We left the Bay Area three years ago, uprooted ourselves and drove south to Tucson to live: Covid gloves at gas stations, take a pass on picking up the squeegee to clean the windshield, contagion panic heavier than bug smear. Before we left a woman in an Oakland market literally shouted at me for coming too close as I reached for broccoli: YOU ARE NOT RESPECTING MY SPACE. Who guessed the dystopian future would arrive as New Age Karen? I flashed on Donald Sutherland in the final scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Under leafless knurled trees in a San Francisco plaza he snaps back his head, bulges his eyes and points at Brooke Adams; flaps open his soft red mouth and lets fly a metallic death screech. “The shot lingers in the mind long after the credits are gone,” poet Elizabeth Cantwell writes. That was SF for me: too many zombies seeing me for who I was.
After a while Covid’s disruptions gave me solipsistic comfort: the space I take up in the world could be an extension of thought-space, the only place I could really trust. Still, shots of my former life lingered in the mind. And here we are, back in San Francisco for a friend’s wedding and of course we have to eat.
But San Francisco is a thing now: a media story as dystopian as a zombie invasion. Nordstrom at Westfield Centre closed, Nordstrom where I used to work in the cafe; Nordstrom which I kind of hated, the Southwestern chicken salads with the tricolor crispy tortilla strips, and the prep guy from Russia who used to steal stuff from the walk-in, stuff Cryovac’ed turkey breasts and roast beefs in his coat so I’m not sad. And Whole Foods South of Market, where I used to go to pick up ingredients for photo shoots when I worked for a food site with a test kitchen: that one, where vaping tecchies would elbow for room around hot and cold tables at lunch, for shit cauliflower pizza and tortilla soup. Yeah these are lost jobs; yeah this is unleashing a political narrative of liberal decay, but nothing about Nordstrom felt leftie; nothing about Whole Foods seemed particularly liberal. And Market Street was always sketchy.
When I first moved to SF in ’81 or maybe the start of ‘82 this guy took me to see The Women at the Strand Theater on Market Street, where seat backs were missing and Anita Loos’s dialogue had to compete with the jabber of crystal meth queens and moans from handjobs. Time erases the blight and the stickiness of other ages, the scourge of earlier drugs; resets perception like the tip of a paper clip that’s found a laptop’s pinhole.
The wedding was in the financial district: Perry told me a guest said he was downstairs parking and saw four masked guys kicking the shit out of another guy, but we were on the 15th floor eating steak with roasted shallot. Next morning before 7, unionized hotel workers picketed our non-union hotel. NO WAGES, NO PEACE. NO HEALTH CARE, NO PEACE. I walked out for coffee: to the Blue Bottle that was closed; to the farther Blue Bottle, past the building where I had my first job out of college, working as a staff writer on a trade magazine. The streets looked clean, and away from the picket lane, blessed by peace: no doom-loop needle users or car window smash-and-grabbers.
The Ferry Plaza farmers market still had Brentwood figs from Knoll in a state of tender near-collapse: black Missions tasting like jam that got cooked too long and started to scorch; tangy-sweet Brown Turkeys. There are never any figs in the dystopia narrative.
That night we ate with friends on Valencia: a new Italian place in the space where other Italian places had been; where Bar Tartine was. We had a four-top in front, in the window. I smelled bursts of resiny cannabis throughout the meal from I’m not sure, product in somebody’s fanny pack or laid out under an HVAC intake I was near the conclusion of, or maybe bud is the leftover vibe of Tartine (jk); like old house smell. Anyway it blurred into the grill smoke from the kitchen line, and maybe it was like a smudging of my Covid space, the freaky interiority I’d retreated to, but the pungency hit like a storyline twist. We ate a fish that had been washed in that smoke of the grill: a rock cod with its slashed skin burnt so it fused like daubing onto the coarse white flaky flesh so the two were no longer separate. Once at four in the morning, reporting a story about Dungeness crabbers I watched a fishing boat dump its haul of pink-and-silver rockfish into a huge wheeled pier-side bin in the half-dark. Jesus, rockfish were still being hoisted out of the ocean; some things still worked the same.
We decide to Über to Foreign Cinema for drinks at the bar. (Everything costs a super shitload but hey, we tell ourselves this is not Tucson.) Outside on Valencia a small group’s formed: Latino boys in their 20s with beers, forming a circle with men in street clothes playing mariachi strings—a vihuela, a guitarrón. The boys look half-drunk. They’re smiling, and I don’t know what they’re singing but I know these guys, know their beer smiles. I worked with guys like these for years in restaurants: Stoic, homesick; packed into Mission apartments, hoping to get back to Yucatán someday to be with wives and kids and parents before the place they knew resets and everything about it is different than the ways they remember. Right now I imagine there’s hope that where they came from is fixed in suspended cadence, the way San Francisco sticks in me. A city perennially fucked up, perennially tweaking, perennially sharp, beautiful, and filthy, decaying along with its 40-year narrative of decline—a place still hopeful I guess. SF has a pungency that lingers in the mind long after the credits are gone: bud and body funk; grill smoke and the burnt-honey smell of figs.
You must have left a lingering vibe: a couple of days ago I was in the city for a meeting (Yes. I know.) and walked by all those places and not-anymore places you mentioned, thinking of you. I can go into a Nordstrom, and sometimes do, but none of their cafes bc I expect to see you and it's still weird not to, after all these years. Now it's time for the figs in my kitchen, not nearly as jammy as yours from Knoll, but still proof God exists.