Slumming It Up In Tenderloin

Let me start out by saying that I've come to hate places like the Warfield and the Fillmore. The best concerts always take place at the smaller venues -- places like Slim's, The Covered Wagon, The Pound -- where the stage areas are small enough to keep the music loud and the bathroom floors are invariably covered in vomit before the night's end. Warfield and Fillmore are just too big. They're crowded, difficult to get anywhere near the stage, and just too big.

Despite this, I went to the Warfield the weekend before last to see Les Claypool in an attempt to fill another Saturday in my empty empty life. The Warfield is located, as CitySearch.com puts it, "on a relatively rough strip of Market Street," which I've often thought was its only saving grace. Arriving at eight, it took over an hour for the first band to start.

I'm 21, and for some reason felt like the oldest person in the place. There was an astounding amount of teenage girls with tight pants and Backstreet boys hanging off their arms. One girl -- she looked about 18 -- walked by with her date whose left hand was roaming all over her ass. Right in the middle it was, and slowly moving south toward ground zero. I remember wondering what would make a person allow someone else to touch them like that, in public. Not that I'm a prude or anything, but it just sort of creeped me out.

I bought an overpriced drink and sat in the lobby looking at the large photographs of previous concerts that hung on the walls. The fact that I was staring at the poster depicting an early '80s performance by Spinal Tap is probably what prompted the insane man next to my right to begin talking to me.

"Spinal tap, man. I saw that show."

"Yeah?" I said, and sidestepped to the next picture, one of David Byrne. He sidestepped too.

"David Byrne. I saw that show too." I have to admit that at that, my interest was piqued.

"Really?"

"Yeah man, it was awesome."

"Sweet Christ, man. I love David Byrne. I'd have loved to've seen that."

"Yeah totally."

He must've taken our brief bonding over David Byrne as free reign to begin spouting, but I didn't really mind as I was there by myself and bored.

"Man," he said, "Les ain't even playing until 11."

"What?" I said.

"Yeah. There's two opening bands. They didn't mentioned that on the bill."

"Ah crap," I thought, anticipating another wee-hours trans-bay bus drop off in downtown Oakland. "I took BART here. It doesn't run past 12:30."

"Man, that sucks," he said. "And drinks are so expensive here. I paid five bucks for this beer."

I agreed that the drinks were expensive, and he claimed to know of a place around the corner where one could get 60-cent beers. I smiled and nodded, and continued making small talk. After working this mythical 60-cent-beer place into the location about five more times, he finally asked me if I wanted to go there until the show started.

You know how they say hindsight is 20/20?

I thought it over, and figured what the hell; sure I'd go and kill some time with this complete stranger. I remember thinking that you don't wind up with any interesting stories if you never go drink 60-cent beers with strangers. It wasn't like I had anything better to do, and it wasn't like I'd have followed him into any dark alleys, or anywhere that wasn't a populated, well-lit establishment.

We got our hands stamped, left the Warfield and walked a few blocks off Market Street, through crowds of bums and dealers. I moved here from Portland, so it wasn't anything new to be downtown and surrounded by junkies and winos, begging for change or shooting up in phone booths, but God damn if there weren't a lot of them. They'd occasionally approach you and mutter something, the only intelligible words usually being "change" or "motherfucker." My companion pointed out the place just ahead.

I had been expecting a bar. He had been describing a liquor store. "This is the place," he said.

"Um, isn't drinking in public against the law?"

"Nah, cops don't bug you here, man, they got more important things to worry about. We can go right back outside the Warfield. There's other people drinking there, see?"

I looked back and saw one man -- clearly a concertgoer and not a bum -- drinking something from a brown paper bag. Yeah, sure, what the hell, I'll get a beer. You don't wind up with any interesting stories if you never drink in public.

We went in, and my companion made straight for the 40s. I am really, to tell the truth, not up on my malt liquor, so I followed his lead and picked up a Miller High Life. We paid two dollars each (what happened to 60 cents?) and walked back toward the Warfield.

"So what do you do?" the guy asked me.

There's something very strange about telling someone you've got an IT job after you've just bought a 40 with them in the ghetto of San Francisco.

"I'm a web programmer," I said. "Not for a dot-com though. Don't hate me."

"No man, that's awesome. I wish I knew computers.. I failed computers three times in a row," he laughed. "How much do you make?"

If I'd thought the previous question was unnerving, I didn't anymore. I stammered, then told him. "Oh, yeah, I make about half that much," he said, but he was lying. The whole night he'd been bumming cigarettes from people, but he didn't smoke them. He'd tear them apart and put half the tobacco into rolling paper to make a really thin cigarette, then he'd save the rest of the tobacco for a second. I later asked him if rent was crazy expensive in the city, and he revealed that he lived in a hotel.

We got back and took a seat on the sidewalk in front of the Taco Bell across the street from the Warfield. He talked about how he used to be a crack addict, and how right now there were probably at least a hundred dealers there in Tenderloin, selling anything from the real stuff to broken up macadamia nuts. He told me that there'd been times where he'd spent over $400 in a single night getting high.

"Man," he said, "if I still had all that money, I'd be with two fuckin' hookers right now." And then shouting "Hey, you got weed?" to passers-by. I felt like an imposter.

Neither of us finished our drinks. After a while, he said he was going to go back in and take a nap in his seat, which was fine with me. We gave our half-drank beers to a group of bums sleeping in front of the next building, went back inside and parted ways.

There was something about the crowd back inside at the concert that made me very uncomfortable, though. For some reason, after drinking a 40 in the ghetto with this guy and hearing his story, I found it difficult to look at all these middle-class kids dressed like skanks and pretty boys, trying so hard to display their sexuality and maturity, as though their biggest problem was that they weren't catching the eyes of enough people. The second band had just started playing, and I didn't want to look at it all long enough to stick around for Les, so I left.

I walked to the Powell Street BART station (looks like I got to take BART home that night after all) and got on the first train back to the East Bay. It was going to Richmond and I needed the Fremont train, but I didn't care; I just wanted out of San Francisco. I'd transfer at the West Oakland station.

On the train there was a woman with her toddler daughter. The little girl looked about four years old or so, and her mother was singing to her. She was singing "You Are My Sunshine." I'd never really thought about that song before that, but the words are nice. The little girl was obviously happy to be sung to, and I wondered what it would take to one day make her let someone put his hands all over her ass at a concert. Would it be because nobody sang to her anymore? Or would it be because her mother never stopped singing to her? I don't know.