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dorm for a few days. Unfortunately for that relationship,I was a train wreck from day one. All I could think was, Where can I get some drugs? I was on a mission, as I called it. I knew that if I could find Jeremy, I would be able to get high. I had heard he had advanced to harder drugs. Plus, I trusted him. Either way, I had to find something. My money was burning a hole through my pocket.
    Up until this point, I had used drugs but never had easy access to them. The seasoned junkies I met out at the bars who were traveling through the city used to snicker at me. They told me I was the “kind of person that had a job.” I wasn’t a hustler. I would learn later I was the type of person who was known as a “mark,” because I was completely naïve about the ways of the drug world. In Ohio, I went to school or worked or both. San Francisco would become a total departure from everything I knew of life. When I left my hometown, I cut myself off from my support system, both emotionally and financially. No longer could I turn to trusted friends or my parents. I had to find my own way as I waded waist-high through the gutter of human garbage. It became perfectly normal to have no job and no place to live, and to use drugs outside.
    When I was a teenager, I used to listen to the band Fang. They would sing songs about the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. Those songs spoke to me. They made me feel as if being a junkie was the ultimate act of rebellion. Everything I had hated about my life was in the lyrics. The isolation, the depression, and the feeling of not belonging anywhere in society. I had seen both my parents work hard their entire lives to obtain financial gains, yet they never seemed happy. Maybe the solution to happiness came with not caring whatothers thought about me. It sounded like everything I wanted from life. I wanted that feeling of complete freedom and not giving a fuck about anything. I had always worried about my weight, my grades, and my parents, why other kids tormented me. My life had been filled with so many expectations. Be a good girl. Get good grades. Ignore the fact that my father is drunk. Don’t tell anyone what goes on in this house. Keep everything inside. Smile—what do you have to cry about? I was reminded that I had everything—everything—except I wanted to kill myself and I didn’t know why. My ex-boyfriend had told me I was worthless. Maybe he was right. For now, I wanted to be relieved of my burdens.
    On the way to my friend’s dorm from the Greyhound station, the cab driver pointed out the window: “This is the Tenderloin. Do not come here.” That moment will always be cemented in my memory. That was the day when I found everything I thought I wanted in one place. I had a return-trip ticket to Cincinnati in my bag. But I never made it back. My life was now in San Francisco.
    I stepped onto the bus that very first night after dropping off my things at my friend’s dorm. “Can you tell me which bus will take me downtown?” I asked the driver. “I need the Tenderloin.”
    I felt instantly overstimulated by the insanity of my new environment. It was complete chaos. In Ohio I had never seen people use drugs out in the open, with the few exceptions being when I stole quick glances from the bus while going past the housing projects. In the Tenderloin, drugs were everywhere. There was crack on one street, people high on meth on another. There were hookers walking the streets inthe middle of the day—men, women, trans folk, and many who looked well under the age of consent. I was in awe of the fact that I could buy needles on the street corners for $2. There was even a place I could exchange them for clean ones, a program that was completely absent in Ohio. People slept anywhere and everywhere on the street. AIDS was in full swing. I had never met anyone with the virus in Cincinnati. Now, it seemed as if the signs and faces of