Across the Globe without a Plane
“East is East, and West is San Francisco.”
— O.Henry
Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco
The brilliant curmudgeon Norman Mailer called Chicago “a great American city” yet allowed that she is a lady. H.L. Mencken noted the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States. John Steinbeck called it the golden handcuff with the key thrown away. A number of great things have been written about San Francisco by writers from all over the world, all beatifically blathering on about how wonderful it is that despite the vice and crime (or perhaps because of), the hippies and grime, America got one city absolutely right (excuse me Manhattan Island, but pound for pound you are no match). Much of this can be put down to the demure size of the peninsula which houses the city once dubbed Yerba Buena by the conquistadores who eventually sailed through what Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolà called the most perfectly formed bay he had ever seen.
I say eventually because it was never discovered by ship, it—that bay of bays surrounding forty-nine square miles of peninsular beauty—was first seen (mistakenly at that) by the non-native eyes of a land-based hunting party of Portolà’s not until 1769. Imagine the eminent 16th century Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo (of Cabrillo Aquarium, Cabrillo Beach, Cabrillo Bridge, Cabrillo Day, Cabrillo High, Cabrillo Junior High, etc.), repeatedly sailing blissfully ignorant by its fog shrouded inlet and eventually founding Bahia de los Pinos at present day–and more obvious–Monterey Bay. Or a war weary and well-scurvied Sir Francis Drake claiming Point Reyes (just north of S.F. Bay and already a part of Spain) for the crown of England in 1579. Not to mention the hundreds of other Manila galleons sailing from the Philippines over the next hundred years. Why was it so hard to find? Or rather why didn’t the Spanish Empire between the time of Cabrillo and Portolà, when more than 200 years elapsed without so much as a landfall, realize they had for all intents and purposes found one of the crown jewels of the Americas?
Modern geologists cite poor telescopy and the odd alignments of Alcatraz and Angel Islands (which seem to align the mouth of the bay with the peninsula) as reasons. Other outre geologists have suggested that it—yes, the bay itself—did not exist at all until the 17th century and then only due to major earthquakes in 1630 and / or 1725 causing soil liquefaction which allowed the ocean to rush in (I like that one). Whatever the cause, the bloated and apathetic Spanish Empire did not take much interest in Alta California, much to the pleasure of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians, as well as at least one hundred other native tribes, until Russian fur traders had exploited their own lands and began to explore the beaver-rich Pacific Northwest. The time of the Spanish was nearly at an end, and even the newly liberated Mexicans soon felt the weight of the bastard progeny of gringo interlopers desire for gold.
For if it is not gold which has paved the streets of the dreams of every single immigrant that has fallen feet in San Francisco, then would it be those low-lying banks of fog themselves upon which we continue to shake our zombie voodoo money-makers that help obscure the true animal heart of the peninsula? Why should this land have any deeper meaning than any other? What makes San Francisco special? The fact that it was overlooked by the colonizers of the new world for so long, only to be finally discovered, built, shook, burned, rebuilt, and repeated ad infinitum—this level of rapid modernization rivals the post-WWII Japanese industrial machine. The shaking out of the raw and wild and replacing of nature with landmarks of human progress is almost nowhere better viewed than in the petri dish of San Francisco. Is it that it cannot no longer grow outward—can no longer physically represent the ever-expanding American waistline—and therefore has had to grow inward, exploring the dark and light which both dwell within the city’s self and the selves of the city’s denizens? This spacelessness is an almost unheard of phenomenon in the western United States and one that makes most Americans uncomfortable: the idea of limits, of limited expansion, of growth that is not unbounded, of profit that is not unlimited, the frightening thought that one day there may be no more gold to rush.
She Loves Me. She Loves Me Not.
The City may be destroyed by any number of natural disasters tomorrow so we shall reap what we can today. So if not golden stones paving our boulevards, then let us press in capital Ps for Progress. Let it be that this experiment in European Americanism is taken as the vanguard of forward thinking civil libertarian peoples from all over the globe congregating in the two upper joints of an extended middle finger jutting out of the fist of California midsection in an an ode to guts and raw wilderness, and the pure visceral butterflies-in-the-stomach sensuality of dangling by the fingertips off the edge of a continent whose drop is shrouded in fog coupled with the intimacy of death by dagger, might go a little way to describing the mentality of the 800,000 odd people who call the City proper home.
The edge. A pair of legs bobbing over beneath the invisible gaze out into that big emptiness. It is that emptiness that resets us. It reminds us that whence we came, so too shall we return. The western border of mostly greyish-black seeming body of undulating water, the fury of life seething just beneath a mostly calm surface, occasionally breaks forth in resplendent blue-green song and foamy whitecap serenade and perhaps we can glimpse a gorgeous scintilla of life in the midst of all the mostly empty universe. San Francisco, with its masses of multi-colored people speaking manifold tongues and practicing strange customs set against a backdrop of billowing hills and blustery wind, cold summers and mild winters, does what other great cities do: it makes us feel small and insignificant, and safe in that smallness and protected in that insignificance. Whatever the reasons people have come to California, most who came to the western end of the United States saw the Pacific Ocean from beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and stayed.
If they couldn’t afford the City’s exorbitant rents they moved to Oakland and Berkeley to the east, San Mateo, San Jose and Santa Cruz to the south, while Marin and the Elysian wine fields of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino which bolster the north of the central valley, while still just the seals and sharks and sundry other alien life housed in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean to the west.
Despite those exorbitant rents and expensive prices, its warping tendencies and ritualistic vice, its impending disaster and self-destructive population I feel myself drawn to San Francisco. Not quite unlike just another moth caught in a hypnotizing shaft of light alongside so many others. I am a unique flower amongst the weeds of humanity. Am I not? She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me?
“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”
— William Saroyan
Midday on Mission street near the 24th street BART Station is busy as usual. I blend in to the crowd as I pass by the bar at least twice, maybe three times, glancing through the window facade trying to catch a glimpse of her before entering. Goddamn I wish still smoked. Is my shirt too nice? Why is everyone staring at me? Should I have rubbed one out before coming to meet her? No I don’t want any MDMA man, thanks anyway. I go in and deliberately do not look around, although I swear I can see her across the room, her booted feet on the tabletop showcasing legs stretched out in tight black jeans as she sips her Chimay and scrolls through her iPhone. Is this what the Trappist monks had in mind, I wonder? I order a Westmalle Tripel and wait for it to be poured. It is a slow burn that runs up my spine and chills my neck and I know she has spotted me. Don’t ask me how I know this. Call it intuition. Call it having feasted and fucked and fought our brains out tens years ago nestled in a warm apartment in the mountains of Matsumoto, Japan. Call it a guess.
Lady Boots and Belgian Beer
I get my beer and an idiot grin from the hipster creep behind the bar, turn away and walk toward where she sits languidly, making the wooden bench appear as if it were a 17th century chaise lounge out of Versailles. She looks up with her olive eyes glinting and smiles. Putting her phone away, she stands as I approach and we hug. In the instant it goes too long there is some kind of connection rekindled. Most every male in the place glance up from their mobile phones, look her up and down and wonders who the hell am I to be with her. We sit and clink glasses and cut through the obligatory small talk after ten years of not seeing one another. I follow the outlines of her heart-shaped lips, thin and delicate as they caress sounds out of her mouth, not listening to their meaning, but getting the gist. Her easy grace and effortless beauty make me feel charming. The strong Belgian ale helps us loosen up quickly and before long we are laughing and flirting. She touches my forearm and whatever anxiety and nervousness I may have been hanging onto melt away. We order sausages and another round of beer from the prick behind the counter, now incredulous at my company. I overtip him. Enjoying the buzzing of our heads, half from the alcohol, half from remembered passions, we wait for our food.
Forty-five minutes later we are done with our artisan sausages and finishing up our beers when I propose that we move on to a Tapas restaurant on upper Haight where I am meeting friends, good friends, blah blah blah, from out of the country who are leaving tomorrow. Her hands on the bench, balancing her subtle rocking, she nods several times, yes yes, with a girlish smile, she will come.
Everything is crowded in the city: the streets, the subway, the muni, the alleyways, the abandoned sofas, the fenced-off construction sites, the bars, the bathrooms, the women. It is a manageable crowd, the kind one gets used to, even gets to like, crowding out the creeping silence of death. Death is the last thing on your mind when you’re with a beautiful woman. Life takes all the chips. Everything is a sensual feast, all spring flowers and fecundity. The sounds of clinking glasses and raucous laughing enhance the pheromonal aromas of food and liquor laced with sweet and savory herbs, intensifying the delicate sexual ambiance like a chum thrown into a feeding frenzy. Men and women’s eyes wander covetously as they hunt around the room for bare skin on which to feast. The liquor is both a metaphor and literal reality for losing oneself in the sensuous comforts of opiate bliss, of gluttonous release, of ultimate death of fucking into oblivion.
Cha Cha Cha is no different. Moderately cheap and very fast, they have the business of getting people drunk and fed and fucked down to a happy science. A man walks into a bar. He is alone. No one cares. A man walks into a bar with an attractive woman and everyone wonders what is his secret. Does he have money? Power? A 12-inch cock? What is it, dammit?! What they never guess is that’s it’s none of the obvious crutches we use when our bank accounts are empty, when no one will follow our orders, when we are finally flacid—it’s an intrinsic trust in the prolific nature of the universe to provide. You must obey its nature—however arbitrary—and follow its path. But if you do, you will be full of, as we toasted tall glasses of Sangria to in the bar, “Amor, Salud and Pesetas.”
I was beginning to notice what everyone else already knew: she had lost her girlishness and was now a woman. Though older and, by dint of ruthless gravity, less firm, she was somehow more attractive than at 19. Her eyes, framed by locks of soft chestnut brown hair, replaced the immature posturing she once exuded and gave her face a depth of character and a softness of beauty I hadn’t ever experienced. Her skin was still tan and smooth, but she fit into it better, wore it like a gown rather than a skirt. Though now a woman in full bloom she was ripe with youthful vigor and had a particular sprinkling of lust about her that was unnerving. She had always possessed the ability to make men wither away with her directness and eye contact. That may have been why I was able to make her swoon, at least for a time, where others had failed: I didn’t blink. I never looked away. It scared the crap out of me to do so, but I could hold her gaze. Before I had a chance to consider how it happened I was clasped on the shoulder by my friends and we were soon entrenched in introductions and how-do-you-dos.
Aided by a second pitcher of Sangria, lots of little plates of spicy Caribbean-style tapas and fast, non-stop talk the day morphed into night. My friends had been traveling along the coast of Central California looking for alternative lifestyles for a Japanese magazine and they regaled us with strange stories of off-the-grid counter-culture still thriving along the pricey coastline. I rested my hand lightly on her thigh to get her attention, asking if that wouldn’t be the funnest thing ever. What exactly, she smiled flirtaciously, blinking in slow motion. Traveling together on the company dime, going to strange, exotic places and writing about it, filming it, whatever. What would I do, she asked. You would be the talent, I said. You will smile and flutter your lashes just like you’re doing now and say to the camera, wouldn’t you just love to be here with me? Now tell me that we can’t get paid to do that. I took away my hand and took a drink. I must have blinked. When I looked back she looked surprised, a little shocked, but still smiled. She picked up her drink and took a sip, putting her lips together, making a mmmmm sound and closed her eyes almost completely before turning back to the other conversation.
I didn’t realize it at the time but I had just lost her, again. Or maybe I had never had her, just amused her for a while. Regardless, she had awoken from whatever weak spell of words I had cast with the aid of alcohol and ambiance. After the meal had concluded and the excited talk still begged for more wine the four of us went to my friend’s apartment, a loaner from an ex-girlfriend, and continued into the wee hours. This happened every time we got together, we spent hours on end talking, eating, drinking, screwing. But this time was different. As the wine dried up and sleep overtook my friends, eventually she decided it was time to go. She asked me to walk with her. We walked along the outer edge of Golden Gate Park talking slightly in the iridescent light, the details of the conversation lost to the chill bay area mist blowing out to sea. The last thing she said before heading up the stoop to some stranger’s apartment was how special I was to her. She kissed me, flashed her eyes at mine, and never looked back. I continued walking and headed back to the park. Like a zombie smelling far off flesh, some nameless power drove me on through the park and toward the ocean.
Walking for hours felt like minutes and miles were mere inches by the time I reached the Great Highway running along the coast. I followed it to Point Lobos where I spied the ruins of the Sutro baths as the sun rose behind, eventually splashing certain of its shafts of golden pink light through the cloud cover. I trekked down the hilly path to the ruins, along the rocks and past the large defunct pool and continued north, climbing back up the trail to the top of the point. I stood there on the cliff for an interminable period of time and watched the seals diving for breakfast amidst the violent waves breaking on the jagged rocks. I projected myself out there, my body surfing in the waves, swimming with the seals, playing in the surf, catching fish with my teeth, eventually losing control and dashing against the rocks, the tide towing me in and out until the crabs got to me, cutting me down piece by piece, back to the sea. She loves me. She loves me not.
The End of the World
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