T.T. is clothed only in a pair of cutoff shorts, and his naked torso is covered in scars. He has a preacher's voice, though, an incongruous sound, full like river water, smooth and deep, and he is using his voice, on this weekday morning in a room where paint peels from the walls at the Ambassador Hotel, to give thanks. "I have had a very fortunate life," he is saying, standing barefoot on a pile of pink paint, which looks as if it has been stripped piece by piece by frenzied hands, as if someone had tried to claw his way, bare-palmed, out of the room. The heat, outside, turns the sky white. Inside, the air is fetid. T.T. sits, lights a cigarette, and pulls out an ashtray made of an aluminum-foil cake pan. He taps an ash into the tray, which is slick with the sputum that flies out of his throat, an emanation that, unlike his voice, he cannot control.
For some people with AIDS in San Francisco, the Ambassador is the end of the line -- a death ship of sorts, a place to go before going somewhere else to die. Of 160 tenants, 100 have been diagnosed with AIDS; they find the building by word-of-mouth, or they are referred to it by local hospitals and doctors. These tenants pay for their rooms with money from General Assistance and disability programs. In addition to a place to sleep, the Ambassador offers these indigent and ill people access to a range of services they might otherwise have difficulty tracking down. On the second floor of the Ambassador, social service agencies operate out of tiny one-room offices, offering the AIDS-diagnosed Ambassador tenants counseling, money management services, disability benefits advocacy, and a link to medical care.
"A lot of these people are not mentally or emotionally able to take care of themselves," says Bill Carruthers, who works at the Ambassador for Lutheran Social Services, providing resident assistance. "At least here they're safe, and I think they're comfortable."
But the physical condition of the Ambassador is appalling. Over and over again, the building -- whose owner is listed in public records as Vasilios Glimidakis -- has been cited by the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection and the Department of Health for code violations. The violations, documents show, have gone uncorrected -- in part because of a reluctance to really push for improvements out of fear that the owner will just close the building down and throw everyone out on the streets. It's a devil's bargain, and it allows the building's owner and its manager to collect almost $400 a month in rent for each of the 160 single-occupancy rooms -- that's about $750,000 a year, most of it paid with public funds -- with little to compel them to make even the most basic building repairs. Glimidakis insists he is repairing the hotel -- "I am very sympathy for these people," he says -- but that "people destroy it every single day."
"We have three plumbers in working in all of the hallway bathrooms. We try to put tiles on the floor. We oil paint the walls. I buy a hundred yards of carpet across the bay," he says. "I'll be honest. We never stop every single day."
But as even the most perfunctory tour will show, the Ambassador is literally falling to pieces. In many of the shower stalls at the Ambassador, the hot-water faucets -- the handles that would allow the water to be turned on and off -- are gone, which means the only option is cold water, a violation of city law.
Some of the bathrooms are padlocked. In others, the glass is missing from the windows, leaving shower stalls exposed to the open air, the wind, and the rain in the wintertime. Some of the bathrooms' ceilings have caved in, leaving huge gaping holes above the shower stalls and in the walls, with pipes and wooden 2-by-4 beams exposed. In one bathroom, on the fourth floor, water streams from the cracked plaster ceiling, pooling on the painted-over tile floor and out into the hallway. The bathtubs, floors, and showers in many of the bathrooms are missing tiles. The shower curbs are 4 inches high, a wall of sorts between the shower stalls and the rest of the bathrooms; there is no way anyone in a wheelchair or with other mobility problems can use the Ambassador showers.
The bare wooden floors of the hallways show marks of water damage, of cigarette burns, of splinters. Some of the stair treads are loose; others are covered with old carpet matting that is soiled and sticky; on one stair landing, on the sixth floor, outside of a bathroom, the floorboards appear to be on the verge of collapse, yielding hollowly to the pressure of a tapping foot. On a recent Thursday, there was blood on the stairs. There are roaches in the hallways. Residents say there are mice in the rooms.
"Luckily, I got a cat. He killed four mice this week," a resident named Katherine says. As she speaks, her husband, Alan, lies naked under a sheet in their room; his gaunt body is punctured with wounds from his recent hospital stay, when doctors slit his side open to insert drainage tubes to keep him alive. He is lying on a cigarette-singed brown sheet on a mattress on the floor; the hotel has not provided him sheets or blankets, he says, although city law requires that those be made available. Recently, he says, "my wife and I needed toilet paper and they didn't have any more. The clerk said they only give out so much a day."
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