30 shots

There will be no ridiculous embellishments in this blog post, and the witty remarks will be kept to a minimum. This is the true story of the day that changed my San Francisco neighborhood.

Monday, August 14, 2006. I was spending a lazy summer day to myself in the apartment. It was shortly after 3 p.m. when I heard it. 

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! One after the other; 30 in total. It sounded like firecrackers. 4^th of July was awhile ago, I thought to myself.

I didn’t think anything of it the rest of the day. I can’t even remember hearing the sirens. It wasn’t until I read the paper the following morning that I realized what had happened.

A 17-year-old high school basketball player, whose dream was to work with kids, was hit with 30 rounds of automatic fire. The shooting occurred approximately three blocks from our apartment. His name was Aubrey.

Those weren’t firecrackers I heard. It was the sound of a young man dying – murdered in the street. Crime was a familiar friend to my neighborhood, but murder was a stranger.

In the months that followed there was a noticeable increase in police activity. A neighborhood that was once largely ignored by law enforcement now saw patrol cars sweeping through every day. 

Dealers were arrested in the street. The building next to our own was raided just a week after the shooting. The Screamer was arrested for vigilantism (OK, that makes one ridiculous embellishment. I don’t know what actually happened to The Screamer and his son). 

This instituted a changing of the guard in my neighborhood. With many of the troublemaking tenants now in jail, landlords and real estate agents had to find new tenants. The clientele that swarmed in over the coming years was far different than the previous locals. Gentrification kicked in.

It isn’t fully gentrified, however. Some elements of the old neighborhood remain. The area still has a certain dinginess to it, but the criminal element is gone.

(CrazyBeard is still around. In fact, he hasn’t aged a day. I think he’s mystically connected to this place and will never die so long as he lives here.)

The dramatic climax to this transformation came in the fall of 2009 when the local meth lab blew-up. I can still remember my father’s phone call. The first words out of his mouth were, “The pink house is on fire!” I knew exactly which one he meant. The police presence slowly declined after that, as crime in the area drastically decreased.

But Aubrey’s killers were never found. No suspects named, no arrests made, no substantial evidence found. All the activity and investigating into the area’s general criminal activity turned up nothing in regards to the murder that sparked everything.

To this day, there is a $250,000 reward for any information related to the shooting. Flyers advertising the reward exist on the street corner where Aubrey was shot. A memorial to Aubrey sits adjacent to a nearby daycare. A small placard on it reads in large bold letters, “JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED.”

I didn’t know Aubrey. Odds are we crossed paths plenty of times in the street, but I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd before all this. Now I see his face every day. Every time I walk down that street, I am reminded of his death and the ongoing wait for justice.

Hearing someone murdered – hearing, not even actually witnessing it – is a sobering occurrence. Magnified by the fact that I thought it was a harmless event. “Just someone shooting off firecrackers,” I said to myself so long ago.

I still feel guilty about that.

Sometimes I think to myself, maybe if I had reacted and investigated the noise. If I had walked down to where the shooting had occurred, maybe I would have seen the shooters and could have identified them to police. But I didn’t.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Things you overhear in San Francisco, but not rural America

• "Hopefully that new tax passes."
• "These french fries need less ketchup and more garlic."

• "That's the hipster bowling alley."
• "I think I'm going to stop over in Japantown before hitting up Chinatown and having dinner in Little Saigon."
• "All finished. That'll be $50." "That seems like a fair price for a haircut."
• "Barry Bonds is the best damn baseball player of all time."
• "How are you today, Mr. Mays?"
• "We need stronger gun control."
• "I was sitting at the bar when Robin Williams walked in!"
• "Who is Eric Church/Lady Antebellum/Dierks Bentley/Big & Rich/etc.?" (no seriously, who are they? Inquiring San Franciscans want to know)
• "Beat LA! Beat LA! Beat LA!" (chanted in unison by 42,000)
• "It's good earthquake weather."
• "I think the Occupy Movement can still succeed." (you also won't hear this one in Oakland anymore)
• "The Warriors will make the playoffs. I can feel it."
• "It's only a matter of time before we get our 6th Super Bowl ring."
• "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." (thanks Mark Twain!)
• "Don't worry, I brought my reusable grocery bag."
• "Hey! You better compost that! It's the law!"
• "I can tell the time based on the amount of fog overhead."
• "Want to go for a ride on my water jetpack?"
• "I know socialists. Some of my best friends are socialists. Barack Obama is no socialist."

The Screamer

My San Francisco neighborhood once had its own superhero. We called him The Screamer.

The Screamer lived in the apartment building next door with his son, who was a couple years younger than me. The Screamer was a 6’2”, lean, African-American man who, over the years, went from sporting dreadlocks to a shaved head. He was not a man who cared about his appearance, preferring to wear a pair of jeans and a simple t-shirt or tank top. Sometimes he would go around barefoot.

The Screamer would teach karate and tae kwon do classes to kids out of the basement of his apartment building. Afternoons on our block regularly echoed with the yells and chants of his apprentices as they practiced in the makeshift dojo. I don’t know if The Screamer held any other job, but I do know what he did with most of his spare time: crime-fighting.

Using the same skills he imparted on some of the local youth, The Screamer did his best to keep our streets clean. The lowlifes that inhabited our neighborhood rarely had to worry about police interference of their debauchery, but they did have to worry about The Screamer.

Woe unto the person who picked a fight with The Screamer rather than fleeing in terror at his terrible vengeance. Not only would The Screamer unleash a powerful round of kicks, strikes and Mongolian Death Locks upon his prey, but he had a special weapon up his sleeve. Or rather, in his voice.

Besides his impressive martial arts skills, The Screamer had a legitimate superpower. He had the loudest voice of any human being. When unleashed at full strength, his yelling could blow back assailants, rattle city blocks and even be heard from space (forget what the trailer for “Alien” taught you. You’d hear him). 

The San Francisco Bay Area (called SFBA, for short, by absolutely nobody) is well-known for its earthquakes. Several earthquake epicenters have been pinpointed to my neighborhood.

I’ve even seen The Screamer cause grown men’s heads explode.

At times, The Screamer was a greater nuisance to the neighborhood than any of the drunks, addicts or dealers in the area. Problem was, no one dared tell The Screamer and risk his wrath. Truth be told, The Screamer wasn’t picky who he berated with his exceptionally loud voice. I felt real bad for his poor son.

Living right next door to The Screamer proved especially wearisome. The Screamer’s building was often the center of all the trouble. To this day I don’t really know what went on in there (I have theories that it was a crack den or a gang hideout) but there was always a lot of noise late at night stemming either from wild parties or from people fighting (or some combination of the two). Naturally, The Screamer would become annoyed and get involved, causing the noise level to dramatically increase.

The Screamer lived next door for about six years, doing everything he could in that time to keep us safe while simultaneously bugging the hell out of everyone with his obnoxious yelling. Then, in the summer of 2006, he was gone! Never to be seen again! But more importantly, never heard from again.

What exactly became of The Screamer remains a mystery, but it was that summer that things started changing in the neighborhood. It all began with a crime that still haunts the neighborhood to this day…

How’s that for a dramatic cliffhanger?

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.