The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  | 435 |

  Of all the multitudinous arteries of San Francisco, Geary Street is perhaps the most important of the overlooked. —Yes, the overlooked—what a fine category! Failing private detectives with their envious ears, self-pitying child molesters who want to “explain” themselves to every stranger at every bar, customerless prostitutes, lawyers who haven’t yet made full partner, and I myself, described in the introduction to the Japanese translation of one of my novels as “a minor writer”—oh, sting! —and you yourself, reader, who suffer from this world’s deficient appreciation of your qualities—and for that matter all of us living creatures, for up to now we’ve been rudely overlooked by death—which reminds me of the dead, for they get overlooked not only by us but also by each other . . . In short, overlooked signifies everyone except lucky Cain, who flees from one wilderness to the next, pursued by recognition of his immortal Mark.

  I admit that Geary Street cannot boast Cain’s flair. And yet in its length and in the proliferation of its speeding corpuscles it ranks almost as mighty as Market Street, which bisects the city into a pair of angled grids, as if San Francisco were a sheet of graph paper diagonally folded, then torn, with the lower triangle, the scrap South of Market, getting magically rotated a hundred and thirty-five degrees before being rejoined. Geary Street likewise is kin to Van Ness Avenue, which offers love-seekers a convenient route of travel from the Tenderloin to Capp Street. Nor should we omit to mention the fraternal relations between Geary and Gough, Franklin and Fell, all three of which the devotees of Freeway 101 employ with scarcely a thought, but what will do they when the inevitable earthquake reduces those serviceways to twisted segments of disconnection?

  But enough name-dropping. Market Street can go promote itself for all I care.

  The tale of Geary Street is the tale of life itself, which begins, as did the first prehistoric unicellular organisms, at the ocean. In that very first block somewhere in the mists of Forty-Eighth Avenue, which almost touches the low sea-horizon and the wet silver-tan sand of Ocean Beach, Geary Street, here known to meter maids as Geary Boulevard, as indeed it will remain all the way to Van Ness, already foreshadows the business character of its adulthood, for it promises wideness, smoothness and above all accessibility, in sober defiance of the maniacal laughter of that convulsing female automaton at the Musée Mechanique on the lower terrace of the Cliff House, where tourists come to gaze upon white-dunged Seal Rock, enter the camera obscura, and afterward buy overpriced hot dogs. Resolutely rejecting these follies, and above all refusing to acknowledge the insanely laughing robot as its mother, Geary Street faces east and grows workmanlike into existence. At this stage, the infant pavement carries with it only dimunitive pastel-painted cube-houses for its toys. Hedges and flowers adorn these properties, some of which actually stand alone, lawn to lawn, unlike the promiscuous blocks of wall-kissing flats which make up so much of San Francisco. Every now and then one can glimpse the tea-smoke forest ribbon of Golden Gate park below and to the right, with the outer Sunset district gently rising into the fog beyond, like some pearlescently obsolete circuit-board studded with pale cubical transistors and resistors. Were we in the Sunset, Geary Street itself and the Richmond district it passes through would look the same way, the Richmond and the Sunset being almost mirror images of one another. (What would the Sunset’s Geary Street be? Judah, maybe, or Taraval.) But already, striving to outdistance the repose of these seaside beginnings, where planktonic destinies allow for nothing but flotation and cool grey submission, Geary Street strains to carry and to convey, to facilitate, to make business happen, to go between. At Fortieth Avenue, in the spirit of corporate mergers, it swallows up Point Lobos Avenue; and as early as Thirty-Eighth Avenue I’ve seen the first panhandler, wrapped in silver fog, listlessly overlooking grey pavement, hoping for nickels, dimes and quarters to congeal out of grey and silver air. He is the genius loci or tutelary deity of Geary Street. He is Business.

  By Thirty-Sixth Avenue the houses have begun to crowd and to swell, like muscular apprentice construction workers old enough to bleed in wars but too young to vote, old enough to lift the heaviest buckets of paint and bags of sheet rock but too young to sit guarding the coffeepot; and so they hustle, trying to get what they can as time advances down Geary Street’s blue-grey ribbon, and the number 38 Geary bus, the most frequent in the city, I believe, except perhaps the 30 Stockton, roars beeping in and out of fog. A few homes, the so-called multiplexes constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, still resemble squarish concretions of mist, but as they move farther from the greenish hazy sea they begin to dry off and get down to brass tacks. Each one wants to be voted Most Likely To Succeed. Each one wants to receive a loyalty certificate. Each one wants to get rich. What to do, then, but work? And at Twenty-Sixth Avenue, demarcated by the teardrop domes, more yellow than gold, of the Orthodox church, whose saints gaze out across the thoroughfare, blessing transport, commerce and journeying, the business world properly begins, and Geary Street comes into full strength. In this Russian zone, the restaurants and video parlors like as not proclaim themselves in Cyrillic—more so now at the end of the twentieth century than in the days of the USSR, when Little Russia was mainly comprised of ageing aristocrats and counterrevolutionaries. Now post-Soviets can come and sell pizzas, which is why the character of this thoroughfare is precisely characterlessness. Long before we’ve reached the Moscow and Tbilsi Bakery, banks and Irish pubs have rushed in, and one never knows whether to expect the Wirth Brothers pastry shop or an income tax service, because Geary Street, nomadically epitomized by Geary Shoe Repair, owns such a plainly utiliarian personality—Jack-of-all-Trades Street, we ought to call it. We can bully ourselves into pretending that Geary is something special, but it eschews preciousness; if only lava were to seal it off for five centuries, anthropologists would love it. Shunning Haight Street’s narcissism, Clement Street’s dreaminess, Geary Street expresses pure functionality, like a well-made Indian arrowhead. And Little Russia? As long gone as the ocean! At Sixteenth Avenue, that outpost of expensive grandeur, the Russian Renaissance Restaurant, where I used to transform money into lemon-flavored vodka in the cause of unrequited love, fails to hold the line laid down by the Orthodox saints: it’s all motleyness now, pied and commercially nondescript in the convenient manner of freeways, although at Fifteenth the two wide ribbons of opposing traffic get purified by the fragrance of fresh bagels, and somewhere around there I remember Shenson’s Kosher style deli, whose proudly pregnant Russian-looking countergirl makes Reuben sandwiches, stuffed cabbages, and other treats. May she and her baby remain always overlooked by death.

  After Little Russia comes Little Korea with its Hangul newspapers, its excitable, clannish grocerywomen, and above all its temples of grilled meat where for a price one can offer up to heaven the greasy incense of barbeque-smoke, faithfully attended by many small round dishes of pickles. Do I write too much about food? Geary Street knows that everybody needs to eat, just as everybody sooner or later needs an undertaker’s services, and, as I recall, there’s a funeral parlor right here. Geary Street, practical and grey, solves all your necessities! And what’s Geary Street’s necessity? Why, to strain continually eastward, toward the greenery of Union Square and the jewelry shops beyond, none of which it can yet imagine. Ask an entrepeneur what his maximum profit will be, and he can’t tell you, because he’s refrained from limiting himself; on his own forehead he’s inscribed the mark of infinity. Geary Street knows only that there’s no returning to the ocean. So it must vibrate straight ahead, toward the steadily increasing murmur and din of downtown, which is at least partially of its own making. And Little Korea, was it ever anything but the brainchild of Geary Street’s brother-in-law, who worked for the Chamber of Commerce? Don’t ask me. Which of its Korean restaurants is the best? Don’t ask Geary Street. Geary Street has other worries. And now Little Korea lies behind us.

  In the Richmond district on a spring Sunday afternoon after many rainy nights, the pale ho
uses shine, with every shadow seemingly painted on. A garage door slowly, magically rolls upward. Sunlight extends its tongue inside. Nothing moves. A sparrow chirps. Clouds hang upended in the sky; the nearly tamed forests of Golden Gate Park peer over the stores and apartments of Geary Street; the morning brightens. A young Asian couple slowly walk down the sidewalk, reading newspapers as they go. But Geary Street hurries past them; Geary Street does not have time for spring.

  Perhaps you’ll get the idea from all this that Geary Street is the soul of nothing but practicality. While that would almost be true, I ought to mention Eighth Avenue, where the middle-aged street vaguely remembers its ocean infancy, the mnemonic being the Star of the Sea Catholic church (I forgot to mention the kindred Lighthouse Lighting and Lamp Repairs a few blocks back), but that’s mere dutifulness, like a grown man’s grimacing smile when his maiden aunt tells him how cute he was in diapers; for by Seventh Avenue, Geary Street has reverted to type, insisting that water was not meant to lie foolishly in oceans, but to be used, which is why from beneath the used car lot’s gleaming numbered windshields and shiny hoods there trickles a braided river of soap-blotched water like a molten leopard, thereby underlining another of Geary Street’s important principles: Business ought to be clean.

  Davis Realty, the Dragon Restaurant, the car wash and the gas station—thus the heterogenously mundane sweeps on, and by Fourth Avenue many proprietorships have become outlets, chains, warehouses, copy services, banks, dental offices, storage lockers. Swelling and bustling, Geary Street propells itself into the next level of mercantile prosperity, getting but not spending.* At Stanyan Street, which itself imust be considered another of the most important of the unimportant streets, not only as a traffic artery, but also as a demarcation between “the streets” and “the avenues”—here too end the Richmond and Sunset Districts, with Golden Gate Park concluding between them—Geary Street widens, rushing into even more incontrovertible ordinariness, which it proclaims more aptly than ever by means of Commercial Street.

  As a prize for this redoubled speed and salesmanship, Geary Street gets its first tunnel at Emerson, where it brightly and shallowly dives, so that no bad sorts can lurk there. Geary prefers the higher class of operators who pay taxes and whose wares are returnable, subject to fine print boilerplate on various warranties; and so it quickly expels us from that tunnel of shining yellow tiles, conveying us to Lyon Street, where we gain our first dissectionist’s view of the white spinal columns of the financial district, that paradisiacal goal of the street, heaven of boutiques, department stores and jewelers. Of course, all that’s still as far away as the imaginary countries painted on the backdrops of the Opera House, but Geary Street has heard rumors from a passing 38 Geary bus that someday, after many city blocks, generations and improvisations, it will find at the summit of its old age a gem laid down for the taking—namely, Union Square, immense emerald set in the stonework and brickwork and pavement of San Francisco—and emeralds, like all precious things, possess the ability to render us first shyly self-conscious, then, as the infection of overpowering greenness strikes us, rolling down on our heads like cabbage balls from a Chinatown produce truck, burying us beneath its stacks of green bean bundles, we numbly doubt our own existences, seeking ourselves amist the shining labyrinths of green eternities. Why on earth instead of real emeralds do I go on describing Chinatown’s produce shops, harbors for nomadic Chevvy trucks full of wooden crates of celery? Why mention an earringed Chinese girl, her arms full of broccoli, coming down the gangplank? Because Geary Street, longing though it certainly does for emerald fulfillment—why, even the baser joys of jade would do! —cannot really believe that it is entitled to anything that fine. In green pears and apples, in the fresh chlorophyll of plants, in greengrocers’ stocks it can believe, for the vocations of its shopkeepers who toil patiently on its westernmost reaches provide them. Every day, Geary Street turns vegetables into dollars and sense. It can rely on their greenness. But soon it must shake off its provincial rudeness, for it will intersect Van Ness Avenue not too many blocks hence, and beyond Van Ness lies downtown itself. Yes, Union Square will crown Geary Street’s career, but can it wear such a tremendous emerald without blushing? It wants to; then it will have finally arrived. But can so broad and bluff and workaday a street pull it off? And so Geary Street retreats into dull meditations on broccoli.

  Lusting all the more and nonetheless for the pale beauty of that distant cluster of towers surrounded by parkland, Bay and sky, Geary Street, which is as endless as the 38 Geary bus itself with the long black accordion-bellows between segments so that it can go around corners, now exerts itself to the fullest, contorting itself, rolling round and round past parks and murals and the occasional grafitti’d fence at Divisadero, Scott, and Steiner. At Webster it dips down through Japantown, then up again in respectful advance of Sushiland. Japantown will be as brief a diversion as Little Korea and Little Russia. Geary Street is in a lascivious hurry for riches now, its wide grey ribbon, adorned by dashed white lines and rectangular patches of blackish-grey or whitish grey asphalt, making haste to approach that angelic venue of old age—

  . . . But it never can, never will, at least not in its present incarnation, because at Laguna and Gough fatality sets in, and suddenly Geary Street, renamed Starr King, shunts rightward past the Montessori House and Universalist Center, and the motorist who, trusting Geary Street for all these blocks, crosses Van Ness, abruptly finds himself on O’Farrell Street as he enters the Tenderloin . . .

  How could this calamity have happened? Because Geary Street, which parallels him one block to the left, has become one-way, the other way. Continuity is impossible. Geary Street will indeed stretch all the way to the heart of the financial district; the prophecy will be fulfilled; but only that most worthless of human beings, the pedestrian, can get there that way. All is vanity.

  Thus, at least, runs the explanation dictated to me by my Lutheran forbears. Hubris and graspingness must be punished. Midas’s touch is a curse.

  And yet nobody else thinks so. Whenever I take a little drive down Geary Street to buy apple juice or condoms, I realize that the street has become more smug than ever. I don’t see any wriggles of shame in its pavement! And so I ask myself: What if the revocation of its bidirectionality were not a chastisement at all, but an arrangement in which it connived? What could be more important to such a street than two-way access itself?

  The crux: Could Geary Street have consented to its own maiming in order to avoid being defiled by the Tenderloin? O’Farrell Street runs right through that district, and is accordingly hooker-studded, greased by the excrement of lost addicts, stamped on by pimps, leaned on by crack dealers with the serenely downcast faces of Kabuki string-players who sit cross-legged on royal cloth; whereas Geary Street almost escapes from the Tenderloin, or at worst uneasily grazes it, anxious to achieve the fancy brasserie on Geary and Mason, attended by the cylindrical pillar which showcases a smallbreasted young blonde whose face and crotch are supposed to sell bluejeans. This is the kind of prostitution which Geary Street prefers. Just as it converts emeralds to broccoli, so, too, dimly seeking to emulate the Orthodox saints whose paths it crossed back on Twenty-Sixth Avenue, it slimes reality over with its native sea-fog, until all relations between human beings have been blurred into orthodox respectability.

  * * *

  •BOOK XXVIII•

  * * *

  John

  •

  * * *

  If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.

  I CORINTHIANS 13.1

  * * *

  •

  | 436 |

  Sacramento is River City, they say, out of logic as long and gentle as the sweep of the American River. What they are actually doing (and by “they” I mean the Chamber of Commerce) is casting about for a slogan to make Sacramento’s ghastly conformity seem somehow different—to them it wouldn’t matter whe
ther Sacramento were Mountain City, Ocean City, Oil City, Balloon City, Army City, Love City, Emerald City, or the veriest necropolis—the gimmick’s the thing, good citizens! —But I’m not being fair. To impute to my City Fathers this much cynicism is necessarily to suppose them capable of seeing through their own inventions, and I have no reason to think that these warm-hearted merchants didn’t look around them most pridefully once they’d transformed Sacramento into River City, that they didn’t say: By golly! What a beautiful pair of rivers we have here! —even the ones whose bid for necropolisdom had been downvoted, buried in the graveyard of uncommercial ideas. And they’d have meant it; I’d stake my last share of AllCo shopping mall stock! If I were only a higher being, I’d be watching them on television, applauding their sincerity. At least I can do that much for John. Miss Deborah Treisman, who allowed some pages of this novel in Grand Street, and rejected others from The New Yorker, asserted that John was a mere caricature, like the so-called “postcard view” from Russian Hill of pale buildings and accidental trees clothing the steep, fog-colored slopes of the city. Deborah, I’m absent-minded, I admit; I make mistakes. What if, resting jovially upon my labors, like the capitalist compradores who now sit on the deck of the Virgin Sturgeon restaurant, toasting their newborn River City, what if I’d forgotten to bring anybody to life? The Queen’s but a figment, mouthpiece of my pompous symbology, her whores only grimy cardboard props dripping with the semen of the vulgar; Irene similarly assumes a merely erotic aspect; Henry Tyler remains limited to being Henry Tyler, which is to say, a grey nothingness. But John, now—oh, but John! How can he be a caricature, when I can’t get rid of him?