Chapter Twenty-One
“A confluence of influences
can distort the music
to your ears.”
“Agh, Polk Street—they’ ve got every little spot marked off—can’t stand here, that doorway’ s mine…”
“What about Market Street?”
“Store pigs—put up no trespassing signs, hatin’ on the homeless, call the pigs on you. I’m, like, don’t go tazin’ me, bro .”
“Civic Center?”
“With all them hardcore stinkin’ homeless?! I’m tellin’ you, it’s murder out here…”
It felt like the traffic lights had been stuck on red for hours. Reese Paulen and I had fled the Town Tavern without further incident, bypassing touch-and-go tourists who scuffled around this stretch increasingly as the day wore on. Which delivered us unto Lombard Street—its straight and narrow, not famous corkscrew stretch—however crooked this touro-ghetto may have been as well. Here, a dozen or so short blocks of tasteless restaurants, charmless shack-up motels and pseudo-San Francisco nightlife bilked captive out-of-towners with slimmer budgets and even skimpier imaginations or appetites for adventure.
We soon stalled along with a herd of Middle Americans at a yellow, waffled handicap cut-out for the Fillmore Street crosswalk, just outside a greasy KFC/Taco Bell on the brink of demolition in favor of a new, improved, transfat-free facade. Waiting out the pedestrian timer, our slumping little bunch quailed at the two-way roar of Highway 101’s traffic—the parade of weekend-packed SUVs—inhaling diesel smoke spewing from decapitated open-air busloads of tourists bound back and forth from the Golden Gate Bridge and Muir Woods, not to mention the artery clogging aroma of fried chicken and spuds.
Tailgating the northern flow, a black bar windowed hard-time express up from the LA Department of Corrections, fumed toward for the Big House at San Quentin. I could only flash on a jaundiced, joint-liberated JT, once reigning over in Aquatic Park. Then there was this mouthy panhandler squatting stoutly between The Colonel and a MUNI shelter, jobbing a mocha-clutching visitor in a teal Sharks hockey jersey—the same chucklehead we’d seen tangling with the liquor storeowner up on Union Street, a street person I recognized I had spotted many times, in way too many places before.
“So, you stay at the shelters, or…”
“Naww, man—them places is snakepits.” Hap Hazzerd, a prematurely toothless beggar now bundled in oversized Goodwill winter layers covering his tracks and a flat-billed BevMo ballcap, cradling an ‘I Am A Diabetic Depressive’ sign, dragging heavily on a scavenged butt, talking shop with a stroll-by Frappucino-lathered sightseer. “Me and my brutha got a system…”
“Brother?” These latter inquiries came from a wheelchair and crutch case respectively, waiting to board the next 22 Fillmore south, to demand their rights, hold up the jam-packed bus and be raised on the front door’s handicap lift, grinding traffic to a bitter halt—if need be, even fixing to make a Federal case out of it.
“My older bro, Hop—he got the corner across Lombard there, playing the Jew’s harp,” said Hap. No musician he, but Hap did sport a tiny transistor radio in his coat’s vest pocket, nothing but the hits. “We split an SRO on our combined SSIs…the rest is gravy.”
“Mouth harp,” Paulen corrected, as we waited out the wail of an emergency siren rapidly gaining decibels up Lombard Street, nudging bumpers along the speedway lanes of this teeming armrest-tourism berth canal, creeping frantically through traffic hell bent on the Golden Gate, if not the redwood paradise beyond.
Hap’s tinny AM radio signaled a newsbreak bulletin, on the latest devastating car wreck beginning to block traffic up on Doyle Drive’s approach, further details squelched by the red and white blur of an SFFD Heavy Rescue Van. The very thought of another bridge ramp crash-and-burn took me groggily back to my first San Francisco visit, longer ago than I dared recall. That time, a Sausalito-bound Porsche Targa compacted into three grisly pieces against the curving toll plaza guardrail on a foggy Friday morning, its driver’s bodily whereabouts up in pre-dawn smoke and flames. Upon reflection, the sight of that sheer vehicular disintegration may well have been something of a personal omen: doomed projectile Porsches and the Marina, all over again.
“You know, I’m sorta getting a headache here,” I said, dome feeling as if it were a honeydew melon in the Jaws of Life—occupational hazard, freelance assignment notwithstanding. In a residual TBI haze, I felt my ears ringing, or was it all the rubbed-raw meat in between them, the whole bell chiming in? So I was doing a personal concussion protocol: How many fingers? Where are you? What day is it? What are you doing here?! “Think I might peel off and head back up the hill…”
“Nonsense, isn’t there a drug store somewhere near here?” Paulen fiddled with his phone.
“I guess, around the corner down Chestnut there…” Yeah, hmm, that grueling climb back to whatever remained of a roily old house…maybe, on second thought…
Lombard traffic slowly re-merging up to a red light, we prepared to cross, though not before ingesting one last snootful of Extreme Quesadillas and Burritos bel Grande, and a breaking newsradio report on Israel’s latest rocket strike at Gaza’s Hamas targets. Giving ground to the passing ambulance, then a silver Chevy Tahoe wheeling out of a cookie cutter motel across Fillmore into the Lombard back-up, we nervously traversed six wide yellow-striped lanes of agitated motorists and a center divider of sooty, exhausted shrubs.
“So then we’ll go get you some Tylenol,” Paulen said, looking both ways, gauging the braking distance of an oncoming Golden Gate Transit coach. “Honestly, you can’t strand me here in tourist hell. Besides, you were going to show me to that other jazz venue, were you not?”
“Oh, right—the ’Trane Tribute,” I rallied, feeling the squeeze from another angle, ducking in behind him, just ahead of a whale-painted San Anselmo bus, with its two trail bikes racked on front like the cow catcher of a Willits steam locomotive. Odd, this jazz riff, when the tune actually rocking my head at the moment was Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab, no no no’. “It’s over at the Palace of Fine Arts.”
“Fine, Saint Coltrane, it is,” he said, as we safely reached the opposing curb. “In the meantime, you ask what’s to know. Well, for one thing, there’s Gaza, with Hamas acting out over there again. Seems we can’t get away from the Mideast business, now can we…”
“Can’t get away from the harp over there, either,” I snapped, glancing across Fillmore to brother Hop, twanging away, albeit with a bloodied, rag-wrapped hand, stomping his toe-scraped, heel-worn combat boot to a bluegrass beat in the doorway of a weekdays-only Honda service center, harping for pennies or the dollar tourists dropped into his floppy beret. Like his brother, Hop had long ago progressed from feeding the pigeons to getting these pigeons to feed him. But Mideast business? Can’t get away? “Mideast? How ’bout let’s not, and say we didn’t…”
Truth was, I did feel a bit shaky, concussive woozy about then—putting one and one together on the Moulton Street rebar hit, Hop-wise. No help were the diesel smoke fumes from a transplanted red double-decker London bus, wavy with ‘jump on-jump off’ tourists up top. Maybe I would be better to stay the course here anyhow, rather than trudging back uphill empty handed—path of least resistance, not to mention the hazardous duty pay.
Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to see where he might be going with this Mideast stuff—whether his second Rendezvous rang true, much less mine. Dame Thornia wouldn’t have it any other way, wherever she may be. What, for instance, did this fascination with Jewishness say about him? This had nothing to do with me, per se—right? Really, who was I to say? What was I to know about it? But how could I blow off the issue of Israel and the Arabs without coming off like some kind of nazi symp? On the other hand, what did my curiosity say about me?
“Easier said than unsaid, my friend…especially depending on your perspective.”
“My perspective? No thanks, I’ll pass,” I noticed how the elder Hazzerd brother was drawing a small crowd between him and the outbound MUNI stop, locals apparently waiting on the bus up to the Marin Headlands and Tennessee Valley, paying for the musical privilege with their nickels and dimes. I was just wary that he might be making me hip-wise for bearing witness, or that doc was uneasy himself. “That bro’s not bad over there, huh?”
“How can he go wrong with a Jew’s harp,” Paulen said drolly, now that we had passed traffic-snarled motel row comparatively bedbug free. Although he instead seemed to take keener note of the roving, mini-skirted whorology. Today, these usually solo streetwalkers were being herded, escorted by a legion of protesting slutwalkers, all virally aroused by rumors of a pole tax on city strip clubs, chanting the likes of, ‘Don’t assess our asses’ or ‘No tax on our racks’. “And what exactly do you mean…pass?”
“Nothing,” I wished I knew why the hell he would pick me to lay this on. Anyway, remember, let him do most of the talking—seemed like he was wont to do that anyhow. But he was going to be springing for the pain relievers, that was for damn sure. All right then, here goes nothing…pushing buttons along the way. “Just how the Israelis and the Palestinians keep pounding at one another, that’s all…”
“Well, shouldn’t you care to know that for Israel’s part, it has been getting Qassam rocket shelled every day for months now, and it’s finally firing back,” he said, pausing to windowshop at yet another cell phone outlet. “Palestinians incinerate buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv cafés with their suicide girls and rabbi masquerades. Arabs turn everyday life into grotesque, twisted ruins, and drive Jewish citizens into bomb shelters and safe rooms. So Israel has no choice but to target the terrorist cowards. It’s retaliation, plain and simple, biblical eye for an eye…”
“But you’re an expert sociologist, doc,” I joined him in scanning the corner store’s display, full of cellular coverage maps, new Blackberry Curves, MP-4 Pod knockoffs, flimsy keyboards and wireless Jawbone hand/ear attachments, not unlike his own. “How are negative reinforcement and zero-sum annihilation getting anybody anywhere over there?”
“Look, I don’t care for the cross-border raids and air strikes anymore than the next person, but what else are Israelis supposed to do,” he plained, as we moved on past an office front of a tech-savvy neighborhood dentist who pulled out all the gadget stops with video screens, poster perfect cosmetic smiles, sidewalk gag chopper implants and animated funhouse mirrors. “This transcends social science. Israel is a little Jewish lifeboat in a welling sea of Arab hatred, which is precisely where their neighbors repeatedly vow to push it.”
“Into the sea, you mean,” I said, my poor teeth ached just thinking about the place, air-abrasion painless treatment, or no—while the air outside was now thick with the homesick, deep-dish aroma from a Chicago-bred pizza parlor right there across Fillmore Street. “But haven’t Muslim militants tried that before?”
“When have they stopped trying? And this, after Israel agreed to give back Gaza in ’05—unilaterally, yet. Whatever happened to land for peace, for godsakes?!”
“You tell me, you’re the expert,” I recoiled. Here we were, the two of us trading takes, body language and facial ticks—Paulen’s will-you-tell overture. And who knew what he or I actually thought about the subsoil they might reveal? “I only go by what’s in the news…”
We stepped around two lithe, flexing young women sweeping into an IsoBar Method yoga/exercise studio with pink and purple mat rolls slung over their shoulders. Frame straightening, core muscle toning, hip slimming, orthopedic isometrics for the younger, exclusively distaff side. I could recall when this place was a freeweight, no-holds-barred body bar, the district’s most notorious pick-up scene outside of the Marina Safeway. Paulen leered in as though he had never seen the likes of this before, unlikely though that was.
I drifted back to circling this block in my clunky Volvo sedan, compelled to catch a glimpse of Her coming out of the hot and sweaty Nautilus Workout Center, whether and with whom she’d be toweling down with next. I remembered there was a laundromat across Fillmore Street there, where I would frantically wait out that heavy damn load.
Speeding up, heating up…like my white-matter brain was Schizoaffective Bipolar on a nitro-methane overdose, my aching cranium gripping atop its brainstem like a shrunken skull toggle on a Speed Queen rotary control. Running myself through the ringer, spin cycling around the tumble dryer in my mind. Her, Chicago, hot and sweaty, just friends: It was all such dirty laundry—still is, swirling and twirling around…
“Besides, that Gaza gesture wasn’t easy, I’ll have you know,” Paulen added, dwelling upon studio photos of the firm female buns, tight abs and Speedo thighs IsoBar’s Method promotionally promised. “Even for an Ariel Sharon—there’s been a heavy political price to pay at home.”
“Seems like he’s paid a heavier price than that,” I said, as we encountered the fishy smell of a sleek, minimalist sushi bar, saki bombs away, which had just finished windowdressing its Yellowtail, Hamachi Poke, Red Dragon, Tonkatsu and Sea Urchin Roe—so real, and colorfully raw, a glassy display that all but took my appetite by storm. “I mean, you know, stroke-wise…”
Yes, stroke-wise, round and round the block back then to a loopy Bob Seger beat, timing her high-toned escapade, catching a glimpse: The amalgamated aromas hereabouts were now making me dizzier, queasier—the mainline artery up my neck throbbing, suddenly starving for the salutary oxygen a passing 43 MUNI bus was snuffing out as it accelerated toward Lombard Street, ‘Justice for Palestine’ billboard on its side panel. Smoky diesel fumes clouded my view up Fillmore, prompting my imagination to run cloudy wild with submerged imagery.
“There see,” Paulen pointed to the bus ad, “the outrageous, unmitigated gall.”
Sudden sirens… beyond Chestnut Street, there emerged anew an abject collapse of Dame’s stucco frame digs out into Fillmore’s southbound lanes, dire, precious minutes after Loma Prieta, ’89. Days later, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio himself was standing stoop-shouldered on line outside that massive white and aquamarine middle school, the Yankee Clipper waiting humbly for post-quake relief like everybody else down here.
Then there was a magic Sunday night more than eight years before that, when the long-suffering 49er Faithful roared back, exploding through this very intersection in anarchic celebration a lá Montana-to-Clark, torching furniture mid block, ripping down trolley wires and parading along Chestnut Street in ’Niner colored convertibles and full football regalia. Endlessly honking airhorns…so much going on: recalling a boozy, Maui Wowie cheer and smear of 49eer banners or Cowboy potshots that crazy January night.
Caught up in such super victorious mayhem, we had all ducked into fabled Marina Joe’s. There at the street corner was an old-school Marina staple where we’d gorged on Anchor Steam drafts and Hangtown Fries, toasting a brewing ’Niner dynasty amid a euphoric, chaotic tide of the NFC champ’s red and gold. But that was then. For by now, Joe’s joynt had devolved through the years and belly-up eateries into a slick young dinner club painted boulevard black, cooly serving up Caprese Skewers, Bearnaise Benedict and bottomless Mimosa sans the swagger and swag.
Diesel plumes slowly dissipating, about all I could spot beyond Chestnut Street today, however, were more tangled trolley wires and the return of that Saturn airship—well above block after Fillmore block of retrofit Spanish-style apartment houses. The blimp glided over them like a salami sausage toward the Marina Green, as though it were ghosting giddy, awestruck promenade throngs at the 1916 Pan-Pacific Exposition. Just the same, Marin’s hills provided backdrop to this day, beyond the free-floating, sailboating Bay.
“Losing Ariel Sharon was a tragedy of timing,” Paulen slid past a stalled shopping cart woman, recycle can bag bulging off one side, bottle bag off the other. “Since then, Israel has been desperate for genuine leadership… for any real sense of safety and security.”
“Aren’t they working around that,” I coughed. So let’s see if I can earn my keep, hang with doc here, as in the olden days—playing a bit of cavil’s advocate. Like a balloon releasing pressure, I just blurted without a moment’s thought. Mind adrift, where was my inner spam filter when I needed one? “Fact by fact on the ground?”
“Hmph. Look, all you need to understand is that shelling nonsense and suicide tunneling had better stop soon,” he suddenly tapped his earphone, stabbing into his jacket pocket for his cell phone, quick on the draw. “Israel can only afford to put up with it for so long.”
“Whatever…sounds like you would know better about that…” I could now hear a bit more from ‘Back to Black’, the soulful beat of ‘You Know I’m No Good’ crying out from the brown-on-black side door of the Cynque Lounge, reverbing off those same boxy apartment buildings across Fillmore Street. High time for an OBAMA ’08 billboard/megaphone campaign truck to be rolling on by: ‘Yes we can, damn straight, sure as hell can’…
“You know about his Kenyan father and Muslim ties,” Paulen said with a jaundiced eye. “Chances are he’s got some bias in him by birth. That can’t be good for Israel and the Jews…”
Heady days, pounding headache, I was hopefully disentangled, then hopelessly engaged all over again. Homeless in the Marina—looking for any angle or escape route, spinning between my sideburns like an IsoBar Method aerobic hamster. Cynque’s stereo system was tracking into ‘Some Unholy War’; and due respect to Newman, Siebel and Bromberg, I was thinking how much I really dug Amy Winehouse.
How could Ms. Back to Black could be Lady Day reincarnate under all that juicy ink when—oops, snaaaping back: I instead picked up a twang of Jew’s harp accompaniment Hopping our way up Fillmore. Which only summoned forth the rework of a late-70s Pinko anthem, a taunting little ditty I’d heard that troubled Berkeley troubadour-provocateur play outside Mecca Java up there a couple of months before. Ah, yes, Mecca Java—but scat, out of my head with that, get the whole twisted refrain the hell out of my skull—those cold, cold running Waters—before I start going off in some kind of echo-karaoke seizure, right here on the spot. Losing game—no, shake it off—I said stop it this minute!!! Roger that…
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Two. A sudden turn of
corner yields fuzziness and bluster,
bringing this Middle East exchange
sharper focus.