Let's go for a walk through the neighborhood

Even though life has found me bouncing from San Francisco to the South Bay to Washington state, the City by the Bay remains my hometown in my heart.

My father has lived in San Francisco since 1978, with the last 17 of those years spent living near the North Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. 

It’s an eclectic area; a mixture of apartments and houses, both old and modern, holding a variety of inhabitants. The hippies from Haight-Ashbury make the most interesting contribution to the area’s personality.

More and more in the last five years it has become an area filled with college students and young married couples. There has also been a distressing increase in small dogs in the area that serve no purpose other than to look ugly and make a lot of noise.

A French restaurant sits on the street corner nearby. Just a block down from it is a hipster coffeehouse. Joggers and Lance Armstrong-wannabes populate the park, and the playground within has been brought up to code (no metal monkey bars or asphalt – everything’s plastic and rubber now. Where’s the fun in that?). There’s a farmer’s market every Sunday.

It’s almost a middle-class nirvana. But it wasn’t always this way.

My neighborhood has never been the wealthiest. It wasn’t like Compton or Detroit by any means, but it wasn’t exactly Mayberry either (although come to think of it, Mayberry had a rather high crime rate. I don’t know how Sheriff Andy handled it all). 

I watched drug deals go down. I heard arguments and fights every night. The pink house on the corner held a meth lab and the apartment building next door…well, I don’t like to think what went on in there. Drunks, addicts and homeless walked the streets. Neighbors didn’t have tiny dogs; they had Rottweiler’s from Hell! By the age of five, I could correctly identify a prostitute.

It was not the nicest place to live, but it was home whenever I returned to SF to stay with my father. And it provided plenty of memorable characters. The Crack Queen, Crazy Beard, Jerky McJerkington and The Screamer to name a few.

McJerkington owned the aforementioned Rottweiler’s, which scared the shit out of me as a little kid. If you can’t tell by his name, McJerkington was not a pleasant man. He lived on the first floor of my father’s apartment building with his twin hell-beasts.

One day I remember McJerkington had left his door open, and the two dogs got out. My father and I were preparing to leave at that same moment. We opened our apartment door, and the two Rottweiler’s were right there outside and walked through our open door as if they owned the place. We had to lock them in before running down to find McJerkington. The dogs were sitting atop my bed by the time we got McJerkington upstairs to get control of his animals.

Getting his dogs out of my room was the nicest thing McJerkington ever did for anybody.

The Crack Queen and Crazy Beard were the respected elders of the neighborhood. Everyone knew them and stopped to talk to them in the street, even though half the time they couldn’t string together a coherent sentence. Even the drug dealers paid their respects.

I will say this about Beard; you could always rely upon him for a cheap hand-washing of your car if you needed it. Nice old man. Goofy, but nice. His name is derived from his erratic behavior and his beard, which forms a perfect semicircle on his face. 

The origins of The Crack Queen’s name I would think are more self-evident.

As for The Screamer – he was the neighborhood’s watchful guardian. Our fearless protector from all that was indecent and immoral. Until one day his services were no longer required. I’ll have more on him in the future, and more on the transformation my neighborhood has gone through.