The Maverick from Vanessa Carr on Vimeo.

San Francisco’s Alex Martins catches the biggest wave of his life.

PRODUCED BY:
VANESSA CARR
NINA GOODBY

Thanks to:
Fred Pompermayer
Mavericks Surf Ventures
Patrick Kollman
US Geological Survey

The Hipster Priest from Vanessa Carr on Vimeo.

MUSIC

Nadia Shihab
Paradise Boys
Alters

YOUTUBE clips used with permission courtesy of Peter Noble

This video will be screened on UCTV.

Some SRO landlords are forcing tenants out of their rooms to prevent them from gaining rights at 32 days — an illegal practice known as musical rooms.

Produced for CNS News Dec. 2009 and screened on UCTV.

Bobbi Hagen and her dog, Dancer.

BY VANESSA CARR AND NINA GOODBY

Originally published on Mission Loc@l. Click here for more photos .

It’s the first of the month, and Tree is sailing around in silk slips and high heels. She’s new to the 248-room Mission Hotel, the city’s biggest single room occupancy (SRO) hotel. It’s government check day, and spirits are high.

“What do you smoke?” residents ask the former hypnotherapist and mother of two adult children, half greeting, half sizing her up. Tree’s round blue eyes, blond pixie haircut, and taste for scarves, floppy hats and the occasional rabbit fur make her look younger than her 49 years. It’s an allure she learned to trade and sell during three months of homelessness before her arrival at the Mission Hotel, she says.

Though the Mission Hotel is a place where, according to Tree, “very little is normal,” an estimated 90 percent of residents have been there for more than a year, says general manager Sam Meki. Many were homeless, and the $493 flat rate rooms and access to supportive services make the hotel, run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a cut above sleeping on the street.

Peace, privacy and stability can be hard to come by in some of the city’s 530 residential hotels, particularly for women, who make up 38 percent of the citywide SRO population of more than 18,000, according to a 2009 Human Services Agency study. For many, a sense of permanence remains elusive, as they cycle through an institutional circuit of “shelters, SROs, the street, jail, and sometimes residential treatment…often repeating this pattern throughout the year,” says Kelly Knight, a medical anthropologist at University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

For those women who manage to find a quieter residential hotel, there are still issues to manage: shared bathrooms, problem neighbors and unresponsive managers. Still, some eventually make the hotels a home that they’re unlikely to leave.

There’s Kym Meadows at the Graywood Hotel, a pretty 42-year-old with bright green eyes and iridescent eyeshadow. The recent influx of men with violent criminal records in her building rattles her sense of safety and revives memories of past abuse. But she’s grateful to have a second chance at stability after unexpectedly ending up on the streets in 2004.

And there’s 43-year-old Bobbi Hagen, Meadow’s neighbor, who has been in and out of hotels since she was 17. Her time at home consists of tending to her boyfriend’s health as he battles full-blown AIDS, and trying to keep her own HIV at bay to live another year, she says. The Graywood is the most stability she’s ever experienced, she says.

Like many women living in SROs, Hagen, Meadows and Tree are recovering from troubled pasts and battle drug addictions and mental illness. More than half the women in and out of SROs have used an illegal drug in the past year, 15 percent have engaged in sex work in the past year, and 25 percent have had psychiatric hospitalizations in their lifetime, according to a 2003 study by medical researchers at UCSF.

“It’s a hard challenge for people to stabilize in hotels when they’re dealing with so many things coming at them,” says Jennifer Plummer, a women’s therapist at Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, which serves primarily local homeless and residents of the 50 SRO hotels in the Mission District. “People are very prone to being victimized in similar ways as they have in the past.”

For Meadows, the men who harass her in the Graywood are a painful reminder of all that has come before—three rapes, menacing attention from men during a stint of homelessness, and an alleged stalker who recently threatened that he was going to “get her.”

In her hotel, one man regularly jiggles the doorknob and tries to push his way into the bathroom with her. Another wallpapered the bathroom she uses with especially hardcore pornography, a cruel joke that reminded her of a traumatic childhood incident.

Meadows has lived in the Graywood in the outer Mission since 2005. The problems only began, Meadows says, about eight months ago when the hotel owner began to rent city-subsidized rooms to No Violence Alliance (NOVA), a program that provides transitional housing for ex-felons, most of whom have committed at least one violent offense.

“Now I carry pepper spray in my robe when I go to the bathroom,” says Meadows. Though she hasn’t been assaulted at the Graywood, she has reason to be wary: More than 30 percent of marginally housed and homeless women in San Francisco reported physical or sexual assault in the past year, the 2003 study from UCSF found. But women may be particularly inclined to stay in hotels, even chaotic ones, as they are 18 percent less likely to be sexually assaulted and 11 percent less likely to be physically assaulted than women who have lived on the street for less than a year.

Living with a partner offers some sense of security. Meadow’s husband keeps a red aluminum baseball bat near their bed, and he’s offered to accompany her to the bathroom with it.

Hagen, her downstairs neighbor, doesn’t like the NOVA program either. It’s brought in a lot of “wackadoos,” she says. But she has found a semblance of community on her floor, where she’s on a first name basis with most people, and is close with Meadows.

Even if she’s regularly disgusted by the pee all over the bathroom and occasionally spooked by a neighbor, Hagen’s managed to eke out a quiet existence for herself and her partner, Matthew. On good days, they enjoy cooking together in the newly installed communal kitchen on their floor. But the fear of losing the government benefits that keep her housed, and her life-saving prescriptions filled, makes her permanently on edge.

“It’s hard to deal with the stress outside my door when it’s a battlefield in here,” says Hagen, whose white-blond hair and piercing blue, kohl-rimmed eyes contrast the somber gray of the room. She cradles a tiny, skittish dog in a green sweater against her puffy white ski coat.

For years, she dealt speed in the Tenderloin, ran an escort service and was herself a working girl who shot dope.

This all stopped when Hagen was diagnosed with HIV in 2005. She also suffers from pancreatitis and says that “if the one doesn’t kill me the other will.” Her health is stable for now, but the prognosis for Matthew is poor.

“Our own well-being is like a daily job, because you can get so depressed,” she says.

Today she’s not sure how she’s going to keep Matthew hydrated. He’s been vomiting from the flu for the last three days, and the only fluids they have on hand are Kool-Aid and coffee.

Hagen plans to get a $16 tree from Kohl’s to go on top of a red Christmas drum, but she’s worried she can’t afford a gift for her 11-year-old daughter, who’s visiting next week from her grandma’s house.

It’ll be three or four days before any money comes in—she’s arranged for her government checks to go directly to the Lutheran Social Services first to pay all her bills before she gets any of the money.

“I want to make sure that my home is stable,” she says. “But that’s why I’m always broke.”

The hope she has for her life at the Graywood is “just to get a grasp on my health, work on my relationship, [find] some contentment in my life.”

Meadows also finds that despite her discomfort with neighbors in the hallways, the Graywood offers a modicum of peace and privacy as she continues on her recovery from heroin.

A small whiteboard hangs to the side of their sink, listing their daily methadone dosage schedule in blue marker.

“I would be dead if it weren’t for methadone, and certainly not living indoors,” Meadows says, fidgeting with her heart-shaped necklace.

A former hairdresser who wears her bright, rust-colored hair pulled into a loose side ponytail, Meadows lives with two cats and the husband she met when both slept on the streets of the Castro. They pay $836.36 for a spacious corner room with a rounded bay window, which she affords with her social security and disability insurance for the bipolar disorder she’s in treatment for. After bills, Meadows has $56 left over.

Compared with what she experienced living on the streets and in other hotels around the city, the Graywood seems “like the Hilton,” she says.

But compared with the Graywood , the Mission Hotel where Tree lives is a raucous dormitory. With thin walls, narrow halls, and windows that overlook a central shaft littered with trash and hypodermic needles known as “crack alley,” privacy is hard to maintain.

People are constantly knocking on Tree’s door.

“Who?” she shouts.

It could be one of many boyfriends, someone asking for a cigarette or offering some kind of proposition. How about some speed for a 40-inch television, someone asks. If the mood is right and the offer is a rock and a pretty smile, the visitor will be ushered in, Tree admits.

But this time it’s Les, one of many on-and-off boyfriends who lives next door.

“Les, baby, I’m hungry,” says Tree in a girly voice. Her only breakfast was cigarettes and orange Gatorade sipped from a goblet.

She excuses herself to follow Les and returns minutes later with a banana, tower of Ritz crackers, rectangle of cheese and can of root beer.

In the seven months she’s been there, Tree has learned how to use the many types of currency that circulate—food, drugs, sex, companionship, cigarettes, TVs, laptops, food stamps—that get whatever she doesn’t have.

“People are trading sex for shelter, sex for diapers, sex for food, sex for whatever they don’t have,” says Carola Shepard, Business and Development Manager at San Francisco SafeHouse.

The supportive services available to Mission Hotel residents help her to get by. She receives $200 a month in food stamps and her subsidized rent is just $318 a month.

But when that money runs out or is stolen from her, Tree says, “I still have to live in this hotel. I still have to eat everyday.”

Because the Mission Hotel is a non-profit, Tree is less likely to face some of the problems that keep other women on the move, which include 21-day forced evictions and accrued debt, according to Knight. But she’s not immune to other factors Knight says force women into transience, such as violence and changes in financial circumstances and partnerships.

“Women here are a commodity,” says Tree. Their role in the underground economy puts them in competition with one another—and if Tree’s experience is representative, exposes them to greater violence.

“We hear women talk so much about not trusting other women and that deep sense of isolation and loneliness,” says Laura Sheckler, outreach program coordinator for the Women’s Community Clinic.

The woman across the hall from Tree has repeatedly told her she’ll leave the hotel “in a body bag,” and one of Tree’s boyfriends punched her in the eye—both because of jealousy issues, Tree says.

“But we also see women who have each other’s backs all the time,” Sheckler adds. Most women Sheckler sees during outreach in Mission District SROs have been living in hotels, though not necessarily in the same room, for over a year. What they have in common, she says, is “almost all of them have experienced such severe amounts of trauma throughout their lifetime.”

Shotwell softball team, Frank Peña kneeling on right in the early '80s. (Courtesy of Louis Lucero)

Their jerseys said “Shotwell” in bold letters and they posed making “S” shapes with their hands. They were the kids growing up on the 1000 block of Shotwell Street in the ’80s, and it wasn’t “Shotty Block,” like kids call it now. It was the “Shotwell family”—and according to them it wasn’t a gang.

“It was a street with a bunch of really tight families,” said Tony Lucero, who grew up on the block with eight siblings.

When Lucero first met Frank Peña—the new 11-year-old on the block who was a whiz at sports and spoke English with an accent—low-rider culture and the “cholo scene” were big in the neighborhood. Only Lucero’s spit-shine charm could coax Peña’s protective mother, Olga, into letting him out to play. She was from Nicaragua, but she knew that what happened on 24th Street—the guys with headbands, the cars cruising, the girls, the drugs and alcohol—could swallow a boy up, according to family friend Ricardo “Junior” Martinez.

Thirty years later, Peña was still living with her when he was shot at Papa Potrero’s restaurant on 24th Street alongside 26-year-old Francisco “Cisco” Cornejo in September. Police believe the brawl, which started with fists not guns, was Norteño-on-Norteño gang violence.

But Peña wasn’t active in a gang, neighbors and some close to him insist. He’d beaten his demons, they said, such as selling and using crack, which led to scattered county jail stints from 1991 to 2000. He’d created a new life with a full-time job, a newborn son and a girlfriend studying to be a nurse. Kids looked up to him, and neighbors saw him as a gregarious, magnetic family man who had learned to navigate the Mission’s many worlds.

But another close friend—and police reports—indicate that Peña’s involvement with gangs, at least through the 90s, was more significant than neighbors or friends knew or let on.

In recent years, however, friends say Peña’s message to kids was to stay off the street.

“Me and Frank were the ones who stayed on the corner. We were the ones who showed the younger kids how to come up,” said Tony Echevarria, one of Peña’s best friends from childhood, of being a 30-something on the block. “[We] saw it as a special responsibility to keep our way of doing things, our legacy.”

Their way of doing things meant not looking for trouble, and definitely not letting a small argument or fight escalate.

But escalation is just what may have led to the murder of three men that weekend in September, which began with the shooting of 21-year-old Michael Sanchez two days before Peña’s murder.

According to Sergeant Mario Molina, the San Francisco Police Department’s foremost expert on Latino gangs who arrested Peña several times over the years, these kinds of shootings often start over a “personal matter”—minor insults, arguments over girls.

“If there was a turf war, we’d see more bodies,” he said of the murders.

Unraveling exactly why Peña ended up a victim of alleged gang violence may not be clear until the 19-year-old charged with this murder stands trial, but the life and death of Peña, the 41-year-old 49ers fan, offers a glimpse of how difficult escaping one’s past can be.

BY VANESSA CARR AND AMANDA MARTINEZ

Originally published on Mission Loc@l. Click here for more photos from the fire.

A two-alarm fire blazed high into the sky from a three-story apartment building on 26th and Osage streets at 2:30 p.m. this afternoon, according to Deputy Chief Patrick Gardner. No one was found inside the building during a search and no firefighters were injured, Gardner said just before 3 p.m.

Firefighters were still trying to contain the fire in the walls of the building, which were visible to onlookers. They believe the blaze started on the second floor and spread up through the roof, popping out glass in the windows, but the cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Third-floor residents Max Hurwitz, 26, and R.J. Philips, 24, were inside the estimated 16-unit building when the fire began and suspect that it started in the central stairwell where trash is stored and people are known to smoke.

“People leave ashtrays in the stairwell, I wouldn’t be surprised,” if the fire was caused by a flicked cigarette that landed on the trash, they said.

Hurwitz said the crackling woke him from a nap. He ran to the kitchen and saw flickering lights from the door leading to a stairwell. He opened the door and found the fire blazing. He quickly shut the door and and started yelling for his roommate, Philips, who was studying for a philosophy final at San Francisco State University.

The two grabbed a fire extinguisher that Hurwitz’s mom had given him and attempted to put out the flames.

“We double teamed it,” said Hurwitz, re-enacting the scene.

But the fire was too large so they ran out of the building down a different stairwell. Hurwitz was able to grab a backpack with his wallet and laptop, but Philips was not so lucky.

“My whole life is in there,” said Philips, who was standing on the street in gray long johns looking extremely distressed.

When the two fled the building, other neighbors were screaming and running out.

Six fire engines and two trucks responded from at least five different fire stations, including the nearest on 26th and Church streets as well as stations in Bernal Heights and Potrero Hill.

One firefighter was poised on the top of an extended ladder over the building as a precaution, but firefighters inside the apartment were able to “stay on the offensive” and contain it from the inside, said Deputy Chief Gardner.

It was easier to put out the fire because the alley beside the house gave better access and allowed the truck to come in, a firefighter said.

Hundreds of people crowded around the scene, the air reeking of smoke. Some who were near the fire before police cordoned off the street were dusted with soot. The smoke blotted out an otherwise blue sunny sky as it began to rain.

Karaoke for crooners at Nap's on a Friday night.

BY VANESSA CARR

Originally published as part of the MISSION NIGHTS series on Mission Loc@l.

Angel stands in a tangle of string lights with a Christmas star in his hands in the back patio of Nap’s. More than just the mustache, he’s got that Burt Reynolds .

Angel has been working the weekends at Nap’s for the last seven years. But tonight he’s tired.

“I’m an organ courier,” he explains, flashing a wall of teeth so thick and straight they must be veneers. “I pick up organs and deliver them.”

“Like, human organs?” I ask, swirling the ice in my Red Bull.

He zips down his off-white jacket to reveal a blue full-body jumpsuit with a white courier decal sewn over his heart.

The job requires a police escort, a surgeon, and a gun, he says. I picture him strutting down the highway to the scene of an accident, gun in holster, Coleman’s cooler in hand, heroic 70s theme playing. Starring Burt Reynolds.

“How much is a heart worth on the black market?” I ask.

“Enough that someone would kill me for it,” he slurs. Angel is about as easy to understand as the Godfather at a loud party, his voice a cottony shout, except the patio is quiet tonight. We’re the only ones out there.

“They’d probably take your heart, too,” I say.

He hoots. Killing someone for a carved out heart is some twisted logic, he agrees.

At 65, Angel is ready to stop working two jobs, he tells me. He served in Vietnam, too.

“Was that the first time you saw organs?” I ask, half joking.

He laughs. “No, that was Brooklyn.”

In Williamsburg, he says, where he grew up. His family, originally from Puerto Rico, moved to the Bay Area when things got too violent there.

Inside, the same fearless karaoke singer is at it again. She’s pretty, with long dark hair and bangs, her eyes closed in concentration.

“I’ll always love you. For the rest of your days,” she croons.

This is not a beginner’s karaoke song. Her voice is terrible, and the mic is about ten times louder than the track beneath it. I like her immediately.

Leaning against the bar’s padded red leather edge patched with duct tape, I order a bottle of Budweiser for three bucks. A plastic James Brown figure sits across from me like a decorated Buddha, layered with Mardi Gras beads, amid rows of dream catchers and tinsel.

On the wall is a handwritten sign: “If you allow customers to do drugs, you will be arrested.”

I want to ask the bartender about this, but he’s been so friendly all night it seems rude.

Instead I turn to the guy sitting alone on the barstool next to mine. His head is shaved to cover the balding, he’s wearing a red turtleneck, and he’s three-quarters of the way through a pitcher of watery looking beer. I should’ve known better.

“Do you come here often?” I ask, forgetting that the questions of a journalist can sound like terribly unimaginative pickup lines.

“Yeah,” he says, “My father knows Nap. They were both in Vietnam.”

Nap, short for Napoleon, is the owner of the bar—and the karaoke DJ. His booth, sectioned off by a stack of TVs and speakers, is decorated in Vietnam memorabilia: uniformed photos, an honorable discharge certificate. Seven-inch records hang overhead.

He’s singing karaoke now, his fist clenched in emotion. Crusted with sparkles, the stucco ceiling glitters down on him like a disco ball.

“Where did you come from?” my new bald friend keeps asking, forgetting I’ve already answered. I bristle slightly and he bumbles an apology. Nap sings a few more verses and he asks again. It’s time to leave, I think.

Angel is swilling a shot glass filled with whiskey at the other end of the bar.

I down the rest of my beer, and Nap winks as I walk out into the cool of Mission Street.

Pachanga at Galeria de la Raza from Vanessa Carr on Vimeo.