It has nonetheless earned fame among motoring vacationers because of its South of Market location on Townsend, between Third and Fourth streets; veteran recreational vehicle enthusiasts say it is the only such park in the center of any of the world's great cities.
But the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park also has its share of permanent residents, and at $750 per month they have their own reasons for living there. Every summer, European tourists finish their RV vacations in San Francisco and bestow long-term park residents with piles of nearly new hibachis, crates of half-empty Crisco bottles, and oceans of kitchen salt.
"It's been two years since I've bought salt," one resident boasts.
The park also is frequent host to movie crews and fashion photography trucks up from L.A. for a week or two. Sometimes the crews simply do their business in the RV park, providing residents with spectacles unavailable in other neighborhoods. Similarly, musicians, evangelists, and other bus-dwelling performers pull their vehicles into this RV park, allowing residents to briefly live next door to such luminaries as Franklin Graham, son of Billy. "He was walking around near his bus and I got to talk with him about the city for a while," says an ex-con who lives in a 20-footer with his wife.
The park's permanent residents also have a unique opportunity to help shape the United States' image in the world, thanks to the thousands of European tourists who pass through each year. "Last week a group of six Dutch kids came over to play with my dog," says a Texan electrician who has lived with a buddy in his 30-footer for a year. "I had them listening to me wide-eyed for two hours."
Now, though, this RV park just south of downtown is scheduled to be torn down.
The end was bound to come sooner or later. Entrepreneur Rich Hightower and his brother leased the land and laid the RV park's plumbing and pavement in 1978, three years before Hightower's landlords unveiled the first set of plans for a Mission Bay construction project that would include the site of the park.
The RV park has been able to survive and flourish thanks to a protracted battle between community activists and the owner of the property, the Catellus Corp. Initially, Catellus envisioned Mission Bay as a giant corporate headquarters ringed by a retinue of lesser office towers. Sixteen years of community resistance scuttled that and other proposals for the Mission Bay property, and the current 2,000-unit midtown-neighborhood scheme was approved after 13 years of negotiations with citizens' groups.
Next fall, Catellus hopes to break ground on the short-and-tall mix of brick apartment and retail buildings, complete with awnings, patios, and shrubbery-bordered walkways meandering between them. A UCSF Medical Centers campus also may be part of the development.
Hightower would like to build a new park somewhere else, but the city has shut the door in his face everywhere he's tried, he says. "We need to find two or three acres in San Francisco," says Hightower. "I'd go anywhere in the city, but where are we going to find it?" San Francisco's only other RV park, a piece of pavement near Candlestick Park, is slated to be torn out for a new football stadium. And San Francisco's era of RV living will end.
"Yeah?" says David Prowler, the city's project manager for Mission Bay. "Well it happened in New York and Paris a long time ago."
If those cities are anything like San Francisco, they've suffered the loss. Because when the bulldozers start to roar on Townsend Street, something more interesting and important than a motor-home lot will disappear.
For the past 19 years, the San Francisco RV Park has been an asphalt field of dreams.
This is where Alyson McKellar, a no-nonsense, jewelry-making hippie, convinced "Ruckus" Rickey, her badass boyfriend, to mend his ways and devote his life to loving her.
It's where a 60-ish former accountant from Dallas named Helen Robbins realized her lifelong dream of becoming a woman about town.
And it's where Skid Row lovers Jeffrey and Al got their own home, their own pickup, and their own business, allowing Al to die of AIDS with dignity.
Halfway between the tarnished lives they've left behind and the better ones they're striving for, the park's dozen or so permanent residents have found a modern homestead, a tarmac foothold inside the RV park's chain-link walls. The residents are oddly effusive in their praise for the park, describing it as the most wonderful place they've ever lived, an oasis in a ferocious world, the basis for a better life.
For Alyson McKellar and Rickey Schaller, a pair of former Deadhead jewelry-makers who live in a 40-foot school bus, the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park has become a foundation for marital harmony.
The park, the bus, and the domestic life they've made there are the outward indications of an amazing transformation. This is where Alyson has managed to undermine Rickey's edgy, selfish, rabble-rousing, drifter personality, and turn him into a generous man who speaks of devoting his life to his wife.
"My life has changed," says Rickey. "The old Rickey was a self-centered person who put Alyson second, who kept his wheels spinning and the dust off his tires. The new Rickey has made all that stuff take a back seat to Alyson's happiness."
It's been a long, strange, difficult trip for Alyson.
But she's done it. She's taken the wiry, hair-down-to-his-hip-bones badass she fell in love with on the road seven years ago and turned him into a devoted husband, a household handyman, an aspiring family man.
Alyson and Rickey met when they were both traveling with the hippie caravan that followed Grateful Dead concerts. Alyson began trailing the band just under a decade ago, when she was a college sophomore in Charleston, S.C. Rickey joined the Dead followers a year or so later, at the behest of a friend who lived in a bus parked on the dirt roadsides of China Basin, where Rickey also parked his bus.
For Alyson the tours were only a summer sideline to efforts toward a college English degree, which she hoped would help turn her into a writer.
Rickey, however, remembers the Dead tours much in the way a one-term politician remembers his brief time in office, or former athletes remember being on top of their game.
After leaving his biker mom and crank addict dad as a teen-ager, Rickey lived from couch to couch in Oakland. He made money any way he could -- odd jobs, odd scams, and whatever else happened his way. This training gave him the skills to become a Duke of the Dead Tour.
He and his friend Randy Turley skippered a series of beat-up buses across the country, hauling paying teen-agers from concert to concert, selling scrambled eggs, beer, and sodas in stadium parking lots, while Rickey sneaked contraband into the concerts themselves. Rickey recalls a half-dozen Deadhead girlfriends, endless mad-rush road trips, and a parking lot commerce scene where he was always the center of attention.
"Money was easy in the parking lot. I used to call the money we would earn from fares 'people miles,' " Turley says. "I could carry four to five times as many people as a VW Microbus, and took around three times the gas. I had a sliding scale -- money, trades, or people who talked me into it for free."
If you get Rickey started talking about his Deadhead days, he won't stop for breath.
"Before each show we'd stop at a Ralphs supermarket. Those stadiums are miles from any store, so we'd buy beers, juice, sodas, milk. You wouldn't believe how much milk we could sell. We'd grab cases of maxi-Pampers, anything. What you could really gouge them on was juice: three bucks a bottle, two for $5. We'd get it for $1.25 a bottle, the same price as LSD," he says.
The fun ended in New Jersey seven years ago, when police found a phone-book page full of acid blots on Rickey. He was sentenced to nine months in jail, and he stopped hearing from his Deadhead friends.
Except for Alyson, the jewelry-making college girl who was so easy to laughter and so quick with a confidence. She and Rickey had gotten together soon before his arrest. At first, he didn't think much more of her than the other women he had slept with on tour. When he went to jail, though, she continued to write, and they became lovers by letter.
When he got out, Rickey moved to rural South Carolina to be with Alyson.
He couldn't sit still for long though. The people were nice and the countryside was beautiful, he recalls. But it was a lot less exciting than the Bay Area streets he had grown up on. So he went out West. He and Alyson promised they'd write each other.
After a few letters, Alyson began to wonder which she wanted more: an English degree or the Duke of the Dead Tour. She quit college.
"I came out here on a Greyhound with a footlocker and $200," she says. "I had only gone to college to be able to write. And my plan was to make jewelry out here until I could write something."
After briefly living with Rickey's mom, they moved to the streets, parking their bus alongside San Francisco's China Basin and in the Central Basin warehouse districts. It was a life Rickey enjoyed, but Alyson was quick to spot drawbacks.
"We were getting malnourished and getting sick all the time because we were living on the street," Alyson says. "Rickey would have liked to continue living on the street, but he sort of swallowed his pride."
So they drove the few blocks from the illegal dirt street parking spaces of China Basin to the then-$600-per-month ones on Townsend Street.
At first living in the RV park was a lot like street life. A steady stream of Rickey's street friends crashed on the floor. There was barely any space in Rickey's 1952 International Harvester school bus to stretch one's legs, let alone cook or clean.
After a few months, though, Rickey had an epiphany. He didn't like seeing Alyson miserable in his tiny bus. So he went hunting for a bigger one. He poked around, got some advice from bus mechanic Randy, and found a beautiful, 1976 Gillig -- the Cadillac of school buses. It was 40 feet long, had a high roof, and plenty of space inside. He paid a junkyard $2,000 for it, drove it to the RV park, and gave the smaller International Harvester to Turley.
Rickey came to like taking showers every day in the RV park bathroom. He liked having electricity, and he liked parking his bus in a space where the cops couldn't tell him to move along. Most of all, he liked being with Alyson, and he liked how Alyson thought the world of him.
Before long, and without saying much about it to Alyson, Rickey started making more improvements. He began tenuously, then proceeded vigorously to turn the bus into a first-rate motor home.
Now, a guest can sit on one of two couches Rickey has fashioned in the bus version of a foyer. Farther back in the bus comes a kitchen, complete with an electric stove and oven, a full-size refrigerator, a stainless steel sink, and ample cabinet space. While there is some finishing work left to do, the kitchen looks for the most part like a truly professional job: The top sides of the cabinets are rounded to fit flush with the domed roof of the school bus, the sink is housed in a Formica countertop, and the cupboards reach from the bus' side at the same height as Alyson's shoulders.
"He's got the American dream right now. He's got a wife and a home," says Turley, who now lives in the foothills above Chico but continues to watch Rickey's transformation with bemusement. "I think it's just having someone around who cares about him, someone to love him."
Rickey credits Alyson with his transformation, but he credits the RV park, too.
"I think the thing about the trailer park is that it has changed my perspective on the old Rickey. I know I need a mailing address, electricity, laundry facilities, a shower," he says. "Look at me, I'm completely clean. I'm such a hypocrite."
Picking up one of the silver-alloy hairpins he makes, Rickey recalls time he once spent in and out of Santa Rita State Prison more than a decade ago on domestic violence charges. He recalls his drug-addled dad who's now in an asylum, the fights he used to get in on the street. He's a jewelry-making businessman now, not a street hustler, he says.
"But I'm a lot different man now. The violent part, that's the one part of myself that I'm really trying to get rid of," he says. "You see this, this is me now. This is me, not all that other stuff."
The new Rickey is a man of generous spirit who will scramble to find a chair for a guest, even if it's just an upturned crate. He's someone who will josh with a loudmouthed homeless madman who comes barging toward his jewelry stand, give him a pocketful of change, and send him on his way with a collegial pat on the back.
"He lost his keys the other week. Before, it would be a huge fight and freak-out. But he just said, 'It's OK, I'll find them later,' " Alyson says one afternoon as she hammers out necklace links in their bus' living room. "I said, 'Hey, what's that?' And he just said, 'I'm tired of freaking out.' He wants to be settled.
"He's hinting for me to stop taking birth control pills."
Ten spaces to the south of the school bus that is home to Rickey and Alyson, Helen Robbins is realizing her dreams, too.
For Helen, a smallish, white-haired woman in her early 60s who lives in a 30-foot, orange-and-white trailer, the RV park has been part of the modest realization of a humble but enduring aspiration.
Helen Robbins, you see, had always wanted to be a woman about town. Not an opening-performance, Stars, or Top of the Mark sort of woman about town. Helen is a soft-spoken, modest woman of unpretentious tastes. She doesn't go for showing off, and she'll tell you so.
But long ago she decided she would settle for nothing less than being an operagoing, window-shopping-at-Union Square, and afternoon-by-the-wharf sort of woman about town.
And that's just who she has become.
It's taken 20 years of working overtime as a Dallas accountant and socking away two-thirds of her salary, but she's done it. She's retired early, bought a trailer, and parked herself right in the middle of the most citified city west of the Mississippi.
"That was my goal. I had no dreams of being a millionaire with a 50-foot yacht," she says. "I've more or less always been a fan of the symphony, of opera, and San Francisco has always had a good opera, good ballet, and a good symphony."
Helen traces her dreams of urbanity to the 1940s, when she was a child in Dallas. Her father was gone much of the time because of his job, and her mother would play the radio while she ironed, cooked, or took care of other chores.
"During the war there wasn't an opportunity to get out and do anything for most people. So we'd listen to opera on the radio," she says.
Before long, she was itching to get out of Dallas, and getting accepted to the University of Texas at Austin seemed the ticket. There, she dreamed of being an artiste, got an English degree, and got married -- to a man who took her back to Dallas.
She bore and raised his children to adulthood, and then he left her. So Helen Robbins started planning again in earnest to leave Dallas, this time for good. It was not a dramatic plan: She would save like a church mouse until she had enough money to retire, and then get out. But it was one she held to with a passion.
"The divorce made me realize that I'm not stuck in the same rut," she says. "So I started working extra hard to be able to retire early. I did what I called 'disciplined saving,' saving everything I could get my hands on. The kids were grown up, and I didn't have to spend it on them. I didn't spend it on myself. I just saved it. If you're making $50,000, you can actually live on $20,000."
Which she did for 20 years. About year 15, she got married again, this time to a fellow accountant named Howard, and with two years to go, they bought an orange-and-white trailer that is as long as two station wagons.
After a few weekend trips, Helen was hooked. RV living was the life for her, she decided, and by the time she had saved enough money to retire 12 years ago they hitched up the trailer, drove out of Dallas, and never looked back.
"I found out I enjoy it," Helen says. "You have the freedom to be able to pick up and go whenever you want. If it rains, you just move your home to where it's not raining. If it's cold, you just drive to where it's warmer."
For a couple of years they commuted twice yearly between Colorado Springs and Las Vegas, moving to Vegas when it would get cold, to the Springs to escape the heat.
But, Helen notes, "after a while, you get tired of driving."
So they headed toward the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park, where the weather's usually nice, you can walk to Macy's, and then stroll over to the symphony hall.
"I like Wagner, though his operas involve sitting for long periods of time," Helen says, standing in a loose T-shirt, checked shorts, and tennis shoes in the doorway of her aluminum trailer. "But it's dramatic music, and I like that. I obviously don't go to opening night. That hasn't been part of my retirement dream, going to opening night.
"It's just being able to go."
A half-dozen spaces to the east and one row over is an old red Datsun pickup that is piled high with cardboard, parked next to a tiny day-trip trailer. Most park residents don't know the occupants, but they've seen them. They're the thin gay couple. The ones who recycle trash.
By any ordinary assessment, Jeffrey and Al suffer a life of misery. Al was diagnosed with AIDS five years ago, about the same time Jeffrey was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Their sedan-length trailer is the smallest in the park, and to pay for its space they spend their days scrounging for cardboard, cans, and bottles. It's a big change from a decade ago, when Jeffrey worked as a well-paid New Jersey mechanic and Al was a San Francisco bookkeeper. Drug habits, crime, and their diagnoses have put those days firmly in the past.
But Jeffrey says he's the happiest he's ever been. He's pulled himself and his ailing partner from Skid Row, and now they dedicate their lives to caring for each other. It took an enormous act of will that included fleeing the Tenderloin and quitting heroin cold turkey. Now, though, they've left behind the humiliation and dependency they once seemed destined to die in.
"We have an advantage, an opportunity to live better than we've ever lived," Al says.
Jeffrey and Al met in January of 1992 at a bus stop. Al was mourning a lover he had lost to AIDS, and Jeffrey had just moved from New Jersey only to learn that his crack-addicted girlfriend had become pregnant. Jeffrey and his girlfriend were on the verge of putting the baby up for adoption, and Jeffrey felt like he was drowning.
Jeffrey and Al chatted awhile, went to lunch, and soon became a couple.
"I kind of liked the way he was outgoing," says Jeffrey, a muscular man with a graying, four-day beard, a Roman nose, and ironic eyes. "He was nice."
During those early years their relationship was based on a mutual melange of petty criminal schemes, drug addiction, and figuring the angles of life in the Tenderloin slums.
They both feared that they had been infected with the HIV virus, but Al didn't want to be tested. Jeffrey had to pester him for months before they both went down to have their blood looked at.
"I knew he had to have it," says Jeffrey. "I said, 'Have you been tested?' And he said, 'I'm not gonna get tested, I'm not gonna go get tested. I'm not gonna go get tested, I'm not gonna get tested.' I had to talk to him a year before he got tested."
The diagnoses at first provided Jeffrey and Al an excuse to embrace their addictions. Occasional crack use bloomed into $60-a-day crack and heroin habits. For emergency fixes, they borrowed money from loan sharks. To pay them back, they worked for a dollar an hour cleaning rooms for slumlords. To fill in the gaps, they'd steal.
This life in the Tenderloin fast lane was Al's version of a last hurrah. It was a hedonistic goodbye to a life doomed by his AIDS diagnosis.
"I just threw the towel in," says Al. "For me it was just time to party and have a good time."
Jeffrey and Al's good time turned very bad when, after getting kicked out of a hotel for theft, the two found themselves homeless and collecting scrap with a shopping cart to survive. Strung out on drugs and without shelter, they remember counting the days before Al would die.
Then a miracle happened. Al's dad, who had shunned him after the AIDS diagnosis, woke up in the middle of the night amid a dream. "Mom says he sat up on the bed and he was shaking," Al recalls. "My grandmother appeared and asked him, 'Why aren't you helping Al?' "
Al's parents bought Al and Jeffrey a camper trailer to live in, and got them a spot in a mobile home park in Keys, Calif., near Modesto. It was an improvement, Al says. But a mild one. Keys trailer residents weren't all that welcoming of a pair of gay men from San Francisco, particularly when one of them displayed AIDS symptoms.
"You talk about being in the middle of nowhere. This was hicksville redneck nowhere," says Jeffrey.
But the isolation and change of scenery allowed the two to focus on kicking their heroin and crack habits. Which they did. After regaining their senses, they noticed that their new home was sweltering hot.
The valley heat made Al unbearably weak. He had to spend his days lying inside the trailer next to a swamp cooler, holding still so as not to break a sweat.
"The valley tore him up," Jeffrey says. "He couldn't function. You wake up in the valley at 5 o'clock and it's 80 degrees. At 9 o'clock it's 90 degrees and at 12 it's 105."
After 18 months of debilitating heat and neighbors' scorn, Jeffrey and Al gave up on the rural life. They rented a U-Haul and headed west, towing their trailer across the Bay Bridge, down Townsend Street, and into Space 244 of the San Francisco RV Park. Dope-free, they spent drug money they'd saved on a $200 pickup. After a few months using it to haul scrap to the recycling center, they traded it in on a $400 pickup. Later still they traded up to the $600 Datsun pickup they now own. It's the main asset of J.A.M. Recycling, named after Jeffrey, Al, and their Shih Tzu, Ming.
With their own business and their own home, Jeffrey and Al are more deeply in love than ever.
Jeffrey, with his forest of tattoos, storied past, and New Jersey accent, is the ruffian of the two, and he becomes fidgety when Al talks about their personal life. But when he's alone, away from Al, he speaks of his partner in tones so tender they describe a romance of 1940s cinematic proportions.
Jeffrey now remembers his life's most dramatic turn as the moment he and Al vowed to look after each other following Al's diagnosis. He's never cared for anyone so much, he says, and that caring has been his life's greatest solace.
Al, a former piano teacher and bookkeeper, has kept his profession's earnest, meticulous manner. He now talks about someday buying a new piano to replace the one he pawned a few years ago, about getting a bigger trailer, another pickup truck.
The 10 blocks from the RV park to the Tenderloin hotels now seem like light-years of distance.
"We had a few debts we had to pay off, which we've done. We've now got ourselves to a point where we can start saving," says Al. "We own our own home, we own our own business, we own our own truck. We're not doing dope anymore. Our life is turning around."
And it will continue to. Until Al gets his first serious infection.
As much as Jeffrey and Al deny its presence, Al's disease looms over every day of their new lives; over the thrill of independence; over the joy of being in love.
Al cut his knee the other day crawling around inside a garbage bin looking for cardboard. It's a deep gash stretching three inches across the bottom half of his right knee. It looks to need stitches, but Al wouldn't go to a doctor. The broad, healing gash now takes on an outsize appearance on his emaciated body much like the outsize danger it represents to his embattled immune system.
On a recent Saturday night, less than a week after he was cut, Al got sick to his stomach -- diarrhea and vomiting -- after he and Jeffrey ate roast turkey sandwiches at a greasy spoon near the RV park.
"It didn't bother me much, but you know my system is a lot stronger than his," Jeffrey says.
Al resists seeing doctors anymore. The last time he did, a couple of years ago, he was put on AZT, which Al says made him impatient, cranky -- not his regular self.
"When they put him on that stuff, it turned him into a fucking monster. AZT made this guy crazy," Jeffrey recalls.
"I was forgetting things, my temper was real short, and I'm not that way. So I discontinued taking it. I haven't taken anything since," adds Al. "But I've had no opportunistic infections at all. The only thing I've been bothered with was a little fatigue, a little diarrhea, and a little weight loss. My weight kind of comes and goes."
It mostly goes.
And by Jeffrey's private reckoning, his partner will go at around the time the park will.
When the Mission Bay development begins and the San Francisco Recreational Vehicle Park comes to an end, Jeffrey's neighbor to the east, Helen Robbins, wants to look for an apartment. Or maybe she and her husband will find an RV park in the East Bay.
"It just depends on what's available when the crunch comes," she says.
Rickey Schaller and Alyson McKellar are already thinking about driving their Gillig school bus to an RV park in Castro Valley. The rent's a lot cheaper there, and it will be just as close to Telegraph Avenue, Rickey says.
Jeffrey doesn't have plans of that sort. He was never one for thinking about the future, and he'd just as soon they keep the park where it is.
"Do you remember the other week when it was raining, pouring out? It was so comfy and warm in that trailer," Jeffrey says.
"There was rain beating on the roof," adds Al.
"And you could just cuddle up in bed, turn on the TV," Jeffrey says. "It was like a cave in there.
