Cities
“How It Goes:” On Slacking and San Francisco
This is not a sad story, although you’ll be forgiven for thinking, at least for a moment, that it is.
I moved to San Francisco in 1989. It was, as they say, a simpler time, by which I just mean that neither the city nor I had arrived yet at our subsequent, more disastrous iterations, and I moved there for reasons that seem, with hindsight, strangely arbitrary.
My girlfriend and I had just returned to California after graduating college. We didn’t want to live in LA, and so we took a long drive up the coast — we were contemplating Seattle, or Portland, both cities that had a certain early-grunge-era shine — and when we stopped in San Francisco for lunch we realized the streets were crowded with young people who were not at work at eleven AM on a Wednesday. I, too, wanted to not be at work at eleven AM on a Wednesday — or at any other time really — and as I looked around at all these skinny children dressed in pajama tops and ratty Converse I figured if they could make it work without working I could do the same.
I wanted to be a writer (did I say this wasn’t a sad story? Well, it’s sad only in the manner of watching a person punch himself in the face, repeatedly), and so this was the path. I moved to San Francisco cold, without knowing anybody. My girlfriend and I broke up a month later, and she moved back to the Midwest.
I write these words in, of all places, San Francisco, a city I have not much visited for many years since. I told you, again, this wasn’t a sad story, and what I also mean by that is that none of the nonsense, almost all of it self-inflicted, I underwent here did me any lasting damage. I lived here for five years, which happened to coincide with the end of the pre-tech era. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park held not venture capital but dozy doctors’ offices and sleepy satellites of the Stanford academic complex; my neighbor, a slacker just like I was, commuted every day to Sausalito to work as an assistant for a programmer named John Walker, whose work on something my neighbor described as a “universal library” that involved computers connecting to one another in some arcane way impressed me a whole lot less than how much my neighbor got paid for how little work. (He left his house every morning around ten and was home, flush with cash and relaxed and full of catered lunch, glowing with the tan he collected during an hour or so spent sunbathing on his break, easily before three-thirty.)
Later I would piece together that this “universal library” was, in fact, one of the earliest incarnations of the internet, but at the time I was preoccupied with scraping together my rent ($185 a month for my first apartment, a quarter of an enormous railroad flat on Haight Street, and $425 for my last, a studio with a fireplace on Waller), with a series of numbing but adequate temp jobs, and with writing, which I did not yet know how to do. I don’t mean that I didn’t have any talent, or even a work ethic, just that each day before I went to my job I would sit down and try to scratch out the beginning of a novel or short story and that each day without fail I would decide what I’d written was inadequate, and so I’d delete what I’d written and begin again the next day with nothing.
Since this is a publication about luxury, I should mention that then, as now, San Francisco was one of the most beautiful places on earth, and that it was (as I was too, despite being pretend-poor) bougie. This word, “bougie,” had a particular flavor in those days — those post-Reagan, but pre-globalization, days — but nevertheless. The city was cheap because it was beautiful and vice versa: because a really good burrito could be had for a buck-twenty, because public transportation cost eighty-five cents, because the public parks were lush and safe and free, because certain things — Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Green’s at Fort Mason — were out of my reach, but I didn’t care because I could just about afford both the burrito and that volume of Chekhov’s collected stories (there were fourteen of them in all, and I liked the way they looked lined up on my bookshelves made of milk crates and planks because the spines were each a different pastel color) as long as I walked home from North Beach to the Mission instead of taking MUNI.
Some days I wandered over to the Castro just so I could roam the aisles of a market I couldn’t afford, staring at the gourmet sandwiches, the organic produce, the walnut breads and olive loaves. The luxury for me was in that wanting, in knowing that these were things I could afford if I were willing to make a different set of choices — I was from Los Angeles and adequately connected inside the movie business, so all I’d need to do was move home and start looking for a (real) job — but I was not. This was luxury, the luxury of being myself: stubborn, ignorant, and far, far more privileged than I knew, but nevertheless. What greater luxury is there than that?
I realize, suddenly, that I am embarrassed by all this. Not so much by the ignorance (what twenty-two-year-old isn’t ignorant of something?), nor by the privilege (nothing to be done about that), but by the sheer sense of waste. I spent five years doing next to nothing, nothing other than pressing my nose up against shop windows like some Dickensian orphan (which wouldn’t be so embarrassing if I had actually been broke, or at least lacked options that would’ve helped me solve that problem), trying to write (itself a vaguely fake-feeling aspiration, one that’s been corrupted by generations of whiteboys hoping to do the same), struggling against the vortex of the movie business, fucking around and playing basketball in Duboce Park. I failed at capitalism, at least in a limited sense — albeit in ways I’m still trying to play catch-up against, decades later — and so that’s part of it, but what’s really shameful, I think, is that I failed at “writing a book,” which was what I wanted to achieve back then more than anything but could no more seem to manage than I could fly.
Maybe the embarrassment isn’t that I failed; maybe the embarrassment is just that I wanted it so badly, wanted it way more than I did a walnut baguette from Buffalo Whole Food & Grain Company (don’t laugh: those baguettes were good), and wanting anything with that kind of intensity — a job or a person — is embarrassing because it’s so undefended.
Yesterday I walked into City Lights Books in North Beach, the same place I used to scrape together my quarters to buy volumes of Chekhov, and I passed my own book on the shelf — one of them, anyway — and turned it around so it would be front-facing. I felt like an asshole doing this, as shop-owners hate it when you do, but just this once I had to, as a kind of nod to my younger self. I walked down the block to Café Zoetrope, on the ground floor of a building where I used to work (when I did succumb to the vortex of the movie business, I did it first by working as a script reader, writing up coverage for fifty bucks a pop), and I had lunch with David Thomson, the British critic and film historian whose writing has delighted me for decades. We talked about how the movies, which we both love, are over, how Hollywood and the period of American empire are both in decline. We drank a few glasses of Nero D’Avola, each of which cost a good deal more than a buck-twenty.
I told you this wasn’t a sad story! It has a happy ending, or at least this part of it does, but everyone knows that writers are liars and anyway if you’re paying attention you’ve probably noticed that I have a melancholy temperament and largely feel that life is a series of experiences in which one tends, generally, to miss the point. Is the point that I came home to San Francisco thirty years later, a successful writer and tenuous but nonetheless undeniable member of the 21st Century bourgeoisie? Of course not.
I left the restaurant and drove out to Sea Cliff, where I went for a walk with my wife. We walked through the neighborhood, then down a little footpath onto Baker Beach, where we watched a dog tear-assing along the water’s edge, then drove over to Fort Point, to the exact spot where Kim Novak throws herself into the Bay in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I kept hearing sounds — foghorns, gulls, cries that might have been seals, or loons — that reminded me of how it once felt to live here, how I felt and how the city felt, and how we are all just sieves for time, how it pours through us and we can do exactly fuck all to stop it except periodically pause to fix certain details in mind, which we can never do all that accurately anyway.
I thought of Robin Williams (we’d passed his house in Sea Cliff), and I remembered how I’d seen him a handful of times in a greasy little hoagie shop on Divisadero Street, a place he apparently loved, given that I saw him there multiple times over a span of a few months but then never again. Each time, he was clowning around with the staff, not like he did on camera, but like these were people he cared about, and who knew and loved him in return, his friends. He’s gone now, as is the hoagie shop, but I like knowing there’s a little scrap of memory that exists unfilmed, something that remains only in the minds of the six or eight people who were in the room at the time. Life is short, but not that short. It continues in the memories of survivors, and after that only in whatever stories are written down or told.
My wife and I drove to Noe Valley and had sushi — miso black cod, spicy scallop hand rolls, snow weizen — at Saru, then drove back to the Lower Haight, because I wanted to look for one last time at the apartment I used to live in on Waller Street. It’s still there, even if what used to be a Baptist church next door is now a bike shop, and largely intact.
A Ukrainian flag flies off the façade, through the window of one of the upstairs apartments, and the windowsill of what used to be my own, street level, unit, is still slightly crooked, so the window itself doesn’t entirely close. At night I used to lie in bed and listen to the occasional pedestrians, drunk usually, making their way back to their cars from the bars on Haight Street. I remember one in particular, the slap of her tennis shoes on concrete — three, or maybe five feet away from my head behind the wall — singing to herself in that completely unselfconscious way we do when we believe we are alone and no one can hear us. She was off-key, and clearly elated — I could hear it in the way her steps bounced off the pavement, almost as if she were skipping, too — singing something about how “I’m so glad I found you!”
I remember the tune, but not the words beyond that; I remember the girl’s voice as if she’d been singing to me personally, although of course she wasn’t. Her song seems to hang upon the air, to feel as fresh inside my mind as it was three decades ago, although I’m sure the person she was singing about, and the feelings she would have had just then are gone, and maybe the singer is too, that her footsteps so bright and elastic have been drowned out by thousands or millions of others and the person who sleeps behind the wall now doesn’t know or and maybe hates the fact the street is noisy, but I don’t care.
I remember her song that was never recorded and probably never even written, just made up on the spot, so that the words themselves are lost now also to the girl who sang them, and so the song itself will never be retrieved by memory or even by the internet, but I will remember for the rest of my life exactly the rise and fall of its almost melody, its flickering tune, exactly how it goes.
