I had been in Golden Gate Park only two hours and already I had found my gang. Or more importantly, I found Tober.

Tall and lanky with bleach-blond hair and a knotty, weathered beard, his baby blue eyes caught the California sun in a way that made me suddenly regret not having my Nikon D200 with me.

“I’m hungover as hell because I just got out of prison yesterday. Pleased to meet you,” Tober said, extending a hand covered in homemade tattoos of words you can’t say on television.

We sat on a patch of sunlit grass, and I started right into it. I explained that I was a journalist, that I was in San Francisco for the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s annual National Writing Competition, that we had received our topic – Golden Gate Park – the night before, and that, it being Thursday at 11 a.m., I had until Friday at 5 p.m. to finish it. I explained that I had chosen one of the Lower Haight’s most dangerous gangs, the Scum Fucks, as my focus.

And then I waited. I waited for him to laugh at me, to tell me to Scum Fuck off, to break my jaw with a pair of brass knuckles hiding in the pocket of his tattered leather jacket. He smiled.

“Well, what do you want to know?”

For the next eight hours I sat with Tober under a grove of trees as he sold marijuana to 20-somethings, breaking only to answer my questions and take long pulls from a Colt 45 in a brown paper bag.

And answer my questions he did. Nothing went unanswered, from his recent incarceration (for nearly beating to death a man who mistreated Tober’s pit bull) to gang life (“Our retirement plan ain’t so good.”) to family (“We may sell pot, drink booze and fight, but we have kids, too.”).

As the sun began to set—and Tober began to threaten drunken violence on passers-by—I finally trudged out of the park and into a bus stop on Haight Street, sunburned and exhausted, my mind abuzz with quotes and story structure. It had been a long time since I worked on a piece like this.

After leaving reporting positions at the Daily Kent Stater and Akron Beacon Journal in 2006, I switched my major and graduated in December 2008 with a degree in photojournalism.

And now here I was: six months unemployed, in San Francisco with the most talented young journalists—and reputable editors—in the country, handing out my “Beth Rankin: Photojournalist” business cards while competing as a writer. What was a career-identity crisis to me was a point of interest to editors I met, who commented that 10 years ago they might have told me to make up my mind. Not anymore.

I left Kent State with the ability to write news, take pictures, shoot video, create multimedia and post it all to the Web at the end of the day. I left San Francisco with the knowledge that there is a place for me in the post-Apocalyptic landscape of American journalism.

And it is with that knowledge that I have taken my first steps into the realm of the unknown by applying for jobs not as this or that, but as this and that: Beth Rankin, multimedia journalist.

And if that doesn’t work out, well, maybe Tober’s gang is in the market for a 125-lb. enforcer. Multimedia enforcer, anyway.

——

I wrote this piece for Jargon Magazine, the alumni publication of the Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication. To read my original piece, “Meet the Scum Fucks,” click here.