It’s beginning to sink in. What am I going to miss?
Casa Sanchez’s Totopos. Acme Levain. Anchor on tap everywhere. Walking down to Capricorn Coffee on 10th for a fresh pound and a smile. 1058 Hoagies. Tomasso’s, Pi, and Arinell. Latin American Club, Spec’s, The Attic. Breaking into that private Russian Hill garden with the clearest jasmine-scented view of the Bay. Literally missing seeing Low at GAMH by a few hours, Sigur Ros by a couple weeks. That I used to commute by Cable Car. Throwing firecrackers at drunken couples arguing under my fire escape after the bars let out in Polk Gulch. Vowing to quit smoking after getting winded hiking up from Baker Beach, and staying quit. Watching hawks circle Pomeranians in Sutro Park, and the turtles of Stow Lake craning their beaky faces toward the sun behind the fog.
Until I’m gone, I won’t know the bone-aching love for my friends, who have become my family, who have made the last 15 years of my life the sweetest and luckiest, despite all those bitter and unlucky things that I can barely recall. You know who you are, friends—you have helped make both this realm and the city a better place.
The Tenderloin Restaurant Map I did for nom-tlcbd. Few things I do will be better than that cow sitting in a bowl of Pho.
Maybe you wondered how this all started? A friend needed an illustration for her magazine, she tired of hearing me talking about mapping the city, told me to put my talk into ink. One very naive drawing later, the Society was founded—in Polk Gulch.
SFMOMA exhibition an ersatz re-creation of 2AM sorties at the now-defunct Nob Hill Cala Foods: the disorientation, the sallow complexions. How I miss it.
Used to have, suspended from a length of invisible line, a pair of jaws just smaller than these. In the manner of all things theory-great, they were genuinely great, until late and dark at night happenstance created one too many toothy run-ins, a ghost shark forever hungry or forever yawning, some mirror to its owner. Like the contents of my late teens and most of my 20s, I’ve no idea what happened to them, but can only hope that like my youth, they continue to prove entertaining.
I walk to work most everyday, most everyday it’s sunny.
Oh. I just found out. When I was young and full of Eastern literature and late 60s New York, Vaclev Havel was something heroic, something hopeful. Artists as politicians? Just as terrible as it sounds, but why not? You have a country overrun by tanks and you try staying in the real world.
In that young world, a twinge of naive hope, as cynical as they said we were. Were we cynical because they said so, or because the world demanded it? Given the chance, we’d like to claim choice in the matter.
Anyhow. Polemics written for or against people you never knew are useless—but let me say, that with all the added noise of the 21st century, some memory of moral, literature, and justice still rule. Go ahead, look him up. Maybe you’ll remember him as the one who got the band back together.
A home improvement tip: if you’re trying to be a smart ass and “occupy” your bedroom with a new paint color, don’t let the evidence of your folly dry, otherwise three coats later you’ll still have a tell-tale sign that you were thinking back to being an 18 year old driving a ‘79 Buick Riviera around San Pedro, listening to “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,” and wondering whether you could, in all honesty, truly consider yourself an anarchist because hey, you were driving a car. Infrastructure doesn’t build itself and the suspension on this thing is shit, but man, eight cylinders. It’s complex.
My youngest sister, she spent formative years becoming a blue-eyed Chola in North Hollywood, such that by the time the family went back to the paternal ancestral home, troubles were bound to be the quarry.
Walking home from school with the boys who weren’t white, while the boys who were shouted “race traitor.”
My sister, she started a gang with her friend, an upstairs neighbor, and they called it “Lonely Park.” Their delicate hands go into an L and a P, an easy throw. Named for the park where no one but them would go. Charitable to call it a park, more a patch of freeway-adjacent grass. I spent most of my life next to one—a freeway—such that when we moved away, I didn’t know how to get a good night’s rest without the sound of cars and crashes. Never ask her if she feels the same.
More than half her life there, and what always gets me is that she says Portland’s still a mix, a little of everything. Every time I come up, it gets whiter and whiter, The Pearl like SOMA without the grit, a Chinatown with no fish funk or ginseng dirt. A city will divide itself like a junior high dancefloor, urban studies be damned, until the new girls who don’t know any better do the unimaginable and dance, because they don’t know the backstory.
Friends there take what they can get. If my sister weren’t married, she and my parents would probably be homeless.
Was I lucky? I always ask myself. By the time I was sixteen, a taxpayer, no illusions.
A forward-thinking history teacher told us that it was unlikely that we’d be homeowners, and I want to thank him. He had taken us to the Nixon Library where we were armed to argue with the docents over Laos. You’re lucky if someone tells you the truth; but doesn’t seem like anyone got told, does it?
I was angry, but I was white, and what good was that? If you’re 16 and not angry, you’re doing it wrong. At some point, it became a permanent condition of being aware.
None of this is new, No Great Society. But you know you hope for a real war on poverty, where no one dies, where everyone gets to go back to a real home. None of it is new. We all throw our signs for Lonely Park, and hope someone throws back.
True story: my grandmother threw out my dad’s comic books. And not unlike this tableaux, everything else. And then he moved to Oakland and after a little while met my mom and that was, as they say, that.
Flavor Flav was right, after a fashion
It’s the rare Saturday night where we decide, YES, let’s go out, even though they are all out, the amateurs. The chance to promenade, to cruise without a car, even if it’s just for a plate of babaghanoush, is too strong this mild nearly-spring evening. A long, busy week, and wouldn’t it be nice?
We’re only halfway to the corner when the strange gentleman who is the mayor of this stretch of Divisadero (his open briefcase spills consequential documents) alerts us to the body on the sidewalk. Not unusual, where we come from. But the prone man has one of those well-groomed pocket dogs on a chain leash, a little Fizzgig number guarding him.
The last thing anyone here wants is to read the next day of the man who died and no one did a thing: a city mouse/country mouse dialectic that plays out too often. But it’s the pause that makes me a city mouse, that I don’t jump to it. What is that bit about San Franciscans, that they look one another up and down, shoes to hair and back? This man has innocuous running shoes, but they fit him, they aren’t dirty.
The first operator hangs up, but the second is brisk with questions that can’t be answered—or at least, not to his liking. Can I shake him? Not without his dog biting me. He’s face down, so no, I can’t see that he’s changed colors. His hands look okay, I can see his hands. He moves a little, so we can assume he’s not dead, there’s that, and he asks some more questions that clearly form the script of a bad night out, a place no one wants to be, the live one who stopped when no one else did and the one who may not be long for this terrible world.
“I can’t move him without his dog biting me.” I get mocked because I admit it’s just a little dog, although I know those are the worst, in the same way the bite of a baby spider can kill you, those little dogteeeth are sharp and do the trick. What’s a little self-preservation amidst the performance of duty?
Somehow the Medics are at the gas station, waiting on the corner. The Mayor of Divisadero flags them down, they come.
“Maybe next time wave at us when you see us, we had a hard time finding you.”
Okay, but I was on the phone with 911, trying to wake this guy and not get bit. The implication is that there will be a next time. Point taken.
I’m tired. The first time I called in this city was to report a fight in Alamo Square.
“Can you get closer to tell how many people are in the fight?” the operator had asked.
“They have knives, and do you mind if I don’t get killed?” She hung up on me.
It is not an easy job: people call 911 to get their kids to eat dinner. There’s clearly no moral to the story, because none of this is about morality, you shouldn’t let a person die if you can help it and no one ought to be comfortable with anyone laying on the street. But we’re obviously somewhat strong in our egos, enough that we think we can be helpful. Not really, not particularly, not likely. We’re as useless as the operator thinks us.
Existentialist dogs come in two camps: sublime and morose.
My own dog was an ill-proportioned mutt, the body of a black lab with the legs of a Corgy, and to walk him was an exercise in ego.
No matter: like any good Lassie or Yeller, he saved my life at least once, and had dignity enough to remain undefined by such a bowl.
Five-year-old me wants this. Current me is not having any of it.
The universe says “go on, get out of town.” And then the universe gives you the sighting of Tim Lincecum, only it doesn’t tell you it’s setting things up, and so you walk right by without noticing the gangly pitcher incognito in headphones and you will only realize when an excited business woman asks her friend on the phone, “hey guess who I just saw?”
And you’ll think, “Oh well,” but it would have been nice. It’s just as well that you do leave town, because you’re no real fan. Or at least, you might be a little more modest when you note how perceptive you are of life’s little details.