Sommelier joins homeless ranks in Oakland

OAKLAND - Opus One, Château Lynch-Bages or Petrus. The crimson ribbons of fine wine trickled delicately into his customers’ bulbous crystal glasses.

Mark-Steven Holys had a knack for recommending the right bottle, for expertly carving the chateaubriand steaks and pheasant and for remembering the dietary quirks of a clientele that included many of California’s boldfaced names. He waited on George Shultz, the former secretary of state; Joe Montana, the champion quarterback; and Steve Jobs, the Apple founder.

Holys, 61, looks back on his decades as a sommelier and tuxedo-clad server from inside a Coleman tent in an Oakland homeless encampment, where the rats, he says, are as big as footballs.

He joined the ranks of the unsheltered five years ago, another life upended among a diverse population that is so hard to categorize. Coming hand-in-hand with the state’s worsening housing shortage, the number of homeless people has swelled in the Bay Area, rising 47% in Oakland alone over the past two years to more than 4,000.

California, the country’s wealthiest and most populous state, also has the most homeless, an unremitting crisis that has confounded the state’s political leaders for decades and exposed one of the most extreme manifestations of economic inequality gripping the country.

Tent encampments - Oakland city officials count 90 of them - are now as much a part of the landscape as the bars and restaurants that cater to the city’s rising affluence. Many Americans are one medical emergency, one layoff, one family disaster away from bankruptcy or losing the roofs over their heads.

For Holys, the journey from wine steward at some of the finest restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area to sleeping in a tent on a strip of dirt next to a freeway was a gradual unraveling. His struggles with drugs, his failed marriages, his larceny when he needed money - they all contributed to his present straits.

“I tasted some incredible wines,” Holys said from a wicker chair in his tent that he calls his throne. “You can swirl and sip, and five minutes later you were still getting layers.”

After many restaurant jobs through the 1980s and 1990s, Holys says his undoing came with an addiction to crack cocaine. He stole to fuel his habit and spent a total of eight years in prison.

“I was the type of guy who would break into your car and steal the change in your ashtray,” he said.

But it was not until several years after his last release from jail, in 2010, that addiction again took over and no one from his fractured family was there to catch him. He moved from one homeless encampment to the next until arriving earlier this year at his current spot by the 880 freeway and train tracks.

Holys loves talking about wine and laments that he has few people around him who share his passion. Over the relentless din of eight lanes of traffic and Amtrak and commuter trains rolling past his encampment in East Oakland, he evokes Opus, the Napa Valley cabernet blend, and Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, the left-bank Bordeaux. He smiles at the memory of sampling a 1974 Mondavi Reserve cabernet sauvignon.

But pinot noir is his favorite grape. “When it’s good and on point it’s an extraordinary experience,” he says, shirtless and in shorts on an unusually hot day last week.

Holys sees parallels between the cultivation of wine and his struggles. Pinot noir vines in particular are fragile and finicky, he says; the skins are thinner than other varieties and the best vines are stressed to produce better fruit.

“Roots are made to suffer. They have to strain for water,” he said. “It’s a metaphor for what people have to go through.”

Holys worked at restaurants where it was not uncommon to serve a $600 bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, the venerable Burgundy. If there was anything left in the bottle when the patrons left, he made sure to drip the remnants into his own glass.

He has witnessed the extremes of the Bay Area, where the median home price in San Francisco is $1.3 million and Teslas seem as common as Toyotas.

He graduated from Palo Alto High School, one of the country’s most prestigious public schools, and studied real estate and business at Foothill College nearby. He played golf at close to a competitive level, he said, scoring in the low 70s, and took dozens of trips to Lake Tahoe to ski. He had five children with three women and worked long hours at more than a dozen restaurants.

He is aware of his flaws and does not retreat from discussing them. He says his Christian faith has helped him control his substance abuse, but he is wary to declare victory.

“It’s really hard to rebuild a person,” Holys says.