Street ministry
Craig Marine
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Feb. 11, 1998
©2000 San Francisco Examiner

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1998/02/11/STYLE14015.dtl

FATHER CHRISTIAN RIVER SIMS TENDS TO THE CITY'S HOMELESS, JUNKIES AND SEX WORKERS, BUT "A LOT OF PEOPLE . . . VIEW ME AS THE DEVIL HIMSELF'

The way River Sims tells his horror stories, calmly, barely raising his voice, poised like the Anglican priest he is, makes them seem all the more ugly by contrast. For instance there's this kid - a teenager - who ventures back and forth between Haight Street and the Polk, living on the streets. No one can get him to even try staying in a shelter.

"He's third-generation homeless," says Sims, speaking in tones members of Old San Francisco might use to speak of their lineage. "His mother shot him up with heroin for the first time when he was 8 years old."

Then there was another boy - young man, whatever - who came back to his Polk Street buddies bragging that he had just made $200 from a john and hadn't even had to perform a sex act.

"All he had to do was let the guy carve up his back with a knife," recalls Sims. "He thought he had really gotten over."

Sims - Father Christian River Sims, born Michael Smith in Missouri 41 years ago - has been working with San Francisco's homeless, junkies and sex workers, primarily in the Polk, Haight and Civic Center areas, for the past three years. He moved to The City after visiting a year earlier. He thought it would be the perfect place to establish his ministry, which he calls Temenos Catholic Worker (temenos is Greek for that which is abandoned, cut off or separated). The ministry is really just Sims, working out of a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment that is crammed with the things that he needs for his work.

And watching Sims work is an eye-popping experience, day or night. It's high noon on Polk Street and Sims, dressed in his usual baggy jeans, sweatshirt with a cross on the breast and backward baseball cap, makes a left into Fern Alley. Immediately, a very buzzed, effeminate male pushing a shopping cart stops him in the middle of the street, barely three feet from bustling Polk.

"Need points?" Sims asks simply, and there follows an endless speed riff response as the person pores through the cart, pulling hypodermic needles from nearly every conceivable spot and loading them into a plastic watering jug.

"How many do you have?" asks Sims, as though this is the most common sight in the world. To him, it obviously is.

"One hundred and fifty," is the answer and Sims calmly reaches into one of the overloaded canvas bags he carries around and counts out 150 syringes, "longs and shorts" in the parlance of the streets.

The exchange made, Sims offers one of the dozens of sandwiches he spends two and a half hours a day making. The offer is rejected - not enough mayonnaise. Others will later be passed by for having too much mayo. There is not a whole lot of "thank you" going on here, though later people will exchange hugs with the priest and ask for nothing in return.

Sims wanders off and explains that that may have been only two days worth of needles for the shopping cart person. He exchanges 2,000 needles a week, which he gets from the Prevention Point needle exchange program. He also distributes condoms, clothing - socks are a big draw with the rainy weather - and as much advice as people ask him for, about drug rehab or shelters or where the free showers are or anything else a street survivor might want to know.

He never gives them money, so they don't ask. He won't let them crash in his apartment, but if he knows they are sleeping on the step in front, he might sneak down and cover them with a blanket. He'll buy them a soda or a slice of pizza. "I must have spent $8,000 on pizza the first year I was out here, trying to gain their trust," Sims laughs. He's serious, however. He survives on donations, gets food from the Food Bank, lives on less than $800 per month himself. It's his life, usually five or six nights a week, from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. The boundaries he has set keep him sane.

Night time on Polk is surreal. The neon from the fancy restaurants, bars, ice cream shops and liquor stores glows off the rain slick streets, reflecting into the faces of the boys trying to look languid perched against the walls, studying the cars that go by studying them.

Everyone knows Sims. He knows all their stories. The faces of some of the young women who come over to grab needles or a sandwich - peanut butter and jelly this time - reveal some of what they have seen, minus the details. They are the same women whose pictures adorn the walls of Sims' tiny apartment, holding their babies like little angels just before the Child Protective Services takes the kids away. Babies having babies.

One boy comes over and shows Sims a walking stick he's made. He's taken a cane and used leather strips from an abandoned easy chair to weave a pattern on the top, which he has adorned with a silver skull and a horned bull's head. The bottom three-quarters of the cane is covered with small pornographic photographs of every imaginable type. It may not be suitable for family viewing, but it is art. Naturally, it's stolen the next day.

"He got his first job in San Jose when he was 13," Sims says of the cane boy as Sims walks on. "A woman paid him to take pornographic pictures of teenage girls. He's been obsessed with pornography ever since."

The cops know what Sims is doing, but look the other way - it's one of those San Francisco things largely influenced by Mayor Brown, who said of needle exchange, "I wrote the law. I think it is a way in which to avoid the spread of AIDS - the best way. It has proven to be an accurate assumption through studies. The National Medical Association, C. Everett Koop, a whole bunch of people believe as I do."

"I know I'm controversial," Sims shrugs. "A lot of people, mostly fundamentalists, view me as the devil himself. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing this. This is the happiest I've ever been in my life. This is my calling."

He says he's known of just five kids that have successfully left the streets since he's been out here. But as to why he would put so much effort into a seemingly endless and hopeless task.

"I see God in their eyes." He smiles. "I see Jesus in every one of the people I see on the street."

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