Writing about homelessness — from home

By ALISON OWINGS

A few months ago, I called 911. I am not often an alarmist, but in front of my apartment building at Fillmore and Washington, I reported, was a pair of legs sticking out from under a pile of left-behind furniture. Lacking the moxie to find out on my own if the legs attached to a body alive or dead, I called 911. Soon, sirens sounded. Paramedics arrived. And a live body emerged: a man, who eventually shambled off. I guessed he was homeless — and that instead of rescuing him from an overdose, I’d disturbed his sleep. 

I’d also disturbed myself. For a decade, I had been conducting interviews in the Tenderloin about homelessness, particularly with one person, Del Seymour, who had overcome his worst demons, including crack cocaine. He’d also started a remarkable free jobs training program, Code Tenderloin. His talks were mesmerizing. Inspiring. And often wildly funny. The result was my latest book, Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco. 

Throughout the years of my Tenderloin visits to interview Del and others in his orbit, including his last dealer, I often saw people lying on the sidewalks, possibly alive or possibly dead. But I never called 911. They’re just sleeping, I told myself. People sitting nearby will call, if need be. I’m an outsider; I shouldn’t intrude. And then I returned to Pacific Heights, made my way to our apartment, entered my “cloffice” (per New York real estate lingo) and opened my laptop to write.

I recognize that the man under the furniture on my corner was not unique on Fillmore. Another person, sex unknown, slept most nights in a face-shielding sleeping bag at what would become the new Citibank. Various people crouch or lie in front of the Clay Theater. Others stretch out on the top landing at Calvary Presbyterian Church, whose compassionate staff organizes all kinds of outreach. And what happened to the tired-looking woman sitting on benches from Clay to Post, asking for spare change? Del, who urges personal connections, prompted me not only to give some money, but ask her name. Joyce, she said. I told her about Code Tenderloin, at 55 Taylor Street, and how it helps people in countless ways. I’ll go there tomorrow, she said. Joyce may be accustomed to saying what she thinks people want to hear. 

The ratio in Pacific Heights of haves to have-nots is incomparable to the Tenderloin, and I wondered if my writing might reflect a skewed sense of location. Although I wrote breaking stories in intense and noisy television newsrooms, calm is my default mode for creativity. I like to slow down and regard my sentences, let them macerate a minute, perhaps turn them back on themselves. I need quiet. Usually I find it here.

Pacific Heights is not Del’s ’hood, but he too enjoys peaceful places such as this. We’ve sat on a bench in Alta Plaza Park to talk about the book. We also gave a presentation at Calvary church after Mayor was published in hardback. It’s available, gladly signed, at Browser Books on Fillmore. 

And now — drumroll, please — the paperback version will be released, on September 9, at Browser’s sister store, Green Apple Books on Ninth Avenue. Del and I will be there for the 7 p.m. launch. Head west and join us.

Alison Owings is the author of three other oral history books on Native Americans, American waitresses and women who lived in Nazi Germany. She is a former news writer at CBS News in New York and KTVU in Oakland. She lives in the neighborhood.