Street Teaching in the Tenderloin Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole

STREET TEACHING

IN THE TENDERLOIN

Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole

DON STANNARD-FRIEL

Street Teaching in the Tenderloin

Don   Stannard-Friel

Street Teaching in the

Tenderloin

Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole

ISBN 978-1-137-56436-8 ISBN 978-1-137-56437-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56437-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947042

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the

Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of

translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on

microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,

electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now

known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this

publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are

exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information

in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the

publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to

the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Jake Lyell / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York

The registered company address is 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

Don   Stannard-Friel

Notre Dame de Namur University

Belmont, CA , USA

To the Tenderloin community: the secret garden

vii

“Hi, my name is Moon.” The man, dressed entirely in blue denim,

sweeps his hands through the air, taking in the big, cavernous, concrete

room. “This is my home.” He seems like a nice guy. Moon reminds me a

lot of the late, great folksinger, John Denver, with his neat, straight, long￾ish, light-colored hair combed over his forehead. He even wears round

wire- rimmed glasses, a silly hat on his head that he crocheted himself, has

an easy smile, and is a natural-born storyteller, just like John Denver.

“Why are you here?” Chris, one of my students, asks.

“I killed two people. I take responsibility for my actions. I did it. I

snapped one day. They didn’t deserve it, and I accept full responsibility.”

Moon nods his head, affi rming his commitment to the truth. He seems

very sincere, just like John Denver, except for the murders.

As we walk out of Death Row, heading over to the death chamber—

where Moon is sentenced to be strapped to a gurney, have a needle stuck

in his arm, and die—our tour guide calls over his shoulder, “He beat his

ex-girlfriend and her mother to death, with a fi re log and a hammer.”

What lessons are to be learned inside the walls of San Quentin State

Prison? What new knowledge will we glean from our street teachers today,

the men behind bars and those who keep them here? What do I say to

Rebecca, a bright-eyed, enthusiastic sociology student and campus leader,

when she whispers to me—in the noisy, chaotic South Block, where new

prisoners in orange jumpsuits are being processed—“Right there!” She

points to a shadow, moving behind bars on the second tier, “That’s my

brother’s cell.” Or Bianca, whose brother, now in Monterey County Jail

in Salinas, is headed to the state prison in Solano? Or Crystal, whose little

sister did time in Chowchilla? What can I say to these three young women,

walking with their classmates and me through California’s oldest prison? I

say to them what I say to those who challenge me with, “What’s the point

of bringing privileged college students into prisons and the inner city?”

“The lessons we learn here will make our own lives more meaningful

and purposeful, and the world a better place to be.”

ix

CONTENTS

Introduction: What Waits Below xvii

1 Wild Awakenings 1

2 Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole 15

3 Höküao’s Tears 27

4 It Was a Terrible Time 39

5 Stories of Survival 49

6 RIP Josh Mann 61

7 One Sadness After Another and Another 73

8 The Drug Store 103

9 Tender Loin 139

x CONTENTS

10 The Mental Hospital Without Walls 167

11 I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas (City) Anymore 201

12 Don’t Count Me! 227

13 The Secret Garden 255

14 Trendy Loin 295

15 The Soul of the City 319

16 Compassion as Pedagogy 333

Appendix I: Exploring the History and Culture

of the Tenderloin 373

Appendix II: List of Street Teachers 377

Appendix III: Recommended Readings In Community

Engagement 381

Acknowledgements 383

Bibliography 387

Index 395

xi

“I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem

to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The

antipathies, I think – ” (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this

time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) – “but I shall have to ask them

what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New

Zealand? Or Australia?”

Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland6

“I remember sittin’ naked on the back of a bull in a fuckin’ rice paddy.

Next thing, I’m dealin’ dope in The TL. Fuckin’ crazy , man.”

Rey, Cambodian refugee

xiii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since 1978, Don Stannard-Friel has been Professor of Sociology and

Anthropology at Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in Belmont,

California. From 1984 to 1993, he served as the university’s Dean of

Faculty, before leaving the administrative position to do “street sociol￾ogy.” Over the years, he has also been a lecturer or visiting professor at

San Francisco State University, The Presidio (US Army) of San Francisco,

University of San Francisco, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa

Rita Jail in Alameda County, and the Federal Correctional Institution for

Women in Dublin, California. Before teaching, he worked as a waiter in

Malibu, a cabdriver in San Francisco, and, for fi ve years, a mental health

worker on psychiatric wards that served the Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore

Districts in San Francisco, during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s

and early 1970s.

He has also served as California Site Director, Notre Dame-AmeriCorps;

Founding Director of the Dorothy Stang Center for Social Justice and

Community Engagement at NDNU; and was a Board Member, including

Chair, of Indochinese Housing Development Corporation (IHDC) in the

Tenderloin.

His recognitions include being selected as a California Campus

Compact-Carnegie Foundation Faculty Fellow for Service Learning and

Political Engagement, and on campus, The Living Torch Award, for

carrying on the social justice mission and values of the Sisters of Notre

Dame; the NDNU Mission Values in Action Award for Exemplifying and

Promoting Social Justice and Global Peace; the Inner Fire Award, granted

xiv ABOUT THE AUTHOR

by the Center for Student Leadership; and the George M. Keller Teaching

Excellence Award.

He was profi led by Julia Moulden (2008) in We Are the New Radicals7

(as was his son, Sean, for his work promoting Philanthropy 2.0), a book

about using one’s workplace to contribute to positive social change.

Stannard-Friel has presented at professional conferences and been a

keynote speaker on topics related to community engagement and ser￾vice learning and has two previous books, City Baby and Star: Addiction,

Transcendence, and the Tenderloin (University Press of America), a study

of two female drug addicts in the Tenderloin, and Harassment Therapy:

A Case Study of Psychiatric Violence (G.K.  Hall and Co./Schenkman

Publishing Co.), a result of participant-observation research conducted

during the fi ve years that he worked on the psychiatric wards.

His PhD is from University of California, Davis. His MA and BA are

from San Francisco State University.

xv

LIST OF FIGURES

Illustration 4.1 IHDC fl yer 40

Illustration 6.1 College Night Flyer 1999 63

Illustration 8.1 Witness fl yer 109

Illustration 8.2 Hand Out Drug War Facts 115

Illustration 8.3 Jimmy funeral notice 123

Illustration 9.1 Proposition K 160

Illustration 10.1 THC Supportive Goals 177

Illustration 12.1 In Loving Memory sign 230

Illustration 12.2 Reading of the Names 233

Illustration 12.3 Homeless count instructions 239

Illustration 13.1 Tenderloin Census 263

Illustration 13.2 VYDC Programs list 274

Illustration 13.3 Seeds of Hope fl yer 282

Illustration 16.1 Margaret Wheatley h.o. 342

Illustration 16.2 Ashley emanciapation doc. 354

© The Author(s) 2017 xvii

D. Stannard-Friel, Street Teaching in the Tenderloin,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56437-5

INTRODUCTION

WHAT WAITS BELOW

GOIN’ DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

xviii D. STANNARD-FRIEL

…it fl ashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with

either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with

curiosity, she ran across the fi eld after it, and fortunately was just in time to

see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering

how in the world she was to get out again.

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

* * *

On the streets, “Jumpin’” is the act of using illicit drugs to change

the way the mind perceives reality and “Go down the rabbit hole” means

to trip on a psychedelic drug or to enter into an emotional and intellec￾tual state of chaos and confusion. But in concluding Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland, Lewis Carroll wrote about how her big sister pictured Alice

as a grown woman, “in the after-time,” and “how she would gather about

her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a

strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago.” It

was, in the end, a mind-altering experience, but not just a place of distor￾tion or terror, as the street references infer. As the name implies, it was also

a place of awe and inspiration, a place of wonder. You never know what

waits below, when you jump down the rabbit hole.

* * *

“Beginning next week, we’ll spend the rest of the semester in the

Tenderloin,” I tell my new Streetwise Sociology students. “Directions to

Civic Center Parking and Wild Awakenings Coffeehouse are attached to

the syllabus. After you park, take the stairs up to the Plaza, not the eleva￾tor. I want you to observe your surroundings. By ‘observe,’ I don’t mean

to just ‘see’ the Tenderloin. I want you to hear, smell, taste, and touch it,

too. I want you to feel it. I want it to become a part of you, something you

will always remember. A place you will take your friends or kids to and tell

them, ‘I remember…. I was part of this.’ I want you to be able to say, ‘I

loved being here!’”

In the two-block, six-minute walk from the garage to the coffeehouse,

the students will smell a mixture of urine and ammonia in the stairwell of

the garage. They will be inundated with the sounds of emergency vehicle

sirens or squawking horns, traffi c noise, people shouting, and the hum

of urban life. They will see the small, twisted, legless man, sitting in a

WHAT WAITS BELOW xix

wheelchair on the corner of Larkin and McAllister, selling STREET SHEET

for a dollar. They may touch his heavily calloused hand as they pay for the

newspaper. They’ll encounter children, lots of them, many in small clus￾ters, making their way to after-school destinations. They’ll see a tall man

in a long, dirty trench coat, wearing a bright purple pageboy wig, shak￾ing his fi st and shouting at Hastings College of the Law students going

to and from their classes at McAllister and Hyde. Then, they’ll hang out

at Wild Awakenings Coffeehouse for half an hour, eating Middle Eastern

wraps or deli sandwiches or baklava or an oatmeal cookie, while I drink my

cappuccino and orient them to the neighborhood and what they will be

doing for the next few hours and the next several months. We’ll walk to the

police station, four blocks away, to hear the community-liaison offi cer tell

us about crime in “The TL.” On the way, we’ll pass by drug deals, street￾walkers, dozens of homeless people, elderly poor, and severely disabled.

Some of the students stay close to me; it’s their fi rst time here. Others,

who have been in Tenderloin classes before, drift back to get a closer look

at a new wall mural or to take an exaggerated sniff at the pungent smell of

marijuana in the air. “Come on, come on,” I encourage the stragglers. I

don’t care how cool they are, I don’t want anyone falling behind.

Later, we’ll refl ect on the day, and talk about why things are the way

they are.

* * *

Street Teaching in the Tenderloin: Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole is

the story of what happened when—after 22 years of being a professor

and college dean—I returned to San Francisco’s high-crime, low-income

Tenderloin District, a neighborhood I lived, worked, and played in as a

young man, to write a book, City Baby and Star: Addiction, Transcendence,

and the Tenderloin ,

1 and wound up becoming a part of a community

that most people abhor. While City Baby and Star told the stories of two

female drug addicts, Street Teaching tells the story of my encounters, usu￾ally accompanied by students, with a wide variety of people who became

our teachers in the Tenderloin. Many were people who lifted themselves

or were lifted—or did the lifting of others—out of dire, often bizarre situ￾ations. Others died.

Street Teaching is about my students learning inner-city life by becom￾ing a part of it. It’s about our experiences, over a period of 20 years, in

community-based learning (CBL) courses, using the Tenderloin as class￾room and its people as teachers, as we immersed ourselves in this diffi cult

and sometimes dangerous world, where children who live here normalize