From Today's Chronicle

Tenderloin mourns an original
Legless panhandler known as 'Skateboard,' killed by mail truck, lived life on the edge
C.W. Nevius
Thursday, April 26, 2007

The requiem for "Skateboard" Holmes began Tuesday night on the cracked sidewalk on Taylor Street. Residents of the Tenderloin community turned out in fits and starts, leaving doorways and tiny hotel rooms to pay their respects.
Few of them would have been able to tell you that the legless, homeless man who rolled the streets on his battered skateboard was named Monty Holmes. Nor that he grew up in Oakland and lost his legs in an accident on the train tracks when he was 6 years old.
But they knew that something needed to be done to mark the passing of the 48-year-old panhandler. Flowers appeared, some of them with potting soil still clinging to their roots after being pulled from planter boxes. There were bottles of brandy (empty), religious candles and trinkets.
Behind the memorial, a concrete wall quickly filled with pencil scratchings and scrawlings from black markers.
"Bless you Skateboard," one of them said. "The man with the biggest heart in the street."
Skateboard's wife, Linda Thomas, stood Wednesday on the sidewalk in front of the wall. A world-weary woman with a nasty scar across her nose, she'd been at the corner of Third and Townsend streets Tuesday afternoon when the driver of a mail truck failed to see Skateboard in the crosswalk and ran over him.
"Skateboard is gone!" Thomas wailed. "I ain't never forget this day."
To be honest, it was not entirely unexpected that Skateboard was hit by a truck. He didn't cast much of a profile way down there on his board, and even his friends admit that he had a tendency to zip heedlessly into traffic.
Ahmed Ali, owner of the Tenderloin Market and Liquor Store, which was Skateboard's first stop on most mornings after waking up on the sidewalk, said, "He almost got hit a bunch of times."
And then, well, let's just say Skateboard had some other demons. As Joseph Kim, who runs the Liquor and More store on Third and Townsend, said, "Skateboard was drunk all the time."
So if you are looking to muster a lot of sympathy, this is an uphill battle. Skateboard was a reckless, homeless drinker who, after any number of close calls, finally got run over. Frankly, he was probably living on borrowed time. So it goes.
We walk past street characters such as Skateboard every day in San Francisco. The city's kind of famous for them. Sometimes they are chattering to unseen companions. And sometimes, like Skateboard, they panhandle areas with lots of pedestrians such as AT&T Park or the hotels.
Of course, we all know the drill in dealing with street people -- eyes straight ahead, keep walking and ignore them if they try to talk to you.
This is no surprise to those who sleep on the street. They've seen the looks. Up on Eddy, around the corner from Skateboard's memorial, I met a guy who would identify himself only as Mathias. He was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a chain-link fence when I asked him if he knew Skateboard.
"He was part of the furniture," Mathias said. "He was one of us. We're furniture. We live here, on the street, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in San Francisco."
But it is also easy to forget that in this small, street-hardened community, there are social conventions. Skateboard may have been a public nuisance at times, cooking his meals on a burner and skillet on the sidewalk, but that doesn't mean his neighbors don't feel the loss.
"I've known him for years," Cary Fisher said. "He was a very gentle man."
I told Fisher and Mathias that I'd heard more than one version of Skateboard's temperament. I'd heard that he was very nice, but also that when he and Thomas were drinking, he could be a rough drunk.
"Naw," said Mathias. "We're rough drunks. He was mellow."
It wasn't the life many of us might have chosen -- and probably not the one he had in mind in his earlier years -- but in his own way, Skateboard was maintaining his lifestyle. Ali said Skateboard was a fixture at Giants and 49ers games.
Skateboard made bundles at baseball games, Kim added, when cheerful fans could always spare a buck or two for the guy on the skateboard with no legs.
He sometimes rolled into Kim's store with a stack of ones, looking to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
"He was a good guy," Kim said. "No trouble at all."
In fact, it is entirely possible that Skateboard was on his way to the store Tuesday when he was killed. Kim didn't see the accident, but rushed out as soon as it happened.
"I was glad that he didn't have any pain," he said. "And I hope he goes to heaven."