Chapter Twenty-Four
“Looking over your shoulder
will likely provide much
food for thought…”
“That your favorite astrologer there?”
“Heavens no. I think this one sees most of her clients after the bars close anyway…”
“So where is your Saturn source then,” chided Reese Paulen. “How and where’s your psychic guru orbiting these days?”
“Couldn’t tell you…” Truth be told I couldn’t actually remember. In any event, I wouldn’t want to go there now anyhow… “It’s been a little while.”
“Hmmm, is that so…”
The irony was not lost on me that this Debrina person had opened her storefront psychic parlor virtually around the corner on Chestnut from where Dame Thornia had spiritually transited her ’89 quake flattened Fillmore Street sanctorum. Lots of baroque blond upholstery with cheap guilded trim, minus the astrology books and a tubby, fusty minion like Richard Muntz—call it a passing of the augory, and all that.
Yet I had basically moved on from Thornia’s star-crossed enterprise, sort of lost touch with her, much less Richard Muntz. That’s not to say I hadn’t subsequently moved the Saturn Return deal online over the years—bootstrapping the astro phenomenon into a beta social media startup at the time. Nevertheless Reese Paulen was having none of it: the charts, readings, the same zodiacal flim-flam. As for me, I has hardly comfortable delving into the innards of this whole Saturn business right now. But anything made for better conversation than matters Middle East—which so far was getting me nowhere but here.
“I know this dude, he’s like bald, pudgy, about five foot-two…”
“Real dog catcher, huh? Total loser…”
“Naw, he’s always with these epic chicks, man. I asked him—whaddup with that? He says, every great chick has one night she regrets—and that’s my niche…”
“Yeah, niche, that’s happening. I wanna be every one of these hot chicks’ bad call…that’s what I’m talkin’ about…”
“Sure, even this worked: a little deviating jock talk. So I jumped at the chance to reset our sights. Two salt puckered, bay winded sailboarders were kickin’ back, buttholes at ease, sun drying on a hair salon’s waiting bench in their Speedo baggies and O’Neill tanks. But their gazes kept glazing over to the display window next door, its logo reading, London’s Britches. Featured therein was an eyeful of frilly, frothy ladies’ lingerie—more for boogie nights and the boudoir than business hours or body bars. Sultry and playfully sexy: the paisley panties, black silky slips and chemises, lacy chiffon camisoles, peek-a-boo peignoirs and leopard-spotted bustiers were making well focused groupies of these usually wander-eyed guys, turbocharging the gal fixation around these parts, this slipstream of gorgeous Marina women.
All the same, Britches was British classy and whimsical about its retail peep show—no NorCal Frederick’s of Hollywood they—sort of Victoria’s Secret, cast in more blushingly Victorian tones. So the nice ’n’ naughty little shop in turn had women slyly window shopping to reload their drawers, and me wondering why I’d barely noticed the place before. As for the windsurfers, they were manning up in their bleach-bum shag cartoon hair, licking Citrus Squeeze smoothies, sharing a Strawberry Surf Rider, mentally dragging and dropping pink-violet brassieres and tangerine thongs onto all the hot young chicks and baby dolls passing by, itchin’ to snatch ’em for the junk in their trunks…as, however furtively, were Paulen and I.
“What some guys won’t do, huh?”
“Certainly not my bailiwick,” doc replied stiffly. “I for one have put those days well behind me. How about you?”
“Yep the more casual approach, I can totally relate to that. But old habits do die hard, right,” I pressed, as we churned past the two waterlogged niche players still riding the styling salon’s wobbly pine, moving further along Chestnut Street, bangers in our britches, and strumpets on our minds. “Especially when certain…opportunities present themselves.”
“Can’t speak to that either,” Paulen’s eyes drifted off to some fracas across the way, leading over toward a handsy dust-up involving the Hazzerds, Hap and Hop.
“Power of suggestion,” I followed his gaze. “Yeah well, guess it all depends on the metier and milieu, huh…”
“Your words, not mine.”
The hair salon itself was Oleg’s Unisex Design, a gold Genovese crest on its bright red, white and green awning peeling away after decades in the sun. Now, however, its styling was mostly unosex—that is, older Marina padronas still clinging to their 1970s chic. Nothing fancy, thank you, surely nothing too nouveau: Oleg’s seemed permed in the boldness of another era—roller sets, cellophanes, bang trims and root touch-ups, with period Formica counters and consoles, Senior Citizen Specials stenciled onto the window glass behind that waiting bench in sclerotic perpetuity.
“On the other hand, maybe some things are better left unsaid…”
“Well said.”
“But of course sometimes matters do need to be addressed,” I added.
“What things? Do you mean words, thoughts?”
“If not acting out on them,” I pressed, button wise. “You know, crossing red lines…”
“Or double crossing them, as the case may be…”
“Better yet, double jeopardy—but you’d know better than I.”
“I don’t follow,” doc volleyed, “don’t speak that language either.”
Oleg’s had been here since the Me Decade, stuck there ever since. Could have been this salon was one of those Bay Area businesses that long ago sold out to disoriented émigrés from the four corners with more investment cash than language skills. Dedicated, but lost in the translation, they took over established local concerns, then ran them strictly as is, worked them to death without changing anything but the price lists, usually downward, until founding owners swooped back in for the distress sale, or long-familiar doors closed unceremoniously in the dead of night. Then again, it might have been that Oleg and his signorinas were just gel set in their ’70s Genovese ways.
“Okay then,” I relented, trying to read into his verbal jujitsu without tipping my pitches: bagging this round, giving more ground, resigned for the moment to meeting him on his terms. “Maybe it’s like your motherland thing with the blood feud over there. Like maybe your not speaking the Arab language is part of the problem…the understanding part, either way.”
“What’s to understand? Strap on a suicide belt, blow Israel into oblivion—the Palestinians are dying to take that country out any way they can,” he said, in lockstep, eyes adance. “And Israel’s got to stop them, anyway it can.”
“Right…think I get that. How does the ol’ truism go? You can’t unring a bell. And in the Mideast, you evidently can’t unsnarl such ancient hatreds.” Ewwph, back in the bog. I really didn’t mean to keep poking this hornet’s nest; then again, I supposed I did. I mean, here we were, and there it be, buzzing away like mad.
Oleg’s aside, we circumnavigated a jerking circle of energized young runners outside the FootFactor store next door, there stretching their calves, Achilles and quads, jogging in place to the beat of their bicep-strapped I-Pods, oblivious to the generational divide within the side walls of the flat-faced double storefront façade. Running their mouths as much as their on-road Mizuno trainers, this was more a social than balls-out competitive crew, frustrated cubicle slaves working off a 60-hour week mining data at the corporate keyboard.
The runners’ material reward? Sleek, aerodynamic compression singlets and race-day gear shorts, sweat release mesh distance tops and Coolmax side-vented motion skorts: We cautiously rounded this bouncing post-grad scrum in their stretchy red sleeveless mock turtles, black nylon splice knickers, silver Madison track pants and yellow cross-back jog bras.
“Hmph, get that, do you? Praise be! It’s only been going on just about 60 years now,” Paulen said, stepping aside for a late-lunching reference librarian who had just emerged with frosted tips. “At any rate, what I was referring to was Israel turning away provocateurs of any stripe at its borders. We’ve ventured into freighted territory here, and there simply is no turning back.”
“That a fact,” I wandered. “Hmm, can’t remember if the salon was here when I first came to town…” So maybe Syd did pencil in there for a highlight rinse back then. All I knew was we were closing in on thorny, volatile territory, stretching back to way back, sweeping from Aquatic Park’s steamy bathhouse bleachers to the windy, rotting runways of Crissy Field—that whole first-round Saturnine meshugass.
“I’m talking about terror and violence in the Levant. How the Arabs have been attacking Israel all along.”
“Well, I do know a little bit, doc…enough to where I’m thinking I can hang with it some…” Sure enough, even with these luscious distractions, I could multitask, could walk and blather with the best of them…
Suddenly, a blur of water bottles, swooshed visors and overpronating Asics and Sauconys took our breaths away as these weekend half-marathoners heel-struck en masse up Chestnut, herding toward a breast cancer 10k on the Marina Green. Feeling so old and in the way, we paused for second wind by FootFactor’s running calendar kiosk—full of ads for upcoming fun runs, from Eugene to Big Sur, to San Luis, Laguna and Cabo—all that stretching, so much tensil strength and endurance before, beyond us. I almost wanted to double down in the crusty ol’ Horseshoe Tavern dead ahead and roll some bones.
“Honestly, you may think you know what is going on over there, Herbert,” Paulen said cryptically. “But you can’t begin to fathom what you don’t know. Clearly you could stand to be schooled on a few historical details concerning the Middle East today.”
“Okay already, what the hell do I know?” I averted to a sudden ruckus on the fringes of Steiner Street’s open market, beyond the dissonant intersection of organic fiber/fructose and the sugar fatty cholesterol of All-Star donuts and coffee.
“So let’s keep that in mind before we go waving watermelon colored flags, shall we?”
“Whoa, I’m not taking sides…” Either that, or I just still couldn’t make up my mind on anything this…freighted. “I’m more into forsaking sides altogether.”
Forget the banner headlines blaring Supervisor Jew’s city hall troubles. More local throwaway papers’ main front-page spreads lately had been on what was shaping up to be this particular farmer’s market’s last stand. Picketing at the event’s edges were a cordon of neighborhood activists for hire: busybodies with far too much time on their hands, reputedly under the direction of a leading Marina provocateur with an ambitious agenda all her own.
Their placards read, ‘Not Fresh!’, ‘Not Fair Trade!’, ‘Not Preservative and Pesticide-Free!’, claiming there was something rotten along Steiner Street. But how could anyone sniff out anything tainted or toxic amid that one-block stretch of canopied fruit and vegetable stands, collectively bringing wholesome farm produce from all over California to the Marina’s urban climes?
Even from this far side of Chestnut, doc and I could savor the collective aroma: baskets of sweet strawberries from Watsonville, leafy lettuce and spinach from Salinas and San Joaquin, tree-ripened cherries from Brentwood—peaches, plums and apricots from orchards north. Castroville artichokes, heirloom tomatoes and citrus from the southland, table grapes from Madera or Bakersfield—a soupçon of olives besprinkled about.
Corner to corner, curb to curb, Steiner’s instantly successful Saturday market was garnished with samplings of north coast salmon, farmstead cheeses from Sonoma, hot, doughy breadstuffs from mid-Peninsula bakeries. Toss in trellis racks of brilliant fresh-cut flowers, some banjo-picking folk singers—and city-bound shoppers could easily get carried away to Sebastopol and Kelseyville for the day.
“Very well then, if you are interested, my study of Middle East history affirms that the State of Israel was already under horrific siege on May 14, 1948, its glorious Day of Independence.”
“Interested, me? Of course…I’d have to be…” Really, what was I supposed to say? No thanks, enough, for chrissake, couldn’t care less. Come on, how could I not be interested? “After all, Israel is the swizzler that stirs the Mideast cocktail, right?”
“Hmph, you seem to act as though Jews have no right to their land,” Paulen continued with nary a blink, coursing us through a line of nibbling shoppers and over-exercised seniors. “But you can trace the Twelve Tribes’ claim to Israeli land as far back as the Old Testament Days of Prophecy. Consider Isaiah, Chapter 11: ‘The Lord shall assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth to the Holy Land’. Take the Book of Genesis: ‘God promised all of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, from the Euphrates to the sea’. This is all preordained, the stuff of antiquity—it didn’t just start yesterday.”
“Amen to that…as a matter of fact, I have long wondered about the Energizer Bunny nature of the whole Mideast situation.” Sure, I didn’t want to come across as inhospitable, or god forbid, anti…history. Yeah, listen up, this guy needs to talk for some reason, and there’s a part of me that says, be my guest—just like they told me. “Still and all, I mean c’mon, why can’t they just sit down and settle that mess like sensible people and move on?”
Problem was, Marina throngs in organic thrall: the prospect no longer smelled so sweet to immediate commercial concerns. Already tense over a rash of thuggish street crime, certain district quarters voiced alarm over the added market trash, the increased traffic congestion, but most of all the congestive conflict of interest. Whispered word over our shoulders contended that a cabal of Marina merchants had put the contra demonstrators up to it, sick of the cluttered street fair ambience, of street shoppers loading up on fresh produce, then shunning surrounding brick and mortar stores on their way home. Fed up with the whole nutty notion of indie growers siphoning off foot traffic from established supermarket agribrands, pushing recycled paper over retail plastic like nobody’s business.
But inciting this food feud even further was a neighborhood agitprop who was said to be sabotaging the Steiner farmer’s market to pave the way for her rival operation over by Fillmore Street’s middle school, along with the aid and comfort of a certain dress shopkeeper directly behind us. According to the local newsrags, any such conspiracy was bruited to be working, as the market organization running this certifiably successful affair had grown weary of the protests, entangled concessions, tired of greasing city hall palms—and was finally running out of permits.
“There see,” Paulen gestured toward the Steiner scene, “a homegrown territorial spat. These things happen, even here in San Francisco.”
“More like particularly here…”
So the farmers were now beginning to fold up their demo stalls amid the picketers’ shout downs and catcalls, already packing away their veggie baskets and fruit boxes, resigned to hosing down perfectly wholesome supply, even in the face of still-healthy community demand. Meantime Hop and Hap Hazzerd foraged maniacally through this scrounger’s delight. It appeared that nobody else really won here except the usual neighborhood kabobs of negativism, leaving a bitter taste in a good many other Marina mouths.
“So pu-lease…just research Middle Eastern history for yourself, Herbert. This struggle is Homeric,” Paulen stressed. “It has taken overcoming Babylonian Captivity in 586-538 BCE, a second Temple banishment by the Romans, ensuing desecrations, world wars, a hellacious Shoah and fanatical terrorism to actually begin fulfilling the prophecy of the Promised Land.”
“Ri,ri,ri,right—but like I said, promises in conflict…harder to keep.” There you go, bring a little good Mideast knowledge to the table, keep the ball bouncing. Yessir, we’ve gotten this far, so if the professor aims to continue with his bullet points, let’s see where else they land… “And haven’t I read where early Jewish gangs did their share of tormenting indigenous Palestinians from the get-go?”
“A necessary bit of freedom fighting, Herbert—insurgent Israeli pioneers struggling against British occupation and Arab hatred, whatever it took,” he acknowledged. “Especially when you bear in mind Jewish vulnerability and desperation at the time. What were poor, displaced Jews supposed to do, dog paddle their way to Greenland?”
“North Africa, the white highlands, I’ve heard Uruguay,” I said, pretty much off the top of my head—top of my splitting headache, at that. “But seriously, sometimes it is hard to figure why they ended up smack in the middle of such hostile territory.”
“Very funny—but is Uruguay the Jews’ ancient biblical homeland? Was it the land where the Kingdom of Israel flourished in 1000 B.C.? I think not,” he insisted, pressing his point over the electric rumble of a hard charging MUNI bus. “Any wonder refugees piled onto rust buckets bound for Haifa and Nablus in 1947, struggling to overcome their European nightmare…retreating to their ancestral home?”
“Well if you ask me, it’s like the postwar U.N. plan was giving a land of no clearly defined people to the people of no land at all.” The Stockton bus having trollyed along, I picked up on some banjo riffs over on Steiner, not bad, somewhere between David Bromberg and early Ry Cooder. “Pushing out a whole slew of Palestinians in the process…”
Such messy boycotts and demonstrations were the price of doing small business in hyper territorial San Francisco. Just the same, what were promoters thinking? Farmer’s markets on a Steiner Street already lined with restaurants, wall to wall? Bordering one side alone were Parma Italian, Hibachi Korean, Spanish tapas and French-inspired Montequilla, gourmet burgers, grilled skewers, Orecchiette with Pancetta, and saffron paella with nectar wine.
The west sidewalk of restaurant row fronted thin-crust east coast pizza, contemporary Vietnamese, country Chinese, rock ‘n’ roll Wasabi and wet-aged steaks & chops—never mind the nearby donut and gourmet sweet chocolate shops. For that matter, neither did organic farmer produce quite square with the Nudie Sushiria. What did granny apples and free-range rutabagas have to do with Edamame, Unagi, Hamachi Kama, Gyoza, Miso Walu-tini or Moriawase Plate? Doc and I chewed over that dislocation as we turned past the Bonzai grill and wine bar to shuffle once again out Chestnut.
“Your terms, not mine—but the sad truth is Palestinians never had constituted a recognized nation. Make no mistake, Israel is real, unlike some mythical land called Mandate Palestine by colonizing powers. Moreover, Arabs generally rejected that eminently fair U.N. partition plan in 1948 that Israel’s founder embraced, I might add. And Israelis have been fighting off their threats and attacks ever since.”
“Do you mean real, as in with facts on the ground?” And yet, this nudge didn’t quite square with my incipient shaking and rattling as we rolled on along. I could feel it down to my fingertips, deep into the side pockets of my neurological genes, whilst I was getting a bit wobbly in the walking shoes, what with so many motives and particulars seesawing under foot.
“Defensible borders, my friend,” Paulen said quizzically, seeming to re-size me up and down—qualitatively and quantitatively, as it were. “Secure, defined borders for their homeland—we’re looking at survival, pure and simple—you do see that, don’t you Herbert?”
“Yeah, but simple survival only gets you so far…this much, I know.” Personal knowledge—hard earned, to be sure. Still, this knot on my noggin was growing like a hybrid organic radish, along with a near migraine of Nietzschian proportions.
Pulsing back to Chestnut Street, I did happen to recall the safe harbor refuge a roomy, skylit book/café was back in those personal survival days. Now home to Rue Seine: how a funky/flannel farmer’s market might be soiling this haute designer dress shop’s business was anybody’s guess.
We passed that salmon pink and green double storefront, toward another Art Deco-style duplex. A more offbrand women’s fashion retailer anchored its street level space, with an old green eyeshade CPA-steno-notary outfit still cooking the books one flight up, as though there were long black Packards and Kaiser-Frasers full of bagmen idling curbside below, ill-suited myrmidons puffing stogies and flasking down for the count.
A much larger former bank branch served next door as a reminder that even on Chestnut Street, Pottery Barn rules applied. The crockery chain broke the place down, and were gutting, renovating the cavernous space 24/7: Transition, downmarket to relentlessly upstyle, in the rub of a drywall dust-styed eye. On second thought, maybe my bitter taste was product of the smoky tar wagon some roofers had planted between two sickly, misplaced sycamore trees overhanging the sidewalk, directly out front of the stone-glazed Barn. The store’s huge preview window posters already showcased florid draperies and mohair ottomans, white wicker patio tables and red leather easy chairs—not a whole lot of crafty pottery to be seen.
Defensive point made, Paulen glanced up at an array of massive rooftop billboards for assorted import beer and cognac, then digressed with a trace of consternation to reflect on how Boulder also had its share of food fights, only on a supermarket scale, before he sighed: “Scuttling a harmless little farmer’s market for godsakes. So much for San Francisco’s peace, harmony and Summer of Love…” As if Hippie Hill be-in’s had ever actually tripped on over to this plummier part of town.
“Hey, that all was San Francisco decades ago,” I said, after noting how Wild Oats Natural Foods couldn’t carve out much of a niche on Chestnut Street either. Momentarily catching my gaze once more, that had to be bad smoke rising up there on the Heights, again with the sirens, sure as the Divisadero inferno once raged down this way. “It’s not 1967 here anymore.” Much less some 22 years hence…
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Five. With the
discussion homing in on ever-more-relevant issues
Middle East, identities blur some, past altercations
closing in—albeit amid scaled-up surroundings…