an acceptance letter was like being found in the desert after years and being told you would live like a king forever. If you didn’t blow it, that is. Then you’d be like my tia Geno, who my mother would snarl at on occasion with the memory of her screaming at my abuelito and abandoning UNAM for the sake of a man. UNAM was definitely a place you respected more than yourself.

Maria was something of a missing piece to life in San Francisco for me. She was here to stay, though the lament of leaving the grassy shade of Mexico, the glimmering of the moon in its late night hours and warm tropical storms was present in the flimsy way she threw about her words when she spoke of it. And her daughter dared to leave what some say is the comfort of American life—though Mexican children never believe it—to be there. I always told mom I was moving to Mexico after college.

Maria asked me about mom a lot, particularly if dad “fixed her.” It’s how she described becoming a citizen. Maria got “fixed” when her daughter was 10 through the “regular process.” She was never more specific than that.

“¿Y todavia tienes miedo? ¿O sientes mejor estar aqui siendo legal?” I asked. (“And are you still afraid? Or do you feel better knowing you’re legal?”)

     “No, ya no tengo razon para tener miedo. No, no, no. Estoy contenta por que no me pueden llevar,” she said, waving her hands as if to say it was sacrilige to think being legal would ever be anything short of glorious. (“No. I don’t have a reason to be afraid. No, no, no. I’m happy because they can’t take me away.”)

A stout old man shuffled in. The door pinched his short, ragged body. He turned around and made a hoarse scoffing sound deep in his throat as he shook his head. His wrinkled face rolled down to his neck and shook with his dissatisfaction. His red plaid shirttails stuck out awkwardly from his brown corduroy. He sniffled. Maria stared wide-eyed. His thinning white hair barely touched down on his head. His white skin seemed to be more noticeable against the bakery that was decorated brown to its very heart.

“Good morning,” he said gruffly while clearing his throat.

Maria wrung her hands. Her eyes were still as wide as they were the moment he walked in. She put a hand on the register, flipped around and looked at the coffee dispensers before fixing the stack of white squares on the counter.

“Uh…uh,” she stammered as she looked into my eyes. She let out a long breath. “Good morning.” Her accent barely allowed her to pronounce the d in “good.”

The man shuffled over to the counter, a wrinkle in his forehead. “Coffee,” he said.

Maria said nothing. She slowly began lifting a finger and accidentally pointed at the coffee making station with the cream and sugar, where customers could fix the traditional Mexican blend to whatever they fancied.

“Yes,” the old man barked. “Coffee.”

She began hastily pouring coffee. “Oh!” she gasped. “Um…American coffee, yes?” She put the cup down to keep it from shaking.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” the old man said impatiently. She pushed the cup across the counter, mouth agape. “$1.75, señor…um…sir.” A crumpled dollar and six coins dropped down on the counter. She carefully scraped them up and counted in Spanish. “Vienticino, thrientiacinco…” She stopped and shook her head. “Twenty-five, thirty-five, fourty-five…” She dumped each coin one by one and crammed the dollar in, wrinkling it and getting it caught in the metal mousetraps of the register. “Thank you,” she said, not pronouncing the h. He said nothing. The bell rang as he trudged up 16th. Her face was flushed, yet she turned and gave me her motherly smile.

Mother, Do You Think They’ll Drop the Bomb?

My gasps between tears were long and heavy. My throat was feeling tighter with each breath. I could almost see my lungs being force to their capacity as I shook and wailed like an injured animal. The parking lot was deserted, but through my tears it appeared as though cars were speeding by in a flurry of smog and hearty engine noises. It was like crying on a freeway.

“Megan!” mom shouted. “Megan, shut up! Enough! Enough! Shut the fuck up, Megan. It’s over.”

I begged my mother to let me cry as I tried to carefully peel back my emotions like a delicate tangerine, without slipping more into hysterics. “No, mom. Why? It’s not fair, mom. I hate her. I hate her, she doesn’t even know you.”

The only thing that succeeded that miserable shouting was a nail in the crevice of my forearm on the underside of my elbow. It was like a magic cure. A painful, magic cure. My voice quivered, my tears were broken. I was not better. I was not done. Mom was.

Three years later, I told mom I wanted to report on Latino issues. “And do what? Be the same like everyone else? Feeling sorry for people who don’t need saving? Be careful how you report on your own people,” she said, her accent somehow helping her take command of the moment.

“Well, what should I report on, mom?” I asked.

“Report on how all of us would leave this country if we didn’t have husbands and children,” she scorned. When mom would get upset when I was younger, she would cry and go to the master bedroom claiming she was going to Mexico and leave us all alone.

“Report on how nothing we do matters. We are always Mexican.”

I sat quietly, rubbing my hand over my hot coffee mug. I was everything like my mother. She was doing the same thing, with that same right hand under her chin, looking down at her cup. The only difference was that I was born here.

“Mom, remember the time that woman in the parking lot told you to go back to Mexico?”

She reclined back, drew a breath and said: “Si. ¿Y que con eso? Pinche vieja no me conoce. Y tu de chillona. ¿Porque te preocupas tanto, mija?” (“Yes. And what of it? That fucking hag doesn’t know me. And you—being a crybaby. Why do you worry so much, honey?”)

     “Because mom…eres legal. ¿Como pueden decir esas cosas?” (“Because mom…you’re legal. How could anyone say those things?”)

     “Ay, Megan, callate ya. No pueden ver si eres legal, entonces ¿pa’ que chingados me importa?” (“Ay, Megan. Shut up now. Legality isn’t visible, so why the fuck does it matter?”) In English, mom was the business administration major—with a master’s—who knew her stuff when you asked her. She was a classy woman who knew how to get clothes, jewelry, handbags and make-up from Macy’s for less than half the price (sometimes free) with her black card she got from spending $1,000 or more annually and buying enough at retail price to start winning neatly enveloped cupons. She never swore, but sometimes she was partial to “shit,” if she really lost it. In Spanish, she was just the same, except for a voracious speaker with an affinity for cursing and hacking words to pieces when she was upset. She told strangers they were stupid more so than in English. She was everything short of a razor blade wrapped in an aggressive package, but no one in this country ever knew.

“America doesn’t know anything about us. They know as much about legals as they know about illegals, but they would be nothing, Megan. They would be nothing without us. We do everything to be like them and we’re never like them,” she said before taking a proud sip of coffee.

Al sonoro ruguir del cañon

Maria scribbled Jaime’s cell phone number on a faded yellow Post-It before I left the first time.

“Jaime es bien olvidon, pero nos cuide,” she said as she passed off the note and held my hand for a moment. (“Jaime is very forgetful, but he takes care of us.”)

The Flower Vendor was sitting at a table in the very center of the initial entryway of the bakery. He slouched back and his droopy eyes wandered back and forth. He looked as though he was washing away. He would smile at Maria sometimes and raise a shriveled hand, his fingers slightly curled as if to raise his hand to mark his turn to speak. He would make quick, cheery comments about how beautiful the place still was, what the weather was like and how he was happy it was Friday.

“Nadie habla directamente sobre inmigracion o si alguien es legal o no,” Maria said. (“Nobody speaks directly about immigration or if someone is legal or not.”) The Flower Vendor nodded, his head flopping so that the glimmer of his eye could barely be seen under his sombrero. He smiled and didn’t say anything. “Pero por lo menos cuando te arreglan, no tienes que tener miedo aunque te tienen miedo a ti.” (“But at least when they fix you, you don’t have to be afraid even if they’re afraid of you.) The whole time, The Headmaster and the rest of the bakers stuffed themselves in the doorway of the baking room. They were wind-up dolls, strolling back and forth with what seemed like the same metal trays before splitting off in an odd dance into the front of the bakery, where the pans slammed and the scent wafted even stronger into the nose.

Jaime never answered my calls for the weekend. Monday morning a tall, tan man in a purple scarf loosely spun around his neck stood over the cash register. “Buenos dias.”

“Jaime?” I asked. He placed his hand awkwardly on the counter, making it difficult not to stare at the yellow gauze sloppily wrapped around his hand. I reminded him about his missed interview.

“Oh. See, I’d love to talk to you, but I don’t look very presentable right now and I don’t think it would be appropriate.”

Jaime Maldonado is hailed as a savior of the Latino culture, with his bakery displaying Latino art, inviting the Latino community and staying true to its Mexican heritage when it comes to the bread he serves. He is the face of the Mission food scene, with videos posted on blogs surrounding all things San Francisco proudly brandished on his Web site. The Headmaster and the bakers peered through the doorway during our whole conversation. They never spoke up. They never came out. But we always made eye contact.

Maria bunched her lips to the right and frowned.

I was back on Friday. “¿Hay ilegales trabajando aqui?” I asked Maria. (“Are there any illegals working here?”)

     “Pues, todos empezamos asi. Algunos terminan asi. Nadamas seguimos trabajando,” she said. (“Well, we all start that way. Some end that way. We just keep on working.”)

Of course Mama’s gonna help build the wall

Mom got deported almost a week after her wedding. She and dad got married after six months of dating to keep her in the country after her visa expired. After a day of 1980s bliss with mom’s ball gown in front of a crowd of people whose language my dad did not understand, they were ready to go back to the States soon. “Fuimos una bola de mensos. Lo hizimos mal,” my mom said. (“We were a couple of idiots. We did it wrong.”) They married in Mexico first. Mom got taken to a facility where she remembers three separate groups of people sitting in each corner of what was like a grey pen. An elder Latino sat in arthritic pain, looking down and never speaking. On older Asian man did the same opposite him. Mom was opposite of two young Asian girls, sisters, skinny and frail and strewn on top of each other, sobbing hysterically. She remembers being driven in a cave and being pulled in every which direction along with the others to make sure something always blocked their view of the general area to keep them from deducing where they were. Dad spent hours yelling at the airport. Mom was long gone, flying solo on a plane back to Mexico City.

In the month she fought for her paperwork, mom lost 20 pounds. “I could not eat. I never ate. I think I went days without eating,” she said.

Four months later, my mom stared down the border, a dusty brown archway where dad’s old red Chevy hummed impatiently. She pulled out her passport for a clean-cut, blond American man who looked as though he’d been in the military. “Where are your bags?” he asked.

“I don’t have bags,” mom said. She gasped. He stared intently, her passport inches from sliding out of his hands and onto the ground.

“No bags?”

“I…I…no. No bags,” she said, wringing her hands. Silence.

“Go through,” he sighed.

Mom was illegal for another three months until she was able to take and pass her citizenship test. She’s never been above 110 pounds since her deportation.

“It was horrible. I was in pain every day,” she said. “No piece of paper could ever fix what I went through.”

Un laurel para ti de Victoria, un sepulcro para ellos de honor

The Flower Vendor slept in front of la Victoria bakery. A group of teens pushed past, some clad in neon and dangling black adornments of lace while shouting and pulling the backpacks of those riding bikes. He stirred and rolled over. He clasped onto his bucket to keep the “gueros” from tipping over his haul. Now he nods and his head wobbles under his sombrero. “Buenos dias.”

“Soy legal, pero soy Mexicana,” Maria said as she leaned toward me and handed me another cup of coffee. “Todos, ultimamente somos Mexicanos.” (“I’m legal, but I’m Mexican. We are all, ultimately, Mexican”)

The streets were dry every Friday, with the same picturesque moments of families speaking a muffled tongue. Their faces, their movements all seemed to run together.

“Vivmos sin cara, aunque damos todos a este pais,” mom said to me years before. (“We live without a face, even if we give everything to this country.”)

The Headmaster heckled me about a job again as she continued her robotic spin through the bakery with her fellow employees, who never greeted me. Jaime never returned when I dropped by. I never met the bakers save for a “Buenos dias.”

“Illegals work there,” some said. I couldn’t tell.

Students Work Hard to Pay for Rising Cost of Education

Adriana Amer and two coworkers smile while working at the student call center at SFSU.

by Jana Howarth

Adriana Amer stands upon a patch of browning grass and gazes up at her childhood home for what may be the last time in a long while. The soft grey color blanketing the large three-story blends with the overcast skies above. A sign hanging over the open, wooden porch reads, “Furniture of Abou Ali Amer.” This is the name of her grandfather, who owns and operates a furniture store out of the first level of their house. Adriana walks through the store, bursting with handmade tables, chairs, and beds, starts up a flight of stairs against the back wall. She enters the living area, hearing the giggles and bickering of her three younger sisters. Footsteps can be heard like a stampede as they run around and around, fighting and playing. Adriana’s full lips turn upwards, and her rich brown eyes twinkle with affection. She walks through the living room, cozy with old family photos, following the smells of herbs and meat wafting from the kitchen. She finds her grandmother standing at the stove, and strokes her dark, curling hair that so much resembles her own. The tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers lying on the green countertops come fresh from their own garden, picked by Adriana and her sisters. Her grandmother’s wrinkly hand swats her own away as she attempts to steal a sample of fresh, homemade bread. Chuckling, her grandmother pulls Adriana’s small, round face down and kisses her light, olive-toned cheek. Leaving the kitchen, Adriana climbs a second, and then a third set of stairs, until she is standing on her roof, among a kaleidoscope of plants and flowers. She looks out over the land, the hills and fields of her birthplace: her Lebanon. Tomorrow, she will be 30,000 feet in the air, embarking on a new chapter in her 21-year-old life.

Adriana came to San Francisco in the Fall of 2007 looking to gain more opportunities and enrich her life with new experiences. Coming from small Lebanese village, she wanted to get out of a place where the most common and important job a woman could have was working in a bank. As her childhood friends began getting married and having babies at young ages, as was traditional in Lebanon, Adriana dreamt of learning and escaping. After convincing her grandparents, who had raised Adriana and her sisters since their parents divorced and abandoned their children more than a decade earlier, Adriana made plans to come to America, leaving her village for the first time in her life.

“I still remember when my grandfather let go of my hand, and said take care of yourself,” says Adriana. “It was weird, seeing tears in my grandparent’s eyes. I think it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, leaving my family.” Adriana remembers the day she said goodbye to her home. Standing in Beirut International Airport, Adriana gathers her sisters close for a final embrace. Kissing each of their cheeks in turn, she then turns to face her grandparents. Choking back tears, she hugs the two people who have raised her, loved her, and have always been there for her throughout her life. Staring into the glassy green eyes of her grandfather, and teary brown ones of her grandma, Adriana feels her own face become damp. Holding her grandfather’s hand, she says her farewell words, and with the release of their hands, she feels the release of her childhood.

Since her time in the United States, Adriana has been hosted by two different families, who have helped her acclimate to this new culture, support her in her educational endeavors, and provide a financial safety net. Adriana couldn’t be more grateful to those she has met during her stay.

“I am so fortunate to have found a home away from home,” she says as she ties back her dark, spiraling hair into one long tail. “If not for my host families, I would feel so alone here.”

Adriana is now studying International Business at San Francisco State University.  Four nights a week you can find her sitting in the Administration building, calling and attempting to garner donations for the school. The shrill ringing of telephones bombard Adriana’s ears from every direction. The lifeless grey plastic chair on which she sits numbs her brain and stiffens her back. The same over-enthusiastic greeting can be heard exiting the mouths of each worker nearby, “Hello my name is so-and-so and I’m calling from San Francisco State University…” Adriana yawns hugely, twirling a dark curl around a finger glittering with purple nail polish. She checks her list of phone numbers, and resignedly punches in the next call.

Adriana has accepted work as a necessary evil. With living costs in America greater than those in her home country, and with tuition for international students steeper than that of locals, Adriana must work hard in order to financially support herself. “My family in Lebanon cannot support me here, and so I have no choice but to work,” she says. “Coming to the United States was a great opportunity for me, but one that did not come cheap.”

…………

Jamba Juice on Church and Market Streets in San Francisco is overflowing with bodies, the line from the two working cash registers winding like a snake out the single front door and onto the sidewalk outside. The “ping” sound that can be heard over the unintelligible chatter of customers signals the exchange of money, peacefully coexisting with the harsh buzzing of blenders. Guests sport satisfied smiles as they exit the store, sipping pink, yellow, and green liquids that go by such names as “Razzmatazz,” “Banana Berry,” and “Mango-a-go-go.”

Behind the scenes, wearing a forest-green apron and black hair net over her long, dirty blonde hair, Rachel Young scoops up strawberries in preparation for a smoothie, followed by bananas, then peaches. For four hours a day, up to five days a week, Rachel eats, drinks, and dreams of smoothies.

Like Adriana, Rachel, a junior at San Francisco State studying business, Rachel works hard to pay for school and daily needs. She’s spent each year of her college career acting as what she titles a “smoothie slave.” And like Adriana, she’s resigned to the fact that working is necessary, especially in recent times with the cost of education steadily increasing.

“School has become so expensive,” says Rachel, as the quad on the SFSU campus is reflected out of her neon green sunglasses. “It’s really terrible. And there would be no way for me to afford it plus living unless I work.”

With her cherub cheeks and summer blue eyes, Rachel resembles her mother as a young woman. She recalls a favorite childhood memory; playing at the park on sunny spring afternoons. Rachel is a bouncy five-year-old, her long pigtails soaring like kites as she flies back and forth on a swing. Her bubbly giggles seep into the smooth, crisp air, merging with the deep, silky laugh of her mother. Together, they swing and swing until the blazing yellow sun sets out to sleep.

Rachel and her mother had only each other while Rachel was growing up, with her mom working two, and sometimes three jobs in order to support her daughter. Rachel credits her mom with her own work ethic.

“My mom definitely taught me what it means to work hard and earn your own way,” says Rachel, pulling on navy blue cardigan over a gray, floral-printed tank. “My mom couldn’t afford to send me to school on her own, which is why I work so hard to be here. I want to make her proud.”

Rachel sits in a small, hospital white room in the Business building at SF State. Her head wobbles and rolls and the dull droning of her professor shoots waves of fatigue through her body. The tick-ticking of the uniform clock suddenly becomes meaningful as the hand lands at 3:25 p.m. Class is over. Rachel grabs her grape-colored backpack, and rushes out to catch the  bus. Work starts at 4:15 p.m. Sharp. Sitting on Muni, she pulls out her hairnet and apron, prepping for yet another day on the job.

Tomorrow, it’ll all start over.

…………..

Students like Adriana and Rachel work hard as they try to remain financially in stride with the ever increasing tuition of California higher education. November of 2009 saw a 32 percent undergraduate tuition hike for the state’s students, put into effect by the California Board of Regents. This past November, just one year after this staggering raise, the California State University Board of Trustees voted on an additional 10 percent rise in tuition for the 2011-2012 school year, while simultaneously instituting a 5 percent mid-year fee increase. These seemingly indefensible monetary swells have led to student protests up and down the state, on university campuses and at the state capital as well, as students attempt to fight for their education.

“I’ve participated in a couple of marches protesting costs,” says Rachel. “It’s unbelievable really, the continuous increases in tuition. And it’s sad that working students like me are forced to work that much harder to maintain our education.”

…………

The black flowers covering Bree Ryan’s twin-sized bed match the color of the sky peeking through her window. The soft silver light of the moon illuminates her sleeping face as the Office theme song chimes through the speaker of her iPhone. Bree throws one arm out towards her nightstand, desperate to shut off her alarm and pretend that it isn’t actually time to leave the warm comfort of her bed.

Reluctantly opening her olive-green eyes, she checks the time; 5:45 a.m. A tiny whimper escapes her small, light pink lips in protest of being up before the sun, as she heads into her paper white bathroom to brush her teeth, comb her dark brown hair with blonde highlights, and apply teal shadow to heavy lids of her eyes.

She has to be at work by 7 a.m., the same time she must be there four other days of the week. Muffins, coffee, and sandwich-making await her at the Station Café at the top of the SFSU campus, where she has been gainfully employed since her arrival at the university.

Bree Ryan with her mom and younger sister as they move Bree into her first San Francisco apartment.

Bree is a third-year transfer student studying political science at SFSU, hailing from Bakersfield; and Las Vegas, San Diego, Tucson. After the death of her father from cancer when she was just six-years-old, Bree‘s mother frequently moved her and younger sister to new cities, never being able to find a place that felt like home without the family’s center.

For Bree, this meant new school after new school after new school; and countless after-school jobs as soon as she reached the age of 15. Target, McDonald’s, and Starbucks have all employed Bree at one point or another, to name a few. Bree has spent much of her life working hard to help support her family after the loss of her father, as her mom struggled under the income of a single parent to take care of her two daughters.

“I’m no stranger to working, that’s for sure,” says Bree, her full cheeks glowing rosily from the brisk, cool breeze. “I’ve always supported myself, because as hard as my mom works, we’ve always struggled with money. Coming to college hasn’t changed this, and with school being so damn expensive, I’ve gotta work even more.”

The squeak of sneakers moving on the shining hard wood floor echo off the bleachers and surrounding white walls of the gym. The stench of sweat hangs in the warm, stuffy air as the slap of palm against ball can be heard amongst the chattering of voices and shrilling of whistles.

Bree stands on the sidelines in a grey-collared shirt and black yoga pants, calling out points and fouls as she watches the ongoing volleyball match. She can be found in this exact spot three nights a week, refereeing intramural volleyball for up to four hours. As she lifts her sparkling silver whistle up to her lips with her left hand, she simultaneously uses her right to wipe the gleaming perspiration off her forehead.

In order to keep up with the rising costs of education, and simply to afford going away to school, Bree has to hold down two jobs. With early mornings spent at the café, late nights at the gym, and those hours in between dedicated to classed and studying, Bree has become used to running on little to no sleep.

“It’s exhausting sometimes, I’m not going to lie,” she says, as she gingerly sips on a Diet Coke. “I’ve gotten used to it, though. I mean, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. And I know in the end it’ll be worth it.”

………….

Adriana, Rachel, and Bree are among a growing percentage of employed college students. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 45 percent of full-time undergraduates were working while enrolled. For those part-time students, this rate jumped to 80 percent. The number of hours students are working has increased over the past few years as well. Those working less than 20 hours per week has declined 15 percent, according to the same survey, while those working 20 hours or more has increased 21 percent. Today, one in ten employed full-time students is working 35 hours or more a week.

Research has revealed as well that the amount of hours students work affects both their academic and social experiences. According to an article published in May of 2005 by the Indiana Project on Academic Success, 50 percent of employed students are working enough hours to hinder their studies, including grade point average.

Enough hours seems to be 20 or more, according to studies, with these students having lower GPAs, and showing fewer interactions with faculty and lower quality peer relationships.

Students working less than 20 hours however, have been found to maintain higher GPAs than those working 20 hours or more, as well as than those completely non-working students.

Whatever statistics show, the fact remains that working and studying together takes its toll on students. “There are definitely sacrifices that have to be made,” says Rachel, the sun shining off her hot pink fingernails as she scratches her cheek, “I miss out on a lot activities, and sometimes don’t have as much study time as I’d like to. But working is necessary for me to even to be here so I’m okay with it.”

Bree agrees: “Working two jobs and going to classes is definitely tiring, and sometimes I might feel like I’m missing out on the full college experience because of it. But really, I’m just grateful to be here.”

The words “college,” “students,” and “poor” have become synonyms for one another is recent decades. This unfortunate truth can be related back to the rising costs of higher education; tution, books, housing, etc.

At SFSU, “poor college students” find themselves losing even more money due to living in one of the most famous -and expensive- cities in the world. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment per month in San Francisco is $1,300, a two-bedroom is $1,600, and a three-bedroom is $2,100.

Compared to the national medium, the cost of utilities in the city is 7 percent higher, transportation 11 percent, groceries 16 percent, and housing is 172 percent higher. By way of comparison, Phoenix’s cost of living is 39% below that of San Francisco, Miami’s is 34%, Anchorage 22%, Knoxville 45%, and Dallas is 43%.

Overall, the cost of living in San Francisco is 62 percent above the nation’s average; a not-so-optimistic statistic for those “poor college students” hoping to live and work in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.People and students especially who dream of attending college in one of the United State’s largest and most popular city must be financially prepared the city’s inflated cost of living and education; or prepare to work very hard.

……………

Monday. 12:50 p.m. Caitlin Martinez slowly, meticulously ties the faded white laces of her black Converse sneakers. Standing up, she stretches her arms towards the ceiling, where multicolored paper lanterns hang amusingly.

She gathers up every last piece of trash left over from the BLT she adoringly ate for lunch, checking, then double-checking the black coffee table for left-over crumbs.

It’s 12:52.

Grabbing her floral-printed purse, she looks inside at the contents; wallet, lip gloss, keys, hand sanitizer, cell phone. Wait. Is my wallet in there?

12:53. Yes.

Sighing, closing her golden-almost hazel-eyes she takes a deep breath as she steps down from her third-story apartment to make the short walk to her work, which she begins sharply at one.

Caitlin Martinez works as a student assistant in the Student Services building at SFSU.

A senior at SFSU, Caitlin works as a student assistant to the Dean of Student Affairs in the Student Services building on campus. Coming from a single income family, Caitlin’s mother and father have spent the past four years struggling to put both her and her older brother through college.

After her mother received a pink slip from the Stockton Unified School District in 2007, she has since become a devoted homemaker, though that loss of income has been greatly felt by the family’s finances.

Caitlin’s father, a worker for the Union Pacific Railroad, has been devotedly working overtime in recent months to make up the loss, but with two kids in college, it’s been difficult.

“My poor dad,” says Caitlin. “It breaks my heart how much he works but he does it for us. I’m so thankful for him, but I know I need to do my part, now more than ever.”

The beep of the elevator as it reaches each new floor causes Caitlin’s heart to accelerate in unwanted anticipation. Two… BEEP…Three. Tugging at her blue and purple plaid button up, tucking her wavy bark-colored hair, she steps gingerly out onto the fourth floor.

She is greeted with SFSU banners on the white wall directly in front of the elevator’s steel gray doors, arranged in various patterns meant to exude school pride to all who pass.

Passing two bold red lounge chairs and a more subdued navy couch, Caitlin sets her purse down under her neatly organized desk, and prepares to spend the next four behind it.

The phone rings and to Caitlin’s sensitive ears, the sound resembles sharp nails on a chalkboard. Vice President, Dean of Student’s office. This is Caitlin. How may I help you? Oh, you’re here for your appointment? The vice president will be right with you. Yes, of course I can take a message.

The beeping of the elevator right across the hall, the ringing of the phone, dial-tone of the fax machine, constant mumbling of voices…

These phrases and noises consume Caitlin’s life for 20 hours every week. Her job as a student assistant for the vice president of student affairs may not be particular enjoyable for her, but the check she receives on the 15^th of every month keeps her motivated.

“Being a secretary isn’t my dream job or anything, so no, I don’t necessarily like it too much,” says Caitlin. “But any job is better than no job. And right now just having some sort of income to help pay for school is the most important thing.”

 Caitlin is looking forward to graduating at the end of May however, but now her biggest concern is paying back the $20,000 in student loans she was forced to borrowed.  And she’s not alone. Higher education has increased so dramatically in the past two decades that not only do students have to worry about working while studying in order to pay for their education but also paying back the debt they will inevitably find themselves buried in come graduation.

In the 2007-08 school year, two-thirds of students graduated from a four-year university carrying some amount of debt forward with them. The average student loan debt of this graduating class was $28,000. This figure had increased by 5.6 percent, or roughly $1,200 in just four years, since the 2003-04 school year. More than 50 percent of recent college graduates end their college education with some form of debt derived from student loans.

………………..

Jana Howarth lies on the dampened cement tinted silver in the moonlight. Scraping at the dirt on her face, running her fingers through her tangled, mud-colored hair she counts coins out of a plastic cup on the sidewalk. The streets are dead, everyone tucked cozily into their homes. Jana sits in within the flimsy confines of a cardboard box, a scarce barrier between her grimy skin and thin layers of ripped cotton.

A moth-eaten sleeping bag lies across the wet ground, providing little comfort from the brisk winter air.  A half-empty water bottle and carton of charitable left-overs sit sadly in a corner. Five years ago Jana was graduating from college, looking forward to a bright future. But the declining economy and less-than-stellar job market had different plans.

Well, that may not be real. But the fear of it, irrational as it may be, sure is. Yes, I am Jana. A soon-to-be college graduate who is preparing to battle today’s unstable job market. Like Caitlin, worrying about the repayment of my student loans is beginning to weigh heavily on my mind.

And like Adriana, Bree, and Rachel, I too have worked throughout the entirety of my college career to afford my higher education. Also coming from a one income family, my family has struggled for the past decade to make ends meet, with  my mother, our primary bread-winner, working full-time in retail to support our family. Hard work and student loans have allowed me to attend college, but in light of recent disappointing employment rates, an almost college graduate like myself can’t help but experience ridiculous nightmarish thoughts about ending up on the streets; broke, homeless, and alone.

Bright sunlight beams softly down onto the little girl’s oval face, the blunt layer of brown bangs dancing merrily across her forward the light spring breeze. Jana rushes out of the classroom in a stampede of students as the bells shrillsloudly through ears decorated happily with leaping blue dolphins.

She hops toward the street on glittering purple Jelly sandals. She spots the worn out, black Aerostar van and the woman with black hair as short as a boy’s leaning lightly against the hood. Her pace quickens and she is scooped up against plum shirt, giggles escaping as fingers dance along her ribs. She’s with mom now and all is right with the world.

My mother’s dedication to her family and awesome work ethic have inspired me throughout my life, and have kept me driven during my college career. My hero, my mother, has always financially helped me as much as she could, but it just isn’t enough.

“I wish I could help my daughter more, it breaks my heart,” Janice Howarth sighs as she plays with a gold stud in her right ear. “I wish our income was larger, but I’m so proud of how hard she’s worked and her college education.”

Working all four years as a teacher’s aide at a local Mission preschool called Buen Dia Family School, I’ve been challenged but the income pays for the education I was studying to receive and studying to receive the education I was working to pay for.

The lifetime experience received from both, however, will be an invaluable skill in the future, and will one day work to further my career.

The late August sun warms Adriana’s face as she steps into the bustling SFSU quad. It is the first day of school, Adriana’s first day of college in America, and she is stepping onto campus as a student for the first time. She hikes her purple backpack with white polka dots higher onto her shoulder, and smiles as she looks around the busy campus with its lush green lawns and rushing, talking, and laughing students going about their days. She smiles and begins to walk towards the business building in her candy cane red flip flops and matching v-neck. She is thinking, Today is the first day of her brand new life.

Losing Heart

By Jessica Heller

On Fillmore Street at the corner of Fell Street, a neat yellow brick building dominates most of the block. Four rounded columns frame three pink doors. Angry, red NO TRESSPASSING signs adorn each of the doors. The windows that aren’t obstructed by plywood are intricate stained glass. Pink, green, yellow, purple and blue glass are encrusted with dust. The lead in between has turned from a once bright black to a powdery silver. In some places the glass is broken or tiles are clearly missing.

The bricks and glass and plywood are a shell of what was once the heart of the surrounding community. Sacred Heart Parish sits on a hill overlooking the Fillmore District, Western Addition, Hayes Valley and Alamo Square, and was completed in 1898. The Italianate building, designed by once-famed architect Tomas John Welsh, was home to a large and thriving congregation for more than 100 years.

We enter through a padlocked garage door, and venture into a dark passageway. A rough hand belonging to Kevin Strain, a friend of the owner of the building, flips a breaker and the garage springs into light. A city-issued work permit lies on the dusty concrete floor. The same rough hand reaches up onto a makeshift metal shelf and hands me a hard hat. We are entering a building deemed too unsafe for public use.

We cross the threshold from the garage and enter a dark, wood paneled hallway. Bead board and crown moldings still cling to the dirty walls. As we walk, his dirty work boots beat the ground and echo.

In his own right, Strain is an experienced landlord, real estate entrepreneur, ranch hand and cowboy. The off-white 10-gallon hat that was on his head when we first shook hands outside is still pulled down low over his eyes. He never replaced it with the awkward, dusty hard hat he handed me. For him, it was an unnecessary precaution.

“I’ve been a landlord in this city for 25 years. This is nothing,” he says as I try to genially pick my way past deserted wood, pails and garbage. My grey Converse shoes aren’t as up to the task as his work boots. “I was in here before they started stripping it. Back when people still thought the city would intervene and deem this place to be a historic landmark. Now look at it. Rat droppings in a church. Watch your step.”

So that’s what the smell is. I had noticed it the moment I set foot inside, but hadn’t said anything. Strain explained that it was a combination of the droppings, the poison designed to kill the rats, and the accumulation of dust in the shuttered building. When I take the time to focus, among the dust and papers on the ground, are small pellets—and I’ve been stepping in them.

Red, blue and white electrical wires protrude violently from the walls where sconces and lamps once hung. Strain walks us through a plywood door at the end of the hall marked MAIN in messy, black spray paint. The original door, like the sconces, is missing.

We have reached what was once a grand worshiping space. The room is enormous. The ceiling is high, and is obscured by the lack of light and what appears to be a net hung around it. In good light it would be obvious that the high ceiling is covered in a chipping mural. The mural was painted in 1920s by the muralist Achille G. Disi. The mural was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prietta Earthquake, and had to be netted to help preserve it.

An organ, which is also missing from the room, once dominated the rear of the church. Before it was illegally removed, the organ had sat silent for nearly 20 years. Parishioners were concerned that playing the giant instrument would further damage the fragile ceiling.

The hardwood floors are mostly intact and the stained glass is still beautiful when it’s illuminated. Light trickles in from gaps in the plywood on the outside and through higher, unprotected windows. The raised altar at the opposite end of the room is bare except for dust and rat droppings.

“Hey!” Strain yells. He’s forgotten my name, and I realize I’ve begun to lag behind. “I told you to keep close. Now, take a look at the floor. It’s scarred, see?” He uses his boot to kick around some dust and random debris. He reveals a foot-long rectangular shaped opening in the wood floor. The boards surrounding it are marred with deep scratches. Some have been pulled up and broken in the process. Someone hacked up the floor here. Six feet away, another wound. They’re everywhere.

“They pulled the pews up for auction. Didn’t do it nicely either. Everything that could go did. Couple hundred pews I think. Same with the doors, altar, trim, everything. When this place gets knocked down, the bricks will get sold too.”

If he feels sad, he doesn’t show it. This is business. If the building should have been saved, it’s the city’s fault. Instead, the city rejected designating the church a historically significant site and demanded that it be brought up to modern building and safety standards.

On Dec. 27, 2004, the priests at Sacred Heart conducted their last mass. Although the congregation prayed for divine intervention to save their beloved church, no help came. The church was in need of major upgrades and earthquake retrofitting that would have cost the parish over $8 million. Instead spending the money to save one of two churches of its kind in California, the Catholic Archdiocese closed Sacred Heart and sold the building.

In July 2005, a San Francisco lawyer named Fred Furth bought the troubled building for $5 million. The goal was to have the church designated a historic landmark, which would lead to the allocation of funds for some of the improvements. The rest of the repairs would be paid for through donations. In the end, even Furth’s efforts proved futile, and the building has sat vacant ever since.

“This is really just a big, fat, unfortunate mess,” said Jeffery Heller, the chief financial officer and one of the founders of the architecture firm HellerManus. The firm has worked on many historical preservation projects in San Francisco, including the preservation or San Francisco’s City Hall and the Columbarium, which is a domed building in the Inner Richmond that serves as the final resting place for the ashes of some of the city’s most famous and well-to-do residents.

“What happened with the church is really difficult. No one counts on all these things going wrong, but with such an old building, and the city’s reputation for barring construction it happens. These things go wrong, but with such an old building it’s going to end up costing someone a lot.”

After the auction, Furth was contacted with the possibility that Sacred Heart could, in fact, be eligible for historical salvation. But, now the church would be missing many of the elements that make it historical and beautiful. Two rose windows were sold, along with at least one of the original intricate marble altars. The inside of the parish was literally stripped.

According to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, no permits were issued by the city for the removal of anything inside of the church. Instead, a Stop Work Order was posted by the San Francisco Department of Inspection. From the inside of Sacred Heart, it appears that if any such order was issued it was subsequently ignored.

Groups that had tried in vain to save the site were dumbstruck by the auction, especially the group Save Our Sacred Heart, which spearheaded the preservation of the site. The group includes lawyers, architects, preservationists, historical society members, parishioners and friends of the church.

The group’s website quotes the Department of Building Inspection’s Deputy Director Ed Sweeney as saying that workers disobeyed the Stop Work Order and went to work during the weekend, crated everything up and off-hauled it. They took the altar, statues, pews, the organ, two windows.” The group states that within the marble alter were certified saint bones.

In a move that stunned both sides, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution to support the preservation of the church on November 16, 2010. Along with it, the board would investigate and direct the City Attorney’s Office to pursue appropriate enforcement measures against the owner for the unlawful sale of pieces of the church.

When the vote was taken no public comment was allowed, but Tara Sullivan from the city’s Planning Department spoke in favor or preserving the church’s historical significance. Because of the ongoing investigation, and the possibility that the city may eventually choose to file a criminal case against Furth, none of San Francisco’s supervisors would comment on the status of these various responses.

Michael Covarrubias, the chairman and chief executive at TMG Partners and also a member of the Land Use Committee in San Francisco, would only say that what happened at Sacred Hear is an example of the “unfortunate nature of red-tape.”

Today, Sacred Heart is still vacant, its future uncertain. Sure, the Board is going to look into it. Eventually. In the meantime, the parish church, like many other buildings in San Francisco, is stuck in limbo. It has experienced a fall from grace.

Origins of hate

In the Beginning

They were swimming in the scent of roses when hatred bloomed.  The grandson led the way, trailed by family members with egg salad sandwiches and pasta salad that had been drenched in olive oil, leaving smears across the oversized bowls.  Hand-in-hand the grandfather took his growing grandson to the edge of the park flourishing in bursting red tulips and “All-American” rose gardens at Gage Park. The humid Topeka heat left the boy, Josh, with a the kind of fever only a five-year-old can have for the welcoming green of the soft cooling blades of grass.  He pressed his grandpa to move faster and faster, making his grandfather’s ten-gallon hat nearly topple from his head.  As the dry hot pavement of the sidewalk began to end, the meadow’s promising magic became more and more real. The grandfather, now becoming more conscious of his cultivating years, attempted to keep the pace but finally submitted to his tired bones.  The boy didn’t notice that he had left his grandfather behind as he took flight into the openness of the field.

The boy swept through the grass with a squeal.  His cousins and siblings raced toward with their bikes and kites as his mother, Shirley, attends to her other 10 children.  The massive lot swelled in the park as other families looked back for only a quick glance, for this was the family that everyone would talk about after church services and at the water cooler. If not for the colossal size of the bloodline, the family was always known for being the subject of controversy in Topeka.  Grandpa Fred, a preacher and civil rights lawyer, was praised for bringing down Jim Crow laws in the city but his fiery brimstone sermons had left many in the town fearful of his Calvinist comments of a sweltering torturous eternity, leaving the entirety of the family as social exclusions.

You wanna go to hell? -Fine.  I love it.  I love the thoughts of you going to hell. I’ll be playing close attention to you brother, sister, in hell.  As the eternal ages roll by I’ll be watching you suffer and all the nuances of your exquisite torment and pain and how you do.  Eternity you know, is a long time.  I’ll be watching you…I’ll be watching you.

But for today, the cerulean sky and fragrance of blossoms played as peacekeepers to any feuds or disagreements.

Josh, named after the leader of the Israelites after the death of Moses, was unaware that he had wandered from the family.  Intoxicated by the warmth of the day, he meandered through the grass kicking up anthills and diving for grasshoppers.  His trance was halted though,when his small eyes caught the last moment of a shadow brushing across a tree.  He looked back for his grandfather.

Now realizing he was alone, he braced himself for the anger and consequence of his poor decision. But instead of being confronted by the scratchy low bellowing of his grandpa he was faced with another man, a stranger.  The man said nothing as he looked at the lone boy, but the scene shouted danger.

The grandfather, now hurriedly searching for his young grandson, caught sight of the boy and froze.  The boy, now inching closer and closer to the man in the shadowy trees and concealing bushes, made slow motions toward the uncertainty.  Hatred took over the man and that small boy and all those near them.

The ordinary person doesn’t know what the fags do and what their agenda is.

The ordinary person thinks that their just simple hearted, sincere, friendly people that are being mistreated and bashed and who need the protection of the law so therefore they won’t be bashed.

            After several claims of his young grandchildren being “accosted” by gay men in the shrubbery of Gage Park, including an accusation that young Timothy Phelps was literally chased by two men through the park, Fred Phelps took the issue to the local government.

Harry “Butch” Felker responded to Phelps and thanked him for his “colorful” letter describing the perversions that took place in the park, and said a program would be implemented to ensure that the impending danger the Phelps described would not continue to be a disturbance.

Because it is listed as a “cruisy” area in the Damron address book, a list of gay-friendly locations throughout the United States, Phelps criticized the park acting as a “safe house” to homosexual activity. After two years of waiting for action, stewing in hatred for the men who frequented the wooded area at the southwest corner of the park, Phelps disgusted silence became too much to stomach.

 

 

Watch your kids! Gays in the restrms

The posters littered the park.  In colorful large fonts they stung the consciences of those who passed, leaving them in either fear or outrage.   In an effort to wake up the local government to the promiscuity of Gage Park, in 1991 the Fred Phelps family, his 13 children, his grandchildren and great grandchildren took up arms to begin “The Great Gage Park Decency Drive” that cluttered every open space available at the public park.

The campaign aimed to clean out the “Sodomites rats nest” that infiltrated the family area.  But as the local churches and God’s law became more and more involved in discussion of the campaign, the family of the Westboro Baptist Church made a bold move in bold letters.

GOD

HATES

GAYS

“It’s catchy and it’s easy to put on a sign because all the words are small.” -Timothy Phelps

Brutality

It is unknown what the boy saw before he lost consciousnesses.  It could have been the glorious view of the starlit sky in the empty fields, the crisp chilled autumn air and the familiar musky smell of cattle.  His mother, Judy, and father, Dennis, and the community of Laramie, Wyoming would like to believe in the picturesque scene as the boy’s last.

But he suffered.  He likely endured freezing cold temperatures that pierced the open bleeding wounds of his crushed skull, made by the back of his attackers pistol, and waited in vain for his murderers to find mercy.

Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, was robbed and viciously beaten in the silence of the dark Wyoming night October 7, 1998.  His defenseless limbs were found bound to a fence in the barren pasture making him appear as a bloody scarecrow to the cyclist who found him nearly 18 hours later.

Matthew’s small body drooped over the wood in an unnatural inhuman fashion.  When the ambulance reached his powerless frame, Shepard’s body was covered in semi-dried blood, all but his face, which was washed by salt tears.

He suffered fractures to the back of the skull and right ear, more than ten lacerations to the face, neck and head as well as severe brain-stem damage.  Shepard had been unreservedly abused and tortured by 21-year-olds Aaron McKinney and Russel Henderson.

For Henderson and McKinney, the robbery was effortless.  They told their girlfriends that they planned to rob the young gay man after Shepard came on to them, to teach him a lesson. What kind of strength could a gay man, a sissy, a queer, a faggot have, they thought.

After allegedly “pretending to be gay,” the two offered Sheperd a ride home from the local Fireside bar.

Robert Debree: What did he look like?

Aaron McKinney: Mmm, like a queer.  Such a queer dude.

Robert Debree: He looks like a queer?

Aaron McKinney: Yeah, like a fag, you know?

McKinney and Henderson later claimed the “gay panic” argument, explaining that because they were so uncomfortable with the notion of a man being attracted to them that were launched into a hyper-masculine heterosexual rage that led them to barbaric actions.

Aaron McKinney: Blacked out. My fist. My pistol. The butt of the gun. Wondering what happened to me. I had a few beers and, I don’t know. It’s like I could see what was going on, but I don’t know, it was like somebody else was doing it.

McKinney and Henderson then took Shepard out into the prairie.  They dragged him through dust and screams to the fence where they tied him to the splintering wood.  Shepard coughed out debris as his dry voice filled with fear shouted in grief.  With each shuddering vibration from contact between closed fist and Shepards bones, they felt more of a man.

They began to laugh at Shepard’s defenselessness as his bright face and blonde hair became suffused with blood.  He would learn. Grazing cattle looked on, perhaps noting their fate would not include such brutality.

Then the laughter halted.  They had gone too far.  But they continued beating him until Shepard was no longer identifiable. Shepard’s shrieks of unbearable pain were unlike any sound his murderers had ever heard in their short lifetimes, and it invoked a human horror in the assaulters that provoked a swift exit.

They took Shepard’s shoes and left the robbery-assault with a grand total of $20. As they dashed to leave, Shepard pleaded for his ailing life. The horrendous helplessness of Shepard caused Henderson to take the last look back at something that was suddenly not a man at all, but a mash of bloodied flesh hanging from a ranch fence.

The headlights of McKinney’s pickup created a glisten of the crimson blood flowing from Shepard’s veins until he was left in the bellowing darkness.

Dr. Cantway: Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour. You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing. Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

He was rushed to the hospital but never regained consciousness. The damage to his brain stem was too severe to maintain life. Shepard kept his shallow breaths through life support until he was pronounced death five days later on Oct. 12, 1998.

 After Death

Matthew Shepard’s death commanded the attention of the nation.  Though in the past, the policy received little attention, it became widely known and widely opposed, that the United States government could not define Shepard’s murder as a hate crime.  Crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation were not grounds for prosecuting such a heinous action as one driven by homophobic hatred.

But bill after bill became a failure.  Wyoming House of Representatives and former president Bill Clinton attempted to expand the definition to gay men and lesbian women in 1999, but legislators could not see the reasoning.

Though hatred was not acknowledged in Congressional debates, pure hatred was unmistakably in attendance at Shepard’s funeral.

MATT

IN

HELL

The Westboro Baptist Church was ready and hating at the entrance to the young man’s memorial. And leading the brigade was father and grandfather Fred Phelps in a red, white and blue windbreaker topped with a ten-gallon hat.

No Special

Laws for

FAGS

With death brought the birth of public detestation. The picket of Matthew Shepard’s funeral by the church gained WBC international notoriety as a symbol of disdain and extremism. Their stinging pain singed the tempers of viewers, which was exactly what they had hoped for.

His parents, friends and family passed the neon signs in tears mourning for the love they had lost in Matthew.

“WBC picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, to inject a little truth and sanity into the irrational orgy of lies consuming this world. WBC does not support the murder of Matthew Shepard,” the WBC website said after the picket. “However, the truth about Matthew Shepard needs to be known. He lived a Satanic lifestyle. He got himself killed trolling for anonymous homosexual sex in a bar at midnight. Unless he repented in the final hours of his life, he is in hell.”

The church touts they have done more than 30,000 pickets in all 50 states. Despite uproar at the violation of the privacy of mourners, the pickets are protected by federal free speech laws.

The church, comprised mostly of members of the Phelps family, sent a wave through American society by providing a modern visual of the extremism that keeps civil rights at bay.

The Laramie Project first premiered at a Denver theatre in February of 2000, recounting hundreds of interviews to describe the torture and reaction to the animalistic nature of Matthew Shepard’s death.

Author Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project created the production that struck the spotlight on hate crime legislation in several states while spurring controversy about the 21-year-old’s open sexuality in an effort to heighten the discussion.

The true-life accounts of the witnesses of cruelty and violence in Laramie gained intricate details of the murder that the New York Times and Washington Post had neglected.

The play, however, was banned from performance in high schools throughout the nation.  Teachers lost their tenured positions after handing a copy to their students and drama teachers became inhibited from taking on the controversial topic.

ACT III of the play even gave attention to WBC and provided reactions from the community.

Despite the needed attention from the media, the battle to gain protection for LGBT victims continued to fall short.

During a congressional debate in 2009, Representative Virginia Foxx went so far as to define Shepard’s murder as a simple robbery gone wrong and the idea of his death being an actual hate crime was a “hoax.”

“I also would like to point out that there was a bill — the hate crimes bill that’s called the Matthew Shepard bill is named after a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay,” Foxx said. “The bill was named for him, hate crimes bill was named for him, but it’s really a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.”

Judy Shepard was in attendance.

Finally, on October 28, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act with Judy and Dennis Shepard as guests. More than 11 years had passed since Matthew’s death.

The Laramie Project

The cries of the suffering had deafened her in dreams. The boys, the young men too young to be simply men, who took their own lives to escape from the agony of the daily cruelty. Needless to say, she awoke with a mission.

The taunting of the tortured voices of—Tyler Clementi, 18, plunged into the Hudson River—Raymond Chase, 19, hung himself in the dorms—Asher Bron, 13, shot himself in the head—along with the innumerous lost voices impelled her actions to the stage.  Two years prior, the time was not right to produce The Laramie Project, but with the recent burgeon of LGBT youth suicides, she became unafraid of the spotlight. The teens, at the ages of her students, were bullied by peers to the point of mortification and therefore took their youthful lives.

Trish Buttrill, drama teacher at Gunderson High School, said in years past she didn’t have a group of students who could handle such material. But this particular company had a certain spark that could incite a conversation of hatred, humanity and tolerance.

Though the students were set for production of “Wylie and The Harry Man,” a David and Goliath folktale for children about a boy outwitting a swamp monster,  Buttrill decided inconvenient circumstances would not deter her dedication to end the silence in her community.

“I just woke up one morning and said this is our moment,” Buttrill said of her decision to produce the controversial play. “We dropped everything; I went and bought the script, made bunches of copies and we started the next day.”

Buttrill came to Gunderson after teaching at a magnet school for the arts.  Teens who were taught to demi-plié and ron de jambe in diapers and were austerely trained from the moment they stepped into a high school hallway.

The teens of Gunderson on the other hand were raw, their emotions untouched by formal instruction. Techniques and passions were untamed and their energy contained a magnetism that fades with the endless lessons endured for the love of stage mothers.

The students of Gunderson High School had been waiting for the opportunity, the challenge, to take on a more serious production, and when Buttrill presented the opportunity to address the recent mushrooming of LGBT suicides by producing the Laramie Project, they unreservedly accepted.

“We grow some great kids here,” Buttrill smiled alluding to the lines repeated in Act II. Buttrill said a community that promoted open dialogue and maturity primed these students.

The adoration Buttrill has for her student’s spills out of any conversation. With each individual pupil, she doesn’t see a slot on the attendance list but a unique mind, a curious soul and an affectionate heart.

There is brightness in Buttrill’s smile that brings warmth and comfort to the most inhibited.  She uses humor whenever possible to embrace happiness and to combat the most dreary of life’s moments. This reassurance was heavily utilized once the students received the lengthy three-act play. Each individual ensemble member would be cast in one to six characters.

“We thought no one would be interested, or it wasn’t the right time to do it,” said Dante Spears who was casted as Conrad Miller, Doc O’Conner and a juror determining the guilt of the two young men responsible for Matthew Shepard’s death.

The idea of producing the controversial play was nerve-wracking already, but the young players were faced with extensive monologues that left them concentrating on the memorization of words rather than the content.

“When they first started out they were wondering why they wanted to do this play,” Buttrill said. “I was discouraged many times, it took a long time for these kids to show that they could really feel it.”

Buttrill began to show videos of the living witnesses of the notorious hate crime, to express the reality of the hatred that possessed the night of October 7, 1998. Buttrill began to create a discussion of real hatred and real people.

Buttrill herself was raised with a generation of silence.  A native of San Diego, she concealed her sexual orientation in a town where women lived as “spinsters” together for years unwilling to reveal their true identities.

“Women I’ve been friends with for years still don’t live openly,” she said. “I’ve even tried to speak with them about it, you know, you can be yourselves with me.”

Women who lived in fear of gossip and controversy ignored her efforts.

Because her teen years lied in the socially progressive decade of the women’s liberation and Stonewall riots that marked a milestone in LGBT liberation, Buttrill believes she benefitted from witnessing movements on the cusp of real change.

Still, when asked what she would have gained if she had the opportunity to perform The Laramie Project in her teen years she remembers the ignominy of her adolescence. She takes a moment of reflection and begins to laugh through tears.

“Oh, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and agony and sadness and shame,” she said.

As the students began to internalize the depth of the hatred that murdered Matthew, the many lines became superfluous and rehearsals began to gain more meaning.  But it wasn’t until hatred scheduled a meeting with the students, did they realize they were part of a movement.

Welcome Hate

 They were coming.

“WBC will picket The Laramie Project, fag propaganda play at Gunderson High School in San Jose, CA to remind this nation that God Hates Fags,” the website stated.

The hateful group that filled the pages with disdain in ACT III became much more existent in the minds of the teens when Buttrill received the message in her inbox.

“When these children die young … their blood will be on your hands,” replied Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of WBC founder Fred Phelps. “When you awake in hell, they will greet you on the streets.”

Though the words of the Phelps family leaves most shocked. Buttrill naturally reacted with laughter.

“They just loved the letter they got back,” Buttrill said of her students. “Perhaps I should take them more seriously but I don’t take them seriously getting that note from her was hilarious to me.”

Buttrill admits that she never thought there would be an argument by producing The Laramie Project.

“I naively thought it wouldn’t be such a big deal because the content of The Laramie Project is so beautiful to me,” she said.

WBC recently issued a statement to all high school students of the United States in the name of God:

“The message is:  every adult in your life has lied to you from birth.  They have taught you that God is a liar and that His commandments are merely suggestions, if that. They told you two lies, to wit:  It is okay to be gay & God loves everyone; ergo, live like the devil himself and you will still go to heaven when you die.  They did that because they hate you.”

The community of Gunderson High School reacted in the same way as Buttrill: with laughter and music.

Law

It was decided there was to be no emotional bias with hate.

When the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court decided March 2 that the Westboro Church and their public actions were fully protected under the first amendment, many in the nation was outraged.

The rights set down by the nations forefathers, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, shielded the church in their protests of soldiers who protected a “fag nation” in a landslide 8-1 vote.

That ruling had come in a case in which WBC had repeatedly picketed veteran funerals to express to the world that the suffering of war was punishment for the United States accepting homosexuals.  In its ruling, the court also reversed a 2007 decision that stated the group had committed invasion of privacy by picketing the funeral of — Snyder.

……………

Numerous LGBT youth were taking their lives in the fall of 2010 due to bullying and family condemnation. Students who lived in fear left this world to escape. Pulling the trigger, jumping, hanging — anything to forget.

Dr. Caitlin Ryan of the Family Acceptance Program at San Francisco State University found that LGBT youth who are rejected by their parents are 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide. Young men and women who are rejected by family and peers are also much more likely to suffer from depression and drug abuse.

Studies promoted the establishment of Gay Straight Alliance clubs in order to create safe environments for students who became victimized by their peers.

The parents of Asher Brown, a 13-year-old boy who killed himself after enduring constant harassment from four boys at his middle school, had attempted to contact school administrators prior to his death, as did many parents and terrified young teens throughout the nation. The school did nothing, but after his death claimed they were unaware of Asher being the victim of bullying.

Several witnesses said Asher was harshly ridiculed for years to the point where no one could claim lack of knowledge.

“That’s absolutely inaccurate — it’s completely false,” Amy Truong, Asher’s mother, told reporters. “I did not hallucinate phone calls to counselors and assistant principals. We have no reason to make this up.”

Parents and LGBT activists soon recognized the escalating number of deaths deserved political action realizing that anti-bullying legislation was not extended to LGBT youth.  It took the blood of youth to realize the law was not on their side.

Protest

Music poured from the pavement of New World Drive that night. The small street that led to Gunderson High School was crammed with bodies of young and old, protesting the hatred of WBC. Playful refrains and catchy bridges were necessary to ease the tension of the looming confrontation. Local police were forced to block the small road as Lady Gaga’s hit Born This Way was played again and again; an anthem for the counter protest that brought more than 500.

In the religion of the insecure

I must be myself, respect my youth

A different lover is not a sin

Believe capital H-I-M

The crowd, comprised mostly of students, was doused in rainbows and hearts, teens were dressed in leopard snuggies and sparkled headbands, neon tights and converse that led them to dance and twirl through the asphalt. The officers eyes darted more and more anxiously whenever a wave of excitement ran over the energized crowd.

The local news station dashed past the crowd with camera in hand. With each passing student, a high pitched scream joined with the crowd. I looked around for a moment to see if there was an oversized mascot provoking students to do “the wave” like homecoming games. The light-hearted fun resembled more of a pep rally than a battle between conservative religious values and LGBT rights.

The group fought hatred with humor. Nearly every hand carried a sign deriding the ferociousness of the notorious neon placard signs. While some decided to take on messages of acceptance and ignorance others simply scoffed. Signs touting massages of: My dog hates fags-I pledge allegiance to the fag of the United States of America-San Jose rejects hatred-God loves us all equally.

Veterans, waving enormous American flags, marched down New World Drive and silenced the scene. As they united in protest at the main street of Chenowyth, the crowd applauded and cheered for the men and women.

Curtain call was announced for those who were quick enough to buy tickets to the sold out performance. Because tickets had been sold out for weeks prior, most did not move from their place of protest. The mass of demonstrators moved to the edge of the main street where supporters honked and energy was maintained in a state of elation. Students from another high school gathered with angel wings representing the spirit of Matthew Shepard, an action mirroring the 1998 student supporters at a WBC protest. They sat at the curb in silence, waiting patiently for the ensuing war of words.

Fresno

The license plate was barely visible through the dust it had collected through the miles.  The deteriorated identifier read: Arkansas

The small campaign office had dubbed him Tattooed Knuckles Guy from the moment we set eyes on him.  For of course, every stereotype related to one with permanent ink on one’s knuckles applied. He was crass and intimidating, with an agenda to see us gone, even with empty threats.

I was 18, my partner, Jamie, only 16. He was ill equipped for what was to take place.

I had signed up to be a volunteer with Equality for All after I left my potentially permanent position at Youth for Christ. In a mere six months I had gone from worshipping Him with hands in air and lips singing out the lyrics to MercyMe proclaiming the word of God to standing in front of a Fresno Target in a bold red shirt proclaiming the need for social justice:

STOP

THE

INITIATIVE

I was considered a veteran after 6 weeks, training a newbie from the local Fresno High School to educate others, often in vain, of the oppression of the Limits on Marriage Initiative.

Do you believe in the freedom for gay and lesbian couples to marry?

The lucky were given thin blue ironing boards as tables for their efforts, but today we weren’t so lucky.  We were the least lucky that day.

He’s here.

I’m scared.

Don’t be. He can’t hurt you. The rule is you can’t speak to him.  We’re representing an entire movement in this city, and people are waiting for us to say the wrong thing: especially him. He’s going to heckle us, but whatever you do – DO NOT SPEAK TO HIM.

OK.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry.

Tattooed Knuckles guy set up his table across from us with a scowl.  He was a paid signature gatherer exploited by his lack of income from outside the state and had come to do anything to sell legislation by the signature.

Excuse me ma’am are you a registered voter? Are you a registered voter? Are you a registered voter?

My partner hesitantly followed me as we took our places directly in front of Tattooed Knuckles Guy. I had my tape measurer handy knowing I had to be at least three feet in front of his table.  But three feet would all I would be given. Our strategy was distraction, and it worked well.  With a big wave and the most American smile we could shine we began the process of “deflection.”

He locked eyes with a woman leading her red cart out of the air-conditioned department store and into the penetrating dry heat that sizzles the earth of the Central Valley each summer.

Excuse me ma’am are you a registered—

HAVE A GREAT DAY!

The tactic was simple: to interrupt the sales pitch with a sunny greeting. The woman stood in confusion as she hurriedly left the awkward situation.

You know, I’ve been readin’ up on my first amendment rights.

He said with a deep accent that made me envision a cartoon.  His consonants harsh and spiteful were somehow eased with his elongated vowels.

I know ya’ll can hear me. I know. I know you can.  Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?

He was hushed as to not make a scene of his vulgarities.

No one’s listenin’ to you. What are you even doin’ here you dumb fuckin’ kids? Get home.

I was angry, but I understood.  The campaign had illustrated us as an enemy; intent on taking money from the hard work of the lower class men and women they employed to see cents instead of reason.  I imagined someone walking into my workplace and stealing my proof of work ethic.

We stood in silence.

Excuse me are you regi-

HAVE A NICE DAY!

His anger grew but felt some release as the manager of the Target placed a massive post and sign in front of my face.  The manager set it on the tips of my toes at first attempt but settled to lace it a few centimeters off.

NO SOLICITING

He gave a wink of solidarity at Tattooed Knuckles Guy before dialing the Fresno Police Department to arrest the youth that had harassed his customers for weeks now. I attempt to tell the manager, in the most mature tone of voice of an 18-year-old young woman, that the soliciting he speaks of also applies to the paid signature gatherers and if they stay we stay.  This was a mantra I had developed through the weeks. He shrugged at me with a smile.

I quickly call the lawyer assigned to our local chapter as to save myself from handcuffs again.

In the chaos, I had forgotten my young partner.

HAVE A NICE DAY! HAVE A NICE DAY! HAVE A NICE DAY!

But his words were disrupted with rage, not by those affected, but by a Target shopper.  With camera in hand he snapped picture after picture of my partner and I. Exclaiming he was sick of our obscenity he was sending the photos to the FPD, so our vile immorality would desist.

Sodom and Gomorrah paid for their sins and so will you!

I quickly turned my back to him as my partner’s tears began to flow in an attempt to shield him from the man’s frenzy.

In a fury of God and the love of Christ, he translated his anger to his hands as he struck the small of my back. I hit stonewall.  Above the concrete ringing in my ears I could hear only one voice.

Excuse me ma’am are you a registered voter? Are you a registered voter? Are you a registered voter?

Scene

A dozen young cast members, clad in jean and flannel, began various attempts at southern dialects. The first performance of the Laramie Project had attracted a large crowd to Gunderson High School. Though their nerves were about them, the true tension dwelled in the seats.  Mothers scratched at their cuticles when their daughters used the umpteenth swear word of the night, and fathers uncrossed and crossed their legs as their sons took the stage to proclaim their characters’ perspective of the “homosexual lifestyle.”  Little brothers and sisters were left at home.  For such young ages, the parents decided, the subject matter was considered inappropriate. Two teenage girls text friends, their faces light up in the bright blue of their iPhones. As the character of Dennis Shepard, the father of Matthew, takes the stage to address the murderers of his son, the girls quietly giggle about the most recent viral youtube video.

Buttrill watched her students begin their scenes but noticed small differences.

The WBC, notorious for not keeping up with their lengthy picket schedule, had made an empty threat to the children. But despite the church’s absences, the chilling notion of such hatred and Matthew’s memory combined to spark a passionate sentiment.

The doctor’s tears were streaming when she spoke of McKinney in the next room.  Ismahan Chire, casted as a young Muslim feminist, lost herself in her monologue. Only Buttrill and other cast mates realized the anguish she felt as she spoke of the responsibility of society for Matthew’s death.

The bows had been initially staged without youthful tears.

The voice of Youth

7:30 a.m. two queers and a Catholic priest

 

The words incited tension in her muscle each time she uttered.

She hushed the word “queer” for some time before she could build the confidence that her father would not hear her.

He would pass by her door in the morning; her eyes would dart around the room to secure that her script of The Laramie Project was not visible.

Priyanka Rao had emigrated from India where she knew the gay community as an entirely different caste of human.

“I came from a place where I thought is a gay person a whole person? “ she said.

Her father still has no idea his daughter was in a play-let alone cast as a lesbian.

“The thing that made me nervous was more, like, who to tell that I was going to be in this play. Could I tell my grandma?” said company member Beth Reyes. “There were certain people who would question ….. Can I tell those people or those people?”

Theresa Voss, a Roman Catholic, invited her priest and conservative family with a fear that her parish may criticize her for her role in the show.

Gabby Lorenzo hesitated telling her father.

“The play wasn’t difficult,” she said. “The fear was telling my dad because my dad is generally conservative.”

Though Gabby’s father had a positive reaction to the message of the production, others were not so lucky.

“Some of the kids’ parents never saw the play and it breaks my heart,” Buttrill said.

“My parents don’t talk about it; they completely avoid the subject,” said Alexandra Nijmeh who played a narrator.

At 73, her Jordanian father would hear nothing of the subject. Her mother, born in Jerusalem, would often tell Shaela she was not permitted to be friends with young gay and lesbian students.

The play had gained the name “gay play” by peers throughout the high school. As it was meant to be an insult, students would respond with patience.

Patty Boyle endured the constant questioning of his sexuality from peers without being bothered. The bright haired young man, wears his polo collar slightly upturned when he explains that hatred and contempt have become all too easy.

“I think hate is a very strong word and hate is used very lightly,” he said. “If we keep talking about how we hate one another, it’s not going to lead anywhere except down.”

Patty played Aaron McKinney, one of the young men who murdered Matthew Shepard.  While watching her child on stage, his mother said that was the very last time she wanted to see her son in an orange jumpsuit.

“Patty was actually lighter than a lot of us backstage because some of us would have to question do I agree with my character?” Alexandra said.  “Because a lot of us were so close to what we were saying.  I wasn’t sure if this really what I believed.”

Patty said he stood differently, furrowed his brows, puffed his chest out when playing McKinney. A hyper-masculine true-life character who showed little remorse for his heinous crime, some of the ensemble resented McKinney while others took a more sympathetic perspective.

“I didn’t feel sorry for either of them. He had the ability to go back and help him. Someone who feels anything would have not done that,” said Evan Rose, a young actor who played Matt Galloway. “People distance themselves – I think that people who try to be over masculine they have an insecurity within themselves about they’re own masculinity and they’re trying to prove that they’re not homosexual to themselves.”

Though all agreed McKinney’s actions were gruesome, many questioned the origin of the hatred.

“I don’t know if I feel sorry, it’s more remorse.,” said Beth Reyes, Gay Straight Alliance president at Gunderson and member of the cast. “I think it speaks for their society.  I think had Russel Henderson and Aaron McKinney  grown up in a more accepting place and instead of people saying ‘oh it’s a horrible thing to be gay’ they wouldn’t have taken it to the extreme.”

Students remembered scenes of small children from Westboro Baptist Church picketing for hate and became overwhelmed.

“These beautiful little kids and you see their parents they’re feeding them all this hatred,” Theresa said. “You want to blame them as adults but they were really just kids.”

The children are not to blame, the cast decided, but generations and generations of homophobia that has filtered down into the status quo.

“You can only teach your kids what you know, there’s nothing you can, do you can’t go all the way back in history,” Gabby said.

But this generation could be a beckoning light, the cast said. With openness and dialogue, such as The Laramie Project, lessons of  hate can be reversed.

“Doing this show made me think I have my own power and I don’t really need them to support me in what I think,” Shaela said.

Such courage and transformation did not develop dryly. Before shows the cast and director would often become “squishy”, the term the cast used for being emotional to tears. Buttrill remembers many tears of pride and mourning.

At one point of high frustration, with the upcoming opening night, schedules and the doubts of society, Buttrill was left in tears. In a moment of vulnerability, she dipped away from the cast as to not inhibit the casts energy. But she could not hide.  She was embraced by the entirety of the cast surrounding her in the love that she had created in them for themselves and each other. They then cried, squishly, tears of humanity and joy.

“I couldn’t have been prouder, I’m going to get all teary about it,” she said through watery eyes. “It was a big deal, it was a big deal. I just love them. They’re just remarkable.”

 

Harold Camping’s Judgment Day

A Radio Evangelist’s Final Days

By Alberto Penalva

Harold Camping looks down at his watch and is ready. It is 5:15 p.m. and his radio show is going to begin in 15 minutes. He sits on a chair from Ikea in the middle of a set, in the corner of the studio, designed to look like your grandparent’s living room. The set is adorned with cheesy paintings of ships sailing along the ocean, seashells on shelves, family photos in frames next to wide leather-bound books. The room is even replete with fake ficus plants along the two perpendicular walls.

Harold Camping leans his thin head back against the back rest and closes his eyes. At 89 years old, he needs to rest up as much as possible throughout the day to make it to his radio show, Open Forum. The show is held every day from Monday to Friday at 5:30 p.m. until 7. The show airs over the radio, while simultaneously being filmed in the Family Stations, Inc. studio for later distribution.

He sits holding the Bible open in his frail hand, talking slowly and sonorously, his large ears like angel wings sticking out on the side of his head, and the skin of his neck sagging down with 89 years of age. His tan coat hangs limply on his thin shoulders. Camping’s rheumy eyes dart from camera to camera as he waits to address the callers.

Harold Camping believes that Jesus Christ will make His return on May 21, 2011 and that the world will end on October 21, five months later. He’s sure of it this time. When he made the prediction back in 1992 that the world was going to end in 1994, he wasn’t completely comfortable making it because the year 2011 seemed more significant. But he quickly got the word out and wrote a book called “1994?” When 1994 came and went without any apocalyptic incident, he chalked it up to not having studied the Bible enough by that point to be completely sure. His follower, Michael Garcia, even brings out a copy of the book and points out that Camping says he may be wrong about his prediction. But this time, things are different. Camping knows he’s correct.

A documentary crew walks in with a duffle bag full of equipment. They talk with the camera man as they quickly set up a camera next to the studio camera. Harold Camping lifts his head and squints through watery eyes at the strangers. He still can’t see clearly so he lifts his hand up to his brow to block the blinding studio spotlights. These must be the British filmmakers that Tom Evans told me about earlier, Camping thinks to himself as they come into focus. He doesn’t acknowledge them.

The Open Forum cameraman walks over to the wall and turns on the air-conditioning to battle the heat from the lights. He looks at his mobile phone for the time and walks over to the phone screener. He makes some jokes while the screener pretends to blast him away with an invisible pump-action shotgun. The cameraman walks over to the camera as a little screen at the base of the set glows blue with the Open Forum graphics zooming in as the show begins. Harold Camping sits up in his chair, straightens his light brown jacket, and props his well-worn Bible on his knee.

“Welcome to Open Forum,” a prerecorded man says to the listeners. “We welcome you to call anonymously to our program and ask questions about the bible with our Bible teacher Harold Camping.”

The cameraman motions to Camping to look at the first camera.

“Hello and welcome to Open Forum,” Camping says. “We’re so lucky to have the chance of continuing our education of the God’s word and his message. Before we begin, I’d like to talk to you about our Family Radio Caravans and the cities they’re going to stop by in.”

Harold Camping lifts up a white sheet of paper and reads, “Cleveland, Ohio. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Morgantown, West Virginia. Washington D.C. New York City. The caravan is really a good opportunity to spread the word of God and get out there and tell people about Judgment Day.”

Camping slowly bends over and slides the paper under his chair. He adjusts himself once again. “Shall we take our first call?”

The phone screener hits a key on his laptop and caller is connected.

“Hello brother Camping,” a voice says through Camping’s earpiece as well as a speaker on the ground next to the monitor. “I’ve got a question about praying to Mary. I’ve got a lot of friends who tell me it is okay to pray to the Virgin Mary like praying to Jesus. I’m just wondering what your opinion is.”

Harold Camping’s narrow, skeletal face makes a pained look. His saggy jowl shakes as he says, “I know there are churches that believe in prayer to Mary or some other people. But they’re wrong. It’s a terrible, terrible idea praying to any person other than God. Thank you for sharing. And shall we take our next call?”

“Hello, Mr. Camping?”

“Yes?” Camping says.

“You know Mr. Camping. I’m so excited for May 21. I keep telling all of my friends, family, and colleagues how excited, how impatient I am for that day. I can’t wait till May 21^st comes so people can see what a damn fool you are.” The phone clicks as the caller quickly gets off the air before he can be cut off.

Harold Camping’s face went from glee to sadness during the phone call. “There are a lot of people who are relying on their own thinking when it comes to Judgment day. God has opened my spiritual eyes to see that. It is going to happen. The Bible guarantees it.”

Sad, Camping thought to himself. People were just trying to throw him off. But he’s been hosting the radio show for 50 years now and his days of anger over such a call are over. As Judgment Day approaches, Camping has noticed that the prank phone calls and the non-believers are growing in frequency. This day is an example of that. The phone calls range from questions about the purpose of the galaxy if God was going to end it anyway, to masturbation, in which the caller sounded like he was asking only to embarrass Harold Camping. The most inappropriate question of the night came when a caller asked, “What do you call a Jew burning on a cross?”

Mr. Camping, not hearing the question correctly, assumed the question was about the Romans crucifying Jesus at the behest of the Pharisees. In the middle of Camping’s explanation, the caller yelled out, “A kosher barbecue.” The phone screener quickly cut the caller’s line while Camping continued speaking, oblivious to the joke.

“84 days from now, our whole world is going to fall into collapse,” Harold Camping says a few weeks before that radio program. “I step on a lot of toes. Sometimes they call me a false prophet. They call me Satan. I never feel offended.”

Camping began his broadcasting career in 1961 when he started the Open Forum program on Family Radio. The hosting began after Camping decided to forego a formal master’s education and study the Bible instead.

“At age 35, I liked to study and decided I again wanted to further my education,” Camping says. “I know what my university is going to be, it’s the Bible. For the last 54 years, I’ve been cramming the Bible.”

This Bible study is what Camping claims is the source of his knowledge and gives him the authority to make the judgment day claims.

“It’s from God’s mouth,” Camping says. “God gave the writer the exact words to use. That means the Bible is fantastically authoritative.”

In 1988, he realized after reading the Bible that the age of the churches had ended and God no longer was going to use them. Now he stands holding the Bible open in his hand, talking slowly and sonorously, sounding like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.

“Since then, God has installed Satan in the churches,” he says, wagging his finger. This time, he’s not on air but rather talking to students from the College of Arts in San Francisco who are enrolled in Jessica Ingram’s Interdisciplinary Critique class. “You’re in church worshipping Satan.”

The hour with the students went by quickly as he spoke about the difference between faith and fact using evolutionary science as his example against fact. Camping mentions that human history can only go back 5200 years because that’s how old the oldest man-made objects are. Therefore, Camping argues, any person claiming to know what happened before that is relying on more faith than someone who believes in the Bible.

His lecture on the Bible and his studies continued until Ingram raised her hand after she noticed the time on the wall.

“Can you talk about the nature of prophecy?” Ingram says, cutting off Camping in the middle of his lecture.

“Sure,” Camping says. “God has given us absolute proofs it’s going to happen.”

Camping then talks about how homosexuality is being accepted now even though it has existed all throughout history. He says it’s because the Bible says that near the end of days, the people who are gay will be accepted, and Jesus will make his return.

Camping also talks about the creation of Israel as a nation in 1955 and that being the starting point for the study of the end times. It’s the marker that allows him to do the math from creation to the end of the world. Camping says that creation occurred in 11,013 B.C. Noah’s flood took place in 4990 B.C.

“It’s interesting to note that the span of time between the flood and judgment day is 7000 years,” he says. “Until three years ago, we got magnificent proofs from the Bible. Ever since, it’s been the time of reckoning.”

The reason that Camping has been most vocal about judgment day is that he’s been studying the Bible for the past 54 years. He feels it gives him a different perspective from the theologians.

“Theologians look at the Bible philosophically,” Camping says. “But the Bible was logically built by the people who wrote it using God’s words.”

When asked to explain his error in 1994 about his previous judgment day prediction, Camping offers the figure of Thomas Edison as an analogy.

“When Edison first patented the light bulb, was it perfect?” Camping says. “No. You don’t arrive at perfection. Like Toyota and their gas pedal. Anyone who thinks you’re going to get it right the first time, you’re not.”

But he knows that the big earthquake is going to come this time at on May 21^st as each time zone hits 6 p.m. He quotes Revelations chapter 18 saying that plagues, death, mourning, smoke will fall upon the whole world. That there will be weeping, wailing, and the world world will collapse.

“They will stand and know it’s the Day of Judgment,” Camping says. “It will make the earthquake in Japan look like Sunday school. When I think about the end, I tremble. It’s going to be awesome.”

But that’s the literal view of the end times from the Bible.

Professor Mark Miller, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco whose interest includes the religious doctrines of salvation, believes that the Bible can’t be taken literally.

“People will use the Bible for all sorts of things,” Miller says. “It’s a good thing people are concerned about the world. But they’re waiting for an outside force to intervene. It’s about blame. I don’t think his prediction is based on a genuine interpretation of the Bible.”

Camping doesn’t agree. He sees the Bible as a literal authority and is convinced that Judgment Day will take place May 21^st.

“In almost all religious traditions, there’s apocalyptic beliefs,” Miller says. “If you feel like things are hopeless, you want to have peace. The kingdom of God is not to be taken literally. I think all things should be put in the realms of relationships and love. Millenarians think about revenge. It’s better to think about restoring love to everyone.”
Harold Camping is not the first person to predict the Rapture down to the hour. The practice of setting specific dates for the Rapture began with William Miller. Miller, at the behest of his followers, was asked to specify when the Rapture was going to take place. He was uncomfortable giving the dates, but he decided to give in and narrow the suspected timeline. A contemporary book quotes him at the time saying, “My principles in brief, are, that Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.”

When those dates came and went, with no apparent sign of Jesus, the Rapture, or any heavenly signs, Miller expressed his disappointment and held onto the belief that the Second Coming was on its way. He believed it until his dying day.

One of Miller’s followers even made a further prediction, correcting Miller’s previous attempt, and set the date as October 22, 1844. The day began like any other. The Millerites waited for Jesus’ return all day. As the sun set on October 22, the Millerites began to doubt the prediction. As the sun rose in the morning, many dropped the belief and moved on with their lives. Others attempted to explain that they were wrong and the mistake was in the people who wrote the Bible timeline. The passing of the supposed Second Coming is now known as the Millerites’ Great Disappointment.

William Miller died on December 20, 1849, still convinced that Jesus was going to return imminently.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have predicted the Rapture in 1914, 1918, 1925, 1942, and most recently 1975 through their Watchtower informational pamphlets. The lead up in 1975 was so big that the church promoted followers to sell off their personal effects and spend the last year on earth preaching their doctrine.

It wasn’t until 1979, after members had sold houses and property in ’75, that the church took any responsibility for being overzealous in its treatment of the end times.

In 1988, Edgar C. Whisenant wrote a book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988. It sold 4.5 million copies. The Evangelical Christian community took him seriously because of Whisenant’s dedication to his cause. Christians prepared for the Rapture and the day came and went. It was a normal day. Whisenant wrote several follow-up books, making further prediction. He was largely ignored at that point.

Numerous groups made predictions in 1993, solely based on the fact that it was 7 years before the year 2000. It would give the Rapture 7 years to play out. 1993 was no different than previous years. Jesus didn’t show up.

Harold Camping made his first prediction in 1994 about the Rapture. But unlike the previous Doomsayers, Camping didn’t necessarily backtrack and justify his dates when Judgment Day didn’t hit. Instead, he points out that he provisioned for it, in case it didn’t happen. Now he’s 100 percent sure Judgment Day is upon us.

The headquarters for all this is a squat, unmarked, dusty green-blue building that sits along a parking lot shared with a sushi bar, grill, and lounge on an industrial road that leads to the Oakland International Airport. The parking lot leads to a chain-link fence with wooden slats, unremarkable save for the barbed-wire lining the top. The fence is motorized, requiring vehicles and employees to have the receiver in order to enter. Visitors are greeted by a motor pool where large trucks, the size of u-haul vans, sit with pictures of the earth from space emblazoned on all discernable surfaces and “Judgment Day is coming May 21, 2011” written all over.

The front door is tinted and unmarked and always locked. There is no doorbell. Instead, a paper sign is taped that reads, “If you would like to enter, please call…” The people who work for Harold Camping always screen visitors before they open the door for them.

To the left, down another hallway, are the kitchen, a warehouse, and most importantly, the television studio. The high-ceilinged studio lies behind double soundproof doors. The wall to the right is painted half blue and half green for the filming and insertion of digital effects into whatever films they wish to produce. To the left sits a circle of chairs with a stool in the middle, set up for talks and lectures.

Static hisses from the speaker on the ground next to the screener’s desk. Outside the set, the screener and the cameraman look at Harold Camping as he awakes and props the Bible open across his lap. It’s another Open Forum Program. Camping takes a sip from his mug, hands trembling as he does, as the hiss turns into a religious song from the local Family Radio station.

Camping clears his throat, the sound reverberating around the room as the screener lowers the volume on his mike. “Good afternoon,” Camping says to the two others in the room. He shields his eyes with his hand over his brow to drown out the glaring lights and looks out to the cameraman.  “How do I sound? Do I sound okay?”

The cameraman gives him the thumbs up and adjusts the cameras. As the hymn ends over the speaker, a voice reads a Bible passage and tells the audience to think about it. He then introduces the Open Forum program and tells listeners to call in and ask Camping their questions.

Camping quickly adjusts his coat and sits up straight his chair. The intro plays on the small screen. The cameraman holds up his hand with four fingers held up and counts down. As he reaches zero, the light atop the camera blinks red.

“Welcome to the Open Forum,” Camping drawls. “Once again we have the grand and wonderful privilege of looking together into the word of God.”

The first caller asks Camping when exactly the world is going to end.

October 21, Camping says. But it begins on May 21^st and that’s when judgment catches up.

Yes, but what day? Asks the caller.

It’s a Saturday. Saturday is a special day according to the Bible, Camping says. It’s the day that in the Bible, God stopped saving people.

“Thank you for calling and sharing,” Camping says as he ends the call. “And shall we take our next call?”

All of the calls that day are related to the end of the world. Each caller wants to know how Camping knows, why he’s allowed to know, what will happen when it happens. Camping, in his slow cadence and resounding voice, assures the listeners that there will be a giant earthquake to signal the beginning of the end. Will it happen simultaneously across the globe? They ask.

“Every city and every region is going to have a huge earthquake,” Camping replies. “Maybe it’ll happen at 6 p.m. in one city. That city will experience that earthquake which signals judgment day. It’s going to be a moment of instant death. It’s just going to be horror, horror, horror, horror.”

As the show comes to an end, Camping thanks the screener and the cameraman as he pulls the microphone clipped to his lapel off. He walks off the stage as the lights dim behind him. He walks out the double soundproof doors back into the hallway and makes his way out to his car. He’s going home to study his Bible.

Harold Camping was born in Denver, Colorado on July 19, 1921. He moved to Southern California when he was six. The Bible played an important role in his life from the beginning.

His God-fearing mother took it upon herself to make sure that her son would learn the Bible and be a good Christian boy.

Harold Camping had memorized the first 20 lines of the Book of Luke by the time he was 5 years old in order to recite them in front of the congregation. During Christmas season, she had him learn all of the Nativity verses so that he could recite those as well.

His father was a different sort of Christian man.

“My father was a legalist when it came to the Bible,” Camping says. “He took the Bible literal in the most serious sense. My father didn’t understand salvation but my mother did. But by the time he died, he understood the Bible a little bit better.”

At 19, Harold Camping moved to the Bay Area in order to attend the University of California at Berkeley to study Civil Engineering.

Camping led a simple lifestyle during college. He had no interest in radio. He had no interest in making a lot of money.

“By 1942, I had never spent a nickel for a coke. I had no money for anything. I would go to church Thursdays and Sundays. Then I’d have dinner with a family and get a freebie dinner,” he says with a laugh.

He met his future wife Shirley at church. He saw her, became interested, dated her, and when he was 21 years old, he married her. They have now been married 68 years and she has always supported him in his endeavors.

Harold Camping proudly exclaims that she loves family. They had six children together. They have 24 grandchildren and 38 great grandchildren. She keeps track of all of their names for him.

But Harold Camping saddens when he thinks of his six children.

“Many of my children haven’t accepted the truth,” he says. “God hasn’t opened their eyes. As judgment day approaches, I pray every day that God will open their eyes and they’ll see his truth.”

After college, Camping started a construction company and joined the Alameda Christian Reform Church. He became an Elder and began teaching Bible study classes. But the rules of the church were too confining for what Camping wanted to teach.

“They didn’t want me there anymore,” Camping says. “That’s why they made the rules that you had to be an Elder to teach the adult class and the classes could be no more than 20 people at a time.”

In 1988, Camping decided to leave his church. He left amicably and respectfully from the church and attempted to start his own church with little success. In 2000, when he officially shuttered his latest church, Camping came out and said that the Church age was over. God was done with them.

Family Radio, Inc. began in 1958 when Dick Palmquist came into Harold Camping’s office at his construction company. Palmquist pitched the idea of a for-profit radio station by gathering a group of Christian businessmen to start it.

Harold Camping was intrigued but was wary of the message they were sending if the station was to be for-profit. So he convinced Palmquist to make a deal for a non-profit station dedicated to spreading the word of God where no board member could make a profit.

Camping and his fellow partners then purchased KEAR 97.3 in San Francisco and started Family Radio by playing gospel music and bible readings. In 1959, Camping was asked to get behind the microphone and answer questions about their mission in order to drum up support for the fledgling station.

Harold Camping enjoyed answering questions so much; he started offering advice and had people calling in asking about the Bible. Open Forum was born on that day and has been on the air since. It’s been on for a minimum of 5 days a week, for at least a half hour a night, depending on how busy Camping is. Even when Camping would go on vacation with his family, he would take time out of his day and go to a place with at least two phone booths, in case somebody needed to make an emergency call while he was hosting the show.

It took great discipline to host the show every night, but it helped Camping to learn how to teach the truth.

Harold Camping plans to host his final Open Forum program on Friday, May 20. After 50 years, he knows he’s done his best to spread the word of God and get his message out to everyone who is willing to listen. After that, Camping believes there’s nothing to teach anymore. He will go home to his wife that night and keep studying the Bible.

The next day, May 21^st, Judgment Day, he plans on going about his daily routine of waking up, eating a light breakfast, and studying the Bible. When the Universal Time Zone reaches six at the Greenwich Meridian, Harold Camping will be sitting in front of his television in his home, watching as the Great Earthquake strikes each time zone at 6 p.m. local time. Once people see that first earthquake, he knows they’ll start praying. They’ll watch Judgment day as it is televised across the world.

When Judgment day reaches his own time zone, if he is one of God’s saved children, he will take part in the rapture and be lifted up into heaven.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” Camping says. “There will be no sin. We’ll be reigning with Christ. It will be a whole new dimension.”

And as he ascends, body and soul, into heaven, into the white light, Camping knows that it’s to the everlasting glory of God, Amen.

Clean Streak

CLEAN STREAK

by Eric Green

The chairs stacked high in the corner of the large conference room seem as if they’re reaching toward the sky-high ceiling as the man moves toward them with a huge dolly to load them onto.  Columns reach toward the arched ceiling, with sunlight shining through each of the one-square-foot glass window panes that add such distinct curvature to the top of the room.  The lights inside of the Sunset Court inside of the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco are eventually turned down as day turns to night, as if a chairperson of the board was about to head to the front of the room and start his PowerPoint presentation at any given moment.

Jason Delgadillo, one of the hotel’s custodial and technical employees, moves the stack of chairs to one side of the room with effortless ease as he preps the auditorium-like room for cleaning.  It’s his job to not only make sure the room is clean enough for the hotel’s upper business-class clientele, but to also ensure the audio and visual technical equipment is set up and ready for use.

“Today really isn’t as bad as other days,” he says with a hint of optimism in his eye, shortly before taking a metaphorical crap on it.   “Sometimes some of the shit that I have to clean up is ridiculous. From food on the ground that’s been mashed into the carpet, to smashed and broken light fixtures, you name it.”

He’s just one of the People Who Clean.  Along with over 2,090,400 other people in the United States, who combined earn $11.60 per hour on average, he has to focus on cleaning up after others people’s messes for work.  Cleaning service is the eighth most populated vocation, according to a 2009 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  According to 23-year-old Delgadillo, custodial work is typically viewed as pretty low on the totem pole of job selection, and unappreciated labor that demands no gratuity when it’s probably the one job that deserves it the most.   It’s coincidental that in the same report, the BLS found that cleaning service is the third most underpaid profession that anyone could choose to pursue.

The People Who Clean are the people who make the world turn.  They’re the people who take the time to make sure everyone else’s lives are more convenient than their own, soaking up the stains of life with already-saturated rags, doing their best to clear up the blemishes of human existence.  From the woman sorting through your trash and dumping your used napkins and soda bottles into assorted bins at a recycling plant, to the man stuck washing dishes in the back of your favorite restaurant.  These are the people who make the planet its own fully-functional conference room.

It’s only fitting in the most ironic fashion that Delgadillo – known for never leaving the house without his grey beanie on his head –should have to cater to upper-management, bourgeoisie characters that get paid far more than the average government employee in order to earn themselves capital.  The job gets him just slightly more than minimum wage would garner, and is one of the three workplaces that he currently holds. At times, Delgadillo says that he’s had to work up to five part-time jobs at once to support himself, and  at one point, it even forced him to consider moving to a different city altogether.

“I grew up in a small town called Lemoore near Fresno, and would never want to return to that kind of lifestyle,” he says.  “And that’s regardless of how much rent costs.”

            It’s also coincidental that Delgadillo spends his vocational time cleaning and sorting through literal messes, only to go home to work out a mess of his own, by organizing and arranging colors on the canvas.  An SF State alumnus and former art major, he continues his passion for paintingthat was once only displayed in the creative and fine arts buildings on campus at SFSU, in the confines of his garage-turned-art studio located in the Haight district of San Francisco.

Jason Delgadillo stands with one of his paintings, which he completed for his senior project at SF State.

###

While the exact history of cleaning and cleanliness may not be possible to pinpoint, its evolution can easily be traced back to the Romans.  Ancient Roman cities would have facilities next to aqueducts that were used for self-cleaning as well as socialization; they even had exfoliating cleansers.  Commonly referred to as the Roman Baths, this well-preserved historic site offers an insight into pre-modern personal hygiene.

            Texts also show a lineage that dates back even further.  The earliest recorded evidence of a soap-like cleanser was around 2800 BC, in ancient Babylon.  They would create a concoction made up of a combination of ashes and oil, which were used to clean various objects.  After centuries of humans developing standards of cleanliness, not only were people cleaning themselves, but they were cleaning their personal property, their walls, their floors, and anything else that had the potential to show a stain.

###

Whether or not one is responsible for their own personal cleanliness has a great effect on how they will turn out as a person.  Take Delgadillo’s roommate, for example. He lives care-free off of his parents’ trust fund, which supplies him with money for rent, food, clothing and anything else he could possibly ask for.   He doesn’t have to get a job if he doesn’t want to, and that’s just the way he likes it.

Spencer Combs, a SF State alumnus with a liberal studies degree, does not know what it is like to have to clean up after himself.  Born and raised in a city south of Santa Cruz, Calif, he loves the notion of a ‘small town.’  Like many others around him growing up, his childhood household was shared by a “housekeeper,” who was responsible for maintaining the state of cleanliness in the house.

“She cleaned everything,” he said.  “Toliets, dishes and laundry were just the start.  She cleaned our floors, our carpets and our walls also.  She also fed us and took care of us when our parents weren’t around.”

Having a Person Who Cleaned in his home from such an early age impacted how he looked at and thought about those kinds of people.  Because he was never told he had to clean up after himself, it ended up being something that he put on the backburner, so to speak.

“It was never something that I had to appreciate or show thanks for,” he said. “To me, it was always just a service that we acquired.”

Today, his and Delgadillo’s shared house is what most people would refer to as a metaphorical pigsty.  Dishes overflow out of the sink onto the kitchen counter, where they wait dutifully for someone to come by and wash the grease and grime off of them.  The carpet is coated in a thick layer of grey dog hair that looks like it hasn’t been vacuumed up in months.  Wrappers and empty cups crowd the living room table as if the two are trying to break a record for most items crammed onto one table.  A pungent smell wafts down the hallway leading from the bathroom to the kitchen, and sears nostril hairs with an unmistakable old-sink-smell, much like a forest fire would.

“I know that I have a problem picking up after myself and cleaning in general, and I do try to improve,” he said.  “In the end, it just comes down to who I am.  In a way, it’s embedded into my personality.”

It’s just one of those things; grandparents tell you as a child, it will help build character.  But there may really have been something to their seemingly trite logic.  According to the book Character Matters by Thomas Lickona, helping out around the house and taking responsibility for one’s own mess is fundamental in developing a personality with high values and integrity.

“Housework, yard work, helping to prepare meals and clean up…These are the many ways we can provide our children with opportunities to practice good virtues.”

###

Children

The phone had already made a few calls by the time she noticed it was missing.  At least that’s what the phone records would show, anyway.  She had cross-checked the time codes on the phone bill with her own memory of the day and she clearly remembered noticing her phone was gone before the calls had been made.

The kid probably called a couple of his friends to tell them how he had just snagged a brand new Blackberry Curve 9000, and how he was going to try to flip it quick to make a couple hundred easy dollars.  She was talking to him about his performance and attitude in school and had only left the room for a couple of minutes when she came back and saw that her phone wasn’t where she had left it.

“That’s what I get for trying to better these helpless kids,” she thought to herself as she silently cursed the world.

She would never get the phone back, but that wasn’t the part that angered her the most.  The infuriating aspect of the encounter was that out of attempted and intended help to clean up a child’s life came a complete act of violating hostility toward her.  She felt as if she had failed the child, and failed herself as well, and could not clean up the mess that was this child’s moral and ethical boundaries.

Elisabeth Trevor, a former assistant teacher at Erickson School in San Francisco, recalls this moment as vividly as the day it happened.  Sunset rays shone through the large window pane and glistened off of the tops of the children’s school desks, reflecting shimmers of sun onto the ceiling, just passing over the art collages and science projects hung on the wall by a teacher proud of his or her students.

“It wasn’t that the phone was stolen,” she explained. “I’ve had my car broken into several times.  It was the contradicting circumstances of the situation that madethe betrayal feel all the more harsh.”  She adds, “I was only trying to help.”

The non-public and non-profit school located on Hudson Ave. in San Francisco houses students ages 8 to 19 and is “an ideal place for students who are experiencing learning, emotional, and/or behavioral problems,” according to the school’s website. It is a completely suitable environment for the type of less-than-appreciated work that Trevor and others like her put forth, continuously tackling untidiness and clutter with a viewpoint that the world can, and should, be better.

Trevor worked at the school as part of her graduate program at the University of California San Francisco in order to obtain a PhD.  Now a fully-licensed psychologist, she only hopes that the kid who stole her phone has tried to better himself in some sort of productive way.  She still prefers to work with kids, and gains nothing but the upmost satisfaction from helping them clean up their attitudes and living situations.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call the work ‘thankless,’ but it’s not like I ever have anyone patting me on the back telling me that I did a great job,” she said.

One of the first children whom Trevor had ever professionally worked with was a young girl who continually ran into disciplinary problems in school, which translated to disciplinary problems at home.  No matter what the subject matter was, the girl couldn’t maintain focus long enough and would eventually get distracted, and punishments just never seemed to work.  Trevor had the idea to sit the whole family down, and lay out the ground rules for what she called “proper behavior for school and home.”  She doesn’t know whether or not the approach ultimately got through to the child, but only hopes that the child, in some way, lives a better life.

###

Carpet

The dark and tiled carpet soaks and absorbs a light, soapy moisture and feels damp under his feet when walked on, even while wearing torn and beat-up Nike tennis shoes. The shoes trudge along behind a power steam carpet cleaner, which mows the aisles of a San Francisco Best Buy from the early morning hours of 4 to 6 a.m.

These particular shoes belong to Francisco Reyes, a Bay Area native born and raised in Oakland.  He works for Sparkling Carpets, a Northern California carpet upholstery servicing company that gets commissioned by the electronics retail giant to steam clean the carpet  once a day.  It ensures for maximum cleanliness as well as a flawless and immaculate shopping experience.  In the hours of daylight, hundreds of people will walk over and benefit from the man’s hard work and laborious endeavors and never come to learn his name.  Yet he is merely one of over 1.5 million people in the United States who specialize in making sure consumers get the privilege of walking on clean ground.

“The bathrooms are what I hate the most,” he says as we march to the beat of the carpet-cleaning contraption.  “Compared to that, this old steamer really isn’t a problem for me.”

Reyes also doesn’t mind the all-too-often commute to the city that offers him such unique and pleasurable employment opportunities.  He and his wife support three kids on what they describe as minimal salaries, and according to him, do whatever is necessary to turn a dollar. He tells me that along with cleaning the retail electronics giant, he stops by an elementary school, a church, and some office buildings to make sure middle management doesn’t have to look at the crumbs and crumpled up pieces of paper that they left behind the night before.  The next day they’ll have the convenience of coming in to the office with a new suit, new pants, new shoes, and a new floor.

Reyes spends around two hours actually cleaning the retail store.  He allocates 40-50 minutes to clean the carpets of the 25,000-square-foot building at the intersection of Geary and Masonic avenues.  He then spends 15 to20 minutes to sweep and buff the hard tiles, before moving on to the men and women’s bathrooms.

“As soon as one job is done I move to the next,” he says to me with determined eyes.  “If I can get out of here early, I can get home earlier to see my family.”

Within the 100 square-foot bathrooms, his workload depends entirely on the level of destruction caused between the current time and when he last saw them.  Today, the men’s bathroom is worse than the women’s, although neither are a pretty sight to behold.  Toilet paper and throw-away towels explode out of the trashcans onto the white and green 6-square-inch tiles that line and pattern the floor, and everything seems to be wet.

The room smells sticky, and when the bottoms of your shoes stick to the floor with every step that you take, it’s only more affirmation. The faux-marble countertop that lines one side of the room drips water down to the floor, where it all mixes into a collective puddle made up of soap, water and urine.

Frank, one of the store’s managers, asked Reyes to specifically clean some graffiti off of one of the stalls, and to take out all three trashcans across the two bathrooms.  Before the store opens, he’ll spray disinfectant on the toilets and wipe them down, Windex and disinfect the mirrors, sinks, and countertops, clean and mop the floors, erase the graffiti off the stall, and take out all three garbage cans across the two bathrooms.  But someone must have really taken their time with the artwork inside of the stall.  Reyes said the graffiti tag looks like it was done in Sharpie and will probably take a couple thorough washings to come off completely.

The previous night before closing, a child had also vomited outside, and the digestive expulsion sat overnight waiting for Reyes’ perfect touch to clean it up.  The next day, thanks to him, the deed was done.  No thanks was ever uttered to him that day, according to Reyes.

But the customers will come through the door the next day, and trample all over Francisco’s hard labor, creating a perpetual cycle of never-ending work that drives Reyes to different locations to continually clean up after others.   At the end of the day though, he’ll get home to see his family, and eat dinner with them.  It’s just his one last hope that he’s not the one who has to wash the dishes.

The thing to remember about the People Who Clean is that they are people first and foremost, each with a face and their own story to tell. All too often with computers and technology becoming more and more an integrated part of society, and society itself becoming more and more fast-paced by nature, simple things get overlooked. Like the man picking up your trash can every week so that the filth doesn’t pile up, or the street sweeper who makes sure the pile of leaves on the side of the road doesn’t do the same.  Thankless as the job may be, they perform day-in, day-out, each on their own personal clean streak.

Before

After

Homeless in Hayes Valley

By Alexis Chavez

Living in San Francisco skews people’s perceptions of crazy. Before moving here, I grew up in a very small, very conservative, agriculture-based town. There was little culture, a seemingly nonexistent homeless population, and anyone who acted “different” was just that. I hated it.

When I moved to the city, I was a sponge. I absorbed everything I could, whether it was going to street fairs, parades, or merely sitting in a park and watching the crowds walk by. Very quickly I learned there are lots of quirky folks gallivanting around. From the eccentric Burning Man crowd, to the leather daddies, to the oh-so-hip-hipsters, the city is full of characters.

Immediately, I realized, what is “normal” in San Francisco is not true of what normalcy is regarded as in other places. For the first few months I lived here, the homeless population that can be found surviving in many neighborhoods saddened me. Everyone knows about San Francisco’s “bums,” yet I was distraught not only  by the idea of homelessness, but also by the nonchalance and disregard so many people expressed over the issue.

My breaking point came one night while driving down Market Street. A homeless man, with his shopping cart of belongings parked next to him, was sitting up against the Muni entrance on the corner of Church and Market. He appeared to be passed out, with a needle sticking out of his right arm. Right then, my normal-to-crazy-gauge broke. Since then, nothing I have seen or heard in this city has shocked me.

It did not take long before I realized, that I, too, in order to get about my business, would have to put aside my feelings, essentially ignore the existences of said homeless. As a broke college student, I did not have any change to spare, and the heartache was getting wretched. I finally understood why so many San Franciscans turn the cheek to those on the streets.

Living in the outer stretches of the city, where there is not as big of a homeless population, has sheltered me from seeing the roughly 6,000 to 12,000 homeless people who live on the streets on a given day. However, in the last year, I have been working in Hayes Valley, and have once again been forced to face my feelings about homelessness and the issues that surround it.

***

Storefronts line the redeveloped Hayes Street stretch, offering the trendiest, specialized boutiques, cafes, restaurants and wine bars. Patricia’s Green lies in the center, a park where parents, pet owners and people looking to escape the cold, concrete city streets flock to admire the art installations and the traffic, zipping all around. But at the end of a bustling day, when the shoppers carry their bags home, the street is inhabited by the people who live on them.

They can be found everywhere. In the alleys around Hayes Street, napping on the benches in the park, digging through dumpsters behind restaurants.

Underneath the black, pre-dawn sky, a man I know only as Michael sleeps nestled in the alcove of the Room Service storefront, a new custom furniture business. Covered in a blue blanket, he is surrounded by his belongings — a plastic bag full of clothes, a crate most likely used as a seat or storage, and an empty paper plate, stained with remnants of last night’s dinner.

At dawn, he rises before street cleaners and 9-to-5 folks take to the streets. He packs his stuff, which neatly fits in both hands, erasing his traces. Tomorrow, he will find somewhere else in the neighborhood to sleep.

Before Hayes Valley became the modish neighborhood it is today, the area was a much different place.  In 1951, a plan to build freeways throughout the city was approved, one of which was the Central Freeway, eventually running through Hayes Valley. The first phase of the Central Freeway construction began in 1959, which is the same year the freeway plans were cancelled, per a vote by the Board of Supervisors. The vote prevented more work on the Central Freeway, leaving only what had already been built—a raised double-deck structure that jutted out from Interstate 80, across Market Street, and into the Hayes Valley neighborhood, with connecting off-ramps on Fell and Oak streets.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the Central Freeway beyond repair and the northern portion of the freeway was removed in 1992. That year, the Board of Supervisors voted against building new freeways north of Market Street, so the freeway was not replaced, yet the southern part, which connected to the Fell and Oak street off-ramps, remained.

In 1995, a city task force suggested a street-level boulevard replace the freeway, but it would be a few years before this would happen. Caltrans started demolition on the upper deck of the freeway in 1996, yet neighborhood locals wanted the entire freeway removed. Patricia Walkup, founder of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, voiced her opposition for the plans of a redeveloped freeway, along with activist Robin Levitt.

In 1997, Mayor Willie Brown placed an initiative, saying the freeway should be rebuilt, on the ballot, which won, allowing Caltrans to begin designing a new freeway, much to Walkup and Levitt’s dismay. The activists began gathering the appropriate signatures to once again get the issue on the ballot in 1998. This time the initiative to remove the freeway won; however, this was not the final word on the subject.

Finally, in 1999, two initiatives went on the ballot — one to remove the freeway and one to rebuild it. Voters ultimately decided to remove the freeway, a decision that  stuck. The Central Freeway would come up to a light on Market, where traffic would cross over north onto the new Octavia Boulevard.

Fourteen years after the damaging earthquake, the last remnants of the Central Freeway were demolished. In 2005, the newly designed Octavia Boulevard was completed, and a year later the rebuilt freeway leading up to Market Street was also finished.

***

Rain pours down on Hayes Street, so much that the gutters overflow with water due to leaf-clogged drains. People scurry underneath umbrellas, jumping from one store overhang to the next. Yet, it is so warm inside La Boulange Café and Bakery that the windows are fogging up with condensation from all the bodies, piping hot coffee, and heat pouring out of the ovens.

Dressed in all black, save for a red beanie, Darnell Easter, 49, cozies up to a table by the window. His warm brown skin, slightly moist with sweat, compliments his dark brown eyes. When I usually see him, he is relaxed and conversational, as he always has something to say; yet today he seems slightly nervous, on edge. Easter has been coming to the café since last year, which he credits with helping him reach a new place in his life.

Though he often gets stares from the customers inside, some of the employees have reached out to Easter, giving him free coffee and food, something he says he would have stolen in the past. Easter usually graciously takes the food, thanks the “goddesses” who work there, and walks across the street to Patricia’s Green, a park he has often called home.

But on rainy afternoons such as this, he sometimes sits inside, quietly, and alone, without making a scene, until the rain stops or becomes a sprinkle.

Here is the story he tells of his life: Easter grew up in the East Bay city of Pittsburgh, CA, about an hour northeast of San Francisco. He was the first-born between his parents, each had one child from previous relationships, and together they had three more. Growing up biracial, Easter always felt like he did not fit in.

“I never had anyone I could identify with,” he says. The son of an African American father from Little Rock, Arkansas,  and Mexican-born mother, he was never white enough, nor black enough to identify with other kids his age, and he was often called an Oreo.

Having parents of different ethnicities was also very trying because of the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s. The tensions were compounded by the fact his father and uncles were associated with the Black Panthers, an African American revolutionary organization.

The Panthers never approved of his parents’ relationship and for as long as Easter can remember, problems surrounded the marriage. His father, however, was not a militant soldier for the Panthers, like his uncle was. Rather he sold heroin for them. Drugs, violence and street mentality were an everyday occurrence, a lifestyle that Easter was raised in.

When he was five years old, Easter was molested for the first time by an uncle, one of his dad’s brothers. When he told his parents about what happened, they did not believe him. The molestation would go on for the next five years. Feeling guilty, confused and stripped of integrity, Easter struggled with what was happening to him.

Feeling that there was no place to run, 10-year-old Easter went to the St. Peter Martyr Catholic Church, where he cleansed himself with holy water and gave his confession about what had happened to him, in hopes he would relieve his guilt. Inside the confessional, as Easter confided about his abuse, he says the priest slid the partition aside and asked the young boy to step over.

The priest then asked Easter to explain in detail what his uncle had done to him, as he masturbated. Afterward, the priest warned Easter that, should he tell anyone what happened, he would never be an altar boy.

Feeling even more confused, Easter truly felt he had no place to be safe. Around the same time, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder. As a young boy, he was prescribed Ritalin, and eventually Prozac. “They never gave me a chance to be who I am,” Easter says, tears streaming down his face. “No one believed in me. It really ruined me and made me depressed.”

He says the feelings of despair and depression only worsened when his parents divorced when he was 13. His dad left his mother for their babysitter, a white woman his mother had once told him to get along with. He blamed everyone for the divorce, and became angry, throwing stones to relieve stress.

Acting out in a fit of rebellion, he began to steal. He stole candy and other small things from the store, though he never got caught, and he also began to steal pot from his father. His parents were never the affectionate type, but Easter thought if his dad saw him smoking marijuana that perhaps he would love him more.

Despite his reckless behavior, Easter fell in love with acting, and the theatre provided him with a place to escape. He began acting in high school with the Willows Youth Theatre in Concord, CA. His first role was as Judas Iscariot in Godspell. To this day, he can still sing every line to his solo with his thunderous voice.

High school came and went, and when Easter was 18, he developed a drinking problem. Still angry over the divorce, he would drink to develop enough courage to confront his dad about leaving his mother. Disillusioned and drunk, Easter decided to get back at the priest who had molested him so many years before.

The priest, still active in the church, lived next door to St. Peter Martyr. Easter says he went to the church to see him one day and ordered him to the granny flat in the backyard of the house. Once inside, Easter ordered him to lie down, as he blindfolded the priest. He then proceeded to “get back” at the priest, he says as his eyes flicker between uncertainty and excitement, by performing oral sex and masturbating on him.

Once he was finished, he says he took a picture of the priest and threatened to reveal the picture if he did not give him $100.

The priest obliged and Easter took the money and bought more booze. On his way out of the yard, he stopped at the statue of the Virgin Mary, which stood in the front yard, and asked for forgiveness. He says he continued to blackmail the priest for the next two years.

In the 1980s, Easter spent a year in jail for embezzlement and fraud. He learned how to steal credit card information from carbon copy receipts from a pair of girls he met in the theatre. After his release, he went back home to find there was nothing there for him anymore.

Soon after, he met a retired Navy sergeant in Concord, who needed a crank connection. Easter, having drug connections in the ghetto, became the liaison the Navy sergeant needed. The relationship lasted for a few years, the pair grew close and Easter moved in with the sergeant and his family.

In  1992, Easter met his friend Lisa, who introduced him to the new and thriving rave scene in San Francisco. As a dancer and performer, Easter instantly loved going to raves. The scene was taking off, and as Easter remembers, there was a party going on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Going to raves allowed Easter to make money by selling drugs, and provided him with a roof over his head. When he was not partying, he couch-surfed with friends, but always had money to pay his way. In the middle of gang wars and violence, the rave scene offered Easter an escape—somewhere he could feel safe.

It was at one such rave where Easter first tried Ecstasy. The drug made him feel things he had tried to repress. The emotions from the molestations surfaced and he began to cry. His friends hugged him, telling him it was good to let his feelings out, and for the first time, Easter felt secure. The parties routinely involved Ecstasy usage, which would turn the parties into a big love fest. Hugs, happiness, music, and dance, Easter finally found his identity. The rave scene provided him with a place where he felt he belonged. After years of feeling like “the other,” Easter, and hundreds of kinds like him, found a home.

Raves were happening all over the city in the 90s — 1015 Folsom, DNA Lounge, Groove Kitchen, to name a few. Easter began taking part in throwing these parties, including one called A Family Affair, which went on for six years. His love for theatre was showcased at performance art parties, where he would perform on stage.

Around this time, Easter also began a relationship with a man named John Pauli. The two shared a love for raves, and the relationship was Easter’s first. Because of his issues with trust, Easter had never allowed himself to get close to anyone.

In 2000, after one of his performances at Dubtribe, a local party, Easter was catching his breath backstage, when drag queen Joan Jett Blakk took the stage. Blakk, a friend of Easter’s, called Pauli on stage. Before Easter’s eyes, the two professed their love for one another, and announced on stage that they were a couple. The proclamation stunned and bewildered Easter, who says he became depressed over the announcement.

“When you fall, people throw stones at you,” he says, tears welling up in his eyes, “It’s happened all my life.”

When the rave scene died out in 2008, Easter began hanging out in Hayes Valley. He had never been homeless before, even though Easter never had a steady place to live. In May 2010, Easter took up residence at the Oak Hotel on Fell Street.

Using vouchers he obtained from Project Homeless Connect, an organization that aims to help the homeless get off the street and into housing, Easter stayed at the Oak Hotel until January 2011. His vouchers were used up in November, but he made an agreement with the manager to clean the bathrooms and do work to earn his keep.

He says the manager began running him ragged with all of the hard work. Though he had a place to live, he had no time to dumpster dive to make extra money for food and drugs. After his housing fell through, Easter started sleeping on a bench in Patricia’s Green.

During the day, he would wander the streets, but always find himself back at the park. He made friends with some of the other homeless people, though some were unapproachable, their minds lost to crack.

In March, Easter went back to Project Homeless Connect’s event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. He got more housing vouchers, valid for the next six months. He hopes the new pair of dentures he is having made, thanks to Project Homeless Connect, will help him look more presentable when searching for jobs. “I haven’t done enough in life. I want to help children. I want to show these parents how to raise them. I could change things,” he says.

***

Easter was just one of hundreds, if not thousands, who waited in line for Project Homeless Connect’s services on Wednesday, March 16. Hordes gathered in front of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium where the event was held, waiting in line for hours; some even camped over night.

Project Homeless Connect was started in 2004 by the San Francisco Department of Public Health as a way to bring critical services to the homeless. About 250 non-profits, private businesses, and volunteers come together to help the citizens in need. Sprint, Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, Larkin Street Youth, and the Riley Center, among others, provided services such as free phone calls, veteran services, free haircuts, wheel chair repairs, needle exchanges, medical attention, and vision and dental services.

Outside, the line wrapped around Grove Street and onto Larkin Street as people waited in lines to gain entrance to the auditorium. Those with pets could drop them off at the pet sitter facility, which was located next to the pet veterinary service booth. Cats and dogs could be heard barking and meowing, longing to be returned to their owners.

A mix of chatter and traffic buzzed along the streets, as City Hall suits walked by our city’s most destitute population.

The inside of the auditorium was set up like a convention of sorts. Once inside the building, the line of people extended into Larkin Hall, where each attendee went through a check-in process. Volunteers, speaking multiple languages, acted as guides, intermediating between the line and available seats at the check in tables, calling out numbers as if it were an auction.

“I have two over here!” one volunteer yelled at another guide, who then escorted two more people to the appropriate locations. The attendees were asked a series of questions before being allowed to roam about the main room.

The main auditorium, where so many high profile musical acts perform, was transformed into a type of shopping center. Each service had setup of long tables, draped in cloths, some of which were decorated with pamphlets, candy and other freebies. The blue drapes were drawn over the stage and the upper level seating was empty, yet the room was loud with chatter. Despite all the bodies in the room, you could still feel the enormity of the space.

“Man, I ain’t ever been in here,” one man gasped in awe, as he sat filling out food stamp paperwork. “This is amazing.”

Attendees exited the building through a food line provided by the San Francisco Food Bank, which gave each person non-perishable foods to take with them. Back on the street, many lingered around the auditorium, their bags heavy with food, some waiting for their friends, some with no other place to go.

***

It is a Saturday evening in the Mission district, the weather mild after a warm, sunny day in the city. The sidewalks along 16^th Street are filled with people walking, pouring out of bars and standing in front of restaurants, while the streets are backed up with traffic as drivers look for a place to park.

On the same street, right between Mission and Valencia, lies Julian Avenue. At the address 179, the Julian House is located. It’s a hotel that features 36 themed single occupancy rooms.

Darnell Easter has been living in room 10, thanks to housing vouchers, for the last month. The first floor of the three-story Edwardian building is a sandy brick, while the rest of the building is painted pale yellow with brown trim. Inside, the hallways have white wainscoting, the upper half of the walls painted taupe.

Despite the clean appearance, and fresh paint, the place still feels old and dark.

I am greeted by Easter at the front gate. Dressed in a cowboy hat, brown blazer and unbuttoned shirt, Easter is especially frenetic. He tells me his roommate is having relationship issues and that now might not be the best time to visit.

As I try to figure out a more appropriate time to visit, he asks me if I want to take a quick look around the building. He grabs me by the arm and escorts me inside the building, acting as a tour guide, and it is not long before he is knocking on his door, yelling to his friends inside to let us in.

Room 10 sits on the left side of the hall on the first floor. The room is tiny, no more than eight feet wide and 10 feet long, and shared with a roommate. The walls are painted a bright blue and are speckled with a few posters, including one of Albert Einstein.

There is one window covered with a white curtain, a small closet, a sink, a bunk bed and a wall of shelves filled with CDs, a microwave and lots of clutter. The floor is covered with clothing, plastic bags, shoes and lots of unidentifiable objects that have been taking up space for who knows how long.

Easter’s roommate sits alongside a friend and Easter’s boyfriend Poe. The four men sit around a 13-inch television screen watching the musical Cats. The room smells musty, with faint hints of smoke.

I step inside for a brief moment, before feeling slightly claustrophobic from all the stuff and people inside the small space. Easter and I continue on the tour of the building, heading upstairs. In another room, we run into Chris, a tenant who is painting a room across the hall from where she stays.

At the moment, she is working on a giant sun, yellow with gold streaks, and long rays bursting from the center. Her idea, she says, is to have a beach themed room. She says she hopes the room will be tranquil, and Easter adds that the purpose of the art in the rooms is to uplift the people who stay there and keep a positive vibe.

“Crack and heroin can be so ghetto,” Easter says, his voice full of attitude and distaste as he refers to old tenants, though I wonder how long it has been since he smoked crystal meth, his drug of choice.

Easter walks me back out to the front gate, where my ride awaits, and says he hopes to see me soon. He waves goodbye, throwing up a peace sign, smiling, before turning his around and walking back to room 10.

***

If there is anything I have learned about San Francisco that I did not know before, it would be that this is a city of complexities. From the detailed and dated architecture to a diverse population to progressive politics and social issues, there are often multiple sides to any given issue.

When it comes to homelessness, the issue is as complex as any. I have heard many people disregard the plight of the homeless, by either ignoring the issue, making light of it, or by blaming those with no place to live, calling them drug addicts or saying they chose the lifestyle for themselves.

Sometimes, this is the case, but such generalizations are often stereotypical. I say that because often times the people passing such judgments have never taken the time to get to know a homeless person, nor see things from his/her point of view.

Other times, some say the resources are available, but it is the homeless who are not reaching out, however many resources are diminishing, like everything else, in this crumbling economy.

Whatever the sentiments are, the facts speak for themselves. According to the Coalition on Homelessness, in January 2009, the homeless count in San Francisco was 6,514 people, though they suspect this is a low estimate, since families and youth are usually underrepresented. And, the number seems to be growing, as 45 percent of the respondents were said to be experiencing homelessness for the first time.

To me, I think a society can only function as well as its weakest link, and those with no place to call home are in one of the most desperate positions I can think of. Homelessness, along with the problem of hunger, seems to say as much about society as it does about the people experiencing it.

Solving the issue of homelessness is not cut and dry, and the only solution I can think of is offering more resources, beds and facilities to help get people off of the streets and into housing. Sadly, the current state of the economy is only making things worse for everyone, from government employees to state-funded programs to the everyday folks struggling to pay bills.

Homelessness seems to be a major crack in the foundation of our system, splintered into all different kinds of complex issues. While this plight might not be solved overnight, if ever, what we can change is our perceptions and attitudes about those less fortunate than ourselves. At the end of the day, we are all human beings, living on this earth, and no matter what choices we make or what has happened to us, we all deserve to be treated with a level of dignity and respect.

Julian House resident paints inside one of the hotel’s themed rooms.

Cans and clutter sit on a shelf, while the musical Cats plays on the television.

A peak inside room 10.

Darnell Easter sits along Hayes Street.

Hayes Valley before redevelopment. Photo from preservenet.com

A Cold-Blooded Struggle

Rupert in his enclosure in Chris's room.

Just Another Day at the Office for EBV John 

By Michelle Olson

A mouse scurries around the five-gallon tank it is enclosed in. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t have the company of an orange, brown-spotted snake slithering around, anticipating its weekly meal. The mouse, desperate for an escape, even jumps on the back of the predator. The saying “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” must have been created by a reptile owner.

As I swallow, thankful for not being reincarnated as a feeder mouse, John Emberton, co-owner of the East Bay Vivarium greets me. (According to the dictionary, vivarium means a place where live animals or plants are kept under conditions simulating their natural environment).

EBV John is just one of the “reptile warriors,” I am interviewing for an article about lack of education in the reptile industry.

“It’s feed day here today, so things are a little hectic,” he says. As he shows me around his “not super-organized store,” I realize it is just one of a hundred things going on at the oldest and largest reptile store in the United States.  All the turtles, tortoises, amphibians, chameleons, scorpions and arachnids are locked up for everyone’s safety.

He asks me if I notice the smell in the air. “Reptiles don’t sweat, perspire, or urinate, but there is still this smell,” he says. “The smell is this, litter.”

Chris holds Rupert.

We enter a side room where EBV John pulls out one white, plastic drawer from a row of six. The shelf is higher than I can count. About 30 white, feeder mice, similar to the one in the snake’s tank, huddle together. They run away from the opening of the drawer, as if they can run from their fate. But they will share the same fate as their furry friend.

Maybe this why so many people don’t warm up to cold-blooded creatures, otherwise known as reptiles. In the United States about 73 million homes own a pet, only six percent own a reptile compared to 63 percent who own a dog, according to a survey conducted for 2011 by the American Pet Product Association.  John has a dog too, a German Shepard names Luna who follows him around, and he lovingly calls “his shadow.”

The East Bay Vivarium produces 99 percent of the food needed for its inhabitants. Not only do they breed feeder mice, but also rats and chickens. This is probably why the room is about the size of an average bedroom with an aisle down the middle.

This room also has another facet, the “hibernation room.” We didn’t go in, but during the summer there are even more spectacles to see. As if the too many to count I saw on this afternoon in February weren’t enough.

On my way out I pass the baby chicks on my right. They are enclosed in a metal tub lined with litter. A light source above the tub provides warmth for the babies. One has made it to adolescence.  But it will probably see its death soon, the circle of life stares me in the face for a second time.

The feeder mouse in his box.

When we get to the adjoining room, the “breeding room,” I get a lesson on reptile lovemaking. He opens another drawer, “Here are two breeding,” he says. He points to the two ball pythons connected at the end of their tails, intertwined like two branches that grew around each other on a fence. The bottom of their end tails are locked together, and swollen. This is like the python version of the high school game, “seven minutes in heaven.”

The reptile population is similar, but different, from the dog and cat population issue. Too many furry friends exist,  there are not enough homes. For reptiles, too many forests are being cleared, making way for golf courses and homes, resulting in  lack of space for their population. Many species have become endangered. This is where the vivarium comes in.

“Ninety percent of what we breed here is endangered,” EBV John told me later on.

Next is the “veggie room,” yes some of these creatures need their salad too. John explains to me how the Berkeley Bowl and the Monterey Market set aside their leftovers for the vivarium. “They would just throw this away,” he says as he pulls the outside of romaine lettuce heads to show me. “And this is the most vitamin-packed part of the plant.” A white, rectangular freezer, that opens from the top, pushed to the back of the room, is filled with “back stock,” or dead, frozen mice.

To the right of the “veggie room,” an aisle lined with blue incubators holds reptile eggs. Different incubators are set at different temperatures depending on the breed. John takes out a Tupperware looking container, and peels off the lid. “Not many people know that reptile eggs are soft.”

I touch the white egg. It is about twice the size of a large chicken egg, and nestled in grey, rock sand. The shell is so soft and warm that I feel its imprint on my right index finger pad for the next half an hour. I touched innocence, like rubbing my best friend’s belly when she was pregnant.

Rupert waits to strike.

We go up the stairs behind the wall that the incubators are against.  The office is at the top, and so are more reptiles, centipedes and millipedes.  He shows me a Mexican Beaded Lizard with black and red spots, measuring about a foot and a half in length. “It’s one of only two poisonous lizards in the world,” he says.

Yes, there are only two types of poisonous lizards in the world. So maybe lizards aren’t as dangerous as many think.

For the first time I get to sit down. John offers me the big, black office chair, while he sits on a yellow cat litter box. He sways back and forth, it’s almost hard for him to sit still. But he gives me his full attention despite looking at his iPhone throughout the questions, which he does apologize for, just another indication of how busy he is.

He has been in the reptile industry for 21 years. He used to come to the Vivarium as a customer, then started working part time. Now he is the co owner, a position he took on in 1995.

“Everyday is different. There is a variety of jobs and animals to work with,” he says. “The customer keeps the whole thing going.”

A pure example comes when an employee climbs the stairs and appears with a Tupperware container. The employee peels the tops off and revels the three, baby red-foot turtles. “What will we give him for them?”

“Seventy dollars in a trade,” replies EBV John. Meaning for each baby the customer will get a $70 credit for the store. Not too shabby.

Rupert, the ball python, meets his meal.

 “The Petco Problem”

Continuing on, John discusses the “Petco problem,” as I call it. “It’s a huge problem because they don’t know what they are doing,” he says.  “But they have the biggest face in retail.”

In October 2002, a lawsuit was filed by the City of San Francisco to keep the company from selling live animals in San Francisco. The charges were a result of a lack of action by Petco after the San Francisco Department of Animal & Control Department gave it “numerous warnings and citations… about its inhumane and illegal treatment of small pets at its 1685 Bryant Street and 1591 Sloat Boulevard locations,” said a press release on the website  San Francisco City Attorney, Dennis Herrera.

“Sick and dying animals in freezers,” and “reptiles and fish left dead in display tanks,” were some of the complaints.

About a year and a half later, in May of 2004 the case was settled out of court. Petco was ordered to pay the City of San Francisco $50,000. It also had to follow certain provisions for 18 months including: providing specialized training for employees, getting medical care for all sick or injured animals and getting animals reviewed by an independent veterinarian.

Rupert strikes.

The PETCO Check-In

On a Monday afternoon, I check in on Four Square at Petco, located at 1591 Sloat Blvd, one of the two locations notoriously known for being cited in the lawsuit against the chain pet store. It is in a shopping center, like most of them are. I walk through the automatic doors. My nose adjusts to the dog food smell. I go left, past tubs of dog biscuits. The reptile sign hangs, I see tanks full of goldfish, bright colored fish, but where are the reptiles?  I turn right and run into a turtle tank in the corner.

I imagine the Peta (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) video I watched a couple days ago. A woman, in the reptile black market video, throws turtle shells in a bag like they are aluminum cans, a 5 cent redemption per can.  She shows no regard for the life form inside the shell. Peta doesn’t promote keeping reptiles in captivity. They site the black market of reptiles, and a statistic that 90 percent of wild-caught reptiles are dead within the first year in captivity. At the end of the video an interview with a lizard rescue in Seattle, Nancy Lanning, closes saying, “There is no reason to have a reptile as a pet, period.”

These turtles look happy enough. They are out of their shell, looking around, inside and outside the waterfall pool. I look right, down the long aisle in front of the tank, and a young, dark-haired guy is cleaning the lizard enclosures. He is wearing khaki pants, brown VANS and a black polo with Petco embroidered on the right, and his nametag clipped on the left. His name is Kevin. But I prefer Petco Kev.

Rupert bites down on the feeder rat.

He pushes around one of those carts I see science professors push around, black, two-tiered with wheels. He sprays the glass and wipes it with a towel, then sprays some of the plants, changes water and food as he answers my questions.

“The water is de-chlorinated. I give them fresh water,” he says. “And I make sure each cage has the right humidity.” Some of the lizards are from tropical temperatures, while others are from desert heat. Different environmental control needed, indeed. I’d say the lizards look good, not a dead one in sight, so maybe that lawsuit worked.

Petco Kev says his favorite lizard is a Canadian Crested Gecko. The one he shows me crawls all over him. It’s about a half-foot long, bright orange with a white stripe down its back. The top of him is flat, which makes him special, the white stripe is like a rectangle down his back. Let’s call this orange guy Moe.

So to see if EBV John was right, I ask Petco Kev what would I need to take this crested gecko home. I am directed towards a free (gratis) care pamphlet. The front shows a picture of a creature that looks like Moe, but a drab yellow color. I am asked to check yes or no for five questions/ statements. They go something like this:  1) Do I have an appropriate location? 2) Can I meet temperature and nutrition requirements? 3) Can I commit to caring for Moe? 4) Do I understand the risk of salmonella transmission? 5) A mature person will provide responsible and primary care for this companion animal.

Rupert holds the bite on his prey.

I can only answer yes to two of the questions; I need five yes responses to take Moe home. I guess I’ll be sleeping alone tonight.

The inside of the pamphlet gives me detailed instructions on how to take care of a creature of Moe’s stature. And the back tells me what to look for in a healthy animal versus an unhealthy one.

Besides this, Petco Kev knows what he is talking about. He had to read six books on reptiles and pass a written test with a score of 90 percent to keep his job. He also works underneath a companion animal manager, who checks the animals regularly.

He led me to the starter kit I would need, if I were to take Moe home. It costs about $80. “I would also recommend a plastic tree,” he says. “They love to climb, and I think it’s just mean not to have a tree in there for them.”

Petco Kev also says that all the animals are from local breeders that the store works with. So maybe Peta doesn’t have to worry, either.

Rupert starts the process of getting his dinner down in one bite.

Willam, the Herpetology Student  (Herp Will)

Herp Will talked to me over the phone. He wouldn’t meet up with me after that despite numerous calls and a text message. I think he thought I was the reptile FBI, but I did get a 30-minute interview.

I found his number on Craigslist. He was selling a boa python.  EBV John doesn’t recommend first-time buyers buying from Craigslist. He called it a “crap-shoot,” and said. “There’s not enough information, and it’s hard to follow up on.”

Herp Will was actually using it as a last option for the snake he was rehabilitating. He prefers kingsnake.com, a classified and informational website for reptiles.

William was another example of how people in the reptile industry are truly dedicated to their cause. Maybe it’s because there are limited lobbyist groups for reptiles, one being the United States Association of Reptile Keepers (USARK). And well-organized groups such as Peta and The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) hold the dominant voice of highlighting the negatives of the reptile industry, according to EBV John.

During my conversation with Herp Will he could not stress enough that all reptiles need a heat source of some kind, ranging between 70 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Not to mention, a proper sized cage. Each reptile has different requirements.  “You can’t forget them for even a day or two,” he says. “You can’t slack.”

Rupert has his meal halfway down.

To his dismay he has seen some very sick reptiles. When he worked at a reptile shop a customer brought in a bearded dragon lizard. This species is known for being very social, and “almost loving,” towards people and other reptiles. The one presented to him looked lethargic and emaciated.

“I looked at it for seven seconds. I knew from that point on there was no saving it. I was shocked it was even alive.” Herp Will was so upset he wanted to cuss the customer out. “But we had to give the reptile back, and send them to the vet,” he said. “I had to be that way as a professional.”

But it is situations like these he is trying to help avoid, by helping to get reptiles adopted. He personally rescues and rehabilitates them.  When the animal is ready to get a home, Herp Will charges an adoption fee, based on the species, and tries to send the creature off with a proper cage and light. “If you want to learn about something you can take it far.”

He is constantly learning, through reading, to get the best education he can. “Read, read, read,” is his advice. He recommends “Reptiles for Dummies.”

 Some Dummy(s) Who Didn’t Read Enough (Is this too harsh? The reptiles don’t think so).

The latest reptile reptile story has made it seem like the boa python population has taken over in Florida. A report insinuates that the snakes are killing the bird population, and are a threat to the human population. An uneducated snake owner probably released the snakes into the wild, which often happens when proper education isn’t passed on, said EBV John.

Rupert is probably wondering why the mouse has such a big ass.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) conducted a study on nine snake species in Florida. Species included: yellow anacondas, Burmese pythons, Northern and Sothern African pythons and boa constrictors. The USGS claims the study is for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service  and National Park Service to be “used to assist resource management agencies in developing management actions concerning the snakes when and where these species appear in the wild, “ according to the its website.

The report went on to say the snakes threaten the ecosystems and all species were considered high to medium risk because all grow to a large size, eat a variety of food, are tolerant of urbanization, and can be potential hosts of parasites and diseases, among other factors.

Another implication of the report is whether the pythons will threaten the mainland. EBV John retorts that what hasn’t been said is that the temperature in Florida has been freezing, and it has killed a lot of the boa population

For the same temperature reason, the snakes would not be able to make it cross-country. “99.9 percent of people will tell you that it’s not possible with that temperature,” Herp Will said. The lowest temperature pythons are Burmese, from Indonesia, and they live at 55 degrees at the coldest, he went on.

Just keep swallowing, keep swallowing.

EBV John worries about this kind of bad press because ultimately it leads to bad legislation. “We are an easy target to pick on.” He feels legislation is important because “people will do crazy things.” Some laws that have been passed include: No one can own a snake longer than six feet in San Francisco, and it is illegal to breed and keep venomous animals, as per Section 51 and 52 of San Francisco Health Code.  “But prohibition showed us that people are going to do what they want to do.”

 

Nick B.’s “Steve Erwin Experience”

Nick goes for bogey with the snake in tote.

And that is just what Nick Bennet did while he was golfing at the Callippe Preserve in Pleasanton on Good Friday. He was walking with his friend Scott, on the 12^th hole green, looking for his ball. Low and behold, there was a brown snake next to the white golf ball. Nick B. picked up the four-foot snake, not knowing what kind it was. (Luckily, for everyone’s sake, it was a gopher snake, non-venomous).

Nick B., drunk and snake in hand, bogeyed the hole. “Now whether or not it was the smart thing to do… it definitely wasn’t, but I’d do it again. Maybe I’ll stop when I finally get bit.”

Well, let’s hope that never happens. No one likes to learn the hard way.

 A Real Snake Owner and Handler

Audio C, Christopher Rouge, is a 22-year-old student who studies sound engineering. He’s a little under six feet tall, medium stature with dirty-blonde hair, blue-green eyes and a nice smile.

He was happy to show me his pride and joy, four-foot long, ball python, Rupert. At first I was scared of Rupert, I mean, he eats rats. His tan base has brown branches that slither around in uneven formations on his body, creating a pattern of uneven circles with brown dots.

Rupert, I think you have something in your teeth.

When I held him, I felt a connection. He contracted his muscles around my arm to move up and explore my shoulder, while poking his tongue in and out to smell me. (Snakes smell with their tongues to get air particles, and bring them to the Jacobson’s organ, in the roof of their mouth, to identify scents).

Yes, his skin was cold and hard, but I felt that he liked me. It was the first time I felt a connection with a cold-blooded creature. That’s if you don’t count my last boyfriend, or Edward Cullen from the Twilight series.

Audio C bought Rupert at the East Bay Vivarium, where he still goes to buy Rupert’s weekly meal, a feeder pup rat.

“Everyone you talked to there could tell you something about snakes,” he said. “That place is awesome. Everyone is super friendly.”

We talked in his room among drab colored walls. His full-size bed covered with a black comforter, behind us, the door to the right, his computer desk to the left, and Rupert’s enclosure in front of us. Enough space so two people can stand comfortably, but definitely not three. His terrarium is in Audio C’s closet, between his shirts and toiletries, on top of his wooden dresser.

Yeah, you definitely need a toothpick.

His living environment has logs, hiding spaces, a cold and hot side, water bowl and wood chips. On my second visit Rupert had a pup feeder rat in there, too. Audio C let me tag along on the feeding adventure. I guess this is how reptiles are different from mammals. You don’t go to the store and buy a bag of kibble; you go to the store and buy a live rat.

Audio C said you can buy frozen rats, but then you have to keep them on frozen food forever. “I want to him have some fun. I want him to get some excitement.”

Audio C drove us in his White Suburu WRX. “Are you ready to ride?” he asks me.  He has one of those personalities that’s so relaxed that you get relaxed being around him. He wears jeans, brown worn down VANS with back shoe laces, and a black polo with red and white stripes.

He played Red Hot Chili Peppers as we cruised San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. One guy in front of Actual Café is wearing a crab hat. Audio C laughs in the middle of our conversation, and I’m like, “What is going on?” Oh, the crab hat. Yup, we’re in Berzerkeley.

We arrive at East Bay Vivarium, park in the backed up parking lot. It’s meant for two cars, ours is the fourth vehicle to get in. We walk up the long driveway, other people talk out front. What do you know? It’s “feed day,” again. So about half  the tanks underneath the front counter still have mice in them.

Is that your tongue or a tail? Either way you're being very rude right now.

A dark-haired man with a full beard helps us, wearing a yellow Berkeley shirt.  “Do you want biggish or smallish?” he asks about what size rat we want.

“Mediumish,” replies Audio C. Yellow Shirt Guy goes to a drawer behind the counter. The space behind the counter is the size of an average bathroom, so there is plenty of room for critters of all kinds.

He shows us a baby with its eyes closed, it has a grey patch around the eye. “A little bit bigger,” says Audio C. Yellow Shirt Guy puts the baby back, and heads to the back “feeding room.” I’ve been there before. Gulp.

“How’s this?” asks Yellow Shirt Guy. He is holding a rectangular, cardboard box a little bit bigger than an iPhone. Audio C looks inside. “Good.”

He pays $1.92 for Rupert’s meal, and we are back in the car, on our way to feed the pet, with a pet. I hold the box on the way. I can feel the warmth underneath the thin cardboard. The box closes on the top with a folded flap and a single piece of masking tape holds it shut. The side reads: Ace Item No. 51602, Qty: 10 pcs. Well, now it’s quantity one, one life to give.

Your neck looks so big. Have you been working out?

“I’ve done this so many times it doesn’t even effect me,” says Audio C. “We eat chicken, steaks and lamb. Why is it any different?”

I continue holding the box, trying not to get attached to the rat inside, but I can feel it moving around. I simply name it Rat. The little nails are tapping on the inside. After arriving back where we started, we go inside his house.

When Audio C tries to pull Rat out, he can barely get it. He pulls by the tail, and Rat retaliates to the back of the box.

Audio C is not having it. He grabs the tail and lifts it up to show me the white, furry, feeder rat.  “Glad it didn’t pee. It stinks when they do that.”

He plops Rat down into Rupert’s terrarium. It’s like donkey kong inside that enclosure. I feel the tension. I crouch down to get pictures. It’s like a game of snake and rat, like a fight inside the UFC Octagon. Audio C keeps doing the voice of Rupert. “Why are you watching me bro?” he mimics.

As soon as Rupert senses the heat of the rat he starts making moves, slithering around. Rat goes underneath a log in the middle. Rupert hides behind another log. He slithers over to his prey. Rat moves and before he can take five rat steps a “SQEAK!” is released.

Rupert bites down on his meal. A blood mark shows where Rupert bit.

Once Rat is dead Rupert must figure out how to eat the white furry thing whole. Yes, one bite. (Snakes can separate their jaw and open at 150 degrees, humans can only open to 45 degrees).

He tries a couple different positions. “Don’t eat it ass first, dumb ass,” says Audio C in the background. Rupert fulfills his owner’s wishes and eats his linner (late lunch, early dinner) head first. It takes about five minutes as he gets the four-inch mammal down his throat. The tail and feet stick out of his mouth at the end and you can see the body lump in his throat. His neck turns twice his normal size. (Elasticity of neck skin and muscles make this possible. Their saliva helps break down the prey and get it down the gullet).

“I can’t touch him for fiv days to let him digest,” says Audio C. “Otherwise he can throw it up, and I don’t want to clean that up.”

I thank Audio C for the experience and I go home. Stuck in traffic I feel gross because I was so engrossed in the feeding of Rupert. But I guess we all have to eat.

 Just Because They’re Not Furry

Reptiles obviously aren’t cuddly or soft, but they hold a huge space in the world’s ecosystem. In Flordia some say sankes are ruining the ecosystem in the Everglades. But in China and Africa, they are being removed to be sold in the Black Market, or eaten by natives.

“Any one of the introduced plants could have ruined the ecosystem, but it’s easier to get people up in arms about big snakes,“ says Scott Alexander, the president of the Bay Area Amphibian and Reptile Society (BARRS).

Out of a list of  25+ endangered turtles and tortoises , a report by the Turtle Conservation Coalition, about 50 percent of the 328 species were considered threatened, but ony about 25 percent of mammals under the same category. Six species species are from China, and four are from Madagascar.

“People care about tigers and pandas and snow leopards,  but if it’s creepy and crawly people don’t care that much.”

Kids in China are paid to go out and find turtles and tortoises and then get paid for finding them. Families also eat turtles for food, due to poverty, and the creatures are exploited for their medicinal purpouses. Turtle shell is ground up and drunk for kidney and liver purposes. And in these circumstances you usually want the biggest turtles, Scott says.

But the biggest turtles are the ones who are old enough to breed; it takes about 15 years for turtles and tortoises of China to get to a breeding age.

Scott is specifically working with Burmese Star and Radiated Tortoise , breeding endangered species in an effort to keep the species from extinction.

An obstacle he is coming across in saving the species is trying to get enough turtles to breed. Currently, there are international regulations on shipping reptiles, in an attempt to keep the Black Market trade down. “If a species is going extinct and it’s not being protected. you should be allowed to export it for breeding,” he argues. “The restriction on transporting for breeding is driving extinction.”

In order to have money to fight for his cause he works full-time. But when he didn’t have time to properly clean and take care of his animals he hired a woman off Craigslist to come over and help. That woman is now his wife, and together they have two dogs, 12 cats, and about 50 reptiles.

He is so dedicated to reptiles and helping the cause that two of five rooms in his house are dedicated to them. But he doesn’t call him self a pet owner. “I consider myself a breeder.”

BAARS is working on getting the public educated on these creatures by having “animal educators.” The society visits schools, holds open meetings and workshops. “Maybe one these kids will be our leaders in the future and make a difference.”

So Now What?

Basically, if you want to get a pet of any kind, breed, or species, do some research. Every animal needs special care. If you get a pit bull puppy, you need to plan on how much space, time and food you will need for it when it becomes an adult.

If you decide to get a ball python, then you need to feed it once a week, make sure it has proper lighting and shelter.

Both are years-long commitments, and neither species can speak for themselves. That is why these “reptile warriors” speak for them.

 

 

 

Beacon

Everett Middle School is both a newcomer site for students who emigrate from Latin American countries, as well as an immersion school, teaching Spanish as early as kindergarten.

BEACON

By Tamerra Griffin

After having spent a considerable and pleasurable amount of time in the Mission the past few months, I have been subject to a number of lessons; some were sweet and happily digested, while others were force-fed, bitter doses of the realities of public education and the lives of children growing up in gentrified and often underserved communities. I learned, for example, that buildings and people are a lot alike.  The exteriors are merely facades that have been carefully crafted to distract passerby from the secrets inside.

Such is the Mission Beacon Center, a beating heart inside the vast body of Everett Middle School on 450 Church Street.  Despite its location on the outskirts of the Mission, the school’s appearance still maintains the regal, Catholic-influenced architecture often associated with the district.  In fact, the only things that seem to be missing from its cathedral-esque ambiance are chartreuse-stained windows and a steeple atop its columned presence.  Surrounding it is the same cluster of modern apartments that attracted the influx of more affluent, Caucasian San Franciscans to the once Latino-dominant Mission beginning in the mid-90s (because who wouldn’t pay an extra $500 a month to live minutes away from the picturesque and hipster-infested Dolores Park or Bi-Rite Creamery?).

But this theme of sophisticated beauty is done away with inside the Beacon; the walls explode unapologetically with graffiti murals.  An inverted skateboarder fights a stylish breakdancer for attention above a window, and both are set against a background of inspirational quotes and powerful words like “unity” and “peace,” all of which have been painted by the students who call the Beacon a second home.

Middle schoolers, having been excused early from school on a thankfully short Friday, lounge on an L-shaped couch, limbs tangled and indistinguishable as they occasionally divert their eyes from “Harry Potter” to check cell phones for text messages.  A smattering slouch at archaic, heavy-backed desktop computers, where instead of getting a jumpstart on their weekend homework, they sneak onto Facebook and leap over obstacles in a computer game.

“Aye Carmen—el Facebook?” says program director Luis Chavez, the familiarity of Spanglish sweetening his otherwise admonishing tone.  The perpetrator, caught red-handed, giggles as she quickly exits the site.

Luis gives me a brief rundown of the program, which is accompanied by three endearing, tri-folded poster boards of projects past.  The Beacon, established in 1999, is a space for kids who might otherwise have nowhere else to go, he says.  Between the girls’ volleyball team and weekly cooking classes, the center aims to occupy its attendees between school letting out and the end of their parents’ double shifts at work, while enriching their learning environments, completely free of charge.

The Beacon’s flag football team practices on the concrete playground out back.  The boys’ rib cages expand as they playfully insult each other, their bare chests glistening with sweat, the onset of pectorals, and bravado.  They are coached by Brian, who walks like he was a star player in his high school days and attempts to control his thick, locked hair in a ponytail.

I look at these pre-teens—as they run down the field and receive passes, dance over a soccer ball, or clamor for another slice of honey ham—I can’t help but imagine how they’d be spending this after school time if they couldn’t hang out at the Beacon.  Duffel dime bags and Norteno-versus-Sureno replace tutoring and shirts-versus-skins in my head.  I am not so naïve to believe that the former life replaces the latter; I know that some of these students, simply products of their perilously underserved communities, must do both to survive.

Back inside, I am tackled by the scent of nail polish as it weighs down the study room with its pungent, acetone-heaviness. Sure enough, a group of girls sit off to the side, hunching over their outstretched fingers as they gently glide dripping brushes over their nails, bumping into chewed cuticles along the way.

“Don’t worry, the bad parts come off when you take a shower,” reassures one girl to her friend.  The second part of what she says, although unspoken, is loud enough to shake the entire neighborhood: if only it were that simple.

A People of History

            In the 1990s, the San Francisco Unified School District and community groups like the Beacon Steering Committee joined together to establish the San Francisco Beacon Initiative.  Aimed at providing adolescents aged 11-14 with the proper social skills needed to thrive in high school and at the university level (such as leadership, civic engagement, and efficient communication, all of which are difficult to teach in San Francisco’s highly populated middle schools, much less tailor to individual students’ needs), the Beacon Initiative implemented eight different programs throughout the city, from North Beach to Visitacion Valley.

These centers serve a dual purpose: being that they are situated in lower-income, working-class neighborhoods, the beacons act as safe havens for children, spaces where they can complete their homework (with assistance from tutors when necessary) and receive a balanced meal before heading home.  Sometimes, these things aren’t guaranteed elsewhere.

Two years into the Mission Beacon’s establishment, Dina, the recreational coordinator at the time, began to generate interest among a group of girls to play soccer.  What started as simple inter-organization pick-up games evolved into scrimmages again different after school programs in the area, like Horace Mann Middle School and the Columbia Park Boys and Girls Club.  Eventually, Everett and the Mission Beacon combined their efforts (and their funds) to establish “Owl Central,” a slight nod to the unintimidating school mascot.  Ruben Urbina, who oversees the soccer program now known as Girls Got Goals, noticed an influx of interested soccer players at tryouts.  Instead of cutting them, he decided to create a second team, both of which have made it to the playoffs this season.

“There was always a disparity between what was offered to boys versus girls,” Ruben tells me over the cackle of his district-regulated phone, “so it’s been great that we’ve had so much participation.”

Without question, these girls’ journeys transcend their win-loss record.  Their journeys are of maturity and team development and confidence and transporting on-the-field success to achievement classroom.  Their journey, like so many of adolescents their age, is one worth telling.

First Attempt Connection

Owl Central goalkeeper Jessica warms up with a combination passing drill. The Owls look to defend their two-time championship title this season.

I can only imagine the insult-coated utterances they shout about me, disguised in a sing- song-y, Central American Spanish they know I cannot understand.

“She plays in college?”

“She’s so short!”

“I didn’t know black girls played soccer…”

And who can blame them?  Here I am, presenting myself as an athlete—with a big, non-Spanish-speaking smile, just begging to be made fun of—who competes at one of the highest levels in the country, and nearly tripping over my own legs trying to chase the impossibly quick footwork of my opponent, who is at least seven years my junior.

The afternoon wind blows goosebumps and the possibility of a snowy night onto their bare legs, which emerge from hibernation under khaki pants and fitted jeans in the heat of competition.  Further down the playground, the football team executes a play, Nikes scuffling and screeching against the fading black surface.  The boundaries of our makeshift field at the Beacon are anchored by two sets of two large, electric lemon cones, our goals.  Novice skateboarders circle the organized sports like vultures, ready to devour a bored team member into their clan.  This is a typical Friday afternoon, where Everett students celebrate the completion of yet another hard-fought and unpraised week with an endorphin fix.

On my team are round-cheeked Carlos, sweating beneath his school-regulation, poly-blend white polo; Kevin, who stands a head and shoulder taller than I and sports a flashy pair of purple and florescent orange soccer shoes; and a passionate Hiner, whose faux hawk slices the icy February air as he races down the field, a relentless and blood-thirsty shark.  We fall to a four-goal deficit in the first 10 minutes, and our opponents swell with confidence at every blocked shot or successful fake out.  Our morale is low.  We make emotional mistakes which, in the case of my teammates, are often followed by their favorite expletives, “Puta!” and “Pinche!”

But as life and soccer demonstrate time and time again, all it takes is one goal, one forward step, to shift the current.  Carlos, reluctant to venture outside the comfortable boundaries of a goalkeeper’s zone, distributes the ball to Kevin, who paints the grassless field with colorful moves for his opponents.  He then sends it spinning towards me with impressive pace, a technique that normally takes years to perfect.  My path to the goal is blocked by Grachel, the only other girl on the field, who fearlessly, almost recklessly kicks at my ankles in an attempt to intercept the ball.  With a quick-footed cut, I slide past her in time to release the ball to a screaming Hiner, so anxious to score that he almost shanks the ball wide of the goal, missing a rare scoring opportunity.

Almost.

Unable to contain my elation, I sprint toward Hiner, hands outstretched to receive his in a celebratory high-five.  He shows more facial restraint than I do, but excitement is evident beneath the surface of his bad-boy visage, a milky, iridescent pearl begging for exposure inside a rocky shell.

On the emotional descent from one victory, I receive another.  Grachel strides toward me, her lip ring twinkling seductively in the winter-white sun.  Her long, lean shape and confident gait suggest the field position of an attacker, but her tenacity likens her to a midfielder position.  It may be too soon to tell.

“How did you learn to play like that?” she asks, the slow tempo and soft volume of her question revealing the effort it takes to phrase it in English.  It’s more than a question, though.  It’s an extension of a delicate rope called Trust, and she’s holding it out to me between her fingers.

“I can teach you,” I respond.  And just like that, we are linked.

Liaison

The following Friday, the Beacon kids seem fatigued and uninterested in collecting the pieces from last week’s game, instead entertaining themselves on a nearby bench.  Ten of them sit shoulder to shoulder, and the two anchors lean hard into the center as the ones in the middle emit uncontrollable giggles.  Ball in hand, my eyes frantically search theirs, desperately trying to make eye contact and initiate a game.  All attempts are fruitless.  Then, a green shirted figure emerges from the edge of my peripheral vision, and by the time I realize that it’s Jose Mejia, a fellow volunteer at the Beacon, he takes the role of one of the anchors and throws his weight into the pyramid.

This swift action causes the students to erupt with laughter, and the force exerted toward the middle of the bench pushes some of them forward.  After a few more moments of this—and there truly is something to be said about the beautiful simplicity required to entertain a child—Jose stands, collects the ball from me, and dribbles down the field, executing fancy tricks as he goes.  And as though are summoned by a soccer playing Pied Piper, one by one the kids roll out of the pyramid and follow him onto the field.  My envy of his seemingly effortless influence is overshadowed still by a sense of thankfulness.  He is my liaison, in more ways than one.

Upon first glance, Jose does not inspire poetic, earth-shattering metaphors or even a raised eyebrow.  He neither towers over crowds nor peers up at them, and secures the hem of his baggy jeans with rubber bands, tiny denim ponytails that hover above black Converse or slick Nikes.  The shape of his body suggests that he is bien cuidada, well cared for (which equates to being well fed in Latino culture), but it would be a grave mistake to assume that his heavyset physique makes him any less agile on the pitch.

He constantly reminds me of this throughout the day; Jose and I always play on opposing teams, and I have suffered on more than one occasion the sear of embarrassment as he fools me with the ball—hips leading one way while his feet go the other—and throws me off balance trying to defend him.  He plays with unapologetic arrogance, which is annoying and admirable.  For guys like him, pride is precious.

Not that he’s a “bad boy,” by any means.  The 17-year-old has been volunteering at the Beacon for almost two months and plans to attend the City College of San Francisco this fall, although still unsure of his major.  Despite the angry-looking exterior that young men of his age have been conditioned to wear, Jose is thankfully not immune to smiling.  But at his still-ripening age, he is armed with an ego that opposes authority.  With a smirk and a bit of a wince, he raises a fist to my eyes, displaying the crusting cranberry scabs left over from a couple of weeks ago when he drunkenly punched a concrete wall during a fight at a club to which he wasn’t even old enough to be admitted.

“My uncle’s the bouncer there,” is all he offers as justification.

At the Beacon, however, Jose’s demeanor hints at not even a trace of negativity or violence.  Sure, he moans at having to chop tomatoes for the kids’ salad during cooking class and is occasionally scolded by Brian for playing on his phone while on the job, but he also spends upwards of 12 hours each week working at this program for free.  In that context, a handful of secretly-sent text messages seems arbitrary.

Jose—who also goes by “Biggie,” but only in the presence of one of the Beacon kids whose actual name is Tupac—aspires to play for the men’s soccer team at CCSF.  He didn’t play in high school because he “got into too much trouble,” although his skills prove that he can certainly compete at that level.  His curiosity about collegiate soccer draws down his tough-guy façade like a moat, and he asks me questions like How often do you practice? and Shit, you have to run how much? or my favorite, They don’t teach you moves like that at State, do they?

He adds taco sauce to garlic bread and ranch dressing to ravioli to give them more flavor.  He peppers his language with the same Spanish slang—A huevo!—as the kids he looks after, and he coats his words with a sugary flirtiness for every female he encounters.  He is such an accurate reflection not only of his Mission roots, but of the Beacon itself: tough on the outside, and necessarily so, when deep down all he wants is someone to lean on.

Owl Central: the Cinderella Team

Everett’s cafeteria is plastered with bright slabs of butcher paper advertising various campus events, annoyingly enthusiastic healthy eating posters, and leftover crepe paper twisted festively in honor of the most recent dance.  On one side of the airy room, members of the football team face the stage, where a motivational speaker commands their attention with grandiose gestures and an urban drawl.  Across the way, the young ladies of the Girls Got Goals soccer program sit quietly at circular foldout tables, pouring over history books.  As part of the program, the girls must endure an hour and a half of homework sessions and empowering workshops each Tuesday and Wednesday before they can touch the ball at practice.

As they print swirly script on college ruled paper, head coach Guillermo Gonzalez looks over them, his soft brown eyes combating a large and lumbering body to prove his gentleness.  Gonzalez, a senior at Mission High School down the street, enters his second year coaching at the Beacon, and hopes to defend the two-time championship title with the girls this season.  He speaks with an endearing lisp and never raises his voice above a café whisper, even when one of the players confesses that she has forgotten her practice shorts.  His easygoing manner is no doubt tied to an inescapable empathy; before becoming a coach, Guillermo was himself a Beacon kid.

He tells me this as we wait for the girls to change into their athletic clothes outside the locker room.  The first to emerge, covered in an oversized white t-shirt, navy blue sweatpants, and thick black eyeliner (applied with remarkable precision for a pre-teen) is Carla.  She regards me, a foreigner, with a scrutinizing but not completely dismissive gaze.  As she saunters up to Guillermo and takes a seat beside him, she says, “Somebody just tried to jump one of the girls outside campus.”  The evenness of her tone suggests that occurrences like these aren’t rare, a speculation that solidifies with Guillermo’s subtle reaction—raised eyebrows followed by an exasperated sigh.  And then, one by one, the Owl Central squad flies out of the locker room, indoor soccer shoes thudding lightly on the concrete.

Once the congregation is head-counted, we all make our way to the indoor gym on the second floor of the school.  Backpacks are discarded on the wall beyond the sideline, and ponytails are tightened.  Jose Guevara, another high school coach, tells Carla to put her phone away.  She walks over to her backpack, unzips it, and mimics the motion of throwing something into it, while actually leaving her text messaging capabilities and her rebellion in her pocket.  Fully aware that I’ve witnessed her stealthy move, she raises a finger to her lips as a mischievous grin breaks across it.  And instantly, the secret is sealed, just in time for practice.

Jose’s demeanor is a nice balance to Guillermo’s.  The former isn’t afraid to shout, which is apparent as he leads the girls’ warm-up. It’s an aerobic sequence of stretches, lunges, and laps around the court, and by the time it’s over, tiny beads of sweat dot the girls’ hairlines.  They refuse to remove their earrings before practice, causing their gold hoops to swing like shiny pendulums against their necks as they run, keeping time with the minutes of their cherished youthful experience.  Outside these walls, environments and obstacles more complex than their maturity levels await them, but for the next hour, they simply play.

Jose focuses on Jessica, the goalkeeper, while the rest of the team works on stationary passing.  In one drill, she faces the wall of the gym, and when Jose yells “Go!” she jumps and turns to face him with just enough time to save a ball he kicks at her.  Her eyes narrow as she tunes into her twitch muscles, sharpening her reflexes.  Jose is equally quick in praising her good saves and criticizing her weaker moments, switching fluidly between Spanish and English all the while.  The chemistry in the room—not just between keeper and coach, but on the entire team—is positive and light, which no doubt has become a foundation in the team’s success.

The practice ends with a much-anticipated full court scrimmage.  The team splits in half, and one group stretches green mesh “pennies” over their heads to distinguish them from their opponents.  At the sound of the whistle, the girls thunder down the court, shouting for the ball over their own stampede.  The mini-squads are evenly matched; each has its fair share of intricate combination plays and narrowly missed goals.  And unlike most young teams, on which teammates typically respond to criticism with immediate retorts and long-lasting resentment, these girls know that whenever they dig into each other, it’s coupled with compassion and a genuine desire for their improvement.

The Owl's first team poses after defeating Columbia Park Boys and Girls Club 5-1 on Thursday, April 28.

“These are my best friends.  We’re all really supportive of each other,” says Lesley Gonzalez, an 8th grader and second-year Beacon player, after practice.  “Playing here has really helped with my social skills.  I talk to people more.”

The game ends with a narrow victory to the green team—the victorious scorer swings her pseudo jersey around her head like a brown-skinned Brandi Chastain—and Jose goes over the logistics of the Owls’ game tomorrow afternoon.

Then they stretch (which is code, as any young athlete knows, for socialize) and head back to the locker rooms to morph back into non-soccer selves.  The pendulums have swung their final warnings, and as they exit the Beacon and disperse like a firework across the neighborhood to different homes, pieces of their identity are laid to rest for the evening.  Now they become adults.

Fault Lines

The double doors of Everett’s second-floor gymnasium stand tall and locked today.  I look through a sliver of Plexiglas, trying to find a pair of eyes inside who will help me enter (this search, as I have discovered in my weeks spent here, is both metaphorical and constant).  I find one, a fellow volunteer in a floppy hat named Donnie, who kicks down the handle of the door with such force that the BOOM reverberates throughout the stairwell and momentarily blocks out the sound of thunder fooling around with torrential rain outside.

When inclement weather strikes the Mission Beacon Center, a rainy day schedule is set in motion.  Indoor basketball replaces outdoor football, the cheer team practices in the auditorium instead of on the blacktop, and small-sided soccer matches shrink to occupy a smaller space inside the gym.  There’s a school-wide dance in the cafeteria, which is why the basketball court is so desolate.  A sprinkling of Vans-clad boys kick a ball around, causing the nets of the makeshift goals to cascade in ripples every time they score.  On the opposite side of the room, Donnie shoots hoops with a seventh-grader named Joaquin, who dribbles the ball with controlled hands and shakes shaggy mane out of his eyes before each layup.

Between these two activities, Hiner—one of my soccer buddies, who recognizes me with excited eyes but admits he can’t remember my name—and a spritely boy named Alexander take turns hitting a birdie across the center court to Cordell, a soft-spoken 12-year-old who neglects to change out of his school-sanctioned white polo into a more stylish tee like the other kids have.  New kid on the block that I am, I inch closer to the game, silently asking for permission to play along.  Within minutes, I’m gripping the worn foam handle of a tennis racket and the last shreds of my athletic dignity as I attempt to engage my hand-eye coordination.

As I swat aimlessly at the plastic shuttlecock, I think to myself, this is one of the beautiful things about this school, this program.  Hiner is Mexican-American, Alexander is of Pacific Islander descent, and Cordell is African-American.  But in this small game in this stuffy room, color is irrelevant.  They are united solely by their interests, resistant to the prejudicial lenses of their respective societies.

And just like the volatile weather outside—which phases from angry, sheeted downpour to sunshine poking through wispy clouds—the climate shifts suddenly.

The dance has ended, and a clan of students to pour into the gym.  As if they’ve rehearsed from a script, a handful of boys rush to the basketball court, discarding backpacks and hooded sweatshirts as they run so that by the time they are beneath the hoops, they are prepared to battle.  Joaquin’s bewilderment is palpable; he is now the only non-black kid on the basketball side of the gym.  The others shout for the ball as they glide toward the net, executing the same effortless layup that Joaquin, according to Donnie, had been practicing for hours before.  Intimidation sets in as Joaquin fades from the arc of the three-point line to the sideline, where he sits and watches an entirely different game unfold.

 Similarly, Hiner’s line of vision begins to stray from badminton to the soccer game—which, from the sound of it, is picking up in its intensity—happening over my shoulder.  After a few more sympathy hits, he hands me his racket and heads over to the far side of the court adding with bland reassurance that I can “play with two racquets against the other two.”  Alexander and Cordell escape soon after, claiming the need for a water break that apparently lasts the duration of the afternoon.  I take a seat and look at the incredible transformation that has taken place.

To my left, black boys swat and yelp for the ball, occasionally acrobatting themselves up above the rim to retrieve a ball that’s been wedged between the hoop and backboard.

To my right, Latino boys chase down a skidding soccer ball, flat-soled sneakers screeching across the wooden floor of the gym and marking it with black streaks.  Minutes later, as if to solidify this segregation, Donnie emerges from the equipment closet with a stack of traffic orange cones—a most ironic warning if I’d ever seen one—and places them in a line across the court, separating the games and, essentially, the students playing them.  This division, so subtle that I’m unsure if the kids are even aware of it, seems so fluid and natural.  Despite Everett’s demographics—57.3 percent Latino, 23.5 percent African American, 3.5 percent Filipino—evidence of same-race magnetization is still alarmingly prevalent.

The Baby Project

Springtime means sneezing through pollen-infested sunshine, swapping puffy parkas for shapelier zip-up sweaters, and the tedium of standardized testing.  The silver lining in the STAR test, however, is that teachers are usually too drained from exam proctoring, healthy snack distributing, and No. 2 pencil sharpening to follow through on their own lesson plans, which means no homework for the Owls.  For this reason, Owl Central is restless in the cafeteria during their normally designated pre-practice study time.  Lesley fixates on the note card-sized screen of an iTouch as she navigates her way through what sounds like a perilously high level in an application game.

“What are these bitches so afraid of?!” she shouts into the fantasy world, but immediately her brown eyes widen at me as one hand flies up to cover her mouth.  She has just released a forbidden expletive by Beacon rules.

I offer her a reassuring smile in return.  Today I am not an authority, merely an observer.

As the girls shake the crumby remains of a white cheddar Pop chips bag into their manicured hands, Guillermo and Jose announce that they will be moving from the lunch room to a classroom for the remainder of study hall for a “special program” for which males are not allowed to attend.

“But if you guys act up, we will know about it,” adds Jose with as much sternness as a high school senior can muster.  Slowly, reluctantly, the girls shuffle down the hall.

Inside, an older woman clad in a pink Rocawear top waits patiently for the team to take their seats at the long rows of tables.  She introduces herself as Lynn from the Mission Girls program, which essentially offers the same services as the Beacon—academic assistance, emotional empowerment, cooking classes, arts and crafts—but focuses on gender-specific groups.  As Lynn raises her voice above the low hum of whispering voices — Lesley is still poking and prodding away at her iPod game — she makes it clear that this is a space for the girls to freely express themselves, to discuss things going on within the community with the assurance that whatever they say will remain confidential.

It’s abundantly clear that by “things going on within the community,” Lynn alludes to the number of shootings — which police have since tied to gang violence between San Francisco’s Surenos and the Nortenos — that have dominated the Mission’s streets within the past two months.  As she offers this vague phrase, a conversational lure into a potentially moving discussion, the girls avert their eyes and remain silent.  Either the topic is still too sensitive, or the promise of confidentiality is too questionable, too risky to believe right now.

Not to be deterred, Lynn initiates a standard ice breaker.  The girls take turns going around the room to introduce themselves, tell their age, their favorite food.  Between Carla and Grachel and Angelica and Calvana and Hilda and Lesley and Alina and Edith and being 11 and 12 and 13 and 13-and-three-quarters (as Alina concludes after counting on her fingers) and 14 years old, they are united by their collective appreciation for Mexican food.

Pacing the front of the classroom, gelled ponytail slick and shiny beneath unforgiving fluorescent lights, Lynn lists some upcoming events at Mission Girls, hoping to incite some enthusiasm.

“On Fridays we have free pizza and movie nights…”

Carla quickly pipes up by asking, “How much does it cost?” a question that is either a testament to her not fully listening, or the importance of price, no matter how small, in every activity she might pursue.

Lynn reiterates, with an admirable air of patience, that the event is free.  Then she describes an activity that sparks an unexpected uproar among the team: the Baby Project.

With the intent of providing girls with a physical glimpse of life as a teenage and expecting mother, the Baby Project equips them with either a mechanical baby programmed to cry multiple times throughout the day, or an occasionally-kicking “belly” to wear strapped to their own tiny abdomens, a backwards backpack in every sense of the word.

As Lynn explains the intricacies of the project (from its weekend-long duration to the fact that she can tell how long the baby cries by a computer chip, “So don’t think you can just stuff it in your closet at night when it goes off,” she says amid an eruption of guilty giggles), the girls are as quiet and engaged as they’ve been all afternoon.  Lesley even takes a break from level-hopping in her video game to ask, “But what if we have a soccer game?  I can’t play with that big ol’ belly,” to which everybody in the room chimes in with variations of “Yeah!” and “I know, right!”

Little do these owls know, though, that every pass they make on the field, every time they slip a black and yellow jersey on, they compete not only against their physical opponent — like Horace Mann at 4 p.m. tomorrow — but the squad of statistics lined up against them as well.

As Latino and African American youth living in low-income communities in California, they are significantly more likely than most to be overweight or obese.  They don’t realize it now, but by playing soccer they greatly reduce their likelihood of illegal drug use, smoking cigarettes, and having unprotected sex.

But it’s not obligatory that they understand this right now.  Right now, they need only worry themselves over hair clips and remembering their indoor soccer cleats and walking home from school in the buddy system.  Right now, the only sounds they need to be concerned with are referee whistles and laughter, not ambulance sirens and teething babies.  Right now, they are young minds yearning for the comfort of routine, for solidarity.  And if they can find it here, in this oblong-shaped classroom headed by Lynn from Mission Girls, then so be it.

Excitement for the Baby Project continues to rise the following week, when Lynn enters the classroom toting one of the dolls in question—all brown skin and round cheeks—along with a vest meant to stimulate a pregnant belly.  The girls hastily scribble down required information on their permission slip forms and waste no time in clamoring for a chance to pass around the special guest.

“He’s so cute!” they croon as they bounce the blue-clad baby (whom they collectively decide is named Junior) on their still-developing hips.  Rather than tiny red organs, the interior of this simulation child is a small black box that randomly initiates crying and whimpering.  When this happens, Lucely Chel, a short 8^th grader with a thick, floppy ponytail, offers up her index finger to Junior’s toothless and unmoving mouth, exactly as any knowledgeable caretaker would to a real baby.

Amidst the hullabaloo, Jessica and Magaly, both volunteer coaches who attend City College of San Francisco, exchange knowing glances in the corner of the boisterous classroom.

“They’re all happy about it now, but after a few hours of crying and realizing they have to take it to school with them, they’re gonna change their minds real quick,” says Jessica with a smirk to a nodding Magaly.

It goes unsaid, but the coaches know that these kinds of lessons are necessary; educational investments to prevent the possibility a future market crash.

Suddenly, Alina (the official team clown) wonders aloud, “I wonder what his wee-wee looks like,” much to the comedic appreciation of her comrades.  Lesley the Brave takes the bait, carefully removing Junior’s diaper.  Everybody scoots their chairs in around her, craning their necks to witness firsthand the impending sight.

After the anticipation has reached an acceptable high, Lesley pulls down the front flap of the diaper to reveal the last thing anyone expects.  Barely discernable over the explosion of squeals and laughter, Alina shouts, “This is not a boy!!”  They all look to Lynn for an explanation, who finds their confusion amusing.  “Sometimes the clothes get mixed up,” is all she says.

Junior never receives a more female-normative name after the shocking genital discovery, but the girls continue to pass him around, marveling at the realness of his weight, the delicate connection between head and body on a weak neck, the natural inward curvature of his chubby legs and precious feet.  The tenderness with which they handle him suggests experience, either with a younger sibling or other close family member.

But in spite of their fascination, the girls still grasp the true meaning of the exercise.  At one point, Edith turns to tell me about an experience she had recently at church.

“This other girl was doing the Baby Project, and she had to leave because it wouldn’t stop crying,” she says, her signature black hair bow bouncing along with her animated narrative.  “Everybody was staring at her.  She told us never to do this; she hated it.”

Overhearing this, Carla nods her head in solemn sympathy.  And then, as if snapping them out of a drowsy hypnotic trance, Jessica points out the time: 4:45.  Practice.

In one fell swoop, the team gathers their duffel bags, slaps their permission slips on the table in front of Lynn, steals one last glance at “Junior” (and for some, a handful of the complimentary Flamin’ Hot Cheetos) and rushes out the door to change into their soccer gear.  I am both astonished and amused at their malleable attention spans, and can only hope for their sake that they continue to leave pregnancy at the wayside in favor of athletics for a long, long time.

Mixed Martial Arts takes over the Bay Area

Vince Bordi attacks Angelo Henry during their 205 lb. fight at “Dragon House 5” on March 15. Bordi won by first round knockout. (Courtesy of: Vince Bordi)

By Robert Cartagena

Inside Zhong Luo’s Dragon House, students’ faces are red from pain. They have just completed some intense submission drills and now take a moment to catch their breath. You can smell the sweat throughout the gym. Sifu Luo, the founder and head instructor, instructs them to compete in a couple of five minute rounds of sparring. He sets his electronic clock for the first round. “Ready?” The students, men ages 18 and up, break into pairs and exchange handshakes. “You got five minutes. Fight to a tap out!” The clock beeps. Immediately, the students grapple each other, looking to gain the upper hand by earning the first takedown. Some quickly go to the ground during the struggle. Others execute tackles and rollovers.

Despite the frenzied pace, Luo calmly kneels as he observes each pair. Right when one student thinks he has the advantage, his opponent quickly turns it around. The battle continues. Another student grabs his opponent’s leg
and slams him to the mat. A sharp “THUD!” echoes throughout the gym. As the round comes to a close, the sense of urgency becomes apparent. “You got eight seconds. Tap out quick!” Each student executes one last takedown. The round ends.

The Dragon House may look like a traditional martial arts school with calligraphy  inscribed on the slightly faded white walls and traditional martial arts weapons displayed in the window. But the training is a whole different story. The students who train there take it very serious. There’s no fooling around inside. “I’m just pretty much the person to monitor off-training, monitor every fighter and make sure they progress, and make sure they don’t be lazy. I’ll call them if they don’t show up for a week – that’s it,” says Luo, who has been practicing martial arts since age five.

From the time each class begins to the time it ends, the students bleed and sweat, transforming themselves into future fighting machines. Various thuds can be heard when a person is taken down or bodyslammed on the mat. Students use the support beams that black heavy bags hang from to perform pull-ups and chin-ups. Even the music played during classes contributes a little bit to the training. If you’re expecting to hear Justin Bieber music, you’re in the wrong place. All you’re going to hear is “fight music,” mostly rap songs that get the fighters’ adrenaline pumping.

Welcome to the world of mixed martial arts. This popular full contact sport has taken the world by storm. Now, it is taking over the Bay Area. The Dragon House is one of few gyms offering San Francisco residents the opportunity to transform themselves into the next Anderson Silva or Georges St. Pierre.

“Nowadays, it’s hard to find a gym that has every aspect in the MMA game. We have it all,” Luo says. “The old school martial arts practitioners stick with the same style – that’s the only style they have taught – and sometimes, it’s hard to survive. People like to have more choices when they walk into a martial arts gym.”

Other local gyms offering MMA classes include World Team USA, Ralph Gracie jiu-jitsu, Fight and Fitness, Bushido Fight Team and Gym 445. In fact, Fight and Fitness co-owner Chris Cariaso recently competed in his UFC debut on Jan. 11 at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. He defeated Will Campuzano via unanimous decision. All three judges scored the bout 29-28. Cariaso will face Michael McDonald at “UFC 130” in Las Vegas on May 28.

K-One Fitness, located at 2001 Van Ness Ave., offers fitness boot camps to help people get into shape. Along with the opportunity to learn boxing, Muay Thai and MMA, the four week program offers nutritional guidance and even how-to’s on selecting the right equipment to maximize training. The most recent boot camp began on May 2 and runs until May 27.

“You can train like a fighter does for four weeks, and get all the health benefits and endurance benefits and the skill benefits you’d get by training like a Muay Thai fighter or a (boxer) for four weeks. You get all that without actually stepping into the ring and competing,” Xavier Macay, a K-One instructor, states on the gym’s website.

Mark Tabuso, the head Muay Thai and kickboxing coach at Freestyle Submission Academy Fight Team, considers the Bay Area a “mecca” for MMA because of the local fighters who are making a name for themselves in the sport. “All of our students here – all these students in every other gym – have an opportunity within a rock’s throwaway to train with one of the top 10 fighters in the world, or at least, one of (their) students,” he says.

Mark Tabuso trains with a young kickboxing student at the FSA Fight Team gym.

One of the most notable fighters to emerge from the Bay Area is Jake Shields, who fights out of San Francisco. Originally born in Mountain Ranch, Calif., he is a former Strikeforce middleweight champion, the first – and last – Elite Xtreme Combat welterweight champion and winner of the 2006 Rumble on the Rock tournament in Honolulu. The Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt went on a 15-fight winning streak before losing a unanimous decision to Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight titleholder St. Pierre at “UFC 129” on April 30. Despite losing, his stiff jabs and right crosses did damage to St. Pierre’s left eye, causing it to almost swell shut. Shields, who received a wrestling scholarship to San Francisco State University in the summer of 2001, was also head instructor of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and MMA at the Fairtex-Gracie affiliate in San Francisco from March 2002 to April 2008. He refers to his fighting style as “American jiu-jitsu,” a combination of his jiu-jitsu skills and the grapples and takedowns of MMA.

MMA is a combination of various martial arts, including Muay Thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and kickboxing. It originated during the Greco-Roman era as Pankration, an Olympic sport that combined boxing and wrestling. It is believed that Greek gods Heracles and Theseus invented the sport because of their frequent use of such skills during confrontations. Spartan soldiers were taught the ancient technique to solely fight on the battlefield. They were forbidden to compete in boxing competitions. Throughout the late 1880s, wrestlers competed in no-holds-barred tournaments and challenges throughout Europe. In the United States, the inaugural boxer-wrestler showdown was between then-heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan and his trainer, Greco-Roman wrestling champion William Muldoon.

MMA ultimately came into fruition in 1993 when the UFC was introduced. Art Davie proposed the idea of an eight-man, single-elimination tournament billed as “War of the Worlds,” which was televised on Nov. 12, 1993. Produced by WOW Promotions and the Sephamore Entertainment Group, the tournament featured kickboxers Patrick Smith and Kevin Rosier and shoot fighter and future World Wrestling Entertainment wrestler Ken Shamrock. Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Royce Gracie won the inaugural tournament. Since then, the UFC has become the most popular form of televised MMA, hosting up to 129 UFC Pay Per View events. “UFC 66,” which featured the 2006 rematch between then-light heavyweight champion Chuck Lidell and former champ Tito Ortiz, generated 1,050,000 buys, which helped the sport reach a new level of popularity. It was also considered the biggest selling UFC event at that time.

“It’s exciting. It’s everything that a sport should be,” Tabuso says. “For American audiences, it’s a bloodshed – I’m not going to lie. It’s fun to watch people beat each other up.” But he also believes there’s more to the sport than just the ground and pound. What he and his students respect about the sport is how dynamic it is and how each fighter has a puncher’s chance.

“There’s so many different things that you’re looking for. That’s what makes it so great. You could have some guy that says he’s a Muay Thai practitioner and the first thing he does is take try to take the next guy down. That’s pretty awesome to me,” he says.

Today’s MMA bouts are reminiscent of battles from the gladiator days. Two men step inside an eight-sided cage known as “The Octagon.” They stare across at one another, eager to be released from their corners. The referee lets them rumble. From there, they have five minutes per round to prove why they will be the last man standing inside that cage. It’s survival of the fittest. Non-title fights lasts three rounds while championship fights last five. A fighter can secure victory by knockout, submission, decision, disqualification or forfeit. Fouls include headbutting, eye gouging, hair pulling, biting, attacking the groin and striking the back of the head and spinal area.

When the UFC originated, it was no-holds-barred – literally. There were no set regulations, time limits or judges. Senator John McCain was appalled by such violent nature and launched a campaign to ban the UFC in all 50 states. He referred to the sport as “human cockfighting.” In response, the organization began reforming itself with “UFC 12,” which introduced weight classes. Gloves became mandatory at “UFC 14” and fighters were prohibited from kicking an opponent’s head while they were on the ground. On Nov. 17, 2000, “UFC 28” was the first UFC event to be sanctioned by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board under the newly formed “Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts.” UFC President Dana White is responsible for transforming the organization into the cash cow it is today.

“People like to think of it as like, ‘Oh, it’s a bloody, barbaric thing.’ But he’s made it into a sport – a real sport” says Vince Bordi, 23, who trains at World Team USA. “They have doctors on sight (and) everybody goes through pre-physicals. It’s very organized – it’s humane. If a guy’s getting beat up real bad, the ref’s going to stop it.”

As an amateur, Bordi is 5-0. He recently competed at the “Dragon House 5″ amateur event at Kezar Pavilion on March 15. He stares across at his opponent, Angelo Henry. Bordi, dressed in a red shirt and black shorts, bounces on his feet. He eagerly waits to hear the bell. Henry, an African American fighter, is wearing a blue shirt and black shorts. The bell sounds. Both men come out of their respective corners. They touch gloves as a sign of sportsmanship. Henry immediately begins jabbing with his right. Bordi constantly guards with his left hand. He soon lands a quick right shin kick. Bordi immediately shoots for the legs, but Henry briefly grounds him. Both men rise together, trapped in a clinch. Henry powers out, throwing Bordi to the other side of the cage. Like a lion, he pounces on Bordi and lands some punches. The crowd gets excited. “OOOHHH!” The pace gets frenzied. Both men exchange punches. Bordi misses a looping right hand. He is slammed on the mat for his troubles. “THUD!” The crowd gets even more excited. They’re ready to see the ground and pound. Bordi, however, breaks free.

“Once he took me down, he didn’t want to mess with me on the ground. He wanted to keep (the fight) standing. So, I was like, ‘Well, he’s uncomfortable being on the ground. I’m just going to take him down,'” says Bordi, a kinesiology major at SF State.

Vince Bordi finishes off Angelo Henry during the first round of their 205 lb. bout at “Dragon House 5.” (Courtesy of: Vince Bordi)

Bordi shoots for the legs again, forcing Henry against the cage. Henry’s back is trapped against the cold steel. He tries to break free, but Bordi drives him to the ground. He lands body shots. Henry attempts to wrap his leg around Bordi’s, but Bordi starts pounding the head. Henry is lying face down, on the receiving end of punches. The crowd applauds the action. They sense that a knockout is inevitable. Henry refuses to surrender. Bordi lands two sharp rights to the head. A ringside observer yells “Left hand! Left hand! Left hand!” Henry weathers the storm. The bell rings. Both fighters return to their corners. Bordi is flowing with confidence. A doctor steps into the cage to check on Henry. He believes Henry has suffered a concussion and declares him unable continue. Bordi earns the first round knockout.

The fight against Henry was almost jeopardized a month earlier when Bordi tore his hamstring. Competing in the California Collegiates Open at SF State on Feb. 5, Bordi faces tough competition from Cal State Bakersfield’s Zach Merrill. He thinks he can easily wrestle Merrill to the ground, but Merrill constantly escapes Bordi’s grip. “So, I was like, ‘Alright. I’m going to jerk him real quick,” Bordi says. He throws his left leg over, but soon after, Merrill sits out. His move traps Bordi’s right leg. As Merrill jerks forward, he forces Bordi to do the splits, where he immediately feels his hamstring tear.

Vince Bordi tore his hamstring during a wrestling competition at SF State on Feb. 5. (Courtesy of: Vince Bordi)

In order to keep the blood flowing, Bordi walked a lot during his first two weeks of rehabilitation, which made the healing process faster. He also ate healthier, particularly many servings of protein. Throughout his rehab, all he could think about was the fight on March 15.

“I had the thought going through my head that I really wanted to fight on this card. I hadn’t fought since November and I was like, ‘Man, if I don’t fight in March, then I’m not going to be able to (fight until after graduation),’” he says. Because of such passion to fight, he refused to ice his injury, which some people thought was a little crazy. But in the end, Bordi returned to the gym two weeks later to prepare for the Henry fight.

At the FSA gym, Tabuso is preparing for his nightly Muay Thai class. Dressed in red workout shorts and a black Muay Thai shirt with gold fighters emblazoned, he engages in a quick shadowboxing session. With some sweat visible on his face, he quickly moves from side to side on the blue training mats. He visualizes his opponent. He throws quick left-right punch combinations and finishes them with roundhouse kicks. “Wah, wah, wah,” he grunts with each combination. The gym may not look like an MMA gym because it’s been relocated to a business park in South San Francisco. On the outside, it resembles a garage; dumbbells and other training equipment are scattered on the floor. But inside, the students work up a sweat.

Tabuso prepares his students for three-minute shadowboxing sessions. He sets the clock for the first round. “Always put an opponent in front of you.” The round begins. Each fighter moves around the mat, visualizing their opponent. They don’t all throw the same strike. Some execute quick feints before throwing a strong knee. Others throw shin kicks. Inside the gym’s ring, Geovanny Aguilar is working up a sweat. Aguilar, FSA’s wrestling coach, is dressed in a white long sleeve shirt and red shorts. With short, black curly hair, he mixes his strikes up. “Hah, hah, hah!” he grunts with every strike he throws. He throws quick punches and kicks. He then moves to the side and throws another combination. He quickly evades an attack and throws some more strikes. Tabuso acknowledges his work rate. “Good! Good!” The clock beeps.

Tabuso encourages his fighters to go 30 more seconds. “One more, one more! Let’s go!” Despite some fatigue, they continue to attack. They each throw a final strike. The clock beeps again. Tabuso wants them to go an extra 35 seconds. “One more! Let’s sweat!” They push hard to finish the round. Some grunt a little louder to help them fight through the pain. “HAH, HAH, HAH!” The clock beeps once more.

A Muay Thai practitioner himself, Tabuso learned about the importance of grinding it out – continuing to fight hard no matter what obstacle may be thrown your way. As head instructor, he hopes to instill that same value into his students. “You’re going to get knocked down – literally and figuratively. You’re going to get hurt. You may have good days, you may have bad days. But it’s about how many times you get up – that’s what I want,” he says.

The fighters have less than 30 seconds to catch their breath. Tabuso resets the clock. Round two begins. This time, he watches the action from the center of the mat with his hands on his hips. Aguilar continues to work up a sweat inside the ring. Boxing gloves, hand mitts and pads surround the outside. He follows up his punches with knees. Knees are one of the most common techniques in Muay Thai, which originated in Thailand. The combat sport is referred to as the “Art of Eight Limbs” because unlike traditional boxing, Muay Thai makes use of punches, kicks, knees and elbows.

As with the previous round, Tabuso urges his fighters to go 30 extra seconds. “Let’s go, let’s work!” They soon hear that familiar beep.

Cynthia Tamura (olive shirt) waits for instruction from head coach Mark Tabuso during the nightly kickboxing session at FSA Fight Team.

Despite its popularity, the UFC has not signed a single female fighter since it originated almost 18 years ago. Hoping to compete professionally in MMA, Cynthia Tamura wants to be a role model to any aspiring mixed martial artist – especially women. She bows before she steps onto the blue mat inside the FSA gym. Wearing an olive green “LOVE” shirt and black shorts, she works up a sweat shadowboxing. She visualizes an opponent in front of her, quickly sidestepping. She throws two left jabs and a right uppercut. Seconds later, she throws a lunging front kick. She likes to mix her attacks.

Tamura considers herself one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. But when she steps on to a mat or into a ring, her game face is on. She remains focused and throws each strike with determination. She can even catch you off guard with strikes. Teammates such as Tabuso and John Kusaba encourage her to be at her best every day. She can’t see herself training at any other gym. She bleeds FSA.

“When you go out there, you’re a team. You have to totally trust that your life’s in their hands and you have to believe that they care and that you have to trust each other,” she says.

The shy 26-year-old kickboxing and Muay Thai practitioner lacked confidence early on in her life. But the UFC sparked an interest in mixed martial arts. From there, she began training at FSA. Today, she is a completely different person; she’s disciplined, stronger and most importantly, self-confident. Though you wouldn’t suspect it, Tamura, who is of Mexican and Salvadorian descent, was born to fight.

Cynthia Tamura shadowboxes during her workout at FSA Fight Team gym.

“It was definitely a whole new chapter in my life once I started. It’s a lot of fun. It takes a lot of dedication, but it’s a totally different sport. It’s an individual sport, but you’re still a team in there,” she says.

Meanwhile, organizations like Strikeforce have showcased some of the best female talent, including American Muay Thai practitioner Gina Carano and Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialist Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos. In fact, Carano and Santos competed in the most significant female fight so far. Televised by Showtime on August 15, 2009, the event garnered 856,000 viewers and marked the first time that two women headlined a major MMA event. Santos won via technical
knockout with a second left in the first round.

“(Women) can’t give as much – bottom line – as our male counterparts. It’s just the reality. So, I don’t think it ever will blow up as much, but I think there’s room for us to kind of (succeed). It’s hard to find the perfect package of what people want, especially in a girl fighter, because you can’t have it all,” Tamura says.

As was the case with Bordi, injuries are common in MMA. During one fight, Tabuso was swept to the ground by his opponent. He tried to break the fall but slipped, and his shoulder popped out of the socket. He popped it back in, but every time he used it, it slipped out. He eventually finished the fight. He rehabilitated his injury and continued competing. However, his shoulder continued popping out of the socket. After a few more therapy sessions, he began contemplating retirement because of a passion for coaching. He also considered the wear and tear that was induced on his body from previous fights. In fact, before his shoulder slipped out of the socket, he had noticed how loose his shoulders were. Following a competition in Bangkok, he decided it was time to hang up the gloves.

“I said, ‘Let me rethink this, because these guys are getting awesome. These new competitors are just pretty awesome.’ So, I decided, ‘You know what? I want to start coaching. I want to coach a lot more,’” he says.

Since joining head founder Mike Fazzino in opening FSA, Tabuso loves what he does. But he does feel pressure to bring the best out of his students and take them to the edge in terms of discovering their strengths and weaknesses.

“I have the burden of them looking up to me and figuring out the answers of not only the fight game, but also of their life. That’s the headache, that’s the worry – that I have to leave the gym and worry about what my students are thinking and how they’re living, because we become a family,” he says.

Mark Tabuso applauds Daniella Nieva (right) as she works on her kicks with Cynthia Tamura.

As class concludes for the night, Tabuso congratulates his students on a hard workout. He knows if they ever decide to step inside a ring or cage, they’ll be ready – physically and mentally. He takes a step outside the gym and enjoys some fresh air. The future is looking bright for FSA Fight Team.

“Somebody from right here is going to come off the street and be somebody, where maybe they didn’t think that they were going to be anybody a minute ago,” Tabuso says.

Daniella Nieva kicks “the suitcase” training bag during the kickboxing session at FSA Fight Team gym.