The materials and craftsmanship of the original buildings were magnificent, but by the postwar era white flight was taking one population to the suburbs and letting other populations—nonwhite, immigrant, poor—into these places that were treated like slums by their absentee owners. The buildings had their ornamentation scraped off and stucco or plastic siding pasted over their wood, or they were divided up into smaller apartments, often built with shoddy materials and techniques, and many of them were allowed to grow shabby and rickety.
Blight was the code word used in the 1950s and 1960s to justify knocking down many of them to the east of our little neighborhood, leaving behind open wounds in the city’s skin of structures. In some of them, grim housing projects were built, some so alienating and oppressive that they were torn down a few decades after they were erected. Other lots in the heart of the Fillmore, which had once been the vibrant cultural zone Mr. Teal liked to reminisce about, were still sitting vacant through most of the 1980s, behind cyclone fencing. A place had been killed, and it never quite came back to life.
Change is the measure of time, my photographer friend Mark Klett likes to say, and little things shifted. When I had arrived, there was a Kodak photo booth on the corner a block west, back when film was how you got photographs, and a glass-walled phone booth on the corner across from my place, next to the liquor store. It became a pay phone bolted to the wooden wall, under a hood like a stove hood, and then disappeared altogether as mobile phones proliferated.
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who’d look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.
In that less expensive era, eccentricity had many footholds. A lot of small businesses doubled as museums devoted to various things—there was a dry cleaner near the Castro with a display of antique irons artfully arranged, and various stores with ancient photographs of the neighborhood as it had been long ago, and a corner store in the Mission with a rubber-band ball several feet in diameter, sitting on the linoleum near the chips. The Postcard Palace in North Beach sold nothing but old postcards, most already stamped and inscribed in the confident penmanship of their era with cryptic or jaunty messages from long-dead people to other long-dead people. I still have dozens I bought, a few at a time, mostly black and white, of various mountain roads and chapels and grottoes, on evenings when I wandered out of a punk show to browse there.
The city felt like something old and crumpled with dust and treasures caught in its crevices, and then it was smoothed out and swept clean and some of its people were pushed out as though they had themselves been dirt. A junk shop became a high-end pizzeria, a storefront church became a hair salon, a radical bookstore became an eyeglass boutique, and a lot of things became sushi bars. The place became blander, with more chain stores and more cars, and without flyers layered atop each other on telephone poles, without family pharmacies and odd businesses like old temples where the priest still performed the rites whether or not the congregation had moved on.
There was an actual lunch counter at the Scully Owl Drug Store a couple of blocks to the west of my apartment, like the lunch counters of the South that people sat in at to protest segregation, and then the lunch counter vanished, and then the drugstore was gone, and then, at the millennium, the whole place with the union grocery store, liquor store, butcher, and bakery was bulldozed to build a big chain supermarket with condominiums on top. Many cities that had been centers of blue-collar labor and the manufacture of tangible goods saw these industries die in the postwar era, but their death was not much noticed when new information and finance and tourism metropolises were exploding into being in their ruins, as was the case, spectacularly, in San Francisco by the 1980s. In that era, Silicon Valley was actually manufacturing silicon chips in clean rooms staffed by immigrant workers and dumping the toxins, and then those jobs went overseas and the tech industry began to supernova, and a region that had been an idyllic edge and sometimes an exception became a powerful global center.
Change is the measure of time, and I discovered that in order to see change you had to be slower than it, and that by living in one place for a quarter century, it became visible to me. Gradually. Not at first. People came and went in the building I stayed in, and many of the transient inhabitants imagined that they were passing through a stable neighborhood, but they were part of what was changing it, a river of people scouring out the place, making it less and less black, more and more middle class. The newcomers lived in the space their money secured, not the space that belonged to everyone, and a vitality faded away as the neighborhood became less a neighborhood.
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My own building, a stucco structure from the 1920s among all those more stately wooden Victorians, had its own graces and charms. My little apartment amused me for the devices built into it as though it was tiny when it felt so spacious: a narrow ironing board that folded into the wall, a Murphy bed that dominated the room when it was opened up, so I unfolded it for good inside what had been a roomy closet. There was a window at the head of the bed, a wide door at the side, and another at the foot of the bed, so it was fairly open as closets go, but still a closet, the one I slept in for a quarter century.
Poverty is sometimes a great preserver of the past, and I lived in a place little altered since its creation. The narrow planks of the yellow-gold oak floors were original, as were the steamy radiator, and the chute on the back stairs through which garbage plummeted two stories into the big can, and the early, tiny, defunct refrigerator built into the wall on one side of the kitchen, by the sinks, across from the built-in sideboard and glass cabinets that rose to the ceiling.
A magnificent old Wedgewood stove presided over the kitchen, creamy white enamel with black trim and a black stovepipe making a right angle on its way to the wall. The pilot lights were never relit while I was there, so I collected matchbooks from bars and restaurants, back when smoking was permitted in those places. Being able to cook meals, to have a whole refrigerator, felt luxurious after the residential hotel in which I’d been unable to store and prepare food.
I was poor. I scrounged furniture off the street and clothes from thrift stores and housewares from rummage sales; we valued old things then, and aesthetically this method suited me. Most of what I owned was older than me, and I relished that; every object was an anchor to the past. I craved a sense of time, history, mortality, depth, texture that had been absent from my upbringing in a newly built suburban edge of the Bay Area with parents whose immigrant urban backgrounds left them with little sense of lineage, few stories, no heirlooms. My work as a writer was sometimes going to be about restoring lost and forgotten pasts to Western places.
I found a small velvet-and-nailhead Victorian sofa at a rummage sale on my way to a demonstration in the Castro District; the gay men selling it for $10 kindly hauled it over and up the stairs after the protest was over. It left droppings of ancient horsehair stuffing on the floor like an incontinent old pet. I accumulated small souvenirs, treasures, and artifacts that made the place gradually come to resemble an eccentric natural history museum, with curious lichen-covered twigs and branches, birds’ nests and shards of eggs, antlers, s
tones, bones, dead roses, a small jar of yellow sulfur butterflies from a mass migration in eastern Nevada, and, from my younger brother, a stag’s antlered skull that still presides over my home.
I was passing through poverty and I would gradually return to financial ease; in poverty too I was a new stranger but I spent enough years there to grasp a little of how it works and what it does. In another sense poverty as a poverty of the spirit had been all around me since birth. My parents had ingested a deep sense of lack during the Great Depression or out of whatever deprivations their childhoods contained, and they were not interested in sharing their middle-class comfort. I did not trust that they would have bailed me out if something truly horrific had prostrated me, and I was never willing to fall apart enough to find out, so I was not slumming quite the way that a lot of young white people around me were, who could opt out of poverty as easily as they had opted into it. I left it too, but slowly, by my own labors. And as I’d understand better later, by the advantages that had come with my color and my background that made me feel fit, to myself and in the eyes of others, for an education and white-collar work.
I read books standing up in bookstores or got them from libraries or searched for months or years to find the cheapest used copy; I listened to music on the radio and made cassette tapes of albums at friends’ houses; I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential.
I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one. And then once I had something the craving died down—it was the craving that was so alive—and then that craving appeared again, gaping and reaching after the next thing. Of course with lovers and boyfriends, uncertainty could keep craving alive (and with the more reliable and kinder men, that metamorphosed into that other kind of attachment we call love).
More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn’t have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape, and perhaps it was why walking was so important to me: it felt like I was getting somewhere.
I did have one early vision of what a life worth living could look like. When I read her diaries in my mid-teens, Anaïs Nin’s evocations of her Parisian life between the wars gave me images of spaces that could harbor conversational depths and exploration, of lives that intertwined and cross-pollinated, of the warmth of being wrapped up in passionate friendships. Many years later, after a dinner party of friends gathered around the chrome-legged linoleum table in my kitchen, the radical historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of the guests, and I agreed that this was what we had hungered for in our lonely youths. (And many years later I was dismayed to find out that Nin had left her banker husband out of the published diaries, so she presented herself as more hand-to-mouth bohemian than she really was.)
Next to the stove were two wide sinks, one an ordinary kitchen sink, the other, to the right, a deep laundry sink I covered over with the old enameled metal dish-drainer tray that had come with the place, and the dank dark deep sink under the tray would grow fetid, so that I had to lift the lid off and scour it out from time to time. Women had washed clothes by hand in it, and in the first years I was there, the building’s flat roof still had a wooden cage for hanging out laundry to dry, up the last flight of stairs whose upper steps crunched with gravel from the tarry roof.
The kitchen’s original yellow-and-green linoleum flooring was worn into something grainy and cracked that was impossible to keep clean, so I painted it black, and then painted it again and again as it wore out again and again. But the light streamed into the kitchen every sunny morning, and into the other room’s east-facing bay window and trickled through the south bay window all day in winter. That last window faced Fulton Street and a streetlight, and sometimes I would sit there transfixed watching the fog cascade over itself like gargantuan, phantasmagorical tumbleweeds under the streetlight, as the wind pushed it in from the cold ocean where it had arisen.
Or I’d lie in bed and hear in the hush of night the foghorns blaring far away. Awakening in the middle of the night, in the center of a city and a place thought of as the inner city, I often heard the foghorns, and they carried me to the edges and beyond, to the sea, the sky, and the fog. I heard them often, and in recollection the sound seems almost like a correlative of that middle-of-the-night state of being not quite awake, not quite asleep, with a wandering mind but a body pinned down by sleep’s Jupiterian gravity. They called to me as though I was a lost ship, not to bring me home but to remind me of the ocean and the air beyond and that there in the closet I was still connected to them.
I lived there so long the little apartment and I grew into each other. In the beginning I had hardly anything in it, and it felt vast, and at the end it was overstuffed with books and with many boxes of papers under the bed, and it felt cramped. In memory it seems as lustrous as a chambered nautilus’s mother-of-pearl shell, as though I was a hermit crab who had crawled into a particularly glamorous shelter, until, as hermit crabs do, I outgrew it.
A dozen years since I’ve left it I can still see every detail, still imagine sometimes that I’m reaching for the medicine cabinet there rather than the one I actually live with, still gave the Lyon Street address to a taxi driver automatically when I went back to walk its streets again before I recollected that I had not lived there in many years, and recited the next address after that and finally the current one that will never be tattooed on my psyche the way that place was. When I lived there, I often dreamed of the street that ran past my childhood home, turned into a country road, and then ended in a horse pasture, the road from which I slipped through barbed-wire fences to so many of my adventures, but now I dream of that little apartment on Lyon Street as a foundational place the way I dreamed of the road then.
When it was still my home, I dreamed many times about finding another room in it, another door. In some way it was me and I was it, and so these discoveries were, of course, other parts of myself. I dreamed over and over of my childhood home as a place I was trapped in, but this place wasn’t penning me in but opening up possibilities to me. In dreams it was bigger, it had more rooms, it had fireplaces, hidden chambers, beauties that didn’t exist in waking life, and once the back door opened onto radiant fields instead of the drab clutter that was really there.
The kitchen walls had once been covered in vinyl brick-patterned wallpaper whose seams showed through the white paint on the back wall behind the stove, so one day I pulled it off. It was like tearing bandages off a wound. It came off in great sheets, pulling the surface of the next layer of wallpaper off as it came. Underneath was the inner layer of an older, more beautiful wallpaper, patterned with lattices of ivy. When I saw the pale brown pattern, I felt the vivid presence of the people who had lived there before me, more ghosts, other times, from before the war, when the neighborhood was another kind of place with other kinds of people on another kind of earth.
Then I dreamed about doing the same thing, and in the dream version I revealed a dense collage of newspaper and magazine pages and scraps of fabric, a lot of floral images, all in rosy hues, luscious and strange, a garden of scraps. In the dream I knew it was a souvenir of another woman who’d been there before me, an old black woman with a gift for making.
The building was located near the center o
f the city, and thinking of it now I see it as the axis on which a compass needle swings, a place that opened to the four directions. I didn’t make a home there; it made me, as I watched and sometimes joined communities, wandered thousands of miles on foot in the city over the years, sometimes over familiar routes to the movie theaters or to bookstores or groceries or work, sometimes for discovery as I climbed the hills, and sometimes for respite from the density and turmoil when I went to Ocean Beach to be reminded that this was the place where a lot of stories reached their end and, across the vast Pacific, others began.
The churning ocean and the long sandy beach were another kind of home and another kind of refuge, in the vastness that put my woes and angst in proportion to the sky, the sea, the far horizon, the wild birds flying by. The apartment was my refuge, my incubator, my shell, my anchor, my starting blocks, and a gift from a stranger.
Life During Wartime
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A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation—doweled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 3