You could be forgiven for mistaking Rachel Church for any other fortysomething mom on an ebike zipping through the Mission to pick up her daughter at elementary school. Church, however, has a tendency to blast Charles Bukowski audiobooks while pedaling through San Francisco.
“I like to hear someone else who worked through the craziness that I lived,” explains Church, now 41. This is something she does before scooping up her kid and heading off to ballet.
Mission Local readers first met Church in 2019. It was a redemptive tale of a woman who had spiraled into the darkest corners hidden in plain sight in San Francisco. An underaged sex worker walking the streets at 14. An alcoholic paying for three-dollar bottles of vodka with small change. A heroin addict. A barefoot homeless woman washing her hair in the gutter. A “High User of Multiple Services” with a rap sheet six pages long…