Hungover in San Francisco
I feel it every time a drop of boiling soup leaves the pot and splatters onto my wrist.
Or on my cigarette break behind the nursing home. That pressure high in my chest as the smoke funnels in.
The last nine seconds of each shower, good and scalding.
Why does missing someone make me want to destroy a tiny part of myself?
Maybe it’s already destroyed, and I just want to care.
It’s easy to say that happiness is steered by where you put your attention. But what’s up with the appetite for pain?
Like when you watch a film with big drawn-out opium sequences and the message is supposed to be how drugs will destroy your life but you leave the cinema half-wanting to lie down in a dark tent with an old Cambodian woman and her giant metal pipe and stare up at the shadows and feel the warmth melting down.
This is what I’m thinking about as I get to checkout and the bespectacled one-earring hipster merchant tells me it’ll be twelve ninety-nine for the three gourmet pear brownies in my left hand.
I do a double-take but straighten up quick because it would be unbecoming of a shopper at The Epicurean Trader to question the absurdity of the prices. We all know about the absurdity. We’ve moved on.
I hand the brownies to the splotchy-faced addict with the formidable (if street-mussed) head of hair who followed me in here on the promise of baked goods. Anyway, who the fuck ever heard of a pear brownie? That’s disgusting.
He asked me twice for a beer but settled for sugar. He knows he should start by asking for something to eat. But I think he’s a little disappointed when he gets only that. It still must feel good, though. Human kindness I mean.
Who am I to deny him a beer? I drink too much beer. It’s okay for me. I have my shit together. I know about GoToMeeting and how you have to press the hash sign at the end.
Still deep in thought, I walk out of the store. Haggardly grandpa hoists a sign about Reagan murdering millions in Asia. On the other side of it, Expensify.com: expense reports that don’t suck.
This is why I had to do Sober October, man.
Let me tell you about last week. I ran into Monique walking past Lucky 13. She wore jeans so torn they were just the idea of jeans. They made her butt look good.
It’s my last day, she yelped, and with that mid-thirties girlish giggle, pulled me right in there. That stinking place. Smells like plumbing, drinks like a tire fire.
Truth be told, I don’t remember much of Sober October. Every drink in this town is a double. I ordered one fucking Negroni. Woke up on Market Street.
It was a regular San Francisco morning, by which I mean foggy and shitty. I stood up and just started walking.
Bicycle dads tolerated me. Young blondes walk-raced each other in yoga pants. People talked to their pets; children spilled things. Stripey haircuts whizzed by on any number of wheels. Instagram sneakers and t-shirts ending in “.ly” and puppies freshly bathed stood in the windows awaiting unanimous love and praise from our species.
Suddenly, a sad and heartfelt note on the door of The Blue Fig. Cappuccino machines once gargled and hissed with the creative energy of artistic minds that survived on a burrito a day. Fat Hungarian men farted into the couch over countless games of backgammon. Account executives made calls and optimized things and sipped lattes and consequently clogged the toilet. Every plant was labeled with its name. And now this.
I kept on.
Sidewalk chalkboard signs were clever at me. Scooters promised to take me places for a dollar if I would just beep boop boop with my phone. Embarrassingly, I did it.
I saw a big green public bathroom like artillery on the corner, dropped the scooter in the gutter, ran inside. Smelled like lilac and urinal cakes.
I blew a pube off the seat and settled in. Everything was crushingly loud. The TP rolled like a tractor. Hand dryer like an air strike.
That’s when I spotted a poem on the far wall, and that’s what I wanted to tell you about. It said:
Pear
Behind spiderweb curtains someplace
she still slices a pear, deliberately
smiles
and with kind brown eyes
extends to you an outsize slice.
Before she’s finished, she produces an old brochure
Tears along the crease and rolls it into a toothpick
And there is momentary satisfaction
around the round cherry table
where for two decades
a good woman made her home.
I took a photo of it, feeling slightly less like garbage as I emerged into the street.
Anyway, I hate pears.
