My Long Journey to Bring My Daughter Home From Skid Row

After months of waiting for my runaway teen, Stephanie, to come back, I ventured into the grittiest part of San Francisco to search for her. What I found was more than I bargained for.

This Creative Nonfiction Classic, first published in our 16th issue with the headline, “Tenderloin: A Memoir,” is one of my personal CNF favorites. I immediately flashed back to it when, about a year after we published it, I saw Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. I remembered Debra’s skill in capturing the same kind of grimness, hopelessness and darkness with just her words… She captures all those harsh realities in her telling of this futile trip, while smartly intimating other, unspoken questions. We know there is much more to this story. Her language evokes the sights, sounds, smells, the leaden weight of her experience in this milieu. And its lack of resolution is delicious.

—Patricia Park, co-founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

The best the cop can do is take my daughter’s name and add her to a national database of runaways.

From across the counter in this dank San Francisco police station, he offers this, as if typing names of missing children rounds them up in some satisfying way, as if that alone should be a comfort and I should leave here with my mind at ease. It’s what I get for my hour’s wait: the officer’s well-practiced speech about how it’s not against the law in California to run away from home and how it’s not possible to take minors into custody for loitering or smoking or even shoplifting because the jails are too clogged with more serious criminals. Besides, he tells me, mothers or fathers aren’t called if arrests are made because authorities have no choice but to assume harm to the child is what forced her to leave home. Arrested runaways, he says, are turned over to a social service agency

The cop gets up, telling me my attempt to report my missing child is over.

“I just hate the truth,” he says. “But there’s nothing the police can do about helping parents like you find their teen-agers.”

I did come to the city thinking I might find mine. But less than 24 hours off the plane from Oregon, leaving the police station and walking the dips and rises of San Francisco, I feel doubt settling across my shoulders like the heavy fog banked up against the coastline. Why have I come? What hope do I have?

For over four months, I’ve waited at home for some word of my child. I’ve talked to kids on the streets of our own downtown, passed out pictures of her, looked at listings of runaways on the Internet, e-mailed youth centers in towns I’ve heard attract these teen-agers, who call themselves “travelers”: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Tucson, Austin. Authorities I’ve turned to have answered with only a shrug. There is no office, no phone number, no agency for parents to turn to when their children run away.