Chapter Three
“Never know what Saturn has
in store. Only that it keeps
coming back for more.”
“Believe me, Sammy—I believe what I say. I may not always believe exactly in the way I punch and phrase it, but you best believe what I say is what I’m really sayin’, no matter what…”
We slipped fully out of Mecca Java into the aromatic light of day, pausing on clogged Fillmore Street long enough to get bogged down in this blustery caffeinated chatter percolating from the other of the sidewalk tables just outside the café’s glass window wall. Sunny seating, smoker central: basking in the brutal midday rays, a churlish row of indigenous deadenders, high-maintenance lushes, physical illiterates milled about in various stages of Sedentary Death Syndrome, sullen guys all clutched up in their smoldering pathologies, shrinking java men sucking on their crusty mustaches with hands stuffed deep in their empty pockets, eyes downcast for loose change and salvageable, smoldering filter-tip butts.
“Yah, bud, I believe in the power of words, alright, and how I use ’em to say what I really truly believe…in my mind, that is. I just start rantin’…I mean, there may be times when it sounds like I don’t know, but you better know that I know, deep down. And that’s all I need to know. You know, you never know, right?”
The tautological sniping and rancor seemed as out of place today as this dead poets society’s heavily layered clothes. Two idle housepainters hunched over the table nearest Mecca’s doors: a paintball in latex-flecked coveralls continued beseeching his colleague in the primer-coated hooded sweatshirt. While Paulen seemed momentarily distracted by the bull session, not to mention Mork’s manic riffing with some S.F.P.D. uniforms over at the cop stand, I was getting dizzy, somewhat retroactively so, what with all the recidivist bombast and invective. Or maybe it was doc’s contentious attitude in Mecca’s, or the peripheral sight of the old Elite Café over across Fillmore.
“Ahh, dreaded words, they will get you every time,” said Paulen dismissively. “Plenty of disturbed street people around here too, I see.”
“Hard to tell,” I dodged. “Lotta these guys are just a payday away…”
“Then don’t believe me, asshole,” snapped the coveralled painter, “maybe I am a little crazy. But on my meds, I’m goddamn righteous.”
“Looks as though it’s not paying off,” Paulen slid back over, as if to nudge me away, toward the streetcorner, Mecca Java’s Mideast music soundtrack quickly fading in the face of live tuning and jamming, overdubbed by some Will Downing and Kenny G blaring from a KBLX radio booth straight ahead of us.
“Something like that,” I muttered, that sort of crowd still giving me the shivers to this day. I reached in through a dark-blue fleece vest—my favorite to be sure: straight-up collar, plenty of pockets, not least this little lower-back number sewn into the lining, sort of like a serious shoplifter’s coat, through which I could pick at personal stashes of breath mints and all.
“Well, I see that at least the ol’ Elite hasn’t changed much over there,” Paulen peered past the crowd, catching sight of Dennis Quaid’s private party being ushered into a bustling wood-paneled bistro, frozen in Hammett/Bogart time. “Although I remember it better as the Asia Grill.”
“Sorry to say,” shuddering at the sight of its dark, discretely den-like booths, “so do I…”
As we merged into foot traffic, a trim, unspeakably bespoke tailored former mayor flying-wedged between us, linebacker posse clearing the way. Willie Brown had just emerged from Mrs. Dewson’s Hats sporting her latest gun-gray Borsalino, daiquiri feather in its brandy sash. He’d had much to do with jumpstarting this weekend’s proceedings, so much political capital invested in a Fillmore District reborn, and was determined to glide and preside over the length and breadth of this scene—all twelve blocks of it—legacy driven, term limits be damned. That’s why I yielded to da Mayor emeritus and his entourage, still cutting a wide, glad-handing swath, Paulen nimbly deferring to him just the same.
“Now all we need is Governor Moonbeam to show up—a veritable Celebrity City,” he watched Robin bound away from the cop stand out California Street, Macchiato in hand, his jacket’s U.S.O. sleeve patch reflecting the sun rays, memento from holidays spent bringing hopped-up Hope to a raw redeployment of overseas troops, good morning, Bagram and Baghdad—open-hearted lion that he was. “The only action I’ve been seeing in Boulder of late are Ramsey tabloid news crews and the occasional Dan Fogelberg sighting, and I hear he’s not doing well himself these days.”
“So, what was that about the Ramseys?” Ex-mayor aside, I found myself averting from the crowds and Elite Café, over to a rock-solid brick face apartment building across the California-Fillmore intersection, a brown and white fortress that shook and swayed like the devil during Loma Prieta, that copy shop I swore was coming down on top of us, women shrieking, guys ducking as reams and cartons of colored papers tumbled from throbbing store shelves, Xerox machines seizing up in power failure.
There I was in ’89, crawling on all fours, clutching my egg-shell business card stock out CopyLand’s door—onto California Street, where opposing store fronts waggled, pavement rolled, sight lines shifting, sewers spewing forth into dusty traffic stalls while utility lines crackled and whipsawed out past the Presidio Heights horizon to the sea. Would the shaking and rumbling ever end? Would one more earth wave bring all these buildings down in smoky heaps of brick and board?
But of course that was another tale entirely. Presently, there was this further diversion, up there through a crosshatching tangle of overhead trolley wires and junction switches, to that bright red airship hovering against a clear cyan sky. Block letter stenciled along its near side in white was the word, RELAY…or was it REPLAY? No matter, for as the blimp droned into a 180-degree turn, the flip side read, of all things, SATURN.
“Nothing that I’m sure you haven’t already seen and heard,” Paulen wafted, still drawing a bead on Robin, now climbing into the shotgun side of a pitch-black Range Rover waiting near Steiner Street. Mork quickly vanished, slamming behind smoked windows, beaming off to his Sea Cliff birdcage, an au pair Mindy whisking him away. Whispers were he was en route to St. Helena, rehabbing over rumored marital trouble in a Wine Country hideaway.
“Yet it still hangs out there, now doesn’t it?” On the queasy side, I could but flash on that thick foggy night out on Clement Street, fleeing from mick NORAIDers and South Dublin gunrunners forcibly fundraising in the Mossy Bog Public House. Then there was Robin Williams, improvising at the Holy City Zoo several blocks away, riffing on a late Sunday night, filching jokes, thoroughly upstaging John Cantu. How he ever got away with it still escaped me to this day: climbing on that squad car’s hood at closing time, taunting both cops through their windshield, pounding glass in what the shotgun side cracked had to be a cocaine rage. They just laughed and nodded as he Mork flew away into the gray, soupy dark toward 6th Avenue. Oh, what a night: Saviors though they were, the uniforms couldn’t begin to grokk his comic genius then either. “So who do you think actually did JonBenet in?”
“Who knows anymore?” Paulen averted in passing, leading us on our little walk-talk. “But take lovable ol’ Mork. He’s Jewish by choice, you know, like Liz Taylor. Ah, yes, gorgeous Elisheva Rachel herself. Want to head up Fillmore? I’ve already been down that way…”.
“Pro choice, huh,” I muttered, thinking still with the dodge, this wouldn’t be so easy after all. We drifted into line with the next pedestrian bridge crossing California to the forced whistles of pseudo-cop security guards—here, at the virtual epicenter of JazzStreet I. “Sadder to say, I’ve been down there too.”
Sure, this may not have been the full-blown midsummer Fillmore Street Jazz Festival, but JazzStreet was the next best gig. A dozen or so barricaded blocks of worldly music, native arts, gluttony and simmering mayhem, da Mayor Emeritus’s pet jazz festival was designed to pick up the tempo of the Fillmore’s cultural rebirth of the cool. ‘Down there’ of course meant The District itself—more specifically, the Jazz Preservation District, a storied City neighborhood rebounding after being torn asunder by ruthless 1960s redevelopment. Live jazz stretched all the way to Ellis, gettin’ down there past shabby, scissor-barred storefronts, rickety Carpenter’s Gothic apartment houses and boxy bland, tall mall/condo towers.
Lower Fillmore once bore shades of tonal greatness, eminently Harlem West: Duke, Dizzy, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins slipping into ‘the Mo’ on the down-low, sleek black Roadmaster coupes delivering these giants to the Blue Mirror, Club Flamingo, Jack’s Tavern, Juneteenth at the Texas Playhouse, or New Orleans Swing Club for a little rainy late-night jamming after hotel headlining atop Nob Hill. On lucky nights, Lady Day would be sitting in with John Handy, Pony Poindexter, Stanley Willis and Vernon Alley over at Jimbo’s Bop City—Teddy Edwards’s tenor sax blowing everybody out of that cozy cigar box of a place, over to the Bal Masque Ballroom or Blackshear’s Café Society.
Hard-earned chops, old school dedication—Fillmore’s timeless jazz masters blanched at what was to come of their brassy jams, the whole straight-ahead 4/4 syncopated milieu. White rabbits, white noise, white grave crosses: Ghosts of Reverends Jones and Bill Graham, the Beatified Triangle of Winterland, the People’s Temple and Fillmore West, were by now mostly bulldozed into yesteryears’ infamy and lore. But the Fillmore itself was finally getting its groove back, after, lo, these many years.
Hence right about now, the Preservation Big Band was anchoring a distant Ellis Street sound stage, getting Basie down for the Count. Sonny Foster’s Trio was wringing mileage out of “Round About Midnight at the Blackhawk” in that smooth new District club serving up Ethiopian cuisine across from the old Chicago Barber Shop. The Swing Sisters mugged early Ella on that windblown turf over Geary Street, in the imposing shadow of Big Brother, of the Dead, Quicksilver Messenger and the Old Fillmore’s other dearly departed. Some Motley McGuires Band would be blowin’ the Doors off the upstairs auditorium, that one-time Carousel Ballroom, on this Saturday evening or so its jumbotron marquee would have us believe.
I continued peering down mid-Fillmore to the District, where the legit action was—so telephoto close yet perspectively far—everything scrunched together amid all that jazz. Street merch, that is—certifiable credwear, the real Afro-cultural deal. Smoke billowed up from the general vicinity of O’Farrell Street, from deep vats of Cajun red beans and Baweri Jambalaya, pool-sized open grills of corncobs and fatback ribs.
Seriously cut, pumped-up homies in full black-striped sweats inhaled hubcap platefuls of gumbo, kabobs and deep-fried snapper, gangsta leaning against rap or cognac-postered lightpoles, dagger-eyeing the colors and pit bulls on parade. Turned-out full figure squeezes tended street stands flush with tribal print dashikis, feather boas, Rastafarian leather and Zulu ceremonial head dresses—red, green and yellow-trimmed—alongside onyx toe rings and suede-braided hookahs on stacked CDs ranging from Master Mamou to the Machete Ensemble to bootlegged Sugar Pie de Santo
“Yes, I noticed on this flyer that the jazz fest is spread out in venues all over town,” Paulen pulled a neon green leaflet out of his jacket’s breast pocket. “I was discussing it with this chap who recommended I begin at the beginning—made sense, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I suppose that when you’re not sure what you’re looking for, that’s always the best place to start. Anyway, it’s been quite a while since I’d been down that way myself before today.”
“Incidentally, do you know what the Fillmore was before it became jazz central?”
“Before? No, I don’t go back quite that far…” I gave space to a noted San Francisco dandy, fresh from lower Fillmore in spiffy graphite corduroy jacket, violet linen high-collar shirt and cabernet bow tie, splendid grey bowler lid matching his straight, pleated slacks—smiling like a greeter at some Big-Four hotel symposium, rabbit’s foot swinging from a lapel chain.
“The Jewish Fillmore, that’s what. Enterprising Jews like Flamm, Goldstein, Koblick and Goldenrath veritably built the district, mostly migrating over from south of the slot. Prominent Yekkas and the like had been there since Gold Rush days, then progressive socialists teemed in, with an orthodox pocket on McAllister. Shops like Shenson’s, Waxman’s Eagle Market, Diller’s Strictly Kosher Restaurant; Temple Beth on Geary and the bustling Webster Street Shul. All the vibrant Yiddish and Zionist aspirations—Fillmore Street lined with tall silver metal arches, cross-forming a brilliantly globe lit crown over each intersection, Fulton up to Sacramento. Yes, it’s a proud history, especially from a socio perspective. Don’t ask me how I know all this, but not bad for an expat, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah—pretty…interesting,” I replied, not exactly catching the connection. Interesting, for sure—that neutral, non-committal nether word, sort of a manicured, better mannered whatever. On the other hand, this little factoid was good to know, to file away, even though I could have sworn I’d heard it somewhere before. We parted like the Red Sea for a pair of black denim clad headbangers, heavy on the chrome studs and chains, full up with heinous tattooed body art. “But I guess World War II changed that, huh?”
“Whoa, do I detect reticence?” Paulen pushed against my unease as we closed ranks again. “In any case, Jewish folk had mostly moved out of the Fillmore into the Richmond by that time. Then came post-war suburbanization, interfaith assimilation. Alas, I remember my mother always saying, nothing good lasts long in San Francisco for long.”
It was during my earlier sweep down fair that gangs of this gritty, edgier crowd had peeled off behind the Nawlins Zydeco Band marching across Fillmore’s overpass, hog Harleys and Muni buses roaring along the Geary tunnel below. I mentioned stopping by the Boom-Boom Room, for a late-morning retroblast of some dark and dirty Chicago-laced blues, long-lost visions of Willie Dixon, Muddy and Buddy Guy—seeing if John Lee might still be Hookin‘ in his private red leather booth. Paulen countered that from Geary on, the tempo eased, lyrics got cleaner, the Sangria sweeter, everything seemed to lighten up, block by city block.
“Reticence, me? Not in the least.” I still wondered why here, why now, consigned to exploring the counterpoints not yet taken as we turned our backs on it all. “Sooo, you left Boulder for the Bay—what’s that about? I mean, it’s such a great town and all…”
“Came for the rainbow weddings at City Hall,” Paulen mused. “What else?”
“No, seriously…” Why was he really skirting Boulder like this? For a fleeting moment, it was almost like back in the day, the two of us comparing footnotes and citings, contrasting annotations—petty caviling and plagiarism never far from the margins—somewhere between clashociates and frenemies. I mean, what was he taking me for now, some kind of lost and found moron? Well, I’d show him I could hang with him, wherever the hell this went. Still, his crack did set me to wondering.
“Or was it the waters? After all, you know dry Colorado can be. I also felt the need to take a little breather from the heat.”
“Right, beating the heat,” I should have remembered, after all the time spent deconstructing and reconstructing the whole damn Boulder wipeout. How do you forget such an open-and-shut, prima facie case of intrapersonal manslaughter? Sure enough, I could relive it like it was last doomsday, aeons before JonBenet roped in the town. “That heat’ll get you every time…”
Care for more?
“Saturn is determined to
revolve. So are you destined
to evolve, or doomed
to devolve?
“This’s just the treatment, understand…”
“Looks like not a whole lot more than an elevator pitch to me.”
“Gotta full-out script—my agent’s all over it—best believe.”
“They optioning this thing, or…”
One Mecca Java table to our left, a pair of would-be cinemauteurs shuffled several sheets of photocopied paper back and forth—fringe screen scribes well past their primetime windows of opportunity. Sharkskin suit vests over Aqua and Dreamworks t-shirts respectively: they must have spun over from North Beach for a hit of StreetJazz, stonily reliving their Keystone Corner nights.
The phlegmish, craggier of the two looked like he had hitchhiked down the yellow brick road to West Hollywood far too often, coming back north empty promised every time. His longhaired, acne-pocked fellow gaffer bore the medallion of a late-shift cabbie, with a scratched-out screen treatment of his own, based primarily on long hours trolling The Beach and SOMA clubs for ditzy, overloaded fares. With that hustle, I could still relate to this day. “Naw, we’re in development, Chaz—pre-development, Nick Cage’s nibblin’…”
“Oh, I dig…”
“Naw, man—it’s legit happening this time,” coughed the bereted bit screenplayer, now recollating his loose white pages into a stained chipboard folio. “Green light, done deal—just a matter of time…”
“Yah, slow option death, Jules. But the time’s running out..”
“Interesting conversation there,” Reese Paulen noted, “the whole verbal to visual process….”
“Uh-huh—but what’s that about ethnographically,” I ventured warily. My eyes wandered past the wifi screen hacks, toward a lavender SF ball capped duo two tables over, paging through the latest Bay Times—likely not caring about or knowing Nick Cage from Nick Cave. “You mean the whole gay thing?”
It hadn’t always been so edgy in Mecca J, but of course 9/11 changed everything. For more broadly, Mecca Java had an unmistakable Middle Eastern flavor. Not necessarily at first glance: With poster-plastered walls, unevenly stained paneling and sticky slate floors, there was little to distinguish it from every other neighborhood café around town. But the coffee was predominantly fair trade, and the price was just about right—keeping it local, all that.
On this late summer Saturday, an unseasonably warm spell ruled the Bay, not the usual windy fog pattern, but true football and earthquake weather in the air. Still, the bright sun washing through Mecca’s storefront windows couldn’t burn off a nagging ennui hereabouts, despite glass-half-full city hall forecasts that San Francisco was slowly turning the digitized fiscal corner, back toward a bright dot-com 2.0 dawn, despite rumblings of a major mortgage-botched macro sinkhole.
The professor and I scanned Java’s airy front room, surveying rows of paired-off mainstays hunching over their cramped, metal-top tables: Unscrubbed nurses aides, undeclared students with dueling laptops, wirelessly downloading their mid-term papers, silently crunching keyboards, frying hard drives, spraining thumb drives, burning through li-ion batteries and tangled power cords. Sullen headphoned senior citizens channeled tape-delayed Limbaugh and O’Reilly, growing more hotheaded by the cup, picking dazedly at sliced crumb and poppy seed cake.
Conflicted, long-estranged souls with more brains than bread nosed through pass-around Chronicles, still out of joint over the hopelessly misguided war and anti-war efforts, over lingering dot-bomb solicitude, a Golden State ablaze. These everyday ranks were bolstered today by mulling window watchers from out of town. At any rate, that seemed to be the view from in here, whereby Everybody’s Favorite City once again seemed to be an ultralib island in a red state tsunami, with a lingering case of the blue state blues, hoping against hope for overdue electoral change. Arguably, the only upside news hole these days featured enhanced photos of Saturn and its icy Titanic moons, in vivid NASA Cassini Space Probe color.
“No,” said Paulen, watching Mork over at the counter, now awaiting his depth charge chaser, pulling out his wallet again, flashing varied plastic to little avail–everybody still waiting for him to riff away. “More like the whole goy thing…”
“Don’t follow…” I then took to tracking the bouncing dramanista directly behind Williams in the long, plodding Java line, a neo-Mindy shadowing the legendary Morkin man. A slight young disciple in butter yellow yoga pants stretching and alternating leg to leg as she inched up the line. A purple rolled mat was slung quiver-like over her right shoulder, shrouding a pink-black Lycra jog bra.
Zip, Robin, nada, whatever: he self-consciously fixated instead on the back counter Torani bottles. Then again, she sure didn’t escape the attention of those Osama-bearded taxi drivers idly parked in the far corner, with abaya visions stirring punishingly before their eyes.
“You know, sleeper cell,” Paulen replied, “I mean, simply connect the dots…”
The Mecca Java crew had gotten a lot of that in recent times, making them and their cohorts a little more sleepless than anything else—looking a tad like the enemy combatant mugshot of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—perhaps taken for a band of dangerous operatives, affinity groups with missing links to Lodi and al Qaeda, as if being Muslim was some ravaging malignancy. Suspicious glances, checkpoint strip searches and detention, rumors of undercover infiltration—everybody hating on Islam—this was no Hajj, no hook-up hookah lounge, even around here.
Accordingly, the café had practiced a measure of defensive patriotism since September, 2001: stars and stripes support banners, troop ribbons, plenty of window bunting, deferential glory, signing on to American pledge ads, lower profiles if not loyalty oaths to counter any political radioactivity or creeping Islamophobia. Still, this Saturday’s packed noontime house was scarcely business as usual.
Most days, enough of these metal-top tables stood empty that several of the principals had been ganging tidily in that corner, beneath the large-screen satellite TV. Behind stacked take-out cups and a rack of pre-wrapped cheese croissants, Ahmed pulled a skinny double-capp for the purple ponchoed dramanista, while shouting at his boy, Ramzin to quit channel surfing and play it safe with sound-down Tour de France updates or something, for customers’ sake. Mr. Williams nodded at the racing screen as he spoon cranked his depth charge at the prep table, no doubt in a shiny new custom Kestrel frame of mind.
These corner cellmates were actually Mecca’s key Shariah-lite investors and leadership council. Early middle-aged émigrés—they could have been Egyptian, Tunisian, Palestinian or Yemeni, non-state actors working either the Shiia or Sunni side of the street. Who knew? Who dared ask any more? They could well have preferred a steady slow-day dosage of Al Jazeera, Al Aribya, even Al Manar to charting recent business shortfalls—torn and openly irate over the latest footage from Tyre, Nablus and the Iraqi Triangle of Death; those sickening close-ups of burned, dismembered children, and creepy civilian body counts crawling bass ackwards across the lower screen.
The café’s brain trust regularly tangled over the remote, endlessly denouncing INS profiling and visa reregistration; still cursing GITMO stress and deprivation drills, with Muslim pride and ego down—grudges dating back at least to Torquemada and Reynald of Chatillon. These elders were cumulatively bitter about feds data mining their hummus and qat consumption, about mourning tents and media stereotyping, about feckless infiltrating counterrorism moles, jihadi watchers and false-flag operatives. About the Koran burnings, and a divine Prophet Muhammad being blasphemously cartooned Europe-wide.
All too often, I myself had seen them fight for the clicker, conflicted in heated debate, hunched over to-go trays of steaming kifta and kosa—Ramadan moonfighting, arguing Hamas and the Caliphate over dolna and beef tamaya. Still, it wasn’t my struggle, had no personal problem with it; was just here for the good coffee and stuff, and it wasn’t helping my appetite much at all.
But then the images had come so vividly and ferociously: bombed-out mosques, blind clerics in wheelchairs, Imams whipping up wailing, grieving turquoise crowds passing instant caskets like so many phish in a moshpit. Screaming video of Purile martyrs praising Allah enroute to their second life and seventy virgins, while I.E.D.s and rocket launchers further scarred Falluja’s and Mosul’s murder alleys. Or black-hooded cowards video recording insurgent drivel and stroking their AK-47s before beheading bruised infidels pleading blindfolded for their lives?
Blame it all on Osama and Sadam, on Odai and Qusai, on bad Salafist prislam actors, the chickenhawks who played PNACle with the Cradle of Civilization. While Arab states largely sat on their oily hands, The Street fermented and fomented coups and contra-coups around them—torches being passed to a new generation of Arabians, in the springtime of their lives. The whole bloody mess of it was so horrifying and mutually destructive, not to mention disastrous for foot traffic here in Mecca Java—bad for business, verrry bad for business—this weekend’s jazz swarm notwithstanding. And lord knows, that’s what really mattered in the blessed here and now.
Still, there they sat, listening to Arab Talk radio—against a background music track of Mekaal Hasan, Latifa, of Sami Yusuf’s ‘Al-Mu’allim’, of Kazem al-Sahir, Mohammed Abdu, and Hakim with his Lion of Egypt Orchestra—sipping on Nectarina while Hashim served them day-old muffins and their Modest Prophet house-blend coffee for dessert—marking time while the whole Middle East region was powder-kegging in the process.
Anyway by now, Paulen had silently tracked Mork as he redonned his field jacket, then appeared to osmosey out the door on eggshells, wielding one last double Macchiato with a blast.
“Sleeper cell, here? No, it’s nothing like that,” I wiped my nostrils with a white paper napkin, 120 milligrams of caffeine always giving my old broken nose a run for its money. “It isn’t exactly a Mideast Peacemakers camp, but hang around MeccaJava long enough, and you learn that everybody just tries to go along, get along.”
“I take it you like this place,” Paulen scanned about. “So you say. Intolerance for intolerance, hey? I for an I…”
“Something like that, though more like a ground level social science field project to me. But it’s why I think if everybody lived here in San Francisco for a year or so, the world would be a lot better off…”
True enough, San Francisco had remained relatively tolerant in the wake of 9/11, ergo the end of America’s homeland holiday from terrorism. Everybody was careful not to reveal too much of anything, take-wise—that way, no harm, no foul. There had been the occasional gallery trashing and drive-by defacing, but nothing like, say, Europe’s terror sweeps, asylum firebombings and multi-kulti slurs—much less Homeland Security call-tracking and behavioral pattern recognition. For that matter, no pigs’ heads rolled through Mecca’s doorway.
“I grew up hereabouts, you know,” Paulen replied tersely, the tiny green pilot light once again pulsing on his metallic brown earpiece. He pressed the blinking button, apparently sending a call to voicemail. “And given what Hamas and Hezbollah are pulling these days, a little morbid humor may be in order…”
“Well, maybe The City was different back in your day. But it’s been pretty normal around here lately, as far as I can tell.” I wadded up the napkin and stuffed it into my now empty cup, dancing around any more ear gear issues at the moment. “Although I guess it did seem the off-duty cabbies over there were just about bonkers over that yoga chick.”
“Hmph, forget it. Probably fundamentalist types, prefer their women draped all over in basic black niqabs and burqas,” Paulen said, leaning in, as if to read my reaction.
“Whoa, am I sensing animosity here?” This entire alien scenario was making me ever edgier, feeling agitation once removed. All I knew was that wasn’t the sort of Cafe M-J I’d come to know. Where was he coming from, anyway? I commenced rolling up my newspaper like a throwaway tire sale flyer—on another level, sensing entry more than exit.
“Animosity, moi? What’s not to like about a nice kaffiyeh. But you don’t see much of this in Boulder,” Paulen said, distracted by the action outside Mecca’s front windows, growing visibly more uncomfortable.
“Well, not really—but yeah, it did seem busy today,” I meandered. “Overall though, I guess I don’t see how these Mecca guys can still make it around here the way things are going, getting lumped in with the terrorism stuff. But whatever, it’s just a little local coffeehouse that lets a guy run a tab..”
“Hmm, the address says Mr. Ken Herbert. Yuy-yo, looks like you be droppin’ this,” said the stouter of two roughly familiar Latino hardware clerks inbound on lunch break, handing me that enveloped letter, which had slipped out of my business section to the Saccharin sticky, cracked tile café floor below. He moved on with his red-smocked partner, who remained fixed on a Chronicle think piece comparing Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recent dust-ups with the S.F.P.D. about stalking and a TRO, to the Dan White-George Moscone nightmare some 30 years ago.
Meanwhile, I scanned a Times article on survivor blood feuds over Rev. Jim Reaper’s name on a Jonestown memorial gravesite, how Guyana was planning to turn the jungle site into a ‘dark tourism’ theme park, and there was even a Jonestown Institute at a university downstate.
It all got me to thinking about everybody shorthand slangin’ about ‘drinkin’ the Kool-aid’, trying to gauge how far I’d come from those days, since having gulped down the Bay Area cool-ade myself. Anyway, the clerks proceeded on to commandeer a table next to a markedly unfamiliar duo—one in a black leather jacket and brown turtleneck, his partner in an extra-large striped rugby shirt—jawing over black-no-sugars and a coffee-stained ‘Maxim’ magazine.
“Thanks much…” I crammed Nathan’s letter back into my newspaper. This and Mecca’s sporadic flare-ups were already grating upon these latest two café arrivals, not to mention on the more fanatical all-day acolytes around them, comfortably reconciled to their peculiar caffeine fixations.
“Well, reading the New York Times these days, are we,” Paulen had taken note of my letter and haste, capping and recapping his Chai tea, pushing slowly back from the table as the hardware clerks squeezed in toward a table once removed.
“No, uh…it was just left here, actually…” I motioned to him to watch out for the blind music man bumping into racks of chips and snacks, cup dripping as he tapped his stick toward the doorway. “Found it when I sat down…part of my routine…”
“What say we move on,” Paulen’s voice lifted over the cross-culture clash of music, particularly the fevered choruses of Hakim’s Sha’bi, which overrode the alternating Urdu, Pashto, whatever, and broken English bursting forth from that animated corner conclave. He rose, straightened his jacket and chinos, then finger combed his curly salt-and-pepper hair. “Sounds infinitely more interesting outside there anyway…”
“Huh…yeah, your call…” I stood up slowly to join him, dutifully letting him lead the way, averting the gazes of that Maximally ripped duo over there. Our table was grabbed summarily by a young bearded, bald-headed Muslim apostate, most likely a local corner bodegadeur, in red scarves and a silver jogging suit, along with his top-heavy Arabesque companion in her secular pink fishnet sweater and orange Capri pants, boldly scanning the room past him for some guys named Mamoud and Mohammed Abu.
“Indeed—take a little walk down memory lane, in a manner of speaking. For I can’t help but feel tension in this air.”
“Umm, I really don’t think you’re reading this room right, doc. Hell, it’s just about the coffee.” I ruefully pointed him toward the open doorway with my newspaper, then exchanged smiling waves with Hashim, now behind the counter, who was intoning peace be upon you as he dipped a falafel ball into some sesame sauce, making me slow to the draw on my table-top debris. “Sounds like you’ve been away from San Francisco far too long…”
“If you recall, Boulder isn’t exactly backwater reactionary.” He scooped up his Chai tea and my coffee cup, then shouldered his shrunk-grained leather brief case. “In any event, I’m afraid it would be this fraught even if we settled our differences tomorrow.”
“We?” I perked up like a ground hog at the reference.
“In the secular as well as biblical sense, Herbert…”
“Biblical? What’s that supposed to mean?”
If we hadn’t been so immediately distracted by the sidewalk music, I might have wondered why he appeared to be souveniring my empty Java cup into his flap-over Gold-Pfiel bag. The trash some people just can’t part with; after all, it wasn’t like that styrofoam had been touched by Mork or Mrs. Doubtfire. Maybe he was just a textbook neat freak. No matter—the cup was now his to handle as far as I was concerned, caffeine always giving me a bad case of heedlessness and something of the shakes.
He must have quickly discerned the styro’s minimal souvenir value as well, however, because he then seemed to think the better of stuffing it into his single gusset briefcase, instead depositing the covered white cup atop a heaped waste basket just inside Mecca’s doorway on our way out. Let it be, no longer my problem. One last glance inside, and my eyes rather locked momentarily with that black-no-sugar duo, setting aside their Maxim, seemingly reading me for involuntary body language and facial tells, if not coffee cup conservancy after the fact.
“Sooo,” I winced in the blinding, rump-summer sunlight, all but shouting over the clamor. Damned if I got how this came down this way. Still I had to roll with it, had to make this deal work right. Peel at the seal, scratch the surface—let him hang on every word…
Speaking of scratching, there was my achin’ lower back again, as if rubbing at it would really ease such a chronic holdover from some cold, foggy nights spent coiled up and thrashing behind the wheel—a mild case of pervature, if not deservature of the spine. But have an itch, you scratch it, right? Still, thisI mean this isn’t my normal S.O.P., my real M.O. at all. “What brings you back to San Francisco, I mean right about now?”
“Ah, yes, catch-up time…particularly in the diagnostic sense, if you will…
Care for more?
SaturNext:
Chapter Three. Hereupon, inner divergences
meet the bright light of day, opening
aperture-wide to the sounds of the street
and all that jazz. A feast for the senses, though
not going far enough to bridge the emerging divide.
2008: Prologue
Pressential Reading.
Comfort Alert: The following story presents a
fictional give and take on what remain several of the
most pressing and persistent issues today. It employs a
rigorously full and ultimately fair approach:
in essence a didactic give and take within a dramatic tale.
Some tough, touchy stuff—but somebody has to try
a meeting of the minds on all this. Because nothing else
seems to be working these days…
__________________
SATURN RENDEZVOUS II
What Goes Around, Storms Around.
__________________________________
San Francisco: 2008
R.I.P. Eternally
Robin Williams (Ed.)
Shots were fired, the race was on. But before they could even hit the first mark, change came like a breakaway header and serious, on-goal kicking of some balls.
Zaaap, a full-sail regatta gave way to soccer warm-ups on the house plasma TV, sort of an America’s Cup for World Cup, with an accompanying volume burst until a shot puller behind the counter clicked the sound way down. More sudden, jolting change, I thought, returning to the envelope at hand. Just like I should have seen this coming all along.
With a little luck, the off-white #10 would have had a tripwire and traces of toxic white powder. But no, not a chance, meaning better that we should have ended this reconnect right then, before something got started that couldn’t be settled so easily. Christ, this could not have been good news either—not today—no cold-bloody way.
Hey Hee-bert, you ol’ scumbag. Good thing my ol’ lady can do some Googlin’ on her lunch time—thought I’d never track your sorry ass down…
Here in my sweating palms was no quick, dirty e-mail, no text message on the fly, but real hard-copy, a full former lifetime of old-school needling echoed via postage-due snail mail —many iterations removed. Not that I didn’t still have some residual luv for Nate and Chitown. Just don’t be coming back at me with all that, Natorious, not when it’s taken me so long to slink away from all that. I’ve since lived, I’ve learned, I’ve seen the hallowed light. Thus I rechecked the return address: hmm…P.O. Box. Don’t tell me Nathan Grimaldi is back in the ’burbs, much less the bloody Southside Chicago Lawn. Naw, bet he’s still cleaning up big time on the near Northside.
Whatever, dead-letter history, I had bigger lawns to mow right now. I hastily refolded the letter, along with what appeared to be some sort of crumpled press clipping, then crammed it all back into its twice-forwarded mailer, which I stuffed partially between the arts and business sections of my liberated morning newspaper. Glancing up at the long, antsy customer line, I could see a queue now swelling out the café’s doors, so many plodding stiffs on the down-low side of their caffeine cycles. I knew all about it, having just been there myself—java here being priced about right.
One strong styrofoam cup later, I was little more than a bundle of resurgent Garuda-charged nerves—biding my time, waiting out, waiting on the latest mark. There I was, tabling the paper, last gasp gripping the armrests way deep into the second act, calender clocking my waning Returnal days, when Saturn would transit stage right all over again.
Christ, Nathan, why the hell go writing me now?! OK, man up—altogether now…Head over heartstrings, remember? So let’s see, where was I? Oh, right…don’t worry…hell, I should have known I’d get flushed out after all these years.
That aside, Mecca Java was a neighborly corner coffee joint with a loyal stream of lefty regulars, and spillover from the loftier addresses on up Fillmore Street. Among them, past the stacked poetry throwaways and Capiero flyers, around a pair of pay-to-scroll Internet terminals, stood idling paramedics, spackled Russo-Irish sheet-rock hangers, flexing hairy-back gym junkies and speed-reading bank teller trainees. But toward the front of the line, sandwiched between a barrel-waisted East Village exile in a floral quilted frou-frou, and a sight-impaired afro-harmonicat impatiently tapping his cane, a famous favorite son sidled about, quietly hunting for some hot joe and maybe just a little good will.
Yeah, these stellar Robin sightings were becoming increasingly du jour around then. Off camera, this iconic comic seemed oddly furtive, at once bracing and insecurely vamping for recognition, counting on the ‘don’t ask, don’t leer’ policy San Franciscans resolutely have toward the celebrities in their midst, hip as they were to the reality that the glitterati usually only interfaced with fans anymore when they were hawking their memoirs and compilated C/DVDs.
Apparently just back from some barnstorm trooping through Baghdad’s Green Zone, Williams’ incognito look was fashionable camo and faux fatigues. Hiding behind a BlackWatch beret and orange tinted titanium shades, his eyes seemed fixed on the colorfully calligraphed overhead menu boards. God forbid anybody should notice; god help anybody who didn’t.
One person ahead of the outwardly nonplused woman pedicurist whom Williams immediately followed was Reese Paulen, Ph.D., who had pegged me on his way in the door, and was now paying for his Masala Chai Tea. A tall, full figure in corduroy and chinos, he turned away from the pastry cluttered counter, nodding, lowering his gaze as he passed this shorter, stouter, world-renowned riffmeister, who himself was now digging deliberately into his guerilla pants pockets for a billfold of platinum plastic. Their near miss by the cream and sugar table, besides rattling the soy milk canisters and honey jars, held all the look-don’t look de-magnetism of a solar eclipse.
Paulen handled the pas de deux capably enough, betraying nary a wink or nod, yet acknowledging that say, aren’t you…look, I know who you are, but I’m not letting you catch me knowing dynamic, because that is so uncool. While Robin’s vacant stare suggested I know you know who I am, yet don’t let me catch you knowing, because that’s a way turn-off. But you still better know who I am, ’cause why else would I be out here–and you’d better damn well let me not know it, too. Just don’t come too close while you do. This little exercise in San Francisco celebratory civility seemed to preoccupy, mildly amuse the revisiting university professor all the way over to my table.
“Honestly, Herbert, how bizarre that I should be bumping into you here after all this time, having just come down from the temple,” he said, sitting down across table like an old wingman at an undergrad class reunion, lifting the black snap lid of his take-out cup. “Talk about probabilistic serendipity…and spotting mighty Mork himself in the flesh!”
“Really, such a…coincidence,” I pushed that letter further between the newspaper sections. “Small world, small town—temple what?”
“Actually I’d happened by Congregation Sherith Israel, up the hill on California Street,” Paulen said, after a sip of his tea, tapping a glossy brochure. “Such a grand Reform synagogue, with its classic Colusa sandstone-clad masonry and magnificent domed sanctuary. Amazing how the opalescent stained glass windows brilliantly illuminate its arching Moretti mural interior. The temple’s in Byzantine and Romanesque style, and over 100 years old, you know. It’s even going to be placed on the National Historic Register, and I’d never really paid attention to it before.”
“Uh, no—afraid I’ve never taken much notice.” All I could picture was the big, brooding holy fortress up there that lorded over the neighborhood. No offense, but what did a little sightseeing have to do with his popping in down here? And why couldn’t he have visited St. Dominic’s Church over on Steiner, worship a little Van-the-Man’s Preview, strumming on the front steps?
Still, Sedge’s tip was pretty much spot on. Except it didn’t account for doc’s surfacing so soon…so right here and now, when he was said to rather recently bend elbows over at the Elite Café across Fillmore Street. But it was what it was: less friendly face time than strap-on-the-game-face time. So better to giddy-up, change the subject and be done with it I diverted once again toward Williams, there singularly awaiting his triple shot Mocha aside the condiments stand, man of the people that he was. “Yeah, Mork & Mindy are hot in reruns again. Nanu, nanu anew.”
“Robin Williams put Boulder, Colorado on the map all right. Sweet rock candy mountain in his rainbow red space suit and silver boots,” Paulen loosed his brown wide-whale sports jacket, then began stirring some nutmeg into his Chai. “Trouble is, the town’s never been the same since.”
“Yeah, he and JonBenet,” I stared up, quantifying the overhead lights and grinding ceiling fans, demonstrating my grasp of tabloid topicality. How did he come across me here, anyway? And what was up with the new personal handle of his? But I wasn’t going there, not yet—had to pace things a bit, see where this ungainly little mashup might lead. Like the head honcho said, take it wherever it has to go to get him flapping, so let’s see what blows. “These days, you can often spot Mork carousing around The City with Bono and Whoopi. Such a positive energy source—wonder how old a guy he is by now…”
“Must be around our age—late 50s, or so,” he cleared his throat, then peered, probed clear through my burning eyes, as if for a hint, some trace evidence of who and what lay inside. “In any event, Boulderites prefer not to talk about the dreadful Ramsey tabloid circus any more unless we absolutely must. Count me among them, no matter what.”
“Why’s that?” Haughty smokescreen, stony denial: Hmph, we’ll just have to see about that. “I mean, the case does keep coming back around, doesn’t it? Kinda like the Zodiac saga here—becomes something of a cartoon strip after a while.”
“Because among other things, those Ramsey people never belonged in the first place—they’re the sort who are ruining Boulder as we speak—all that tax money wasted on a grand jury. Such ignominy has no place in a mellow place like that. Alas, nasty business all around, therefore what say we just change the subject,” Paulen said in muffled tones, pausing for didactic effect. “On the other hand, my guess is you won’t see ol’ Robin waltzing into this place with Billy Crystal any time soon…”
“How do you mean?” Intriguing that the professor seemed to take the Ramsey case almost personally—why so quick to dismiss—gotta mine that vein, all right. But first I glanced counter-wise to spot Mork peeling off his field jacket to reveal a black Rainforest T-shirt and the same old rainbow suspenders he sported when Orsen was calling down from Ork—peering anywhere but straight ahead. Everybody else seemingly waited for him to go off somehow on the tabletops, just like the old days. “You talkin’ about all the snow Crystal’s blown, or what?”
“I mean, this isn’t exactly Beverly Hills or South Beach in here, now is it…”
“You’re saying as in, like demographically…” I nodded, struggling to grokk the reference, noodling way back for some grasp of a once common clinical lexicon.
“No, as in ethnographically,” Paulen’s voice rose over some thrumming and trilling, quite exotically thrilling ambient music overhead.
“Whatever…” Unclear on that concept either, I dismissed it as arcane sociological argot I’d begged off ages ago: I instead noted the metallic protuberance barring across his right ear. These electronic devices I’d come to deride, long annoyed with the slow pedestrian wandering, the disjointed monologues in a polyglut of tongues—the overheated airs and wireless pretentiousness of them all—ultimately leading to little more than radiation burn and a bad case of celliflower ear. “Too loud in here…with the hearing aid there…I mean, what’s with the ear armor?”
“It’s Bluetooth, voice activated,” Paulen pressed the green call button blinking near his starboard lobe, a brown and chrome Jabra v2.0 headset, not that much smaller than a 9-volt radio battery, hooked tightly to his ear. Mildly distracted, he released the button, then reached for his jacket pocket. “I’m just getting accustomed to it—you know, the driving, and all.”
“Oh, right, cell phone-free…look, ma, no hands…”
“So to speak. Although under current circumstances, ma is an unfortunate choice of words.”
“Wouldn’t know, don’t drive much anymore,” I relented, pursing my lips, at pains to lighten the mood. “Bluetooth, huh? I just know my grill is getting more on the yellow side.”
“Non-stop coffee will do that to you,” Paulen leaned forward, folding his arms. “What’s more, if you’re not careful, it can make you hide yourself. Is that what you’ve been doing here all these years, Herbert? Hiding out from something, or hiding from somebody are you?”
“Me? Hell, no, I’ve got plenty going on, don’t you worry,” I grimaced, pursing my lips—really, how did he even find me here? Shit, call it Saturndipity. “But I’ll take your input under advisement…”
“Yes, chew on it…because you do look a bit thinner than I recall.”
“Well, guess I’ve shed a little poundage around the edges,” I replied guardedly, noting his tight, streaking curls. “Just like you look a bit saltier…”
“Goes with the gray matter, I suppose…”
“Tell me about it, doc…”
“All in good time, my friend. All in good time…”
Care for more?
SaturNext:
“Right when you’re thinking
you’ve got things right,
something else crosses
your line of sight…”
“Powerful pipes on that young thing,” Paulen said. For his part, he hadn’t taken much notice of the tangoists, but seemingly couldn’t keep his eyes off this singer.
“That they are.” I proceeded to step gingerly around a chary eyed Wellseley grad walking her oversized pet Savannah.
“Well-nigh takes me back to the ol’ Blue Note on Pearl Street.”
“Tell me about it…” I once again found myself with a touch of backscratch fever, tracking that red blimp still hovering above, me being rather more nearsighted than far.
“What’s to say, other than that club’s long gone too.”
Coda to this upper Fillmore leg of JazzStreet, struggling to get a tune in edgewise against the bigger bands, was a young combo calling themselves ‘RCane’. Four pieces, full of promise if not delivery, the amplified group was fronted by a wavy-haired strawberry blonde named Yerna Storm, or at least so read RCane’s lacquered drum skin. Just call her Stormy, she shouted at a coyly admiring heckler, possessing as she did a #80 coarse sandpaper voice, rubbed raw before its time by non-stop club dates full of untrained melodies, Lucky Strike Longs and Joplinesque ingestation. Still had her looks, though—there pounding out a medley, rough-cut meandering between Joni Mitchell’s Paris period and Diana Krall.
Yet crowd attention was rapt, not least among the uber males fixating more on her ‘I’m a Reader, Not a Breeder’ T-shirt, as though she were Liz Phair with an Elektra makeover, even though boasting a Bend Sinister shield tattoo on her lefty bicep. In turn, many of the unwound career gals keyed on RCane’s bulked up guitarist, his long Fabio hair falling over a battered Rickenbacker lead, black sweatshirt emblazoned with ‘Bane’ in white block letters as he chord shifted into Hejira.
“Bane…what’s that about?” By now, the professor couldn’t veer his eyes, leaving his biodegradable water bottle atop a real estate magazine dispenser.
“Bane? That’s like not knowing about the…Ramseys…”
“What about the Ramseys,” Paulen asked guardedly, abruptly changing course.
“You know—ransom notes, beauty queens, the whole confounding Christmas tragedy…”
“Hmph, that little star baby will be the death of the People’s Republic yet. Like I said, true Boulderites rue the night it ever happened.”
“And how about you?” I probed, recalling it was actually deemed to be an early morning kill. Off with his minced words–my right brain zeroed in more on his Anglophiled inflection, his lecturn intonation, his seminar-affected stances and gestures: an on-campus odyssey, from West Coast wiseacre to a cultivated classroom dandy, but for God’s better graces there go…all that…
“I am among them, of course. Would that she had never been exploited and…violated at all,” Paulen looked away, rather detached, at that. “Peculiar case study, though. Perhaps the only upside from the sordid affair is that the Ramsey house of horrors is now on the market for about two million two.”
“Who says crime doesn’t pay, huh? Still, a sticky situation…with the family, and all…”
“Fraught, heartbreaking,” Paulen replied. “Utterly…wrenching to dwell upon so…”
Attention grabbed by that African Bengal cat was quickly diverted back toward RCane, where StreetJazz had gotten a bit more ragged on the fringes. Of all things, a Banana Slug had joined the torch singer-in-training in a ragged ‘Stormy Weather’ duet. Dude was wearing a grey UC Santa Cruz hoodie, ripped Billabongs and footloose Cobian Vents—no J. Crewman here. Over by the Lucite-framed Miro knockoffs, two catcalling USC party animals pretty much dug it, sporting Cuervo Especial and Trojans in their cargo pockets: this still being the nation-state of California, after all.
Not nearly so amused, however, were the neighborhood regulars inside Tally’s Coffee—pensioners mostly, indignant over this street fair nonsense, and how the trash such raffy fare attracted did little but destroy Pacific Heights as they had known it. In passing, we could see young tip-jar slaves pushing house blend and pulling long capps to the RCane beat, mocking the crazy street guys who were out there air guitaring, finger-fretting phantom tabs, singing wildly off key. Apparently, Talley’s part-time staffers were too fresh-faced to realize that oddball Fillmore Street characters like that once became Boz, Steve Miller and Carlos Santana.
Then again, these baristas-in-training were too busy serving and suffering a shop full of fat, arthritic and osteoparietal cranks, biddies and fussbudgets. Their bulbous old snouts stuck in discarded ‘Economists’ and ‘Financial Times’, or just pitched sternly aloft, the ill-funded retirees nursed cold paper cups behind half-readers and oversized sunglasses, nodding off, mostly waiting for afternoon services at the massive cathedral across Jackson Street. Yet they jealously guarded their faded Saks and Neiman-Marcus shopping bags, or muttered away through store windows at this raucous parade of ‘unending urban decay’.
“Hmph, Calvary Presbyterian,” Paulen said, again changing the subject, nodding toward that ages-old, sandstone-masonry monument to Pacific Heights protestant certitude. “Some things never change…”
“You used to go there?” Bane aside, I followed him around a horseshoe of police barricades that fed the crowd across Fillmore, at the jazz fair’s Jackson Street conclusion. We paused mid intersection, where the metal barriers backdropped RCane’s low-rise stage. From here, we could review the long, crowded length of StreetJazz, southward past the bandstands and white tent-tops, clear down peninsula to San Bruno Mountain.
“Quite, ages ago.” He glanced cautiously up and down the cross street, as though once again a child looking out for the clack and clanging of a cable car on the dead and buried Washington-Jackson line.
“Yeesh…” About then I nearly slipped on another of those blood red leaflets, and couldn’t help grabbing it up off the crosswalk’s wide yellow stripes, not unlike picking at a sore. “This stuff is so totally uncalled for…”
“More like reprehensible,” Paulen huffed, passing glance at the flier, then once again fixing on Stormy, who had regained sole control of the microphone and torn into Rickie Lee’s ‘Coolsville’. “Look, these Blame-Israelogues see the Mideast warfare and Israel joined at the hip. Is that anti-Israel or anti-Semitic—you tell me.”
“Me? Why…” Leaning harder into the barricade, I diverted my glance up and down Jackson Street, from Tally’s Tudor-style apartment building, across toward a cater-corner Arab convenience store—the only one that mercifully stayed open with kerosene lanterns to feed quake-rattled neighborhood strandees on that long, powerless Loma Prieta night back in 1989. “What makes you think…”
“I mean, how can a person turn the other cheek to this rubbish when it keeps coming back full bore?” He grabbed the flier from my hand, crushing and spindling it with his own copy, to where he nearly lost his elbow grip on those magazines. “Then again, even the Presbys over there are BDS-ready to boycott, sanction and divest from corporations doing business in Israel, while some of them preach ending its U.S. aid. Honestly, if they aren’t endorsing the Bern Perspective, they’re seconding the Israel-bashing Amman Call…”
“Hey, don’t look at me, I still basically bleed Catholic.”
Besides those randy post-grads—the jazz smoothies in from the suburbs and beyond, the downbeat city-wides with their polygluttonal tastes and tongues—there was that edgier fringe element for Tally’s coots and codgers had to contend with through espresso steamy windows. Namely, the thicket of overgrown immigrant school kids passing around Jolt Colas and off-brand smokes, blocking entry to the other corner market. Or those color-coded Bayview bangers in cockeyed ball caps hip-hopping atop some garbage bins next to the grocery store, battle dance krumping wild-ass to RCane’s keyboard riffs, rap sheet Sinatras pumping their cranked-up heads to the hip-hop beat.
Steady streams and sweet-sour stench of blue Porta-Potties stretched along Jackson to the Newcomer/Montessori High School. Two peach-fuzzy Mormon cadets, their recruiting mission impossible rejected non-stop, had shed bible packs, black trenchcoats and shaken faith, sparkin’ a blunt, tossin’ down a little spiked Monster with some bad-boy basketball jonesers just off courtside from the school playground, street begging the question: Was this still the old folks’ snooty neighborhood, or just The City’s latest downsliding ’hood?
“Well, I’ve heard Calvary’s pretty tolerant and tame,” I watched some hydrating cycle cops swoop in to corral a squadron of silver Vespas, there towing mediated trailers, upon which posters advertised the latest flavors of SoBe Elixer.
“Strangling Israel’s economy doesn’t sound all that tame to me,” the professor turned to cast a critical eye upon the imposing 104 year-old church’s arching stained glass windows, then down Jackson toward the large school. “You know, I went to that place when it was Pacific Heights Elementary—before mother and granny got me into Stuart Hall.”
That’s when Calvary’s massive dark oak doors opened wide and bells pealed, even overdrubbing Stormy and RCane, presumably heralding the celebratory ending of a matinee service’s Gloria Patri, Doxology, offertory and benediction: such reverent affirmation, ever prim and proper Christian solemnity. Except that this postludal procession happened to be led by a long-bearded rabbi, yarmulkehed mitzvah boys bearing Torah scrolls immediately behind him, Calvary ministers and deacons deferring to either side. In their wake, what seemed to be an entire Beth Zahav congregation—unfurled their banner, proud and joyful as all get out as they descended the main round arched stairway of the church’s classic Roman and Italian Renaissance façade.
“This borders on post-structural phenomenology,” Paulen said, visibly flummoxed by the biblically improbable vision, this testament to spiritual inversion passing before our eyes.
“Well, it is San Francisco,” I replied, as we crossed Jackson Street in something of a daze between swarming taxicabs, noting an otherwise perfectly respectable Polo partier bending over down by the school fence to toss his piecemeal JazzStreet lunch fare as if at a Roman vomitorium.
“Be that as it may, I foresee a measure of qualitative and ethnographic analysis on my agenda,” the professor then noted a vision of two exuberant young women slapping their pink and yellow flip-flops down Calvary’s front staircase—one in a dark blue jersey screened, ‘Jewcy’, the other’s green tank-top reading, ‘You Had Me At Shalom’.
“Maybe it’s, like, a two-faith solution, or interfaith, or something,” I replied, suddenly downloading, employing jargon I hadn’t referred to in aeons. “But statistically speaking, it looks like a pretty unstandard deviation from the mean, now doesn’t it…”
“Just the same, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Herbert.”
“Still, only in San Francisco, huh? Birthplace of the United Nations, and everything…”
“Yes, well, I won’t hold that against it now.”
“Huh? Meaning…”
“Simply put, the U.N. has been no friend of Israel’s of late. And a ‘no friend of Israel’s’ is no friend of mine.”
“Gotcha—guess I’m just trying to figure out why…”
That was when a tap on my shoulder, and this stocky old neighbor in a Planet Hollywood Hawaiian shirt, white linen slacks and a crimson-sashed Panama hat said, “she’s at it again, you know, a real plaster blaster this time…”
Care for more?
Chapter Ten. A puerile confrontation with
religious undercurrents hastens a reckoning
with the spectre of Saturn Rendezvous Two…
“Be mindful of those
pulling you out of the norm,
while blithely dancing up a storm…”
“Trust me, girl, it’s so fluid, you just naturally get swept up in it…”
“Swept up…incredible…”
“Honestly, you can totally turn your mind off—get lost in the moment!”
“Really—brains are overrated, anyway. I mean, when you really think about it…”
“Omigod, Meg—that’s so brilliant…”
Now then, the dancers being awed over had been gaining quite a following. Sleek, slicked back, skin-tight dressed and zooted, a strong feline woman and meek macho gaucho stepped haughty and naughty about the fake parquet flooring, spread across Fillmore like a display roll at Carpets-R-Us. An eight piece Latin group crowded the tiny StreetJazz bandstand, pitched sideways against a mid-block driveway, Honda generators feeding off the open garage power source of a set-back tan Victorian three flat. Fantango had progressed from Jobim Brazilian to Jazz con Salsa; to Dizzy Cubop to some sizzling tango fusion before teasing out a standards set of tango classics by Roberto Flores, Mariano Mores and Alberto Caraccido.
It was ricocheting horn layers and trap-set percussion that eventually impelled a clapping semicircle of the merely intrigued, and those fully inclined to flood the spongy parquet. Admiring them as well were the same two gal pals from a crosswalk down, who had beaten us uphill to this curbside cabaret. Offering forth further barricade commentary, the same leggy brunette, again within earshot, caught my eye, this time flashing a discreet spin and thrust of her index finger, just as quickly glancing away—as if she knew me from somewhere.
Among the few reluctant dance hold-outs was a mortgage broker likely down from Marin, in open-collared Pink and Polo, evidently calculating his interest in this streaky blonde whirlwind brandishing her daisy print halter, black running tights and gold ballet slippers. Soon, even his well-weathered Sebagos were slide tapping to a smooth segue from a Francisco Canero cover of ‘Amor y Primavera’ to some hotter blooded Tango Nuevo. By now, even several of his snarky ubersexual buds stopped checking their Bulgari and Hublot chronographs, reconfiguring their Blackberrys, long enough to sweep adventuresome weekenders from Vandy and Swarthmore right off their black platforms and Primo Chills.
Lengthy, frothy linen and eyelet lace skirts swayed and swirled to Fantango’s angular melodies, the Latino band’s polyrhythmic riffs, as steamy and sultry partner dancers improvised, embraced, dipped, vamped and intertwined in sensuous synchronicity, as though lost in some somatic milonga zeno-zen trance, egged on further by the string glissandos and push-pull bandoneon.
Never one for dancing, I nodded back sheepishly to that brainy, ball-capped woman—real neighborly like—then continued leaning against a parking meter, watching as another dance duo stepped out onto the faux parquet flooring with demonstrable compound interest. Turning away, I spotted Reese Paulen emerging from the Juicy News and Smoothie store, soon steadying himself against a bus shelter, chatting up a little more ear phone action of his own. By the time Fantango reached its encore crescendo, he was sidling back down my way.
“Well, well,” Paulen smiled upon approach. “You actually know that lovely?”
“Ginger’s a real estate associate,” I fixed on the dance duos. “She shows the house units sometimes.”
“What house?”
“Again, a whole other story, no big deal,” I said dismissively, not wanting to tip any scales, much less let on that I actually lived in the neighborhood. This, as Fantango eased off in freeform interplay between its standing congas and bass. “Anyway, it looks like you missed their real smokin’ licks…had more pressing matters?”
“Heard plenty, thank you,” he wedged between my parking meter and a covered trash bin, the tight space that Marinated odd couple had just vacated. “Had to replenish my reading material, make a quick little call. Fascinating exercise, though. Pure social regression, if you will, post-modern urbanites reverting to earlier behavioral rituals in the face of today’s fear and uncertainty.”
“Yeah, seems the mambo and samba are coming back, too…” With that, I caught a downward glance at his new magazines, a mix of the clinical and neuro-cytology, with a little clerical/secular conflict tossed in.
“Funny, in Boulder, they’re neo-squaredancing to country rock,” he flipped through fresh copies of ‘Parabola’, a ‘Scientific America’ brainwave special, a ‘Forward’ and retrospective issue of ‘Tikkun’, hand to hand.
“Guess this here’s a bit more fashionably retrosensual,” I shouted, steadying myself over Fantango’s closing flourish—not at all feeling embedded in a culture of like-minded people. Actually, their swirling, the spinning soundscape imbalances altogether spun around my semicircular auditory canals like carnival Tilt-A-Whirl cars. But this surfacing disconcertion ran much deeper than that.
“I’ve read where Josef Mengele danced a pretty mean tango himself.”
“Uh, that, I wouldn’t know…”
The whistling and applause subsiding, we pivoted up toward Jackson Street. Those pseudo, neo, neuvo, wannabe tango dancers, such as they were, dispersed to the surrounding fair stands and shops across Fillmore, to the sheepskin slippers and hieroglyphic sculpted paper displays. Fantango were already breaking down their instruments, Lindy hopping from the low makeshift stage, though mindful not to sully their Tropicana Cubavera linens and beachy Havana Joe’s.
Peering down from the bay windows above us all were various isolated old-timers, pacing their musty efficiency apartments, aghast at the whole sordid spectacle and this vulgar, racy trance music—slamming sashes, yanking blinds, registering dismay, utter disdain for those scandalous dance moves barely removed from the beaner brothels and barrios. Neveryoumind that they had mamboed and sambaed their own way to ecstasy in San Francisco ballrooms long, long decades ago.
Up here at StreetJazz’s higher end, the few remaining white-capped tent stands displayed matted spectral emulations, letterboxed antique seed packets and cleverly framed trompe l’ oeil. Jade jewelry and solid silver wristlets, Colombian mochila bags, kiln-dried teak garden furniture, trapezoidal hanging lawn chairs and sidewalk armomatherapists: Rimming all this were a frosty mix of come-lately storefront tax dodges making their don’t-ask pricey antique and fashion statements. Among them, mainstay tailors/cleaners, hair and nail parlors clung to their regulars and long-term leases, lofty Pacific Heights addresses getting higher by the month-to-month.
“Mengele, huh?” I avoided eye contact with an all-knowing tarot reader card tabled into a green brickface apartment house doorway. Ancient Nazi history, right? But at least doc wasn’t hitting on all the Two-State talk going on these days.
“Doctor Death came to mind when I picked up this little item on the newsbox over there,” Paulen said, as he motioned toward the crooked string of Chronicle, Bay Guardian, and assorted throwaway weekly dispensers, atop which were scattered color-crazed dance club and rave cards.
“Naw, what the hell’s with…” I took a blood-red leaflet announcing tomorrow’s Die-In mobilization rally down in Dolores Park against the aforereferenced Palestinian strife going on. Its headline read, ‘No War For Isroil’, followed by some bold, exclamatory copy along the lines of casting off ‘Israel: America’s Albatross’. “Where did this come…”
“Need I say more? I particularly point out that part about peak oil and the Zionist Occupational Entity,” the professor sneered, as we angled up Fillmore, between a clot of young women sampling Zencraft body lotions, and the Muni bus shelter within sniffing distance of that flower-scented sidewalk display.
“I can’t believe somebody would be spreading this guff,” I sputtered, noting another power point to the effect that Israel was avenging the Eurocaust by persecuting the Palestinians in their very own land. “I mean, hereabouts of all places now…totally unreal…”
“Oh, it’s real, all right. As I said, the hatred never ends, my friend—the bigotry never dies. There’s no dancing around that.”
“Maybe so—just not up here…”
“Here, there, everywhere.”
Streetward from the bus shelter, StreetJazz trailed off in an effluvium of plumed vests, driftwood end tables and aberrant paintings of Montmarte and Moulin Rouge. Ecospheric montages sprayed with tinted polymers crunched up against Tuscan fine-art glass, which crowded out tooled leather poveles and graybeard hippie fogscapes of the Mendocino coast.
Midway between the rock crystal amulets and kookoo fish magnets, we happened upon a bustling promotional booth for pure Rocky Mountain spring water. Its clean green, the planet-friendly reps were passing out free biodegradable sample bottles to a steady throng of parched Fillmore inclimbers: agua straight from Colorado—such a sky hydrating deal.
“Be that as it may,” Paulen sighed, likewise pinning his magazines under his arm so as to twist open his bottle cap. “Happen to miss Boulder do you?”
“Miss…dunno about that,” I marveled that the icy container was made of a corn derivative, something termed polylactic acid, so politically biodegradable—all the better for to dodge how refocused I’d become of late on developments up University Hill. “Haven’t thought about it for so long…” Yeah, the majestic Flatirons, Dot’s Diner, the famous Sink. Still, those haunting, searing memories—all the abnormal feedback loops, a central nervous system once gone utterly, hopelessly haywire. ‘Twas a lightening storm in rival regions, of hyperactivity across my neural networks, as best as I could recall…even though it wasn’t really about Boulder at all…. “But sure, in some ways I do—like never getting over how I left there.”
“Really, how empirically…interesting…”
“Why, have you regretted not being back in San Francisco all these years?”
“Too soon to tell, Herbert,” Paulen toasted, scanning warily across across Jackson Street. “Mite too soon to tell..”
Care for more?
Chapter Nine. Fair’s end precipitates
some outrageous movements,
and leads to a curious twist of faith…
“Change be upon you,
the challenge being to
fathom eternal truths….”
“Bull…”
“Staffordshire, actually…”
“But basically pits….”
“Well, the darlings have been through a lot,” said an SPCA volunteer to several cage tappers. “But are very gentle, loving companions at heart.”
That wasn’t how I remembered them, especially down there on Marina Green. Just ask Bruno, or whatever was left of him, about gentle and loving terriers on a tear. I shuddered at re-thinking about that grisly night back then.
“Anyway, what you said, it’s a mystery to me,” I mindlessly knuckle rattled the animal hospital’s sidewalk cages, relieved to have spotted no abandoned Irish Setters in them.
“How’s that,” Professor Paulen replied, rather more eyeing the females of our species strutting past.
“You know, about Mel Gibson and that virulence over time…” I just wondered why he kept doggin’ me about it.
“Alas, this from a person who says anti-semitism is not a problem any more.”
On pet center fringes stood larger, more steely cages stuffed with beleagured, cowering boxers, mastiffs, dobermans and flagging German shepherds—battered abandees from bad, sadistic masters—terror and beat-down distance in their eyes. Clearly, bull terriers had caught the worst of it, from neglect to cruel rejection to inbred torment and flame-broiled abuse, to where muzzles and breed-bans came with the territory these days, especially further up in the neighborhood.
A dispiriting sight, to be sure—all the barking, mewling and whimpering, ears and tails dragging from tough-love emaciation. Then again, the far corner pen of half-starved greyhounds was another tale entirely, scarred and chewed up just as badly, however rescued they may have been from the mechanical rabbit and trifecta finish line.
But few strollbys were so moved as to buy in and carry them away. Nor were we, for that matter, instead crossing the Fillmore intersection before doggone guilt could bite us in the behind.
“What an absolute rush…”
“Omigod, it sounds soooo incredible up there.”
“I mean the whole thing was so sensual—so, like, totally orgasmic.”
“Soooo awesome…and fun.”
“Exactly, and who’d have guessed it could be that good…I mean, who needs male toxicity, anyway? Like that whole fish-bicycle deal…”
Now manning the barricades, or at least pausing for a breather against them at Washington Street, we couldn’t help getting caught up in some heavier breathing along the white rail, several black stripes down. One maiden late twenty-something fox propped herself back against the barrier, sight straightening her orange Pearl iZUMi mesh top and aquamarine gauchos, sand blonde ponytail tied back tighter than her pink performance Reeboks, sweat beading across her forehead in the beating midday sun. Beside her, a lean, leggy gal pal sat perched atop the railing, dark hair tucked up under a yoke-yellow Adidas cap, sporting mauve crossback straps and a taupe leotard, tapering down to baby blue Nike Frees, twisting provocatively in the breeze. Faces full of sunglasses, they were looking pretty damn unapproachably good nevertheless. I allowed as how the familiar brunette couldn’t make me out through my own off-brand shades, even though she likely could if she so chose.
Evidently, the pair was as tuned into the upstreet Fillmore music as most everyone else here crossing Washington. A brassy Latin Sound permeated the intersection, from those chalk-white apartment buildings across Fillmore, over around the green step terraces of Alta Plaza Park, out beyond Steiner Street. Everybody toe-tapping and hip swaying, queuing before the four corner foodstands, for wicked good Cajun Jambalaya and Chicken Apple Sausage, paper platefuls of Kaabli Chana, Tikka Masala and Pad Thai Barbeque: They were feeding and feeling the ero-erratic beat; neither not totally unfamiliar, as I’d seen them sniffing around the upper Fillmore shops before.
“See, that’s precisely the problem,” said Paulen, as if with an empirical shake of the head.
“What problem?”
“Put some mileage on them, and all you get is attitude and rancor.”
“Huh, rancor? Anyone in particular?” Now we were getting somewhere.
“You’d be surprised…”
Otherwise yupscaling these Pacific Heights were a J. Crew of bicoastal power school alums, with some Bigger Ten, Rice and Vanderbilt sprinkled in. Haughty, salon peeled, gamefaced, cliquish chicks scanned the beef herd behind their smoke-lensed Revos and Donna Karans, caressing wine cups, nipples perking beneath lace camisoles and mock-neck jerseys over white pleated-pocket shorts, on the look-out for somebody safe and solvent—or for how weird the next chance encounter might actually be.
In any event, cell phones were at the ready for the inevitable vibration ping or melodic ring. Posed for action as well were the gelled, Geoffrey Beane and Perry Ellis number crunchers and deal makers, the shaggy, stubbly adventure capitalists in re-preppy herringbone and madras wear, jumping the Paul & Shark—networking and networthing over higher techquities and exit strategies—P/E rations and quiet period IPOs—the strategic pump and dump. Looks and books: these early-stage movers and shakers were largely rooted in Ivy or The Farm.
No Burning Maniacs or Suicide Girls here either, and however daring the sheer Balenciagas and paisley Hugo Bass, they were all toned and tanned Banana Republicans in their cool, calculating hearts—not to mention at least up a rung or two from where we public schoolers stood. Sorority sisterhood in full flower, fresh from Vassar, Smith and Radcliffe, out here trying to explore the quirks and wild sides for a spell, bringing little more than Voguey poses to the party, their every sentence beginning with, ‘that’s so funny’.
Paulen here just muttered something about this all being hard on the stomach, but real easy on the eyes, in a clinical, acquisitive sort of way. I slipped that factoid into my vest pocket, figuring he wasn’t referring to this canopied wheel cart of kishkas and spinach-sweet potato knishes on the corner we had just inadvertently encountered. It all did feel pretty much out of our league, Ivy or not. But at least the whole sexy secular spectacle was diverting us from an even more tempestuous spiritual topic—until now…
“God sent his son Y’Shua to be the Savior of the World for those who rely on him…”
“The Christianistas—they’ve brainwashed you!”
“And then there was another Jewish preacher named Paul…”
“Yeah, it’s like EST all over again with you people…only this time it’s more like Evangelical Spiritual Transgression…what have you been smoking, anyway?!”
“Not to worry, rejoice. Just remember, Jesus loves you…”
“The hell…”
There probably could have been a better time to come across something like this. Nearby the knish and kishkas, just outside Margaret O’Grady’s fashion studio, was a gray wooden demo stand sharing a counter top with petitions against force-feeding geese and ducks for foie gras. A small blue and white banner tacked across the front of the stand read, J.J.J.—that is, ‘Jews Joining Jesus’ in smaller block letters just below. A slim middle-aged woman behind the counter was dispensing ‘Is Your Messiah Too Complex?’ pamphlets in her lavender ‘Co-Ex-Ist’ pullover.
Wearing a cabala necklace and Solomon’s sealed blue beret, as well, she stood blissfully steadfast, increasingly toe-to-toe with a brown-vested knish disher taking his break from the canopied wheelcart.
“On the other hand, there’s the likes of this,” Paulen said, as we emerged from under a salty, sweet-sour cloud of smoke choky tent stands of Ginger Wasabi Ahi, Papusas and Key Lime Calamari. “Moishe Rosen’s converted Christian robots, utterly preposterous—even if the messianic rabbi does happen to be a CU alum.”
“Preposterous? You mean the Jewish thing?” I folded, filed said pamphlet into my vest pocket. Backing and filling, I followed his lead back across Fillmore, up past that Frenchy new corner café, falling in behind two former Pac-10 rival coeds, sporting their XXL Stanford Cardinal and blue Golden Bear T-shirts respectively over roomy khaki shorts nearly down to their NewBie slip-ons. The Cal gal seemed to be cheerleading their conversation, something about the highlight of her day being catching Him in a lie: To wit, how could she be waking up next to this loser—in her raspy, beach-gravelly vocal fry.
“No, I mean the Jesus thing. That whole Rapture shmeer, the Second Coming—seven some years of apocalyptic tribulations for the non-believers left behind.”
Everybody had their triggers. Mine was this blamed intersection, an earlier era, another crowd milling about in overheated disorientation. Only then, it wasn’t mesquite-smoked open grills of Jerk Chicken or Salvadoran corn cakes, but a broad arch of locals pressed in around the hood of a marooned Ford pick-up truck, glued to a small portable TV atop its hood, plugged into the dashboard cigarette lighter, providing the only news available in a blacked-out ’hood. What about aftershocks? Were the bridges all down? Loma Prieta had laid low San Francisco, Muni trolleys still thirsting for electric power, stalled in place, dead overhead wires still whip snapping in the eerie stillness of Indian Summer. My mind temblored, my feet turned jell-o just re-thinking about the Earthquake of ’89. For Paulen himself, Washington at Fillmore apparently discharged an entirely different caliber round.
“I have no problem with these particular neo-Christians, per se—even if they are inherently Jewish,” he continued, trashing his brochure. “Surely they mean well, but it’s their evangelizing, the pious proselytizing, the provoking—just don’t be throwing that apostate bible-thumping in uninterested Jewish faces, thank you very much. The First Amendment needn’t extend that far.”
“Well, I could see how that could…” Catching myself, checking my backside, I again tracked the erstwhile coeds’s bobbing tied-back ponytails, their subrosa midseason form. “I mean, especially for those of the Jewish persuasion.”
“Precisely…” Paulen winked at a decoupled duo of black-fashion slaves. “The so-called Saved ones—they believe messianic Jews have a better chance of converting other Jews and Israelis to their crusading Christian dominionism. Hmph, ‘Jews Joining Jesus’…”
“Sorta like ‘Catholics For Cromwell’, huh? But I guess there’s room at the table all around.”
“Yes, well, depends on the seating, now doesn’t it.”
More broadly, hereabouts was still a variegated multi-culti crowd, but this particular stretch of upper Fillmore appeared even a tad more of the meatmarket variety, only with choicer prime cuts. For example, these were hautier hang-loose women—coy, hypercritical, mostly career-minded for now, the more daring harlots handily juggling organic Gauloises cigarettes with their ring-toney cels: Lotsa sleek, well-schooled sneak-a-peek prescreening before any thoughts of a real meet and greet.
No crybabies, no wardrobe malfunctions, their blasé-faire posturing came wrapped in appliquéd silk caftans and embroidered Moschino jeans, in tangerine bright scoop neck tops and yellow clamdiggers. I-Poding Wilco and Smashing Pumpkins, toe-tapping their Tevas, air-cushy suede clogs, even off-season Uggs—sharpshooter clicking their camera phones at the white-capped tent jumble of nouveau art glass, Australian opals, Navajo turquoise, naïve watercolors, ecospheric photographs, baobob lotions and Japanese feather vests—their UV tan faces full of Versace and Bolle sunglasses, tumorphones grafted to their jewel-studded ears. And that’s to say nothing of the parading malestrom.
The social drill was to network—digital connectivity—hook up in public displays of huggy bear affection, make it happen. Either that, or pull up, step back—a quick, clean control>alt>delete orchiectomy, then beat a hasty, discreet retreat to abstinence+ and cohabitating with their respective urban tribe, recounting what a total gross-out the encountered ‘other’ had just been. Couldn’t dare imagine what they’d make of us.
“In a manner of speaking—but then you’ve got those loony Christian Zionists flocking by the charter load to Israel, bankrolling some of the most militant ultra-right-wing fringers,” Paulen added, “trying to evangelize ‘The Chosen People’ with all their crapture about how Israelis are just place holding the Holy Land for them until End Times. How Jews resisting conversion are blocking millennial utopia…”
“Right, didn’t I read where that was really going on in Colorado Springs,” I nodded, knowing little else about it, picking up on a flock of feral cockatiels swooping down over StreetJazz from nearly Alta Plaza Park, whistle-ruckusing to beat the bands.
“Dobson’s crowd…and at the Air Force Academy, no less. Hmph, prophecies, Revelations: biblical injunctions, and by the Second Coming, of course, Jews either convert to Christianity or go down in flames—such a deal,” Paulen sputtered. “I mean just whom do those Armageddon-peddling charismatics think they are dealing with? Do those morons really believe Jews were born yesterday?”
“Or born again yesterday, for that matter.” No denying, this breezy conversation, this meet-greet small talk here was bringing on some old, all-too-familiar splits. Honestly, who in God’s name was he offended by, anyway? Whose good book was he throwing, and at whom? Hmm, what if it was a little bit of both…Christ, it felt like my prefrontal was flapping open like a screen door in a tropical storm, a heady paring back of the ol’ parietal. “But then, who are we to say, right?”
“Who else? Ezekiel and Deuteronomy wannabes? Utter nayprayers, that’s what they are so patently misinformed…”
“Wow, seriously?” I wavered and re-aimed galward. “So they have about as much chance with their proselytizing as we do of winning over these sweethearts, huh?”
“Speak for yourself, Herbert,” he gazed about. “Speak solely for yourself.”
Huffing further up Fillmore, we inched past a school of alpha studlies beta testing their latest lines, something on the order of ‘How’s your bars’, working on their sans-block tans. Here, too, Ivy League T and sweatshirts served to pre-screen better than those Mastercard sign-up tents on seemingly every StreetJazz corner, only with a scattering of Boalt Hall, Tuck and London School, a spreadsheet of Palo Alto, Fuqua, Wharton and Sloan.
The better dressed among these guys sported Izod pullovers and spinnaker-brilliant Nautica knits tucked into patchy cargo shorts, over thatched leather sandals or sleek OP clogs. The real clothes stallions maintained Ferragamo linen and crisply pressed Gant dress shirts over creased three-bill blue jeans, at easier Yalies fashionably sockless in tassled Bottega mocs—spread collar Tyrwhitt gussets and French cuffs afly.
“Anybody I should know about?” Thinking there, tell me all about it, doc—wrinkled, rethreaded, off the shrift-shop rack attired though I be.
“Not so as I can now, Herbert.” Prof actually sporting a far better chance on the face of it in his properly donnish, wide whale coordinates.
“Well, it’s not like me to pry, so…” Nevertheless being eager to pry away.
“I should hope not,” Paulen replied, pulling me out of the path of several even higher margin trollers. “Some peaks are better left unscaled.”
Whatever that meant, these dudes were the gen-next players and comers, fashioning cool faux-hunk poses, with black leather courier cases and freshly minted MBA profiles—more often than not already striking paydirt, seldom if ever striking out. Between here and the antique stores and designer boutiques across Fillmore, these chic magnets flexed and preened and circled to bolster their cell strength…bicoastal, multitasking, tapping their Treos, pounding their Palms in real local time, if not txting that hot little number at the Skybar down in L.A.—or ringing up producer buds star-schmoozing around the Chateau Marmont jungle garden and starlit pool.
Checking their heirloom Brequet and Blanc Pain watches, they adjusted their Revo Polars in the neighborhood goldsmith’s display windows, steadily driving less net-worthy San Franciscans out of this part of town. Other trustfunder trendoids chatted up their black MotoRazrs and earsets, systems analyzing, wealth counseling, vulture capitalizing the next potential ground-floor start-up with stratospheric upside, shrewdly culling the cred from the crud—committing holy hikikomoria on a 24/7 basis until the deal closed, then speed dating, popping ecstasy, micro wines and fruit brews well in hand.
Didn’t know about doc here, but in some ways, I still envied them; in others, I was just thankful to be statistically beneath and beyond it all—so cognitively on the periphery while remaining in the thick of it in the physical realm. Yet the cross-sphere tugs and tensions, doggedly spread across my lobes…
Sure, there were the odd comparative-lit Brownies in retro Bermudas, white socks and REI sandals with matching fanny packs. Yves and Calvin clad symposium devotees cruised with their exquisitely sculpted, powdered poodles and skittish wiener dogs. But either way, the conversations we heard piecemeal were over my head at least, hitting below our budgetary belt—altogether, a mighty imposing young crowd. Still, drawing everybody inexorably forward in concert and common cause were those intoxicating Latin rhythms.
“Intriguing multivariate skew to this demography, nearly its own tribal moral community,” the professor said, suddenly making with some socio shop talk, then pointing across to a canopied Symphony resale shop, which was softly piping out some ‘Air On The G String’—no doubt its staff’s classical interpretation of the Bacchanalia that lay outside their doors. “Say, didn’t there used to be a neighborhood pharmacy over there? It was where mother filled her myriad prescriptions—what father skirted paying for, grandmother always covered in full.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing about your gram back in Boulder days.” I eyed a come-lately estate antique store, by now wondering whether she was a granny or a bubbie. Enter the cognitive inhibition and dissonance: how did that tune go, holding two opposing views at once, both being equally true? “Next to where that great old Russian appliance repair guy used to be. Had a great old-timer phone booth too.”
“But then I suppose that was a long, lifetime ago…” Paulen’s eyes rolled wistfully up toward that red airship, as though spotting it for the very first time, as if there was something else in the air.
“Right…like, somewhere between the Second Coming and End of Days,” I smiled thinly, patting his shoulder with my folded newspaper. The rejiggered plan was just to toe gently at the edges this roiling seiche of his, even though I felt like I was cliff diving with leaded flippers into tar balls and deep-water plumes. Still, I had signed on, and my credibility had come at a premium, going way back. Anyway, what was the worst that could come from a reasonable little discussion of unreasonable discrimination and disparagement? If I had only known…
“Yes, lifetime ago indeed. So whatever has happened to you, Herbert? Going ghost the way you have all these years. Why are you hiding amidst all this? What are you hiding…not into anything indictable, I should hope. In any event, you surely are an interesting case study yourself, all right—namely hanging out in dim, jihadesque cafés like that.”
“Jihadesque? Me, hiding? That’s not…no way. See I’m really working on somethings, don’t you worry,” I stammered, not wanting to tip any scales, much less letting on that I still lived in this very neighborhood myself. But that was another story altogether. Pulling the rib-tickling pamphlet from my pocket, I caught a quick glance at the flip side, before carefully angling it back into my vest. It seemed to have a disclaimer stamped in fine print on its rear panel, referencing among others, the acronyms JFP and ZOA. But it all came as more like some Grimm revelation to me. “Yep, got a lot of hats in the ring, and am working on a project—upside big one, real consequential, as a matter of fact.”
“I’ll just hazard a guess that you are…”
Care for more?
Chapter Eight. Ante is raised,
some overheated trance music
leads to news of past transgressions…
“You’ll never have more need that the heavenly
bodies should befriend you, for your earthly
path is now darkened and confused.”
(Apologies to Leicester)
“Senores? Que tal, quieres Carne Flautas o Tostada Compuesta?”
“Uh, no—I don’t think we…”
“Y la Sopapilla esta muy sabrosa…”
“No, gracias, por favor,” Paulen said, hoisting his nostrils skyward, with a sweep of his backhand. “Muy por favor.”
Now then, a decidedly Latin flavor wafted from Consuela’s sidewalk steam table—hot, spicy uvula scalders out front of the sprawling Mexican restaurant’s red-yellow and burnt orange storefront. Radiating like an Aztec Tajin escudo against Fillmore’s pastel Victorians and pale hospital complex amassed up there on Webster Street, next to Sherith Israel’s temple dome in all its incarnadine majesty, this neighborhood cantina had become a bit too overgrown and underfed of late, to where la senora was about fixing to go belly up, and in no mood for any street fair stiff arms. Whispers were that some Indian or crepe place—crepes and cheese fondue yet—was waiting in the wings to take her space over—how totally ‘70s of them. “Then keep it moving, vagos mio,” she shifted, “we’ve got customers to serve here…”
“Si, moving right along,” I said. With that, we did simply sample some of her vegetarian soy taquitos, horchatos and strawberry sangria—las muestras gratuitas—veering into mid street, toward a Raza95 FM radio station’s promotional display with a Sanctuary City theme. But not before I downed the sangria and exchanged it for a different cup, seldom being one to pass up a freebie of any kind. I then winced at the sight of the medical center up the hill, site of my mental spinout on that foggy backstretch, the night ages ago I couldn’t quite reconcile the Stroop effect and my chiasma, bring my throbbing cranial beast under control.
“Not to belabor,” Paulen continued, discreetly wiping his chin. “But it has been a veritable springtime for Hitler, would you grant me that?”
“Me? Haven’t really given it much thought.” Yet apparently here we went back to his premise, into that grating divide.
“Look, I do have my reasons, and all I’m suggesting is it’s more than just Bruno Ganz in SS drag,” Paulen nudged my shoulder in anticipation of the breezy incline ahead, crushing and tossing his tiny wax sampler cup into a large plastic basket. “People are throwing Hitler and Nazi references around lately like cheap beer-nuts and those bloody juice cups—even my beleaguered ethnic studies colleague at CU.”
“Well, I guess it’s an industry, bigger than Elvis,” I said. “And yeah—I’ve read about that whole Churchill thing. Pretty outrageous, all right—in a Ward and Nederland sort of way.”
“It’s disrespectful and downright demeaning, that’s what it is… trivializes the very tragedy of the Shoah itself…”
“Show…well, I don’t know, but maybe that’s because of World War II and the death camps being in the news so much lately—all the memorials and remembrances,” I ventured, hoping to dismiss this topic out of hand without tipping it. I thought this was all settled anyway, all squared away by me. “People can pick up on such things, with all sorts of axes to grind.”
“No, I’m afraid it goes far deeper than that, my friend…always does.”
Juxtaposed to the salsa radio booth was another police outreach stand, the SFPD’s insignia emblazoned on assorted T-shirts, jackets and sweats–stronger and surer than ever. This was the business end of event oversight—near enough to the live action evildoers downstreet, nearer yet to the friendlier fire—and anxious, willing wallets—of the more supportive constituents, who placed a nicely higher premium on their protection. Assorted Glock sniffers and PAL types ganged around San Francisco’s finest, schmoozing over service pieces, stun guns, logoed Kevlar vests and other riot gear, buying up midnight blue souvenir night sticks and ball caps from half-cocked patrolmen, whose black-and-white trail bikes were at the ready for disturbances back down Geary way.
In the bargain, the neighborly patrolmen (and a token woman or two) dispensed tales of harrowing heroism over the squawking of their shoulder radios. Nearby was an adjunct stand of beefy firemen, hawking their similar, albeit blood-red wares, gathering petition signatures against citywide firehouse closures and departmental reductions with so much arson going on. As we passed by, one full-gear battalion chief was getting hosed by some power walkers and retired busybodies over cruising around in those foul-smoky engine company and diesel hook-and-ladder rigs for no apparent reason or alarm other than marking territory.
“Whew, pretty hot stuff…”
“To say the least,” replied the professor. “If you think of the bigotry purely in sociological terms, Veblen, Kenneth Clarke and Charles Horton Cooley must be burning in their urns about now.”
“Actually, I mean this Ceviche sample,” I spooned snapper cocktail off the bottom of another small white paper cup, Nate’s half-scanned letter still tucked into the Saturday Times clamped tightly under my right arm—keeping up appearances, if not sheathing the past.
A hoop-bellied android clown handed out helium twisty balloon animals to passing pulchritude, of which there were the usual multitudes. Skirting around his/her glowing nose, Paulen and I somewhat gauged and reread one another, before merging once again into the up-fair flow. Here, the warmish weather had brought choice, better-bred, pouty young hotties in the best and brightest of suggestive San Francisco attire. Catching a breath, we followed their sonic trail of chart topping ring tones and random cellphone chatter, leading to the pelvic lure of Latin music up ahead.
Drawing my eyes as well was a display of squiggly blown glass wind chimes, clinking and tinkling in the westerly breeze, a grinning Nicasio artisan hanging his new and improved serpentine wind whistles. But rather seemingly seizing Paulen’s attention was the perfect storm of well-toned hormones that persisted in gliding by. Who wouldn’t glaze over eyes-wise, what with this coed-to-Cosmo cavalcade: So many lovelies safely north of the boinking age, yet all snugly under 35, with their mounds of cascading dark curls, the streaky blonde hair tied back and pony tailed to varied lengths up and down their fluid vertebrae, strolling so casually in their flips, trainers and colorful Crocs. Yes, so blessed many of them—so many, so blessed, all around.
Crushing my sample cup, spindling it around its plastic mini-spoon, I couldn’t help but notice the professor continuing to fix on the whole hip-swaying, groin-stirring procession—nominally, of course, highly analytical, less subjective than clinically objective—or so it would appear. Yes indeed, this was about women as pure visual stimulation, about objectifying young chick bait all over again—their tanned gym rad hard-body parts, their sinewy Nautilus-toned limbs and Brut flute stemware-to-rock climber calves straining turquoise crop pants, deep quad bike thighs bulging under black wicking Spandex cycling shorts.
Broad, shapely shoulders ripping steel blue tops, deltoids bulbing through sleeveless straps, XXL Delta Sig sweatshirts and Bolero wraps cinching steel-belted strategically around steel rod slim waistlines, between Rushmore bosoms and rubber-tight derrieres. Alas, for all the blinkin’ good it did aging farts like us, settling as we were instead for the furtive sneak and peek, a generation or two removed.
“Be that as it may,” Paulen suddenly regrouped, although still far more attuned to this scene than I dared be. “My only point is this Nazi, Holocaust business—it is all about triggers, hot buttons that have gone from taboo and verboten to common vernacular and catch-all phrases. Look, how is it that a term and point of reference can go from hallowed to ringing so hollow, Herbert? Tell me that, will you please?”
“How on earth would I know,” I tossed the wadded cup into a blue plastic castered litter bin, next to a pegboard display of beady fused glass necklaces and earrings in kaleidoscopic colors. What was his trip here? This little grilling was taking me back to orals, that academic Star Chamber so long ago—only now I had no thesis, let alone a dissertation to defend. Yeah, there was a part of me that wanted to hang with him on this stuff. Still, there was another part that didn’t give a hang about any of it anymore, having too much to worry about now. “Wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Well, I venture to say I do,” Paulen led me around a debit card sign-up booth waving Visa emblazoned T-shirts as a lure, in behind a dynamic brunette duet in sporting purple and red sequined batik halter-neck tunics and low-riding rolled up jeans, sparking a certain hankering, at least on my part, for the little blue pill. “It begins at the beginning, has been with us from time immemorial…”
“What…time,” I muttered. Where was he going with this? What was it all to him, anyway?! I figured for sure he wasn’t even Jewish—that much, I remembered. God knows, I wasn’t being coy, just clueless as to how we had gone from catching up to cracking back to something like that, and was getting chimichanga gaseous just thinking about it. I’m, like, been there, please don’t go there again... “I mean, should we even be talking about such things here?”
“I say where better, San Francisco being so utterly international, the birthplace of the United Nations and all…”
So I re-checked my backside, took to reading ‘Rearender’ in script letters across the tidy little sweatpants of a liberated Texas Ex. The Lohan-Paris knockoff stopped dead right ahead of us, at a rack of Brazilian necklaces and Rio wristlets, as we moved gingerly on around. “Then what exactly are you talking about?”
“The same old ugly weeds popping up from primordial slime.” Paulen sighed, averting a glance toward a stand of matted Caribbean photographs, more specifically the leilani-like tse-through sundresses and floral sandals gracing colorful Havana doorways.
“Weeds? Slime? I don’t follow…” In any case, this all really wasn’t my baggage. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t end up a lowly redcap after the fact.
“Then let’s call it what it is, shall we, the world’s oldest prejudice,” he caught a breath, gearing further for Fillmore Street’s steady rise, laboring noticeably in the thicker sea level air. “It is so troubling, but I’m afraid we may be looking at the scourge of your garden variety anti-Semitism—in all its ignominy. Yet how utterly intriguing as a resurgent phenomenon in these presumably progressive times, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, uh…I suppose, but…” Taken somewhat aback, my initial reaction was to reconsider the broader picture. That would be StreetJazz’s inviting upward queue of snowpeaked fair tents, their sky-blue panels of ascending grade merchandise in ever more burnished configurations. I scanned mid-street stands chock with monarch shadow boxes, blown glass ornaments, rock crystal bracelets and pop-art decoupage—the crowds browsing among them, streaming to either side—all these fragrant young starlets surfing, pawing the artsy-craftsy finds, charge cards burning holes in their sunblocked little hands—especially those with their bored stiff frat beaus in tow. “I just guess I never thought of things that way…”
“It’s like an ever mutating virus,” Paulen added, as he gently tapped a collection of Andean leather key pouches, setting them asway on their strappy displays. “Historically speaking, it ebbs and flows, my friend, has since before Jews were exiled in 586 BCE. Still, it grows by the day to this day, even in the most unlikely of places.”
Whoa, time out, this pretty much snapped me back to the viral here and now. Red light, third rail, conversation stopper, poisoning the dialogue, dropping the A-S bomb: Christ, is he really here, am I really here talking about this with him in such a glorious place? In such polite, politically correct company? I hardly think so…well, anyway, better divert to that turbo Diesel couple huddling curbside, sharing a styro tray of Chicken Satay.
That distraction led me to a passing trio of daddy’s little heartbreakers in short Gap khakis and lacy citrus camisoles. as I struggled to get on to a more…tactile topic. They were probably over the bridge from Walnut Creek or Danville for some serious plastic maxxing, looking to trigger at will. Dutifully tanned and impervious with their copper-clad toe rings—they were fixing to party like rock stars, posing like models in Ralph Lauren ads, all with that cute little upspeak inflection at every statement’s end. Look, but don’t dare touch, however—this much, I still knew after all this time, now didn’t I. “The women around these parts, huh?”
“Yes, they’re much like Boulder, only slightly older,” Paulen motioned us mid block between racks of homespun aprons, tasty WWF ceramic trivets and spoon rests, back over to the slightly shadier side of Fillmore. “Nicely so, I might add, mid to late 20s…one never can get enough of it. That is, if the ladies are still to your liking.”
“Sure, of course,” I exhaled, over the Michael Breckeresque solo of a lone saxophone player peddling his indie CDs, serenading a waiting line for a sidewalk chiro-massage chair, ostensibly for a little neck adjustment and spinal check. Whatever, this is much more productive, conversation-wise—less incendiary and far more to the point… “I mean, why wouldn’t they? But they really do seem to be to yours.”
“So you say, although it is probably is safer this way. The campus crop can be nothing but trouble these days—everything stacked against you,” the professor added obliquely, picking up on a tube-topped chippie in pencil jeans, flashing her lime jelly bracelets and barbed wire ankle tattoos. She quickly vanished behind some dudes gathered around the sax player, and an adjoining display of lacquered Fillmore posters, debating the headliner legacies of Steve Winwood versus Jeff Beck, Morrison Hotel versus Van the Man, over frosted plastic tankards of a Mendocino micro brew. “Of course it’s even going on in Boulder these days…”
“Safer…women?” I found it curious, fetchingly so, that he would stitch these words together.
“Safer spaces, campus all around, PC, trigger warnings, tricky to navigate. And yet a mite more sensual, all things being equal…”
“Or consensual, equally wise, huh…” I then stifled the urge to ask how old or young he might go, and to what lengths. Couldn’t slip up again, couldn’t let on.
Obversely, the guys in question right here were a load-bearing metrosexual mix by and large: The shaggy, strategically ripped D&G denimistas, close-cropped Abercrombie Greek rats with their tidy little soul patches, tippling local beers and Margaritas in wrinkled chinos and awning wear by Lacoste; leathery, slicked back poseurs layering Polo over their Calvins; buff-cut bench pressers sporting their Creatine Tommy guns; teddy boys wrapped in marked-down Prada or Perry Ellis, feeding their faux ennui, but more often than not just side-eying cleavage. Altogether, the women among them appeared anywhere from put upon to assertively in play; little wonder, the hooking up on upper Fillmore being patently off the hook.
“As the case may be—however, what I’m rather more concerned about is the rampant, repellant prejudice,” said Paulen. “Even the People’s Republic of Boulder, educated as it is, has had its share of minority attacks and hate flyers.”
“Hmph, really—well, that’s not the Boulder I remember…” We might have had an easier go of it on the other side of Fillmore Street, over by a less festering bric-a-brac emporium, spacewalker footwear salon and Victorian ultraceutical skin care store with Steve McQueen’s blistering old red Indian motorcycle in the shop window—as Cooler King primo as it was improbably displayed—much like the classic beast dad always said Uncle Early loved to ride, way, way back in the narrow plowboy Prairie Crossing day. “Besides, I suppose it can happen around here too, you know—the most Jewish-friendly city west of Gotham. Protests and graffiti…incidents like that.“
And right here we were, wading into a particularly dense thicket in front of Pacific Heights’s friendly neighborhood animal hospital, an outsized tribute to Getty family largess that famously treated virtually every domestic species from damn near every part of town. Stacked metal cages lined the sidewalk, from one end of the block concrete hospital to the other, filled with cuddly kitties, spaniels, Siamese, beagles, Pomeranians and Chihuahuas. Strays mostly, mutts up to here: the wannabe house pets variously bounded, pawed at or recoiled from the wire kickers fawning over them, when not window shopping the all-too-cute wanted posters tiling up behind the pen rows. Little wonder our foot traffic was slowed to a stuttering slog by this cellblock petting zoo—capped by a pen of gaunt racetrack greyhound refugees.
“Well, that’s not the San Francisco I remember,” Paulen breathed heavier, noting as how he recalled the pet center being an autohaus repair garage, much like the eye clinic back across the way, that gentrified former body and fender shop beyond the burl table and embroidered throw pillow street fair stands. “But wherever it is, it is patently wrong, am I right?”
“Wrong? Uh, right,” I pushed back, taking my own refuge in that red airship now hovering, humming directly above us, and the sounds of Latin music growing louder up ahead. This wasn’t how it was drawn up, how it was supposed to play out, not at all. But the money was OK, half up front. So whatever, just flow with it. If this was the way in, I had to barge, topic be damned. That’s right—draw him out, size him up further—get him to keep on spooling, whatever it took, wherever it went: cat and mouse-clicks, garrotes and sticks, feints and dodges when need be. “Without a doubt, totally uncool…”
“Good, wouldn’t want to think we had another Mel Gibson on our hands…” He looked me over like I was wearing a suicide belt. “Honestly, where do you suppose such virulent hatred comes from?”
“Huh? Who knows?! Not me, jeez…” I mean, how could this stuff still be going on? “That’s not my cross to bear, believe you me.”
“We’ll see about that, now won’t we…”
Care for more?
Chapter Seven. Further upward
in secular class and style,
spiritual divergences collide
in scripturally unexpected ways…
“Saturn can transit ambition,
a slow climb to power, yet quick,
subsequent fall—take Napoleon and Hitler.
Though most never attempt to rule the world.”
Dame Thornia
“Who asked her, and where’s that coming from anyway?”
“You mean the Kerry Swiftboat crack?”
“I mean the Ashky crack…”
“Ashky? Not exactly familiar with the term—but seems people are always spoutin’ off about something around this place,” I replied with a wary eye, though no less flummoxed by the cyclist’s name calling. “It’s just political hot air, doc. All politics is loco, far as I can see.”
But feign dispassion, that was the ticket, register as an independent—totally noncommittal, back to playing it both ends toward the middle. Yet the Obama ’08 petition stand had otherwise set me to reflecting on how his insurgent presidential campaign had trained a bright, Wright light on the South side of Chicago. And how, in the late 1970s, a city park little more than one mile west of all that could have been such a cold, cruel world away.
Nevertheless, course correction, back to the present: Part soap box, part newspaper chase, part overage sandbox, Big Beenz Coffee and Tea typically brimmed with such hypermentalation, free-form association damned near operatic in audible tenor and range. Here was a daily corner kaffee klatsch of regular crack caffeine junkies like me long hooked on Beenz’ infamous dark-roasted rocket fuel, along with bookish health services grinds from the nearby dental school. Beenz blends could be as exotic as Sierra Dorada or Arabian Mocca Sanani, seductive new samplings ever in the pipeline.
Today, I peered though steamed glass panes at narrow, cramped window counters of Chronicle and New York Times browsers living cup to cup, buzz to buzz, a post-grad biochem A.D.Debating the likes of stem cells to string theory with a research chemist from the hospital complex just uphill. Everything was an off-point postulation, every up or down tick extrapolated into an ensuing trend—other college sweatshirted didacts between lab sessions gathered around, making it all political, in a neocom versus neocon-job sort of way, clutching their triple Kona latte cups with self-righteous authority.
Children of the ideo-intellect planned their next demonstration, boycott, and plug-in protest over ballot propositions, grassroots insurgencies, occupation mobilizations or municipal garbage and sanitation strikes. Urban bioplasy blowhards spilled full side and rear denim airbags out over their counter stools, so many squirrely, somewhat girly men with their own poultry pink skin: Or so it must have seemed to the canny, manly work-out starlets just in from the gym, sipping their Au Lait Swirls and Caffé con Pannas, picking at fat-free oatmeal muffins and cherry peach scones while fawning over the SF firemen muscling in on shift break. Beside them, unemployed young techno Turks noodled over their online portfolios. Next table, Lapsang Souchong teetotalers poured over their new poetry volumes from that bookstore next door—all of this set to a surround sound Verdi/Sevillian score.
“Ashkenazi, Herbert—the hiding Jewish crack,” Paulen said, having stopped cold. “But even if the EuroJewry part is true, what’s that got to do with anything? Kerry’s nothing to hide, nothing at all.”
“Exactly,” I nodded to his lead. “Although I do believe I heard somewhere that his brother is some kind of rabbi.”
“Hearsay at best. In any case, I didn’t expect to hear that sort of bigoted crack, particularly not here.”
“Who would? I mean, I don’t know where that came from.” I found myself really not wanting to go there anyway. “It’s probably just the caffeine talking. Hell, I don’t even know if she’s from here, or if I’ve ever really seen her before.”
“Yes, well, I liked this store better when it was a Japanese burger stand. And why am I gaining the impression that my beloved hometown has been overtaken by newbies for whom San Francisco’s storied history holds no sway?”
Outside, shaded metal tables stretched around the corner, retired teachers and grizzled city pensioners nursed their small French Roasts and caramel-whipped Blasts: mostly elbow-grabbing neighborhood motor-mouths, obsessive-compulsive newspaper clippers and hoarders comparing radiation and chemotherapies. Wrangling for good seats and movie sections was a contingent of out-to-pasture veterans of Fire Island and Provincetown—part-time docents and dog walkers, with long, wistful eyes and sighs, reading Times remains as some red badge of relevance.
Among them were hot-talk radio earbudders tuned faithfully into another show of ignorance with attitude. The rest of Big Beenz’s outliers were a leftover bunch of lefty nobodies like me trying to be somebodies again—brain-fried time spongers who didn’t know anything, but were content to just know of people who knew things, and never stopped letting anyone within earshot know about it, over the growling snarls of squabbling parking meter leashed dogs. From amid all the jostling and jabbering, this shower of babble, sprouted the Kerry jibe in question.
“Besides, I can hear such imputations anywhere these days,” Paulen continued, “even in Boulder.”
“Imputations, Boulder?” I closed in for clarification, lamely leading him away. More irritating than my back itch was the rash I’d developed lately, courtesy of low-hanging jeans, product of some stress-related and budgetary weight loss not entirely confined to my billfold. More recently, this rash had abscessed into a chafing sore, aggravated by my bothersome habit of yanking these saggy straight-leg 501 Levi’s back up over my hip bone.
Across Sacramento Street, Fillmore’s jazz party scene began to change for the noticeably better bred. First inkling was a marquee on the venerable corner liquor store. Specials of the day included a deep, rich-nose Pichon Lalande, a non micro-oxygenated Cheval Blanc and ’97 Verget Meursault les Charmes. There were no screwgies here, no bulk Pinot Grigio by the box. After all, this was not your typical San Francisco ubergay freak street fair: No Hashbury smoke-out, no Castro dragathon, no North Beach neo-Bohemia nor Polk Street man-boy parades—no more batik dashikis and Etouffee gumbo stands.
For we were no longer on the down lower Fillmore. Beyond a cross-laced thicket of overhead trolley wires and rent-a-copped barricades, this next silken leg of JazzStreet was on the upswing. Here was a trendoid, trust fundster, très gourmandian San Francisco. Alas, StreetJazz food here wasn’t as smoky or spicy, the scene not so freely radical, the music nowhere near as good and real.
“You know, crackpot theories about plotting world domination, that sort of anti-Semitic rot,” Paulen continued, as we inhaled the sticky sweet of aroma of ice-blended pomegranate-blueberry coolers and lavender mint tea from the corner Santa Monica-style coffee shop doing battle with hi-caf Beenz there back across Sacramento. “See what I’m saying?”
“Me? God no…how would I know?” Christ, don’t be dragging me back into that mortar field. On the other hand, I was on the hook to see this assignment through no matter what. Besides, there was no way I wasn’t proving I could still hang with him after all these years debate-wise—whatever, wherever the conversation might lead. But whoa, that third-rail term again… “Anyway, if you mean anti-Semitism, I believe I’ve read where it’s actually on the wane in this country. I mean, in most circles, it’s over, way past history—long gone, no problemo, far as I hear around here…”
We slipped past a small crowd gathering around the cramped little Sacramento Street bandstand, upon which Melodync, a mild-mannered, methodical MJQ knockoff in black slacks and turtlenecks dutifully distillated the basic Brubeck catalog. This group soon took five and more before a small picket-fenced wine garden straddling Fillmore’s center yellow line, wherein the liquor store poured decanters of Sonoma Merlots and Fume Blancs. Paulen did have one point, though; even on this sunny day, basic black remained a sobering fashion rebellion against the brightness and light. Leather to eel skin to denim and fleece, the mini garden was awash in Dolce & Gabbana and Kenneth Cole.
Youngish—blond to Banderas swarthy—post-grad/pre-nuptial, skosh left of center sophisticates sipped Rutherford pinot noirs, dipping fresh chabatta and pain rustique strips into petri dish samples of Rafteli and tre Colli from the neighboring Italo-American olive oil emporium as Melodync re-staged and ran through some scales.
“Are you mad, Herbert? ” Paulen asked, going donnish on me after the fact. “Have data to support that postulation, do you?”
“Uh, no just grokking the whole zeitgeist thing…” Really, let’s get off this, shall we…
“Look, I don’t know where you get your information, but you honestly don’t believe that, do you? For that’s not how I see that sort of bigotry at all,” he sighed. “Anyhow, intriguing how those tent tops remind me of Denver International Airport.”
“Yeah, DIA’s way better than ol’ Stapleton Airport during a snow storm…I mean as a means of quick escape,” I leapt for the opening; then came visions of spinning out along the Denver-Boulder Turnpike… whoa, be still my head…there, better… Hmm, come to think of it, JazzStreet’s fair booths, lined smack up the middle of Fillmore, did somewhat resemble the flagship terminals at Denver International, at least from the news photos I had seen. Like inverted sno-cones with alternating red and white flying pennants, the tent tops pitched one after the other, chock-a-block all the way up to Jackson Street.
Whilst south of Sacramento the display roofs were a hodgepodge of exotic colors, from here up, they were almost uniformly icing white. Each booth housed its own unique brand of artisanry, a main drag of quirky, craftsy clutter, tended mostly by blissful counter-culture mavens from Santa Cruz to the Sierra foothills to Humboldt and points north. Stained glass, cut glass, tulip-leaded glass, and flower planter pottery—many on pegboards, adding up to arts and crafts no end.
“Escape? In a metaphorical sense, I suppose.” Paulen winced, abruptly offering to spring for nosh from a bagel chain shop, something for the walk ahead. I confessed a certain queasiness from all the cuisinal and olfactory crosscurrents, studiously avoiding any semblance of a man date. As he grabbed a quick spinach-Swiss and cream cheese, I tossed back some samples from the juice bar next door. A little Citrus Blast smoothie chased with wheat grass, and things seemed to pick up considerably from there.
“Cinammon-raison,” Paulen asked, remerging from Abe’s, pulling another fat, doughy bagel from a small recyclable brown bag.
“Uh, no thanks—maybe later,” I said, as we lateraled through the crowd stream toward Fillmore’s center display stands.
“Suit yourself,” he bit into his neatly quartered BCC. “Yes, there’s nothing like a good shmear.”
“I’m trying to lean more toward electrolytes and antioxidants myself.” Yeah, hypothetically…
“Well, I daresay this is much better than the moldy cheese and tea shop that used to be in there.” Paulen motioned back into the blue and maroon Victorian storefront, then across Fillmore toward the sliver of a Mediterranean café, next to the Olive Oil Company, now serving prix-fixe sidewalk platters of Meza, Fillos and Levant. “Let alone the ol’ Big Belly Deli that was over there.”
So went the upward flow, doc munching his transfats as we compared notes over the Fillmore Street that once was, plus all that we marveled at, and maneuvered through, in real time. The sno-cone tent booths displayed an array of matte framed photography: upstate stuff mostly, foggy bridges, north coast abalone beds, El Capitan at sunrise. Cleaving between a stand of Photoshopped cable cars, martini glass mirrors and several racks of vibrant silk sarapes and sarongs, Paulen noted how relatively little this east side of Fillmore had actually changed.
Sure, there was the obligatory Starbucks, but at least that plebeian Baskin-Robbins had melted away. Otherwise, colorfully trimmed second and third story bay window cases, their enviro-foundations and psychotherapy offices basically remained the same—loft-office shrinks still stroking their pet patients on storefront benches—as did the trickle-down thrift shops and mild, unassuming Latin grills catering to the hospital trade.
Lining the sidewalks, browsing scented soap and decoupage stands, was a primarily older-monied, younger-trending demographic, save for the prostate-plagued, menopausal scavengers with their ragged Saks and Gumps bags, queuing for position outside Junior League and Catholic school resale shops posting 50%-off sales. Melodync’s measured diminuendos tastfully rubato sound-tracked a digital scene now seemingly more attuned to Cold Play and Black-Eyed Peas.
While I checked out center street displays of Mayan jewelry and pressed-glass butterfly art, Paulen picked at his nosh and appeared to be a bit more mindful of the women on the fringes just waiting to be discovered across Fillmore: Insolence was the attitude, casual, studied beauty the standard to bare—along with tummy skirt midriffs and backsmalls, whereupon narrow, monarch-winged tattoos drew double takes in their wake. These were trim-cut California girls from everywhere, in low-riding yoga pants, fine-mesh camisoles—with combed back pony tails—sipping their hot, half-caf Mistos, caressing their sweet-talking cels, playing dodge eye with sly passersby.
Still I couldn’t help noticing how intently Paulen seemed to follow their white flared pants clear down to their feet, the clip-clop of their beaded flip-flops, wiggling toenails ablaze, so calculated as to steer just the right misters their way. Such pedicures could have come from any number of late-model salons along this stretch of Fillmore. Makeover Row comprised a hipacious zone of workouts and wellness, from full-sweat aerobics wear to day spas for full-body renewal and restoration, interspersed with the fashion nooks designed to accessorize it all. Anyway, doc continued taking aim—duly noted, although I wasn’t about to call him out on that quite this soon.
We soon meandered through fair booths chock with stained-glass sunburst panels and framed mezzotint whales, between a stand of macramé hangings, laminated blossom acetates and a burly klatsch of microbrew testers encircling a gnarly acacia tree. Pausing at a tent wall of vintage Fillmore West and Winterland posters, we both dwelled upon reproductions of the psychedelic relics first printed so colorfully by Tea Lautrec Lithography.
“Takes me back to my Cal days,” Paulen said wistfully, pointing up to a refurbished double storefront, black tile motif with purple window trim and mossy green patina-arched doorways. “Used to be that rambling bookstore, as I recall. Above it was a rooftop space that was outfitted as a couple of acoustic rooms. Back then, you’d hear this amazing Latino rock music at all hours. It was a makeshift practice studio where Carlos Santana originally honed his sound—hoping Bill Graham would happen by. My Sixties San Francisco, begone…”
“Speaking of which,” I nodded ahead, stealing a peek at serious cleavage. A slump shouldered, buttoned up Boz Scaggs had rounded the corner at Clay Street—emerging from a silver-blue Bentley that had whooshed by at the Sacramento Street crosswalk. Now he Lido Shuffled before us into Heroes and Shearoes, a white-hot hairstyling salon that reputedly clipped everybody from the Mayor to pre-split Sean Spicoli and Robin Wright Penn. “There’s Mr. SF blues himself…at least until he turned Mr. disco.”
“Money sings, all right…”
The other patinaed portal led to RelaxCentric, a blindingly neon day spa dispensing glycolic facials, mudpie body wraps, hot sharin stone massages, peeling exfoliation and macro-dermabrasion—all manner of yummy treatments and procedures to ward off everything from toxic stress and hangnails to overage acne and Botox drool—reputedly even for the likes of Bacon and Johnny Hairspray. Contact sigh: even the two of us began to look past the crowds and chill a bit, Paulen actually going so far as to pause and reflect upon the refreshing midday breezes, the clear blue sky, the no-ozone and low-particulate-matter levels compared to Front Range Colorado today, that big red Saturn blimp still lordly hovering overhead.
RelaxCentric’s power of suggestion seemed to knead Reese Paulen into low-grade contentment. That is, until he caught a glimpse beyond the metal shade awning, an acacia overhang and shadowed tree limb painted dark green on an olive façade leading to the Clay Theater marquee.
“God forbid, they’re showing that bilge here?” he erupted, tossing his bagel bag into a trash can near the box office.
“You mean ‘Riviere Crimea’?” I noted the fading single-screen theater’s headline feature, a new French romp on underage sex traffickers, four stars straight from Cannes, tripling up with ‘The Toxic Avenger’, and counting ‘The Big Lebowski’s’ 278+F-bombs. The usual art house fare…”
“No, I mean that,” he pointed to the late-show title, among coming attraction signs for a hellish little documentary exposé called ‘Jesus Camp’, and ‘Jonestown: The Movie’—Jonestown, for godsakes, just like it was yesterday. Between them was a poster of Bruno Ganz in Gestapo drag, for ‘Downfall’, a rerun of the latest Hitler revisionism. By now, that flick’s undertow had spawned a YouTube meme of so many parody riffs on Herr Commandant’s last bathetic bunker rant it wasn’t funny, having turned the sappy German biopic into a mein campy comic midnight romp coast to coast.
“Oh, der Fuhrer did build the Autobahns. Poor, frail Adolph was manic depressed. Tell that to the skin and bones corpses piled in his death pits.”
“Aww, it’s just a stupid goof, I mean like ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, or ‘The Reichy Horror Picture Show’…I heard they’re even remaking ‘Inglorious Bastards’ that 1978 Gestapo-bashing Castellari film.”
“That your zeitgeist, too, Herbert? Puleeze, ‘Downfall’ is utter heresy, Holocaust trivialization…and there’s nothing funny about it. What’s next, Birkenau farce musicales?!”
“Whoa, I should hope not.” Whoa, steady...leave me out of it this time. “But you’re pretty testy about it, aren’t you…”
“Pardon moi, but I can’t abide such evil. I mean Nazi this, neo-Nazi that—Nazi, Nazi, Nazi! They’re neo-marching all over Europe, denying everything. There’s a Nazi pope, a Nazi sympathizing prince in the UK, they’re targeting Jewish judges—we even had a neo-nutcase on Boulder community TV calling the mayor a big bad Jew. Really, all the antisemitism drek has got to stop!” The professor vented as we passed the theater altogether, toward another women’s fashion salon on the corner—career-track silky chiffon ensembles draped over black wire-frames, more New York style. “Anyway I digress, didn’t there used to be a pigeonhole of a café in here somewhere?”
“Yep, it was the Hob Nob, but Millard’s-on-Fillmore ruled when the bistro took it over in the ’70s. Sadly, that sliver of a space got squeezed out long ago.” Then I noticed Boz Scagg’s driver swiftly backing his Bentley saloon down Clay Street, Melodync fading into an entirely different retro sound. Blink, blink—anything to get off topic, change the conversational threads, invoking Godwin’s Law, if need be. At any rate, I had to keep us talking, no matter what—sociobjectively or no. Besides, testy is as testy does… “You know, for a minute there, I almost got to thinking you were Jewish your own self…”
“Really? Whatever possesses you to say a thing like that?”
Care for more?
Chapter Six. The JazzStreet scene
turns hotter, pricier; the conversation
runs more heated and revelatory…
“Saturn can Return on
a term or a dime, send you
off spinnin’ in unreal time…”
“No, seriously, seriously…what brings you back to San Francisco, and why now?” Paulen’s rainbow wedding crack had set me to wondering, looking for a third finger ring, any signs of domestic wear and tear or alienation of affection—nothing doing—just as digitally barren as mine. On the other hand, there was that stone, which had an oddly familiar pewter ring to it. “I mean, what would possess you to leave Bouldervana after all this time? Everything all right on campus and everything?” Now, that’s more like it, press the issue, motivation-wise.
“Right as right there, but I came for a Concerned Social Scientists conference over at the Hilton. And then to tie up some loose ends—mainly family matters, that’s why here, why now.”
“Conference…of course,” I muttered, now gazing beyond the S.F.P.D. community outreach and souvenir sweatshirt stand, southward past steel drums and tabula. The jazzy R&B combos worked every street corner between here and Post Street, the aural pleasures of which ranged from a little Pico Rivera or baby Chick Webb to a pledge drive Ken Burns snippet from NPR. In the bargain, I gained a snootful of aromatic Crawfish Etouffee, Thai sticks, barbequed oysters and Uhuro falafel with chicken apple sausage from a global village of StreetJazz’s tight procession of indigenous food tents. “Hilton, huh?”
“Sure, you remember how those conferences go, don’t you,” Professor Paulen said, somewhat impatiently, looking the other way. “Vitae, group dynamics, exhausting papers, networking among the non-affiliated, and nametag roulette…we must stay current in our respective fields. My topic du jour: ‘Is sociology too far left of mainstream to promote purposeful debate and discussion beyond the academy?’ With accompanying deterministic discourse, I might add.”
“I guess, like vaguely…” After the pungent transmelding of deep-fried clams, garlic and blackeyed beancakes had invaded my sinuses, a raucous Elite Café scene and Loma Prieta memories jellyrolled me at the knees. I found myself going wobbly altogether with another upward gaze at that red hovering airship. Its digital newscrawl trumpeted Huygen’s imminent moonshot approach toward Titan. I just kept wondering if the blimp’s lettering didn’t actually read, ‘Saturn Replay’. How far, how near it does ring…
“But enough already with all that stuffy pomp and façon de parler. Let’s dispense with the socio-formalities, shall we? Keep it street casual for purposes of our little catch-up.”
“You mean dumbing it down for the lay brains?” Still, I couldn’t help noticing his alligator-banded timepiece glistening in the sunlight, appearing to be a vintage Girard-Perregaux, Grand Date model, circa 1945. The heirloom watch was clearly from a generation once removed, conceivably handed down from someone with a goodly measure of time on his hands.
“As you please. In any case, mother recently passed away here, and I’ve some of her affairs to finalize,” Paulen said, beckoning me toward California Street as two glow-vested rent-a-cops blew tandem whistles, signaling backed-up foot traffic and assorted look-a-loos to a pedestrian bridge across the intersection as they did block to block. Keg beer drained over the convex crowned asphalt, outbound taxis and delivery trucks stopped cold, snarling, revving in wait.
“Oh, sorry. Losing your mother and all,” I shuffled through the crosswalk in sheep step, with mom’s pained face flashing before me on deathbed sheets. “Gone through that myself…long time ago.” I tripped over the long steel leg of a police barricade, as everything was clotting this side of California.
“Thank you, but it wasn’t quite like that,” he steadied me some. “We really hadn’t been all that close until toward the end…you likely know what I’m talking about…”
“Mother, not close, not hardly? But it has to be a difficult trip for you. That much I can…”
“Yes, well, let’s just say we all have our setbacks, our little turning points in a difficult year, our little chores and obligations. Alas, for better or worse, I tend to remain loyal no end to my loved ones and friends.”
Already drowning out any stray decibels from a Machete Ensemble down on the Sutter Street stage, or the Moroccan Trance Trio at Pine, was the gaseous hum of a hedgerow of orange Honda generators. Suddenly, StreetJazz’s main bandstand erupted before us in a harangue of tuning instruments, this baby Hammond keyboarding to life as we snailed helplessly by. Rattling shop windows already suggested that upper Fillmore wear and ware were upper market by comparison.
Cleaving through the crowd around the jazz bandstand’s blindside proved a tighter squeeze than the Italian sausage casings in Pemmora Pizza, which still solidly anchored that corner brickface ‘Albright Apartments’ building—a haven some 15 years post-1989 earthquake. But we hit a dash of daylight, and the flip side of the canopied main stage yielded Jazzbone—a brass, mid-range cover group known for drawing upon the standards playbook, ‘Begin the Beguine’ to ‘Closin’ Time’—all with a wrinkle or two of their own.
Cooly tuning, flexing scales and teasing out chord progressions in the white-tent shade, this sextet’s opening fanfare set the tone for their headline chanteuse, an outsized blur of cape and feathery boa soon bounding to the center mic from stage right. “When you’re dead, you’re dead, people,” she screamed, “so let’s be livin’ it up whilst we can!”
“Still, mother’s wake and funeral were interesting enough,” Paulen added. “Old family and friends turning out…some erstwhile neighbors and schoolmates, too.”
“Huh? Bet that was…interesting.”
“More than you know, Herbert. More than you might know…”
“Yeah, well, want to stop and check this out a sec…” My mind paused and reset momentarily on this Fillmore stretch—back to minutes after Loma Prieta struck, all these stores dark and deadly silent, panicked shopkeepers wambling about outside, gasping and cracking gallows wise, Muni drivers chocking their bus wheels, pulling power poles down from shorted wires in the stifling October heat as I scrambled past milling crowd clots toward my home TV and the disrupted Earthquake World Series of ’89.
“I say Bay or bust,” Paulen snapped me back, as immediate foot traffic stalled. “Unearthing truth or falsehoods along the way.”
“Actually was thinking more along the lines of multiple choice….”
That’s when everybody froze in place here too, nearly twenty years after the seismic fact. Breaking into applause on cue, the sun-drenched crowd stretched out, kicked back on a green faux-grassy carpet spread out over Fillmore Street. Rays and vibes: This from an eclectic gathering of latent techies, in-town neighborhoodies, urban bohemes and over-extended exurban exiles. There was an abundance of free-floating sun soakers—still mourning past elections, random dot-com dislocations and the San Francisco middle-class diaspora overall.
The ‘Oughts’ so far had not exactly been salad years for The City; it had gone from the place to be to the place to flee back then. Indeed, hoards used to bring things here, if only with nasty habits and flowers in their hair. By now, many had just U-Hauled things away—to Vacaville, to the valley, to Vegas and beyond—land grabbing tract houses and no-down ARMs, in lieu of first-and-last Victorian flats, with deep-breath abandon, setting themselves up big-time for the subprime underwater trap.
For those who remained, it was high time to step back, soak up some suds and straight-ahead jazz, rhythmic relief before laboring anew to cover rising rents, soaring appraisals, exit strategies—turning everything, all the bad karma around, patiently waiting for those good ol’ San Francisco Values to kick back in, knowing it was just a matter of timing and time before the bubble days returned, seed capital, secondary rounds, IPOs flowing in the streets. Tread water a while, then catch the next wave, and you’re boogyin’ on top of the world all over again. No denying, this viscous cycle had kept me hangin’, ten times over.
A suddenly inspired Jazzbone, having plied the crowd with a little uptempo ‘Summertime’, fanfared Zeldarina Gaige as she seized the mic stand, leading the combo’s notched-up segue into ‘A Fine Romance’. ’Bone’s Tenafly Landis drove his Hammond like Jimmy Smith incarnate; Slats Byron stroked his upright bass with low power contours. But Quincy Porter modulated the chord voicings with a little tenor make-up sax, harmonizing vocal tracks like Saint Coltrane himself—nasal, throat and mind in its melodic detail. He may not have been Pharoah Sanders nor Ornette Coleman, but his bluesy undercurrents, his penchant for punctuating furbelows, sneaking notes between octaves, played into Zeldarina’s meaty style like Pres himself squiring Lady Day.
Ultimately, there was Ms. Gaige stickin’ each number, staple gunning everybody in place with her chiseled phrasing and audacious pipes—a little early Ella, some street hardened Eartha and Pearl—but mostly Zeldarina channeled the William in her, hitting marks, licking her chops with that cigarette smoky voice. Prowling the stagefront, she twirled her peacock feather boa, re-cocked a soul cap, spun her hoopy earrings, mugged to her keyboardist, coaxing his craggy, quirky dissonances, taking the full measure of a quietly Buddy Rich drummer boy as he foot pumped his top-hat, brushed over his snare. Mail sorter-cum-headliner for a day, she by turns caressed her lyrics, coaxed and scatting choruses and intertwining some lip trills to thrill the crowd, kicking it with long, tied-back corn rows, gold lamé and gilt-edged patent heels.
“Believe I see some daylight,” Paulen pointed to a sliver of a break in the sporadically dancing crowd. “Nothing like a little lively, free-form music to pave the way, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s do it,” I nodded, following close. “Can’t beat the price, considering the highway robbery of regular concert tickets these days.” And we all knew who those music mogul culprits were, greedy ticketmasters like Josh Gravanek (circa 1978), to name names. “Fortunately, there’s still talent to burn around here.”
As if the crowd wasn’t already jacked to the ’Bone, it began staccato clapping once Zeldarina slid into her next solo riff, scattin’ away like Cab Calloway, Casio keyboards lacing in contrapuntally behind. The mid-street spongy green plastic carpet, full of color fading tanktops and old software start-up T-shirts, was bordered by the strutters, outgliders and windowshoppers jamming Fillmore sidewalks—ever the rainbow gathering, albeit with sharp, intensified edges. Beyond the weekend aesthetes, the melony zooting up hipsters, the gay men, ex-gay men and ex-ex-gay men and their whistles, were hi-top bike messengers in cut-off Dickies lugging document-filled Timbuk2s.
Fringier elements included mohawked, droopy jeans low-riders; burly, bearded Oaktown-Chapter Angels from hell; Mission creeptins rockin’ MS-placed body and skull tatts—recently out of lock-up, inked to the shot-caller max—fist bumpin’ knuckle to knuckle with king cobra forearms, having just rolled crosstown from the Amnesia Lounge. Intergrooving among them were South City chavs in wife beaters, colors-coded ballcaps and performance-enhancing jewelry, fixin’ to tune up any sucka trying to short-cut their killer ho’s.
I pulled the professor curbside as several full-dress Raider Nationals gained yardage shoulder to shoulder, rockin’ pirate beards and black-eyed squeezes. In their wake, some San Bruno gym rats escorted boozy, bosomy retro-hippie chicks plucked from the Haight.
Watching their backs were the wingmen and cockswains chugging vodka bombs—ripped, acne-backed, moon-faced ragers packing blown-up biceps and shrinking ’nads into silver scaly cutoff sweatsuits—pure, unallayed menace in their staredowns. Overall, some rough and tumble tribes for this normally higher San Francisco ground: Yet Zeldarina had catnipped them into nodding, hip-swaying submission, had them all in her pocket, in syncopated thrall—everybody groovin’ and gettin’ along.
Snuggly, look-at-us couples waved with rhythmic accompaniment out the upstairs bay windows lining Fillmore to either side Full-on party animals and assorted crashers prowled and danced, dangling off along fire escape balconies, bowing to Zeldarina’s awesometimity as her stack-amped voice ricocheted building to four-story building. Just beyond the green carpet, domestic partners in pastel Polo wear toasted goblets of frosty Maggies to a table of more leathery homo-machismos seated amid the mixed- breed hetero diaper changers doting under citrus-yellow sunbrellas.
“Blue Note still on the Pearl Street Mall, huh?” I angled over, as we merged into the elbow-tight flow up the modest incline toward Sacramento Street. Yeah, that’s it, shift the focus back to Boulder.
“Heavens, no—that place went under aeons ago.” Paulen cleaved us past the throng grooving in front of a sealed-off designer drapery and one-hour photo, particularly a hip-hopping velvet goddess in ruffled green PJs and turquoise brocade flip-flops.
“Too bad…it was a good little jazz joint in its day.” But the thicker bottleneck, just past a consignment jewelry shop and hands-on cosmetics bar, was this parade of black on black on black fashion slaves steaming across the grassy carpet to a months-long uomo liquidation, pawing sidewalk racks of tailored Zegna, Zileri, Hugo Boss and Ferragamo—all two-thirds off retail and security guarded, with a hook ’em/book ’em look in the ex-cops’ eyes.
“Yes, well, Boulder’s changed considerably since then, believe me…”
Zeldarina had departed the stage, leaving them all wanting more, blowing kisses left and right to a cornet coda. Jazzbone was finishing strong now as a pair of Lacroix rainbow-saraped damsels skipped past us, over toward the tequeno, bocadillo and churrasco samplings outside a three-star Peruvian restaurant.
“I’ll bet, but think this place hasn’t changed,” I asked. Beyond such hard-core handicapping, the rosticceria and salumeria essence of an Etruscan deli conflated with the tart sweetness of Gallic pastry—both shops bordered by even more skinique cosmetology and casual chic. “Anyway, how you figure Boulder is so different, especially nowadays?”
“It just keeps getting greener and squeaky cleaner all the time. McKyle’s is long gone too,” Paulen countered, head aswirl. “Mind telling me why in such a colorful city is everybody so obsessed with wearing black around here?”
From this point to Sacramento Street, mid-Fillmore food stands served up everything from Efo-Doda and suya chicken to moi-moi combo plates. Amid the modest climb, we choked on the deliciously smoky grills full of pork sticks and kabobs. Surrounding storefront architecture and the thronged fire escapes dropped down a story or two, housing sleek Euro-dermal skin salons and designer furniture studios, that oddly placed walking shoe store full of cushy Ecco, Rockport and Mephisto clodders.
Hmph, obsessed with black, he says…just check out those old Chinese women in flowery quilted vests and fat straw hats getting into the colorful JazzStreet groove, picking as they were through garbage cans, cleaning up on a trove of empty containers, crushing the 12-oz. aluminums and throwaway bottles into brown plastic trash bags. Besides, everybody seemed to be getting it on, getting along just fine the way they were. So how on earth could I myself bash this Saturnian spectacle, this moving musical feast, this quintessentially San Francisco cocktail of delirium and dread? Particularly when things hadn’t always gone down so smoothly for me hereabouts.
“Guess it’s kinda considered creative expression, kind of a New York thing.” Breathing deeply, my voice rose over the jazz-techno fusion blaring over the stadium size loudspeakers of a free-form radio station’s booth anchoring block’s end. “But Boulder’s greener? Thought I heard there’s been some kind of drought going on back there…”
“Not that kind of green, Herbert, greenbacks green. Take the Pearl Street Mall—it’s devolving into chain stores, wall to wall…”
“That where you live these days, near the mall, or…” Smoother move: nail down his location, location, location.
“Umm, a trifle uphill from there…”
“Did make it up University Hill, huh?” Whoa, that sounded even better.
But all those San Francisco treats were on the other, sunnier side of Jazz Street by now. Before us, high style met a more stubbornly intellectual corner of the world. Here, we force marched past a cozy, pre-glam neighborhood bookstore dating back to the 1970s—straddling two storefronts, tidily carving out a tree-shaded patch of sidewalk between some free lefty newsboxes. SF State students manned an activist ironing board beside them—on the front side of which unfurled a hand-markered sign reading, ‘Had Enough? U.S. Out of Iraq. Bush Keeps Lyin’, Americans Keep Dyin’. Save the country, Support Barack Obama for a change.’
The taller, more animated of the two was imploring several cup-clutching coffee regulars to sign up with pride, already piling on the specter of piping tea baggage and the RNC. “Wake up, people,” he said loudly, scaring up affirmative petition action at a buck-a-signature clip. “Save our country. Give them Democrats back their balls and Americans our nation. Truly Believe in Barack Obama.”
“Yeah, not like with John Kerry, huh?” said one of the beseeched, a stocky, balding tech start-up drop-out, gripping his double mocha as though it were a launch party tumbler of sauvignon blanc. “He flat-out got his hairy head handed to him by the Swift Boaters in ’04. How he couldn’t defend his old Vietnam protest thing…”
“Naw, man—Kerry lost because of the whole Iraq-terrorism thing,” offered another, as the trio huddled closer to the petition board, the passing crowd clotting and annoyed by this little streetcorner Obamarama. Not that we were going anywhere fast as it was. “Barack will straighten out that Mideast mess, work hand in hand with Israel’s Ehud Olmert—just you see.”
“That is if the PM is even still around by then. But Kerry lost because of the charisma thing, stiff as a sail board,” added the third. They were all decked out in Green Day, Che or Napster T-shirts, with mismatched cargo pants in varying colors and lengths, scuffling their Teva strapped sandals. “Anyway, he’s Skull and Bones, just like Bush—more elitist blah, blah, blah. You don’t have to be in the tank for Obama to see that.”
“No way, it was another JFK-style assassination,” said the other petition peddler. “Total character assassination, taking down another good Irish bloke, Texas-style.”
“Kerry lost because he’s no JFK after all,” puffed a sleek, cheeky brunette in a cobalt blue workout suit, red racing stripes ablurr as she jogged impatiently in place from around the corner, her wet-combed ponytail waving like a metronome, a little y chromosome going on as she waited out the stoplight. “Because he’s half Ashky and keeps trying to hide it.” Red to green, and she was off…
Care for more?
Chapter Five. Herein, that passing
remark gains traction amid
the melodic fair and fare…