I spent the night with a homeless San Francisco woman
I had no idea how Samantha Hernandez was going to respond when I asked to sit down beside her on the sidewalk. She was cool with it, and proceeded to tell me one of the wildest stories I’ve heard in years.
And it was true.
I happened on Hernandez, 21, at 21st and Folsom streets as she kneeled on a greenish blue rug. Bathed in lamplight, Hernandez smoothed the shag fibers like it was a piece of fabric to be cut into a garment. Because to her, it was.
Her coat, bag and scooter were strewn on the sidewalk. A book rested on the pavement next to the plastic storage container that she uses to store her dumpster finds. Hernandez had just found the rug in the dumpster that she was now beside, and she was going to make herself…a coat?
“Honestly, I think of it as a blanket,” she said.
That’s when I asked if I could take pictures, and if I could record her answering questions. She opened up almost immediately about her life.
“You want to know something interesting?” she began. “When I was 15 years old, I ran away to Brazil with fake passports. I’m on Google. My mom went on ‘Good Morning America,’ and I was on CNN, ABC.”
It happened in 2010, and a Google search corroborates what she said. She ran away from her Massachusetts home to be with her then 17-year-old boyfriend whom she met online. Her disappearance sparked an international custody battle. In an interview with ABC after the Brazilian government had detained and released her to the boyfriend’s relatives, Hernandez told a reporter that she would only return home dead.
“I’m not going back, because if I do I’m going back in a body bag,” she said.
Obviously she came back, because she’s living on the streets of San Francisco. Her home now is the tent city near the Best Buy on Harrison Street, which isn’t too far from Ripple’s office. Hernandez didn’t tell me how she got home from Brazil when we met, and I haven’t been able to track her down for a follow up conversation. But she did tell me how she ended up in California.
“I moved out here because I was getting raped constantly at my old home,” she said. “I kept falling in love with drug addicts.”
Hernandez has been involved with intense, love-fueled quarrels lately. One recent incident put a frequent male companion in the hospital. According to Hernandez, he was hit in the head with a sledgehammer, and subsequently doctors removed part of his brain. The assailant? Hernandez’s ex-boyfriend.
“They’re both my exes, though,” she said flatly.
The blanket she was making on the Folsom Street sidewalk added some much-needed cheer. When she got them, she said she’d add waffle cones as spikes.
“I feel more comfortable with a tail and ears,” she said. “I guess I’m a furry, but I’m not.”
She added that she was born with lycanthropy, which, according to Wikipedia, is a “rare psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusion that the affected person can transform into, has transformed into, or is a non-human animal.” Hernandez believes she is part animal, which she says is elemental to her Mexican heritage.
I tried to get Hernandez to tell me more about her origins, her family. I wanted more of her story. The conversation, though, kept drifting as she worked.
On one of her hands she wore a glove with a pink skeletal pattern. The fingertips had been removed. Her other hand was covered in a dark film like what you might see on the hands of a car mechanic. It’s because she dyed her hair green earlier that evening. A bracelet with a four leaf clover charm jangled on her right wrist, as well as a paper bracelet from a hospital admission.
“There are a lot of fucked up people, and the reason why they’re on the streets is because they’re fucked up people,” she said. “But there is fucked up in different ways. Me, I’m disabled.”
She said she suffered from sciatica, a lower back pain coupled with shocks of discomfort that shoots from her butt down her leg. She seemed to be moving without pain as she gathered her stuff.
I was going to walk to BART, and asked if she wanted to join me for whatever street delicatessen we might pass along the way. Before she loaded her salvaged goods back into the storage container and put on her backpack, she wrapped the rug — no, blanket — around her body. She reminded me of the “Sesame Street” character Cookie Monster.
Was that everything she owned?
“Pretty much. I just got robbed today,” she responded.
Walking with the container on the scooter was cumbersome so she decided to leave the container on the sidewalk against a building.
“Stay here,” she said as we walked away. “Nobody’s gonna touch it. If they do, they’ll see it’s a bunch of nonsense.”
She began telling me about her father, who was born and raised in Oakland. Hernandez was born in Florida. I felt we were getting somewhere when we walk by a pickup truck loaded with construction materials.
“I need that tarp, but I’m not going to steal it,” Hernandez said. “You should always know who you’re stealing from.”
She’s dated a bike thief before; she was his scout. She is an engineer. She has four inventions but, if she tried to get a patent, her ideas would probably get stolen.
She’d been eating ice cream as her only food for the previous week. She smoked crack a few hours before we met. But it was only a small hit to spark the evening’s creativity.
We smelled the griddled sausages before we saw the Mission Street vendor. Before we ordered, we had to duck into a parking lot to look for…anything. Hernandez leaned over two dumpsters to see what was inside. She picked up and discarded a shoe without bothering to look for the other; it wasn’t her size. A couple continued to eat their dinner in the shadow of another dumpster without acknowledging us.
Hernandez ordered a bacon-wrapped sausage on a hot dog bun. It was drowned in cheese, jalapenos and onions.
“Put as much food on it as possible,” she told the cook before ordering a water to wash it down.
She started talking to a man waiting in line. She noted that they shared Mexican heritage.
“I’m half Mexican. The other half is Scottish-Irish. That’s a lot of workers,” she said cracking a joke that she didn’t even bother to laugh at.
She told the man that she was an engineer. He nodded politely.
“I know how to fix scooters, lights, sound,” she added. “I need to be an apprentice. I want to work on cars.”
“Can you put extra bacon?” she said to the cook as the generator groaned underneath the sizzle of the cooking food on the griddle.
“Money is so weird,” Hernandez said, restarting her conversation with the man waiting in line.
“It’s just a piece of paper,” he responded.
“I think drugs are worth more than money,” Hernandez said.
“If there’s no drugs, there wouldn’t be money,” he replied.
“That’s the truth,” Hernandez said.
She gave me the scooter’s handlebars so she could take a bite out of her sausage. The combination of melted cheese and meat juices bubbled over the bun and slid down her fingers, running freely like soda out of a bottle shaken too hard before opening.
Like Cookie Monster, she chomped with delight.
[Thanks for reading. This story originally appeared on ripple.co. If you like what you read, check out more of our stories.]
