The Loin Index
by Steve Zabriskie
In keeping with our summer list-writing theme, here are some little known facts about the Tenderloin in a format we ripped off from Harper's Magazine:
- Number of bars in the Tenderloin: 46
- Number of churches in the Tenderloin: 12
- Amount by which spending on strippers per capita exceeds spending on children's education per capita annually: 25:1
- Average number of students in a Tenderloin elementary school class: 38
- Percentage of children who ride Muni to get to school each day: 42%
- Number of used condoms each child will pass on the sidewalk, each way, among children who walk to school everyday: 3.2
- Number of Tenderloin 3rd graders who will end up graduating from High School: 53%
- Average age at which the male students will drop out: 13
- Average age at which the female students will drop out: 15
- Percentage of female dropouts that will end up as prostitutes: 18%
- Percentage of male dropouts that will end up as prostitutes: 14%
- Percentage of their customers who will suspect that the male prostitutes are actually males: 7%
- Average number of marriages per year that will end as a result of acts of prostitution performed in the Tenderloin being made public: 5
- Number of nights expelled husbands will spend in pay-by-the-week hotels in the Tenderloin after being ejected from their homes: 18
- Number of cases of tuberculosis contracted per week in pay-by-the-week hotels in the Tenderloin: 8
- Percentage of cases who will realize they have been infected: 16%
- Percentage of tuberculosis carriers who will visit an Asian massage parlor in the subsequent 30 days: 46%
- Average amount of money that will be exchanged per customer for a happy ending: $180
- Percentage of customers who will actually feel happy when it's over: 8%
- Percentage of massage "providers" who are practicing their trade by choice: 21%
- Number of women trafficked to the Tenderloin per year to work, against their will, in massage parlors: 680
- Percentage of those women who arrive from what the US State Department classifies as "failed states": 55%
- Number of siblings the average sex slave will leave behind in their home country: 12
- Number of hand jobs she will have given by the time she earns her freedom: 2,386
- Number of steps she takes on her walk back to her dingy apartment after work at 4:00 am: 6234
- Number of passed out homeless men sleeping on the sidewalk she will encounter for every 43 yards she walks: 1
- Number of 24oz. Steel Reserves that man will have consumed since waking up earlier that morning: 8
- Number of crack rocks he will have smoken in the last 24 hours: 4
- Number of lost British tourists he will have terrorized with his angry and disjointed paranoid mutterings: 6
- Number of demon badgers from the 7th dimension living in his pants that intend to destroy the world if he does not gather the remaining amulets of Gorgon and deliver them to their rightful owner: 48276481291446238778