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walking around San Francisco
Saturday, May 26 2001
Soon after John and I awoke in Jen Wade's living/bedroom, Jen announced that she was about to go for a run. John said that sounded like fun and that he'd be interested in maybe joining her. Periodically, you see, he and Fernando go for runs in Santa Monica and there was a time back in the fall when John was even training to run one of those long-ass things called a marathon. But Jen thought it only fair to warn John that she was not intending on some leisurely little jaunt around the neighborhood. John, ever up for a challenge, couldn't imagine any run that he couldn't join. "Sometimes I go for nine mile runs," he announced. But Jen wasn't especially impressed. She announced (in her usual self-effacing way that somehow verges on the mocking) that she was probably going to go for something more like a 15 mile run. Holy shit, now that's far! "Are you training for a marathon?" John wanted to know. "Yes," it turned out, "the San Francisco marathon" of course. Like anything else that interests her, Jen is extremely dedicated to marathon running, even subscribing to Runner's World. (By the way, the May issue features a big picture of my marathon-winning grandfather.) Suffice it to say John might be hyperactive and usually just a little bit bored but there was no way he could see himself running fifteen miles today. We'd do something else instead. Maybe just walk fifteen miles instead.
The parking situation in San Francisco is never pleasant, and John had it in his mind that he had to go out and feed the meter. We'd been talking some about Murphy's Law on the drive last night (By the way, who is this Murphy who came up with Murphy's Law?) and John was a little nervous because it was already 9:30am and according to the signage the meter had to be fed at 9:00. "Hopefully the [meter maid] is a little more relaxed on weekends," said Jen. "Not according to Murphy's Law," I retorted. But when he got to the car John found the cliché pessimism of Murphy had been vanquished by the gods of good luck and the Golf was still unticketed.
While Jen was off running her 15 miles, John and I reparked the car a little closer to the Haight and hit the sidewalks for awhile.
What a different city San Francisco is! Varying with the neighborhood, the weather was grey and somewhat chilly, but people were out and about on the sidewalks doing things, socializing, shopping, drinking coffee, and otherwise finding ways to have fun that didn't involve automobiles and celebrity sightings. Meanwhile back in West LA the day was probably warm and sunny and everyone was indoors watching celebrities on their televisions. We ducked into a coffee shop and continued our pedestrian adventure outfitted with non-Italian caffinated beverages.
We made it all the way into the very heart of downtown San Francisco (over three miles from Jen Wade's place), passing homeless gangs of cheerful panhandlers along Haight and garage sales nearly everywhere else.
The one and only retail store that interested us on our entire walk was a low-key Army/Navy place. We looked over the combat boots and oversized knives and then made a beeline for the trouser section. They had this one kind of 100% Cotton Sanforized California BrandTM six-pocket warrior pants that matched our æsthetic senses equally, and at $28/pair, the price seemed right. (I don't normally buy clothes, but it's been gradually getting to the point where I have nothing suitable to wear to work.) John claims he was the first to be interested in this particular type of trousers, but his interest didn't really manifest until he saw me handling a pair. At that point he escalated his interest by actually trying on a pair. They were so comfortable he was immediately sold on them and decided to wear them out of the store. Meanwhile I was following a similar trajectory exactly one phase behind. The one little trace of discomfort for me was the butchery of folding I performed on the one pair of trousers I decided were too small. I crumbled them up and put them back on the pile, and one of the guys working in the store came over and told me that was no way to fold pants. "I couldn't figure it out," I shrugged. "You just follow the folds!" he said as he refolded it in three seconds. Then he muttered something about how this didn't require any special skills, in a way that seemed to imply that I am an idiot. I was thinking, sure, if it makes your job more rewarding, you can go right ahead and think that. For the most part, working stiffs thrive on examples of stupidity amongst the people they serve. I know I do.
I was so happy with my trousers that I bought another pair in a non-black color, (olive drab). As I've discovered recently, it's good to have some non-black trousers to wear on occasions when one is wearing a black shirt. I've gotten to the point in my life where I've decided I look ridiculous when clad entirely in black.
The whole time we were in the store, John kept teasing me that I was nothing but a fashion copycat. I didn't feel too bad; if we were chicks it would have mattered, but men like to dress in identical clothes. And this is how we came to walk out of the Army/Navy store in matching black warrior pants.
Further down the sidewalk we noticed a homeless man surrounded by several shopping carts, all of them stacked up with blankets. John was impressed, observing, "He must be the bum who specializes in blankets." Once he gets an idea in his head, John usually runs with it, and so he continued in one his many impersonation voices, "Hey, shoe girl, do you have any size 12's? I have some blankets from a guy who died the other day. They smell like puke and piss but it's nothing your B.O. can't take care of."
We continued onward, into the teaming terraced neighborhoods of Chinatown and then downhill into Little Italy. We just wanted a simple little lunch, nothing fancy, but keeping things simple is never easy in Little Italy. In the first place we went a guy greeted us at the door as if he thought we were expecting some sort of romantic experience. "You can sitta by the door, or you can sitta over here, or if you like you canna sitta inna da corna." We tooka one look atta da $6.95 appetizers onna da menu and bolted fora da door, eating at a more casual pizza place next door. We even had beers.
Climbing back up through Chinatown, John ducked into an odd little grocery store to purchase a couple strange little Chinese snackfoods, each costing only sixty nine cents. One was a bag of little animal-crackeresque cookies individually dolloped with smurflike tufts of solidified cream. The other was a clear plastic box of sugar-coated semi-hard gelatinous spheres. These had a most unusual flavor, starting off as sweet and ending with an overpowering peppery aftertaste. It wasn't the sort of flavor ensemble anyone with a Western sensibility would ever deliberately place in a food item, and for that reason alone I wanted to keep eating them. Who says you can't mix sweetness with hot pepper?
The little cream-dolloped animal crackers were so numerous and so cheap that they quickly became props for one of John's endlessly-morphing comedy routines. Whenever John has been off his ADD medication for a time, he becomes positively manic, often disturbingly (but also entertainingly) so. He started out by tossing the little crackers into the air and occasionally catching them in his mouth, claiming he was so wealthy he didn't even have to worry about wasting them. As we neared the highest dead end of a very steep street, he started diving behind objects and flinging the crackers at me one by one.
Once we made it back down to the lowland, we began our long walk back to Jen Wade's place. As we passed a large anti-smoking poster, the famous one that features the woman smoking out of her tracheostomy hole, I licked one of the little Chinese crackers and stuck it to the picture of the hole in the woman's neck where it adhered much better than I could have hoped. Meanwhile John had taken to ripping the cream dollop off each cracker, spitting it randomly onto the sidewalk, and eating the remainder "So I can find my way back."
We caught an electric-powered streetcar from the heart of downtown into the heart of the Castro, where the rainbow flags fly without any of the usual hint of apology. Rainbow flags are, in fact, the neighborhood flags of the Castro and they fly from every lamp-post. There's no need for words or community-boosting slogans. John and I were sitting in separate seats and we couldn't help overhearing the conversation in the back seat of the streetcar. One guy was telling a somewhat skeptical captive audience of one his hokey multi-traditional take on Rastafarianism. Somehow it involved the seventh chakra, the seven seals, and Hali Salasi being a direct descendant of King David. Somewhere woven into all of this, the pontificator made his best effort at modesty, saying "I'm more of a scholar than a holy man." After they got out, we figured we should get out too.
Now, inspired by the many examples of source material around us, John switched directly into his gay impersonation. It was so hilarious I couldn't keep from laughing, though I was wondering what the more legitimately gay passing us on the sidewalk thought of his faux flameage.
In order to get back to Jen Wade's place from the Castro we had to cross the Twin Peaks ridge. As we rose out of the lowlands and the rainbow flags of Sodom were gradually replaced by more family-oriented California State flags, etc., we came upon a garage sale. Some old Mexican dude was selling tools for el cheapo. John haggled himself a good price on a little armload of socket wrench equipment, including a two foot long socket extension, which he wielded menacingly throughout the rest of the walk. "I never thought I'd get so close to Uranus," he said as we reached the top of a hill. "Huh?" but then I could see that we were at the intersection of Uranus Street.
Later on I grabbed a few books being given away: BASIC Computer Programs for the Home (1980), The Secretary's Handbook (1969) and Therapy of Fungus Diseases (1955).
By the time we struggled back into Jen Wade's little studio apartment, I was so crabby and tired that John's boundless energy was starting to grate on me. We'd just walked 15 miles.
Jen Wade had run something like 14 miles, but she'd also taken a nap and she was comparatively perky (although Jen Wade is far to deliberate to be characterized as perky). She was all femmed out in pink and black, prepared to go out on the town. She had plans to go hang out with a slough of online diarists, two of whom I knew but most of whom I didn't. Evidently the online journal scene in San Francisco is considerably more cohesive than it is in such generally non-cohesive places as Los Angeles. Part of this is certainly due to the rich concentration of well known diarists who are (unlike myself for the past few years) active in the scene. Diarists up here seem to get together on a regular basis, mostly (it appears) to get drunk and talk shit about other online diarists. When you consider the revelatory and self-promoting aspects of online diaries, you can easily see how it might become a medium whose principle social dimension would be gossip. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself; I myself am an unabashed gossip.
After Jen Wade was gone, John tuned her teevee set to one of the two stations it gets (an episode of Sheena was on; Sheena is a scantily-clad white blond girl raised in heart of negro Africa, speaking with an anomalous milk-fed American accent). I had no interest in watching any teevee so I curled up in Jen's bed and immediately fell asleep. Similarly, once his energy finally ran out John rolled out a cushion and took a nap on the floor.
When we woke up it was about six or seven in the evening and time to start enjoying our vacation again. John was doing a little low-level snooping around the apartment, taking note of Jen's shoes and making a big deal over the fact that she's a "pronator." Then John drew my attention to a curious PostItTM note by the phone. It contained the following conundrum:
NPY
lephn
MC4
|
how do they fit
together?
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It was such an odd message that I just had to escalate the surreality by making a duplicate of the PostItTM in my own hand, using this to replace the note by the phone, and sticking the original on the refrigerator. (It turns out that this was a question in Jen's mind about some sort of arcane organic chemistry relationship.)
Fandango Matt had emailed both Jen and me wanting to get in touch with me, so I did something I almost never do: I used the phone. It's possible I'd once talked to him on the phone years ago back when I lived in Charlottesville and the internet still seemed to me like a big simulation, a lunar landing filmed in Utah. But in any case, his voice sounded exactly like I expected it to. He was stuck on the other side of Golden Gate Park and we were making tea and we didn't know how best to get together. Eventually he just decided to take the bus.
In person Fandango Matt looks exactly the way I thought he should based on his Vodkatea/3WA posts and hilarious Adobe Photoshop capers. He's tall and thin and looks like he might run with an intellectual mod crowd. In many little ways (most of them behavioral) he bears an uncanny resemblance to my estranged college friend David Halpern (who was also good friends with Gretchen and Matt Rogers for a time).
John, Matt and I sat around Jen's kitchen table for what must have been hours, drinking tea and talking endlessly about all kinds of interesting things. Two intelligent people on a conversational roll in one room is one thing; three is not only rare, it can actually feel like a one-room Renaissance. Throw in a fourth and the FBI starts to pay attention. We spent a considerable time discussing the subject of failed dotcom business models. Matt is, you see, one of the many in San Francisco who was recently laid off, but from the sound of things it was more an issue of business to business bad luck at his design firm than it was a misuse/misunderstanding of the internet. The most effective commercial use of the internet, we all agreed, is to automate interactions between tiny niches of the online populace. That's wired. Trying to aggregate eyeballs and feed them bland mainstream crap is not what the internet is about. That's tired. I gave a little demonstration of my embryonic content rating system and Fandango Matt seemed sufficiently impressed. He suggested that a good way to insure my continued employment would be to do a little show and tell with such creations now and then at my workplace.
Speaking of bizarre dotcom business actions, Fandango Matt related an interesting story about his domain name, Fandango.net. It seems a company contacted him a few months back asking if he wanted to sell his domain name for a tidy four figure number. Intrigued, Matt went to check in on Fandango.com, which used to belong to a restaurant in Monterrey. To his surprise, the site had completely changed, having apparently been taken over by a movie ticket concern. So Matt got on the horn and called the Monterrey restaurant to find out what had befallen the domain name. The guy on the phone said he'd sold the name but then hemmed and hawed about its price. Evidently he wasn't allowed to tell anyone how much he'd gotten for it. But from the nature of the conversation Matt figured out that the restaurant had raised $15,000 by the sale. And none too soon; their old grease trap needed replacement and a good grease trap will run you about that much.
Somehow we drifted into the subject of Farley, the hapless 26 year old infant son of a gnomish Texas billionaire. You remember Farley, he's guy who never shows up on time for anything but is sure to be the first to start whining when he's being stood up. Sometimes when Farley's being late John and I find ourselves wondering if perhaps he's stranded at the bottom of a well, but not being terribly upset because he can't even imagine challenges suddenly coming this late in life. There has always been, you see, someone there to pay that utility bill, to buy that baseball ticket, straighten out that collar, to do that laundry. Rhetorically John asked me, "Have you ever known Farley to have any actual money?" John went on to tell Fandango Matt the whole sorry story of the time he got roped into babysitting Farley on a Friday night when the lad was having having his tonsils extracted. That was near the end of John's unfortunate social-professional hybrid relationship with the guy. Meanwhile, you see, Farley had been running up a big tab of unpaid tutoring fees owed to John for "life skills coaching," but when John finally got around to billing Bill (the billionaire father) for the money, the old man seemed surprised that he should really have to pay for the tutoring as previously agreed. Bill sent John a curt note with the payment, saying John's services "will no longer be required." You know something? Every fucking one of those Texas fat cats are slippery, manipulative scoundrels. It's no surprise Farley's dad is good friends with the current 'Tard in Chief.
Another important subject we discussed was whatever it is that is so horribly wrong with Los Angeles. For John and me, our day's pleasant experience in the teaming streets of San Francisco had once more driven home the fact that there is a grave societal defect woven into the very infrastructure of the City of Los Angeles. Matt advanced a rather interesting theory about the problem with Los Angeles, and he credited it to his mother. According to Matt's mother, the fundamental problem with Los Angeles is, paradoxically enough, the weather itself. Huh? The theory goes like this. In Los Angeles, the worst thing that ever happens with the weather is rain, and even that doesn't happen very often. There is no snow, there is no salt, and there is no rust. People who would never do so in Detroit (although Bathtubgirl's mother is an exception) buy BMWs in Los Angeles because cars are less disposable here. Since the weather is always perfect, people don't have to bundle up in unsightly layers against the cold. They can decide to look their best when motoring down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. Society in Los Angeles has come to place an even greater value on automobiles than it does in other places. Riding the bus in Los Angeles is not only inconvenient, it's a fashion absurdity. Los Angeles is all about cruising around on the freeways and being seen in your expensive car. Consequently, the bus and rail systems are neglected, having long ago become the transportation system of the losers in society. By contrast, in San Francisco the freeways don't really go anywhere and parking is a complete nightmare. Everyone is forced to take mass transit and forced to interact with their fellow humans. Mass transit in San Francisco has a democratizing effect; there is no clear class distinction such as one can easily see on a Los Angeles freeway.
About this time Jen Wade came home from her girls' night out with the online diarist crowd. The night had apparently featured expensive rum drinks and artificial thunderstorms but alas, no karaoke. Somewhat unexpectedly, Jen had actually brought most of the online diarists home with her. "I guess we're having a party," she announced with an emotional flatness that might well have been delighted resignation. With one exception, the new guests were all women, big chicks in the online diary scene. The only one I knew was Lucy of Aries Moon (because I only know the old-school online diary people). Jen must have taken them all aside and told them not to talk about my online journal in front of John (yes, miracle of miracles, my housemate still doesn't know about it) because they were all really good about not bringing it up. In fact, none of us talked about online journals at all, which was really refreshing. Instead we started drinking beer and vodkatea and listening to party-volume music on the stereo: some local teenage girl punk band, Sir Mixalot doing "Baby Got Back" (from a Hip Hop Party compilation in Jen Wade's extensive CD collection) and assorted ABBA songs. I'm something of a sucker for ABBA myself and did my best to sing along, though I'm a little scared to see any of the video that one of the diarist chicks was shooting.
It seems the diarist women were all pretty disinhibited by their expensive rum drinks, talking openly about sexual matters, singing loudly, and in the case of the woman with the bolt-action Polaroid (Trish?), snapping lots of pictures. I found it interesting that Fandango Matt was adamant that he not be photographed; I suppose he, more than anyone, knows the dangers that lurk in our Photoshop-enabled world.
All the online journal people had to catch the last BART before it closed down for the night, and that left Jen Wade, John, Fandango Matt and me to go to this other housewarming cocktail party being thrown by one of Matt's friends over on [Dirty] Sanchez in the Mission. These friends had just bought a fairly large house for half the price paid by its previous owner. This previous owner, yet another casualty of the dotcom shakeout, had perhaps been forced to split town go back to living with his folks. I guess it says something about my sociopathic lack of empathy and karma-tempting ways, but so long as I still have my dotcom job I find the causalities of the dotcom shakeout hilariously entertaining.
For most of the party I stood around talking to various people, including Matt's girlfriend (whose name I have of course fogotten) and someone who happens to be one of my readers (this never happens in Los Angeles!). There was a large dog underfoot who kept looking at the various guests suspiciously. I tried to be friendly and got down on my knees to call him over. At that point some woman at the party warned me that the dog has a tendency to lash out and bite people without much provocation. Indeed, this dog had once nearly torn off someone's lower lip. After I heard that, I kept taunting the dog by pulling out my lower lip and calling out in my dog-friendly falsetto "come on!" John was trying to get me to stop, because it turns out the guy whose lip had been nearly ripped off was standing right there. Actually, that might have been the same guy as the one who is my reader. But I don't much remember; I was, as you can probably imagine, pretty drunk at the time.
My man Plaid Rabbit in Vodkatea has been planning a confab of Vodkatea regulars (code-named "Vodkacon") for over a month now, and when Jen suggested that this, tonight, was as close to Vodkacon as we'd probably ever get, I had to disagree. Plaid Rabbit was nowhere in sight!.
At some point we got the grand tour of the house. It was a marvel of opulence. "I've never seen so much stainless steel in a kitchen before," John said afterwards. Downstairs, the bathroom had a wide handicapped-accessible shower stall and obscene expanses of marble. All this seemingly unnecessary excess was justified by the fact that a frail grandmother would be living there. Small as this may seem, the need for such justifications is yet another major difference between the San Francisco and Los Angeles scenes. In Los Angeles, gross excess is self justified; any further justification, especially functional or pragmatic justification, takes away from all-too-important status-boosting qualities provided by the excess.
Matt's girlfriend is "allergic to alcohol" and this served us well; we had a designated driver to take us back to Jen's place when the evening was done.
The sheer variety of spontaneous interactions and chance encounters in San Francisco makes it a real city for me. I have traction here in the way I used to have traction in Charlottesville. I have no traction in Los Angeles. None whatsoever.
Today viewed from different angles:
Jen Wade |
Lucy |
Mo
San Francisco cityscapes, looking mostly eastward at what I believe is the Bay Bridge.
John being wasteful with some strange little Chinese cookies on a steep San Francisco street overlooking Chinatown.
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