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:
“Try wishing things away,
and they will dog you by the day.”
“Stop it, Buddy!”
“Hey, get hold of that bastard, will you?!”
“Prince, no! Pull him the hell away…”
In the flash of a Gold Card, this scraggly dog had torn loose from its leash, an abraded leather strap still tethered around the trunk of a shady sidewalk tree. The wolfish husky mix darted straight for a full-scale, groomed and pawdicured schnauzer that had been chained to the wooden chair leg of a spindly round corner table. No lapdog, the black purebred lunged back at that mongrel husky, dragging the chair and its pint-sized woman occupant along for the bronca—right here before us, stopping us cold. This caused the munching young, wet-combed Berkeley coed to brace her tanned soccer calf against the table’s center base stand, inadvertently overturning her table for two.
The resultant tipping of an iced pitcher of Agua Fresca over her USC sweat-shirted companion drenched them both, along with a couple one table down, who were until then huddled lovingly over Mesquite Chicken Nachos and strawberry Margaritas. Baring teeth, fiercely agrowl, the dogs continued tearing into one another, a fur ball of mismatched tumbling fury, as the woman jumped up to dress down her afternoon playdate.
“Hmph, dogs will be dogs, now won’t they,” Reese Paulen said, shaking his head, stopping in his tracks advisedly, so as not to stir the volatile mix any further. “But at least they’re not Press Canaries…”
“Presa Canarios,” I replied, as I backed off curbward to avoid altogether the canine scrap. “Anyway, that what’s you get with big dogs in the city.”
“But at least it’s not pram kids screaming bloody murder,” he disdained, not without a trace of rancor—rather coolly fixing on the scrambling gal’s golden bears.
Just as rattled by the canine clash were a half-dozen other tables on this cramped front Mejicano-style patio, chatting and chowing down on ample stoneware bowls of Pozole soup, pewter platters of Pascado al Mesquite, cooled to the palate with 100% Agave tequila. Jalisco’s was a muy atmospheric taqueria bathed in coral terra cotta and guaca green, with black Spanish wrought iron chandeliers descending from high skylight ceilings to meet soaring potted Monterrey palm trees. Recessed in the deeper corner of the restaurant’s patio was an adobe gas hearth with folk art tile trim, matching in style the seraphic murals spread across interior walls, punctuated by mounted Brahma bull heads and Aztec sunburst light sconces.
Jalisco’s struck the primo escenario for a dine-and-dash comida of Carnitas, Camarones al Alillo, Maya Burritos—flautas or Chipotle Quesadillas on the side. But no amount of Tecate or sangria, no Los Lobos nor Pikadientes ambient music score, was about to douse the fire of indigestion ignited by this ferocious brawl. Even as the corner couple and a game-legged Chestnut regular out from the Harbor Lounge struggled to pull the dogs apart. All I could conjure up were images of that infinitely more vicious carnage between Eric’s loyal Chessie, ‘Zeff’, and the free-range pitbull family back in ’78—not all that far from here, over by Gashouse Cove.
“And yet, I suppose it could be worse,” doc shifted, as we stepped briskly away from the fray, dropping the matter just as fast. “This might be some café in Tel Aviv, and rather than a dogfight, it could have been one of those bhurka lovelies packing a suicide sash…”
“Wow, why do you have it so in for those people?” Damn, not that again—but might as well put a jolt into things, see if I might ride him better that way. “Really, where’s your clinical objectivity?”
Before we could vacate that vicious circle, Paulen dodged an ankle-high pair of Bichon Frises scooting toward us on a dual tethered leash. The lanky dude walking them wore a Warriors jersey and a power forward demeanor, strictly swaggerville. Still, his little snowball littermates drew shucks and strokes of passing affection every tiny ramble-scramble step along the way.
So continued the bipolar nature of Chestnut Street: Good dog, bad dog; cool normality met hot-tempered deviations from the mean—chick dogs, chick’s dogs; little gals with monster pooches, big dudes with pint-sized pussy dogs. The warrior’s gal friend quickly posted up to him, tall Matcha Green Tea Freddos in either hand.
“Look, Herbert, I don’t have it in for anyone, per se,” Paulen regained his stride. “That’s like my asking why do you have it in for Irish bead swingers.”
“But I don’t have it in for Irish Catholics…I am…”
“Then why do you have it in for the Prods?”
“And I don’t have anything against Scots-Irish Protestants either, per se,” I said guardedly. Why was he jobbing me on this, anyway? “Only the troublemakers…”
“So that’s whom I’ve, quote-unquote, got it in for,” he replied, “Palestinian troublemakers, particularly those making trouble in and against Israel.”
For a brief, shining moment, all eyes were on the L.A.-grade, streaky chignoned blonde flame doing her star turn out front of Eyes Palace Optix, flashing a vanity mirror in the sunlight, leaning over the hood of a vintage cobalt 280SE Benz drop-top, shaping her take on a faceful of leopard Dior shades, as though waiting for validation from the passing crowd. She looked to be living real large, with her various procedures and injectables, the liquid fish lips, kind of like Angelina and the Ritchie set nowadays.
No easy call, as there were plenty more styles where those big Audrey Hepburn orbs came from, in a sleek wraparound reflective eyewear salon framed with metallic tubular lines and rose-colored lighting, clear display cases of most every glam fashion brand, Alain Mikli to Bvlgari, from Venice to Venice, Sierra Madre to St. Tropez—sooo smacking of Wilshire Rodeo, silicone on out. Star-struck and breathless, we paused thereabouts for a quick Sulawesi-Kalosi to go, then planted ourselves at the lee end of a long storefront wooden bench to talk some…history.
“So this massage I’m doing, it’s like acupuncture without the pins, aerobics without the perspiration…”
“That’s weird, Meg,” said the second of two Marina ‘sisters’ seated further up, another Cal gurl with a beachy granular voice.
“Darlin’, you don’t even begin to know weird. Yeesh—I’m gonna be depressed something awful by the time I turn 30.”
This from a neighborly ol’ Yalie, frowning as several svelte Santa Clara milers strode gracefully by. These two fellow bench riders came on strong from our concentrated shadow area along sunshine street. But here now, slouching in the umbra of that starlet’s golden sunglass glow, a bit slatternly transplanted Ivy femiregular stroked her motley old hound, snoozing next to her on its vermiculated blanket pad at bench’s end. Spinster in progress, she was sifting through some printouts of a massive data dump, 3.5x lens readers perched on her sun-peeled nose. The Sonoma State sidekick had planted tightly at her hip, leafing through a Marina Times.
Immediately behind them, peering out over their shoulders through the storefront windows, sat a trio of graying buzzards comparing their 401ks well within earshot. Parabola’s point men spent far too much time spilling over three of the five stools lining its front window counter, perched like cantankerous pole birds, also plaintively watching what they once were now but a shadow of passing so youthfully past them.
“Community property, it’s a bitch…”
“Pre-nup, never without a pre-nup…”
“And she wants the whole house…not a chance, not one chance in hell.
“So, what can you do? The law’s on her side, and it sounds like she’s got a Gloria Superskank as a mouthpiece.”
“I’ll burn the place down first—so help me, I’ll torch it to the ground!”
“Yow, the ol’ insurance inferno—you? Get serious, Larry.”
Sipping Uzuri African Blend straight up over our shoulders, these high-wired counter dwellers were residue from the earlier caffeine rush, otherwise talking TV golf, reading news headlines to one another with all-knowing nods. The better sweatered middleman was apparently slumming with his more marginal Chestnut supplicants, holding court like Stephen Sondheim at the 92Y. He sniffed on about snob-nobbing down at his parents’ gated spread in Palm Springs—certifiably pompous, recounting his past touches with the really rich and famous on cross-country business flights while a Wall Street haie financier. I’d not have minded being one of the guys, just couldn’t for the life of me be one of those guys.
Hovering about were a sprinkling of plainly hungry young vulturettes, borderline listening through their teatime, sweet on spreading some fruitful sympathy over these lost, lonely wooses and wallets. Much of their idle conversation turned on amour and/or the lovelorn: how San Francisco was so tough on relationships, how bar-born romance hereabouts inevitably devolved into chafed bouts of suspicion, accusation, misconnection and disconnection, with futile stabs at reconciliation.
Some flings never changed. Then again, there were those turkey buzzards sitting there, so prime for the plucking for a few lusty pops come happy hour. Beyond these designing femmes, interspersed halfway out onto the sidewalk, stood technical writers, freelance designers and paralegals, wait staffers in waiting, a lagging real estate broker flapping his trenchcoat behind two short-cropped lesbians in love—essentially MeccaJava trending upscale.
Still, Parabola’s appeared relatively downbeat on such an uptempo Chestnut Street; its dark-roast brown décor and Mahler-Wagner soundtrack didn’t lift spirits much either—all the better to keep the harder-core java junkies temperamentally down and caffeine depleted, clinging to their mugs, jugs and stainless-steel tumblers, capping like Meg and company here on the sunshine vitality sauntering by.
“I’m telling you, it’s Israel that has been making the desert bloom over these years,” Paulen rallied, not that the aroma of baristas short pulling lattes didn’t grab us, as well. “All the PLO and Fatah extremists have done is boom and doom it…”
“But they were kind of uprooted all of a sudden, right?” I closed in, as we up and strolled off, Gaia cups in hand—noting that whether booze, dope or caffeine, nobody was walking around San Francisco in an unaltered state any more. Could have used an extra espresso dose my own self at the time.
“And the Jewish people weren’t uprooted? Think Exodus, the pogroms, death camps…”
“What I mean is, Palestinians were displaced, disenfranchised in their own land,” I recalled what the MeccaJava elders would always bemoan over a pot or two of Assam Gunpowder tea, re-keying on the task at hand. “Wouldn’t anger and baggage come with any territory like that?”
“Ask the Israelis about it. Note however that they put their bitterness and resentment to work for themselves from the very beginning of their nation. Whereas Palestinians have just channeled it into terror, corruption and war…”
Things picked up considerably from there, most immediately in the sunny spot between two overgrown acacia trees, out front of the next-door branch bank and trust. Elements of Parabola’s more kinetic take-out crowd, a klatsch of serious distance cyclists circled their steeds just this side of the nationwide branch’s bank of ATMs, the brighter side of that shadowy coffee bench and overhang, having ducked into PC&T just long enough for some iced joes and double macchiatos to go.
Here, they fine tuned and otherwise tinkered with their gleaming road bikes for the long Mt. Tam and San Geronimo rides. To a man, Team Weekend riders were festooned with sponsor logos, woven into the UV reflective SQ fabric and taped seams of their second skin cycling wear, stretched over wheel spoke-thin torsos and bulging thighs, squeezing critical masses of testicular fortitude, if not malignant growths.
“I’m just saying, maybe they need some security and dignity in their own land like anybody else,” I noted that as colorful as the bikers were, Paulen seemed curiously more preoccupied with their Sidi cleated-sole cycling shoes. “I mean, they’re down to less than 40 percent of original Palestine and still living in refugee camps, right?”
“And I’m saying they can’t bomb their way to peace and prosperity.”
“Well, sure, but,” I stammered, distracted by the little woman climbing into her oversized Navigator SUV like a pre-schooler into an upper bunk, hauling in a full bounty of Williams-Sonoma packages—which fell to the floorboard, then out the door. How that tyro homemaker leapt back to scoop them up so quickly was a fascinating physical diversion, all the more. With Marin plate frames, she must have been a Flow Yoga devotee—yeah, that whole flexy yoga thing… Which only made me writhe and grind over that lingering smoke up on Pacific Heights ridge again, how close it might be hitting to home.
“Look, Herbert, Palestinians were under Jordan’s governance in the West Bank for over thirty years, and did nothing to create an actual homeland before ’67. Had they conducted themselves more responsibly, a Palestinian state could be celebrating 60 years of independence by now,” Paulen said. “Instead, they are a nation manqué.”
That exotic coffee jolt was all well and good. Just beyond the savings bank, however, a different formula of chemical enhancement had made its way onto the street. NutritionPlus was a chain vitamin-supplement center that trafficked in ingestively augmented appearances and artificial performance. From larger-than-life cardboard bodybuilder cutouts in the store windows to its high-lignon Cinnergen Vitameatavegamin balcony, the store was shot through with competitive edges and corners robustly cut. Shelves and coolers were bulked up with plastic bottles of anabolic composite, flaxseed oil, chlorophyll juice, glucuronolactone and muscle tech creatine monohydrate, of Hydroxycut hardcore and Hot Rox extreme.
Bulging granite torsos in sleeveless aerobic pullovers barcode scanned jars and jugs of Fast-Twitch Cytogainer and alpha dog lipoic acid. I could spot big white buckets of Freak Fix fat-incinerating serum, lecithin whey, DMAE and DHEA boosters to supercharge the ol’ DNA. Reason enough why it became mighty cream and clear how so many would-be Serenas and studleys looked so pathologically ripped around here. Bench press some iron, pass the protein powder: couldn’t hold their sweat bands if I’d tried.
“You know, I really do wish you hadn’t gone there,” I said. My head had begun swirling with echoes of that accusatory sentiment, condescending tone I’d picked up so long ago. “I mean, aren’t there some dim, thornier shoots on all that blooming Israel stuff?”
“Dim? Not going to start calling Israelis mud people, are you, Heeb-ert? Not going demonological, over to the dark side yourself…”
“Dark side? Who me? Come on,” I retreated, in the face of another lithe tits-on-a-stick figured L.A. woman passing by, designer bag swinging, a pugilistic dog on leash reel. “Never have, not me, nosireebob…” Anyway, is that really smoke uphill there? Insurance inferno? I’ve so damn much to deal with at the house as it is—already have me plenty of brushfires to put out…
“All well and good, but your grasp of the facts is even more tenuous than I suspected.” A power couple in designer sweats whistled past us with armloads of NutritionPlus’s grade-A stuff—mega tubs of Muscle Milk, CellMass and Isopure—swell headed as they were for the gym. “Thus a little more substantive survey of regional history is truly in order, my friend, some further enlightenment. And you might want to take notes, as you may be quizzed afterwards.”
“You mean like a backstory, professor, is it gonna be true/false?” I joked thinly, nursing as I was a jacked-up shoulder and bad case of sarcopenia, flatfooted as the cops suddenly deploying to reroute Chestnut traffic. What was this, some kind of frickin’ sociological field study of his? I was so wary of the prospect, chary from having provoked it, compact or no. “Or do I get a multiple choice…”
Doc and I then passed through the shade tree shadows of a CitiBank branch, back into the bright sunshine on Pierce Street intersection, slowed at the corner by a small crowd circling a green chalk body trace spread across the yellow-striped asphalt and a PG&E manhole cover.
We could overhear speculation as to how a frail, elderly woman had recently been mowed down by some rampaging red Prius in need of a pedal fix, which was left turning into a just-vacated loading zone. We might have stayed glued to the neighborhood conjecture and recriminations, if not so quickly distracted by what soon appeared to be gaining on us: some raucous sort of Chestnut Street procession. And whose eyes wouldn’t train onto a Moscone Park-bound parade? Witness even the Hazzerds swooping in to work the gathering crowd. On the other hand, I shuddered, what if those dipsticks think I saw what I think they think I saw? What the hell then?!
“Multiple choice?” Paulen winked. “The way I’ve heard it, that’s what got you into trouble once before.”
“That so—says who?”
“Like I said, you can never tell…”
“Hmm, what say I choose otherwise…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Eight. Amid a rousing
procession, discordant voices, as all sorts
of history marshals on in due course…
“So choose to go with the flow.
But others may soon show a
different way to go.”
“Plus the fact that John’s gonna make it to the altar first really gets me to worrying about myself. It’s like I’m done, man, done…”
“Who’s done? Look at those guys over there in the Adidas suits. They’re what’s done…”
“Sad thing is, sometimes I think we could really make a go of it. I mean, once Stacy gets out of rehab…”
Three guys were leaning against a Toyota FJ, more specifically against its black vinyl fender splashguards, the rest of the Cruiser dulled with a film of off-road grime. They sucked on the clear plastic cups of iced Jasmine Lime and Hibiscus Breeze Coolers, chill in their cargo shorts and UnderArmour tanks, getting in a little navel exercise. Couple of ex-Cal rugby players were over from Danville, a center and a wing, with a battle scarred tagalong flanker. The yoke yellow FJ was decked with trail bike hooks fitted to its tailgate tire, gray Thule box and neon green surf boards up top as though just back from Feather River, headed down to Point Sur for afternoon curls.
The trio was swapping spit over a brassy mashup medley of ‘Fidgety Feet’ by Eddie Condon, Satchmo’s ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’ and the ‘Shake It And Break It’ of Sidney Bechet—having marched back over from that zoot-suited Dixieland sidewalk combo out front of the nuevo-retro Marina Theater—and were otherwise taking in Chestnut Street’s sunny side here, as well as the fully loaded racks.
“Aww, who knows what women want? Hell, I’d go see a good therapist about it myself, if I could find a dude in that racket anymore. Somebody should start a website, like www.man.com, lay it all out there for dolts like me…”
“Why the hell, man? Around here, women all think they’re tens, just want a smiley-face, hoops trim dunderhead with a fat wallet, somebody they can parade around to gallery openings, dinner parties and their best, best girlfriends’ weddings.”
“Well, that leaves me out…I’m getting shredded by threes and fours.”
That’s not to say Reese Paulen and I weren’t ogling just the same. We had crossed back over Chestnut with some Walgreens Advil when, without warning, cleavage was not to be denied. Majestic peaks, heavenly valleys: We had been stopped cold at the sound of that aging Dixieland combo’s rendition of ‘Feelin’ No Pain’, by Miff Mole’s Molers, yet were rapidly reheating over the décolletage on display. Here, the Marina women were more radiant by decree, sizzling by the nth degree—noses pitched to the heavens or deep into their cell screens—speed climbers shopping around like their plastic was going out of style, along the way boldly hawking their wares. At any rate, they were likely out of our price range—mine, anyway.
They were ducking high and hard into a chic little dress shop with rising hemlines, patent foldover shooties and chandelier light reflecting like stage floods off its starburst stamped metal ceiling, as if straight out of Milano. No denying, they were emerging blindingly tuck ’n’ rolled in Juicy tracksuits from a slimline Sun Glass Hut to screen test their Persols and Pradas.
At every turn, we faced rock-firm uppies in halter tops, erect nipples punching through trapeze shirts with hints of areola rising, ripe melons stretching meshies, torpedo alley in ribbed tube tops, wired flex bras, sloppy floppies in graphic tees, provocative V-necks, overstuffed scoopnecks—fleshy mounds tanned, freckled, and every shade burgeoning in between. Pouty dishes in wireless push-ups, tiny cupcakes to full double Ds in body-hugging henleys; passionate come-ons, well-pointed weaponry, 10k legs down to here.
“Come on, bud, you gotta sack up…stop punchin’ holes in your man card, and pull on your big-boy pants.”
“Yeah, suck it up, get me a testosterone boost…whew, can you believe all the cleavage around here?”
“But no touchy, no feely. You touch ’em, she owns you.”
“Don’t stop ’em from hangin’ their business all out there…”
Then there was the occasional silicone set, improbably defying gravity aboard stick-figure frames, bursting full-form tankinis topping off shapely shorts and shapeless skin-tight jeans that seemed better fit for a 12 year old, bouncing to the beat of gliding slides—just more cleavage ranging qualitatively from utters to utterly bodacious, daring bosoms by design. Brazen, up front, out-there enticement: It was the showroom demonstration with negligible prospects for a test drive.
“Stop kiddin’ yourself—all these chicks are loose in San Francisco. If they weren’t lookin’ around for a romp and roll, they wouldn’t be here…”
“I hear ya…the women are looser and we’re just losers…” The trio rattled on, in the wake of another passing hourglass figure. “Still and all, that chick there is so fuckin’ beautiful…”
“Just beware of blondes bearing all black,” said the smaller, stouter of the rugby rats, seemingly less after-affected by all the game-on headers, clearly not one to mince his words. He cautioned along the lines of how the golden-haired could be so wispy, winsome—light as lecithin granules, yet lethal as industrial strength lye—pale damsels coming across as curious, impressionable, elusive, skittish or indecisive, until the emotional hammer fell. “Probably wheels her daddy’s Bentley…making, like, outta my way, dork, I’m way too busy maintaining my aura…”
“Fellas mind?”
“Nnnot a problem…” chimed the amigos, backing off the splashguards.
Must have been the Cruiser’s owner, scuffling his orange and black trailrunner shoes across Chestnut Street, authentic Patagonia, head to toe. Hoisting a bag of provisions from the drug store, he was scowling, restaking his claim, firing an ‘off my FJ’ warning shot across the hood of his Toyota, apparently raring to ride. The jocks-turned-freelance ‘consultants’ begrudgingly obliged, slinking into foot traffic as Mister Off-Road checked for fender scratches or any other aluminum body damage, not to mention a parking ticket or two.
“Can’t believe those guys either, huh,” I dismissed, half blinking, half winking at all the bro and ho stuff as we slow-strolled by well within earshot. A little red-ass trog talk, nothing I hadn’t heard long before.”
“Yes, lower down the evolutionary chain, to be sure,” Paulen replied. “More’s the pity.”
“But nothing pitiful about what I’m seeing…” Although still shaking off the Crabber attack, I had to take another stab at nailing down more of doc’s predilections, what crossed his bright red lines, was beyond his personal ken and pale. “If only they weren’t all so blamed young, huh?”
“Why? Young is beautiful—to a point, that is.”
“What point is that?” We had eased to a crawl by now in rubbernecking awe, despite things otherwise blurring, coagulating, speeding up again. Even though we were veering toward our sexpiration dates, the whole female bodily tease struck me in the groin, just the same.
“Rhetorically speaking, Herbert. But in actuality, who doesn’t love the little ladies to death?” Paulen seemed swivel-necked, yet peculiarly edgy about it all—fully preoccupied, showing frustration, even a trace of aggravation and rancor. “But I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse. Boulder’s not exactly Lourdes, you know.” Then he just as abruptly appeared to suppress it and turn the page.
“That so,” I edged closer. “Been lucky with the ladies there, have you, doc?”
“Me? Well, of course—why wouldn’t I be? You?”
“No complaints on that front myself…”
Still, this territorial staredown was not nearly so fascinating as the veiled visions of solemn darkness coming toward us—most authentically penitent, head to toe. For amid all the exposed eye candy, all the chatty, calculated wiggle and jiggle, what appeared to be a mother and daughter pairing skimmed quietly along, drawing more second glances than anybody half as clad. Busy as was Chestnut Street, the leisurely shorts-and-sandals crowd hastily cleared a swath for these mysterious Arabesque females in full-figure burqas, a shrouding mass of Muslim black in maid and maiden sizes, hijab veils baring only narrow slits for their wide, darting eyes.
Around Riyadh, Baghdad, Dearborn or Fremont, those eyes might have made quite the fashion statement. But here they looked near…medieval, as though traversing the Koranic Kaaba of Mecca or Medina, only ag least a dozen or more centuries ago. Maybe misdirected enroute to their Divisadero Street mosque, the apprehensive, devotional due made a comparative mockery of any attempts at false modesty by the contemporary Marina hotties. In their own right, by contrast, they could be seen as somewhat exotic, if not prohibitively erotic.
Doc followed the women’s bagging burqa shadows and black billowing flow. Other sidewalkers filled in the wake just left by two apparently Muslim women coursing so far off their divine spiritual path, now scurrying toward the 22 Fillmore bus stop. Many liberated young urbies craned for a double take on what Allah hath wrought. Lord knew we could be counted among them, one wag cracking whether these were observant Muslims or bank robbers in niqab drag.
“Be that as it may,” Paulen said, “you think Israel should attempt to bargain in good faith with the likes of that?”
“How could you tell they were really Arab, let alone Palestinians?” I caught that yellow FJ Cruiser roaring its way out Chestnut—surf’s up—a PC green Subaru Outback quickly swinging a mid-block U-ey to nose into its parking spot, looking anywhere to avoid going back down this miasmic road. “Hell, maybe it’s a goof. Ever heard of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence?”
“Hmph, perpetual indolence, maybe,” Paulen said, as we stepped around and between trash barrels and a thicket of real estate magazine stands and flower boxes along this three-storefront stretch, crowned with a silver sunrise Art Deco façade. “Besides, Arabs, Palestinians—distinction without a difference to me. How shall I put it: They’d all rather fight than thrive, except for the mullahs and sheikers scooping the pretrodollars off every barrel.”
“They have much of a choice, do they?” I asked, voice raised costively. Car horns blared at that traffic-stopping Outback as its SoCal-style driver, sporting an Oregon football jersey, ducked in for a Tazo Iced Passion Tea. “The Palestinians, that is?”
“Of course they do. They have from the beginning of the whole Middle East miasma…”
“Miasma—as in the beginning of the…‘occupation’?”
Otherwise, fetching as they were, the Marina’s oversexed secularists were even more appealing because of their overwhelming vigor and tone. Rigor of mind, strength of body and spirit: that was the ascendant religion, the Falak al aflak, the Holy Grail along sunny Chestnut Street today. Work out, work it out, work it into your profile, and let your presence work for you—that was the latest mantra, the key to socioprofessional Elysium here. At least until we hit upon the onset of a neuro-toxic zone—a little old pocket of multivariate chemical enhancement that served as antidote to this newfangled antioxidantal gospel.
Same time, we sidestepped an aged stroke victim in a manual wheelchair, sneaking some chrome-flasked Jaegermeister into his tall Americano, chain-smoking Merit 100 brownies, annoying every wired body downwind.
“That’s your word, not mine. Israel can’t occupy its very own land,” Paulen said, stifling a cough. “Besides, a reading of history demonstrates the Palestinians were like that long before 1948’s partition plan.”
“Like what?” As if I didn’t already know his answer.
“They were already self-detonating when Israel and TransJordan were just pipe dreams—before you could say Ben Gourion.”
“You mean when the UN carved up historic Palestine…” Smoking, I was still cursedly used to, even if only in the secondhand mode.
“Carved up’s your term, not mine,” Paulen huffed. “Point of fact, Palestinians had their place at that table in ’48. They were offered a homeland of their own, side by side…and have been ever since, to no avail.”
“Yes, but under duress, if not gunpoint of fact?” OOps, should I have just said that? Gordian slip, or…
Waving that cloud away, we then soaked in the carcinogenic ambience of the Harbor Lounge, one of the Marina’s last-gasp neighborhood dives—a wombish den of darkness even on this energetic sunshiny day. Inside, old-time mood ringers nursed their malignant growths over Miller draft and Manhattans, swinging from elation to indigo, depending on the ESPN feed. Hunched over pitchers and popcorn baskets, they were largely over-50 league softballers with major boilers and rebuilt knees, mostly lifeless all-day suckers, moldy jocksniffers and plus-four duffers holding over from the A’s and Raider glory days, groaning over the slim draft pickins and grim late 70s-like prospects of Bay Area teams of the day.
Still, a late Giants splash hit sent bar-thumping cheers through Harbor’s open window front, firing up even the dock and cop pensioners huddling around a sidewalk trashbin, glassy eyes squinting, drawing deep and long on their stubby cigarettes, turning this stretch of Chestnut into a slender slice of Casbah. Fortunately, these wheezers were increasingly outnumbered and clearly out lunged—grumpy barflies flitting about this Bayside Lounge, bitterly waiting on The City to excise tax their well drinks.
Once through the smokescreen we could savor the commingled aroma from an upscale little Asian-themed eatery—quiet and understated, with lots of bamboo shoots, rice paper lanterns, framed silkscreen and calligraphy. Dragon’s Head offered Lemongrass Chicken and Tea-Smoked Duck, with Curry Mi Fun to complement the Steamed Hawaiian Butterfish and Crystal Prawns: So civilized, the narrow stir-fry palace had been seeded by some Taiwanese Stanford business grads—Palo Alto casual to the core. Such was this yin-yang side of Chestnut Street: from cirrhotic, cancer stick figures propped up against Chronicle news boxes to vigorous young pillars of health, in the blink of a hazy, irritated eye, nary a whiff of compromise in the air.
“Gunpoint? Not in the least, Herbert…and what exactly is your point?”
“Just that I’ve heard the Palestinian detonating was not all self inflicted…”
“Trust me, Palestinians do indeed have that capacity. They never miss an opportunity to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Reflex response: In fact, She said it over and over, as I recalled, mainly about me. Suddenly I was confronting my own frontal lobe, semantic memories remaining somewhat fuzzy. But a slight paring back of the parietal pulled up painful experiences past—episode by unsettling episode.
Slowing the flow to a DMV crawl was yet another sign of the Chestnut times, ‘Close Out. Lost Our Lease. Everything Must Go Before We Do’. Only this fire sale was particularly painful, being as is was for a Marina shop that predated the very advent of the high technology being newly canonized in the Apple computer cathedral directly across the street. Penman’s had forever been the district’s stationary stationery store, and was now sadly moving decades worth of analog merch at any cost. Out with the old: everybody browsing card tables lined neatly along the sidewalk were heaped with dusty three-ring binders, pocketed presentation folders and outdated photo calendars of New England foliage and Yosemite falls.
Inside Makeshift wooden shelving added willy nilly over the years creaked with graph tablets, reams of colored construction paper, cartons of compasses, pencil sharpeners, T-squares, right angles and protractors. Long-time regulars pored over Penman’s dead tree remains, consoling the sisterly spinster owners as if paying respects before the casket of a full life’s work. The writing was Garfield postered walls: Here was a paper artifact in a virtually paperless world, hard copy when a soft PDF would do.
“What who said?”
“No-body…nothing…” I noticed as how the Dixieland combo was fading out with some fanfare and a drumroll into their 90-proof brand of take five in the sunshine. Drowning them out further, an orange on white Volkswagen convertible passed blaring a hip-hop mashup of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. To this day, every time I heard that rasta number, things seemed to turn hazier and occluded. All this cross stimulation was ricocheting off my occipital lobe, side to side. “Besides, it’s all ancient history, right?”
Pulling up closely behind the rolling VW igloo was that head-banging Ninja ranger, once again revving his dual glass-packs to accelerated effect. Tripping the car alarms of parked Ferraris, Lams and Carreras along the way, he appeared to have victory lapped around by way of Pierce Street— velocitized by the American Graffiti-style rod and custom rallye over at Mel’s. There, the Bay Area’s primo vintage rides periodically spilled out of the Drive-In’s palmy parking lot.
The airborne vet likely saluted ’32 Ford T roadsters, chopped and channeled, running Jimmy-supercharged hemi’s, stroked and bored—chromed-out spoked rims and candy apple metalflaked. The ranger had to have air horned toward an array of mid-50s small-block Chevys: Bel Airs, Nomads, early Corvettes, a two-seater T-Bird or two—magnetos firing, chromed-out lakes side pipes aflame. Hand-rubbed lacquer outside, rolled and pleated interiors, burning wide-white sidewalls on magnesium slots.
Nevertheless the ranger circled back around to Chestnut Street, seemingly cruising his aging torque and horsepower in our general direction. Guess he still didn’t get that chicks may dig horsepower all right, but chicks ditch horses’ pitutes. And what was the former GI doing still buzzing around El Presidio Real anyhow? It hadn’t been an Army post in well over a decade.
“Defeatist Palestinians—ancient history? Good god, it is still playing out to this day,” Paulen glanced askance, as if vetting another textbook case of male inadequacy and/or pedal envy behind the wheel. “And what do you know about it—or who for that matter? By all indications, you really are in need of a good, quick history lesson yourself about now.”
“Forget I said anything about this, okay?” The stress resumed crashing through my globus pillidi, super colliding with the superior colliculus at my subthalamic nuclear core. In two shakes, on came a bad case of the tangled cranial and trigerminal nerves, jimjam tremens setting in—Advil of minimal relief—yet more Marina backfire. “Just a figure of speech, another poor choice of words.”
“Ah, but you must always remember that age-old Jewish admonition, Herbert—never, ever forget…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Seven. Add a canine element
to the equation, which only tips the balance
toward more biting, searching exchanges…
“A taste of the past can
set the table for your tomorrows.”
“It’s nothing but in your head, sister girl—I’m, like, totally sure of that. You could get along with a tsetse fly.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, hon. Anyway I am stepping out with my guys tonight. My two gay boy and my straight little straight poodle…”
“Mmmm…sounds perfect…hi there gents, try a touch? Me, I’m hoping I meet someone new…am getting tired of my Durex and avatar.”
Two working gals flapping gums, snapping gum—they were demo marketers standing out front of Body Essence in black clinic aprons, dabbing out samples of guava and jojoba après-bath butters onto the wrists and backhands of most every young woman passing along Chestnut Street. From the reputedly cruelty-free, enviro-friendly store itself, fragrances of pineapple facial wash, eau de elderflower eye gels and other nature-based lotions floated out via bubble machines as the pair worked through the essence of their personal lives between swipes of the fruit-flavored tongue sticks. That is, when not caressing their smart phones: the new cigarette—something else to do with the hands.
Drifting over from the far side was a thick chocolate wisp courtesy of CocoaJones and a cheery zephyr of Sonoma Sauvignon Blanc from the indie Wine-Merchant Club—all folding into an intoxicating out-of-body mixture as we walked by, a delectable, sensorial olfactory fondue glacé goo.
“Uh, oh,” Reese Paulen demurred. “sounds like one aberrant mènage á trois going on there.”
“Couldn’t say about that,” I did likewise, “not my area of expertise…”
“Likely story,” he replied sardonically. “Nevertheless, they do appear to be personifying genderal role disfunction all around.”
“Or just a supply-demand differential again,” I said, tensed and preoccupied, jargoning up, jumping at the opening to more promising hectares, namely fertile female ground. “Then again, you’d know better than I.”
“Enough to fathom that the more the merrier is not always the case,” Paulen said, final passing on the sample dab, just as soon getting off this clinical chick trip. “But what was that you said about survival only getting you so far?”
“I mean survival—all well and good,” I said, waving off the same last dab, reminded that I was having enough trouble holding down some clashes of my own. “But then what?”
“Why, how about world affairs, like those Middle Eastern peace talks? The much heralded Road Map, final status agreements,” he winked, quick to re-aim the conversation. “Retread that threadbare old standby: a two-state solution…separate nations living side by side in peace and harmony—all that Oslo jazz.”
“Okay, but think about it. You said yourself it’s been 60 years since the UN plan and WOI armistice already,” I replied, caught between wanting to tune this out, and hidebound to hear all about it. “You’re like, pushing 59 now, and really think that will happen in your lifetime?”
“Isn’t that what they have been saying about your Ireland?,” he blinked at my offhand factoids. “These things do take time…”
“Yeah, but Ireland isn’t still arming to the teeth,” I side stepped an overnight accident of gastric proportions, determined to look away. “And if what you say is true, it hasn’t been treading in such a sea of hatred.”
“Granted,” Paulen said, following me around a pool of binge-barfing splatter still sun baking into the sidewalk. “But that’s assuming you actually have an honest broker, and someone with whom to bargain.”
Time was, free-fall adventure and carnal opportunity knocked up and down Chestnut Street, marriage and family could wait. Today, for those fresh out of college, knocked-up nuptials and tied-down routines looked to be priority one, as though there were nothing on earth better to do than comfort feed and breed…which they could do just as easily in the cul-de-sacs of Danville or Morgan Hill. Nowadays, however, this stretch of the once preternaturally swinging singles district was bloomin’ preggo with Pampered rug rats—we could just about smell the rash cream and talcum powder. Newborns abounded, snugly tucked and strolled, adorable as a Huggies calendar on pictorial parade. Accordingly, we steered clear of the buggy bumpers best we could, doc notably so.
Sesame Street piped forth from the nearest of two cute-as-a-panda-cub shops catering exclusively to the Marina’s swelling diaper and toddler carriage trade. Several young mothers had gathered around Jacque & Jill’s, serenely rocking the precious cargo in their tri-wheelers and jogging buggies to the Barney theme, staring with gleeful anticipation into its playhouse store windows—storybook displays of preppie and teenybopper threads in miniature sizes. Trendy Polo and Kate Spade looks, classic RL ensembles in pre-junior 6.
Other glowing twentyesque mommaries-in-waiting gushed over the larger front windows of Cuddles next door, which appeared to embrace infants and newborns, comparing their lactation coaches. Its rainbow-striped façade framed cartoon mannequins in baby frocks and crib wear, dangling celestial fuzzballs, stuffed animules and crocheted blankies, scattered Big Bird and Teletubbie nursery playthings. J & J’s chatty windowshoppers soon pushed the bundled payloads down Chestnut, toward the teeming preschooler playgrounds at Moscone Park and Rec—alas, that Mayor George R. Moscone Park and Rec.
“How about bargaining with someone like the Palestinian Authority?” Rueful and kidstuffed to be sure: yet another part of me said, enough already—what’s with this all Mideast stuff around here? I was getting dizzy and gaseous at the thought. “Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, or whatever…”
“Such as it is…” A sociologist like Paulen here might label this burgeoning phenomenon the gentridomestication of the Marina neighborhood—that is, if he had noticed it at all. “Though tell me, how can you trust a corrupt, doddering political hack with an Arab alias…”
“Dunno, but he is the Palestinians’ elected leader, right? At least in the West Bank,” I said—point, counterpoint, nevertheless. “And he does seem to support your two-state solution—at least in theory…”
“Ah, yes—note however that I said two-state solution, not three-state,” he countered, “Not dealing with the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza who drove Fatah out, which still vows Israel’s total destruction. That would be bargaining with the devil and philistines.”
Any lingering traces of newborn colic screaming and panty waste faded appreciably on down Chestnut. Cuddle’s nursery music track gave way to the Wine Club’s bubbly banter and laughter from across the street—although that smooth vivi-vibe was abruptly broken by the smoky diesel rumble of a passing SFFD Engine Company—its crew of bored, buzzed up firemen on the mid-shift prowl in full turnouts.
From here on, the street turned rather schizier—accent on the Chest, ditto on the nut. Old school, new school: ancient, living phantoms drifted from Peet’s to Starbucks in search of the daily news, picking up around nose-to-the-keyboard TXTers who were tapping blindly away, redlining their mental bandwidth. We stepped advisedly aside, as they plowed on through us, opposing Crackberries, iPhonies and all—hawkish iPod and Nano snatchers milling, scavenging similarly about.
Healthy habits, nasty habits: crushed fruit aromatics from the Jamba smoothie shop conspiralled with the choking contrails of sidewalk cigarette and cigar fiends—gluten-free melded with sugary junk. It was all good, then, festa su che…
A stocky Italian delivery guy wheelhauled stacked cases of DiStefano Extra Virgin Olive Oil from a tomato red wholesaler truck, shouldering his load mightily across our path, pushing under a carnelian and green awning into ‘The World’s Tastiest L’Ital Deli’. Donato’s was a scrumptiously preserved vestige of pre-Depression times, reeking proudly of cured and aged garlic, onion and Mortadella. Framed in a Deco detailed, black tiled storefront, this was a genuine old San Francisco family deli—one of the last true iconic owner-occupied artifacts of an earlier Marina District.
Paulen and I paused to pore over vine-laced windows fat with boxed Parigi, sugary Balocco wafers, bars of Parugina chocolates, jars of pickled mushrooms and grated parmesan, hanging slabs of Aurichio cheese, assorted boxes of caprese, crema gusto and Bonomi Savoiardi. Sprinkled among them like Bolognese holiday packages were tidy tins of glazed date cakes, Sardinian sardines on a bed of raw Rotelle, Rotini and Fiori, next to cellophaned cannoli and Torrone.
A multi-colorful eye and mouthful, no denying, especially with Tournadot bellowing out the deli’s operatic portal. We could soak in a cramped, cluttered feast if Italian delicacies, past window posters of placid Tuscan and Campanian countrysides. Inside, wicker baskets of antipasto and biscotti, numerous white-skin salamis, hung like stalactites or bass clef quarter notes from Donato’s Savona-muralled ceiling. Straw paglia bottles of Chianti and ruby port lined a sidewall, surrounded by red/white cans of Amaretti di Saronno Lazzaroni.
Doc particularly focused on maestro servers in crisp white shirts and aprons manning a store-long counter atop plenteous deli cases. Like a chorus of rising tenors and baritones, they machine sliced the provolone, heaping cold cuts of Bresada, Sopressata and Zampino on time-worn chopping boards. Above the crew swayed fennel sausages, coppa and linked luganaga.
Other black bowtied Donato ‘dons’ cleaved lengths of hard sourdough sandwich rolls, binned beneath a back wall lined with gallon cans of Sagra olive oil and bushels of raw penne and rigatoni. Apprentice donnies slathered mayo and mustards onto fresh foccacia and raisin Biroldo, sliced chunks of grissini, peeled from large balls of caciocavallo, tapped even larger glass vessels of bulk ceci, canellini, tondini and Borlotti. In all, enough to stir cognoscentric culiningus right there on the spot.
Increasingly famished customers were tempted all the more by a cheese case of such pungent varieties as Brescianella, Teleme, Kasseri and Piave Vecchio. Further along, spicy al dente pasta varied from Fedelini and Farfalle to Orechietti and Perciatelli, with riso pastina and gigli nastrini for gusto measure. Champing to order, the patrons-in-waiting were then whetted by simmering vats of minestrone stock, the hand rolling of Donato’s fabled ravioli, sheet by sheet. No less hyper-salivating, we nevertheless gave way to sated customers emerging like freed hostages with picnic baskets of chicken or prosciutto on panini sandwiches and dolci biscotatte, clear-wrapped party platters of sprigged Taleggio, Grana Padano, Crostini, Asiago Fresco and triple-crème brie—all with plenty of Ruffino to wash it down.
“Epicureanism for the ages,” Paulen nodded wistfully, with a torn look of fond remembrances, and a trace of paterfamilial pride. He recalled his dad often bringing him here a lifetime ago for more Italio-cultural grounding, along with take-out paneforte, gnocchi and tortellini. “I can taste the Sunday cacciatore and spumoni all over again. Still another part of him looked like he was conjuring up full-throated Mussolini as well as a bout with holy heartburn.
For my part, I could picture lounging with North Beach beats at Caffe Trieste, gorging on linguini in Napoli, haggling over leather goods in Firenze, squeezing into that ol’ Fiat 500 for the ride from Catania up to Mount Etna’s volcano crater, molten lava overflowing the olive groves. It was Mediterranean manna, after all, with no dictatorial father figure to spoil things—rascal with a roving eye that Paulen imparted he was.
Our near miss with that dolly pusher prompted a rumination on the concept, the taste and flavor, the overall premise and raison d’etre of olive oil. Paulen touched upon the whole breadth and applications of olive extract, the nature and pleasurable nuances of the oil itself: The physical, virgin stuff, of course, squeezed out of fresh olive paste near the point of Italian harvest—primo Tuscan blends. More broadly, we surveyed the epicurean manifestations and machinations of olives, ultimately, the gestation, roots and branches of olive trees—and inevitably, the holy genesis and geopolitical implications of certain olive trees in particular…nice, brief break in the two-stated discourse that it be.
“You know some of the best olives also come from Bakka Valley, the so-called West Bank,” Paulen said, a counterbalancing aside, while he perused, somewhat longingly so. “Like out around Bilin and Nablus to Jericho…”
“Rrr-right…isn’t that one of the few natural things the region has going for it these days. If only the Palestinians could still work their crops, without the settlers’ burning and trashing anyway?”
“Yes, well…a bloody lot the Palestinians have done to make a robust industry out of it over the years,” Paulen said, “and you can’t lay that at Israel’s feet.”
“Hey, I’m not trying to blame anybody.” I averted to the colorful Grolsch and Tsingtao Beer billboards crowning storefront rooftops across the way. “I’m just pointing out that don’t they say that’s because even their gnarled olive groves have been taken away from them? Anyway, that’s what I’ve heard on a lot of TV interviews… though I guess it’s mostly from the Palestinian side…”
“Of course it is, Herbert, if you’re tuning into Al Jazeera and the BBC…”
“Me? No way. Still and all, you talk about Israel’s survival—don’t the Palestinians need access to their own Roman olive trees to survive, as well?”
“They have access, believe me,” Paulen dismissed, taking note of an unfashionably late barmaid of Kardashian proportions jiggling hastily toward Milligan’s Lounge. “They have many dunams of access…”
“Well, you’re the one doing the studies,” I counter-punted. So, okay, maybe I’d just deliver him to the Palace of Fine Arts jazz gig…leave him there with Coleman Hawkins or Pharaoh Sanders and be done with all this. “I guess you’d know more about that as well…”
And yet, the deli’s opera was still inspiring, its crespone and fritatta still saucily aromatic all the way out Donato’s doors and down the block—too bad we remained so well noshed up from the bagelry. Turning away, I noted as how a lively sidewalk jazz combo was tuning and soundchecking there across Chestnut, in front of the renovated Marina Theater and drug store complex—Spanish style new mainstay of a district back on the make.
Even the Brinks truck idling out front of Apple’s latest computer store seemed to keep to the nano beat—loading to the axles with fresh iPhone take, from polishers and nutJobs already cueing up around the block to drop plastic for the latest small screen gems. The Mac palace over there stood firewiring next to a local camera shop that had been hereabouts since Brownies and Baby Rollei 127s/Zeiss Box 120s were state of the photographic art, only to be going by way of optimized pixelation.
Then a cardboard caballero pickup truck rumbled up from the Mish, loaded with stacked carton flats, high plywood bed extenders gang tagged beyond recognition—honking around that double-parked deli supply truck with the Amaretto banners on its sides. ‘Acuerdate’ Tejano, followed by some doleful narco corridos, ripped 130 decibels through the reconquistos’ tinny loudspeakers, primered mal dentes on seemingly every fender and door: blood colors flying. It brought back images of fix-a-dent trucks that used to roll through Marina Green’s dead-end parking lot—our wrecks and clunkers so far beyond repair. That was about then we sighed, turned fully in the moment on our way, and into this…
“Hoibit, ain’t it?” Strange, but no stranger, this guy was a decrepit bike messenger delivering the goods from a beat-out Timbuk2 bag, fat tire wheels on a rewelded, stretch frame Schwinn. Crabber Don had curbed up on a BofA run, foghorn blowback from the past. Wild eyed, grayed hair standing on end, he lurked in an all-weather outfit of worn winter pea coat, tattered turtleneck and high-water blue sweat pants and oversize basketball hi-tops picked from some city trash can. The guy apparently still had good days, on his meds; off his meds, on bad days like today, he got off schedule and bearing, and passersby got this muddled earful.
“Huh, Crabber?” I asked, startled as I was by this lurching middle-aged figure who was nearly vaulting over his handlebars.
“Who is this…Crabber person?” Paulen reached for some pocket change.
“Uh, nobody,” I sputtered, amid a surge of acid reflex, not even believing this was re-happening—losing my bearings, taking it on the aching dome, something to do with a cerebellum back on the fritz. Getting lighter headed at the same time things keep getting heavier. “Just somebody I came across once—you know, field study-wise. Kind of a kook—real hair trigger type—caused quite some havoc back in the day.”
“Still at it, Hoibit? I know what yur ass’s up to, dude. Clifford’ll be glad to hear yur still snakin’ around while he’s still doin’ yur time,” the bike mess shouted, quickly cowering behind his ragged, doubled-up Old Navy shopping bags, flushed with hypertension.
“Clifford?” asked Paulen, staying several prudent steps away. “Clifford who?”
“Sherry’s a lawyer now, man,” Crabber said, pulling me away from the doorway. “Yah, she’s workin’ on Clifford’s parole hearing right now…”
“That’s crazy talk, just mistaken incriminality,” I sputtered, fearful my waning Saturn Two was reverting to a onesie. We shuffled along out Chestnut, deferring awkwardly to a trio of fresh ingénues sauntering along this sunny side of Chestnut in their clingy work-out threads. Gotta keep at it, damn it, gotta persevere. “Really, I’ve no idea what he’s talking about…”
“See ya back on the Green, Hoibit. Don’t forget to bring along some truth serum,” Crabber shouted over the women’s banter in passing—their snippets of apologies proffered for being so late, misconnections by voice and text.
“Egad, what have you been up to,” doc said, “Back in what day?!”
“Aww, nothing—he’s always been a textbook socio-psycho, if you know what I mean. It’s got nothing to do with me,” I muttered, relieved as Crabber rode off with his middle finger aloft, desertion entering my aching mind yet again. “Well listen, maybe I will be heading back up…”
“Not on your life.” Doc hooked my arm.
“Maybe, maybe not…” Christ, buck up, snapp to. Concentrate, reshift the focus, lesser of two woevils, for better or worse. I looked out ahead, internalizing the stressor, and there was that Saturn airship again, re-drifting—must have been doing about 45 m.p.h., in the general vicinity of the Presidio gate up ahead. “Anyway, you were saying about dunam access…”
“Close, Herbert. But no olive branch,” Paulen said. The women’s cross mea culpas were being laughingly accepted—so many glib rationalizations for being thoughtless in annoyingly real time—mainly centering on male-propagated obstructions. “Interesting though, I’d forgotten how some people here can seem so disturbed, while others feign such blithe, untiring positivity, no matter what.”
“Yeah, everybody’s spinning some song-and-dance spiel,” I said, off guard—trying to figure out what came over me, yet knowing all too well. “It’s all coping mechanisms. zero-sum competition. People who’ve been burned enough by the sharks and parasites to totally mistrust anybody else, so on go the masks.”
“That’s rather big-city jaded of you…”
“Guess some have just been at it for too long, cannonballed off the deep end,” I sighed, no less conflicted my own self. “But put a wide-open smile on your wallet, most of them will come around.”
“Well—I, for one, am refinding it rather attractive…normatively speaking.”
“All the same, it’s not helping my headache much…maybe I need to head up to the house for some bedrest…”
“So let us cure that ill right now,” Paulen insisted. “Honestly, you’re not seeking to avoid anything out here…”
“No…not, why would I?”
“You tell me…something just doesn’t add up, Herbert. But let’s go for a nice long walk, shall we—good for the mind, body and soul.”
“That’s what She said…or was it just ‘take a hike’…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Six. Further down a
stylish path, into the dizzying maelstrom
of issues near and far, pressing a
and maddeningly current as today…
“Looking over your shoulder
will likely provide much
food for thought…”
“That your favorite astrologer there?”
“Heavens no. I think this one sees most of her clients after the bars close anyway…”
“So where is your Saturn source then,” chided Reese Paulen. “How and where’s your psychic guru orbiting these days?”
“Couldn’t tell you…” Truth be told I couldn’t actually remember. In any event, I wouldn’t want to go there now anyhow… “It’s been a little while.”
“Hmmm, is that so…”
The irony was not lost on me that this Debrina person had opened her storefront psychic parlor virtually around the corner on Chestnut from where Dame Thornia had spiritually transited her ’89 quake flattened Fillmore Street sanctorum. Lots of baroque blond upholstery with cheap guilded trim, minus the astrology books and a tubby, fusty minion like Richard Muntz—call it a passing of the augory, and all that.
Yet I had basically moved on from Thornia’s star-crossed enterprise, sort of lost touch with her, much less Richard Muntz. That’s not to say I hadn’t subsequently moved the Saturn Return deal online over the years—bootstrapping the astro phenomenon into a beta social media startup at the time. Nevertheless Reese Paulen was having none of it: the charts, readings, the same zodiacal flim-flam. As for me, I has hardly comfortable delving into the innards of this whole Saturn business right now. But anything made for better conversation than matters Middle East—which so far was getting me nowhere but here.
“I know this dude, he’s like bald, pudgy, about five foot-two…”
“Real dog catcher, huh? Total loser…”
“Naw, he’s always with these epic chicks, man. I asked him—whaddup with that? He says, every great chick has one night she regrets—and that’s my niche…”
“Yeah, niche, that’s happening. I wanna be every one of these hot chicks’ bad call…that’s what I’m talkin’ about…”
“Sure, even this worked: a little deviating jock talk. So I jumped at the chance to reset our sights. Two salt puckered, bay winded sailboarders were kickin’ back, buttholes at ease, sun drying on a hair salon’s waiting bench in their Speedo baggies and O’Neill tanks. But their gazes kept glazing over to the display window next door, its logo reading, London’s Britches. Featured therein was an eyeful of frilly, frothy ladies’ lingerie—more for boogie nights and the boudoir than business hours or body bars. Sultry and playfully sexy: the paisley panties, black silky slips and chemises, lacy chiffon camisoles, peek-a-boo peignoirs and leopard-spotted bustiers were making well focused groupies of these usually wander-eyed guys, turbocharging the gal fixation around these parts, this slipstream of gorgeous Marina women.
All the same, Britches was British classy and whimsical about its retail peep show—no NorCal Frederick’s of Hollywood they—sort of Victoria’s Secret, cast in more blushingly Victorian tones. So the nice ’n’ naughty little shop in turn had women slyly window shopping to reload their drawers, and me wondering why I’d barely noticed the place before. As for the windsurfers, they were manning up in their bleach-bum shag cartoon hair, licking Citrus Squeeze smoothies, sharing a Strawberry Surf Rider, mentally dragging and dropping pink-violet brassieres and tangerine thongs onto all the hot young chicks and baby dolls passing by, itchin’ to snatch ’em for the junk in their trunks…as, however furtively, were Paulen and I.
“What some guys won’t do, huh?”
“Certainly not my bailiwick,” doc replied stiffly. “I for one have put those days well behind me. How about you?”
“Yep the more casual approach, I can totally relate to that. But old habits do die hard, right,” I pressed, as we churned past the two waterlogged niche players still riding the styling salon’s wobbly pine, moving further along Chestnut Street, bangers in our britches, and strumpets on our minds. “Especially when certain…opportunities present themselves.”
“Can’t speak to that either,” Paulen’s eyes drifted off to some fracas across the way, leading over toward a handsy dust-up involving the Hazzerds, Hap and Hop.
“Power of suggestion,” I followed his gaze. “Yeah well, guess it all depends on the metier and milieu, huh…”
“Your words, not mine.”
The hair salon itself was Oleg’s Unisex Design, a gold Genovese crest on its bright red, white and green awning peeling away after decades in the sun. Now, however, its styling was mostly unosex—that is, older Marina padronas still clinging to their 1970s chic. Nothing fancy, thank you, surely nothing too nouveau: Oleg’s seemed permed in the boldness of another era—roller sets, cellophanes, bang trims and root touch-ups, with period Formica counters and consoles, Senior Citizen Specials stenciled onto the window glass behind that waiting bench in sclerotic perpetuity.
“On the other hand, maybe some things are better left unsaid…”
“Well said.”
“But of course sometimes matters do need to be addressed,” I added.
“What things? Do you mean words, thoughts?”
“If not acting out on them,” I pressed, button wise. “You know, crossing red lines…”
“Or double crossing them, as the case may be…”
“Better yet, double jeopardy—but you’d know better than I.”
“I don’t follow,” doc volleyed, “don’t speak that language either.”
Oleg’s had been here since the Me Decade, stuck there ever since. Could have been this salon was one of those Bay Area businesses that long ago sold out to disoriented émigrés from the four corners with more investment cash than language skills. Dedicated, but lost in the translation, they took over established local concerns, then ran them strictly as is, worked them to death without changing anything but the price lists, usually downward, until founding owners swooped back in for the distress sale, or long-familiar doors closed unceremoniously in the dead of night. Then again, it might have been that Oleg and his signorinas were just gel set in their ’70s Genovese ways.
“Okay then,” I relented, trying to read into his verbal jujitsu without tipping my pitches: bagging this round, giving more ground, resigned for the moment to meeting him on his terms. “Maybe it’s like your motherland thing with the blood feud over there. Like maybe your not speaking the Arab language is part of the problem…the understanding part, either way.”
“What’s to understand? Strap on a suicide belt, blow Israel into oblivion—the Palestinians are dying to take that country out any way they can,” he said, in lockstep, eyes adance. “And Israel’s got to stop them, anyway it can.”
“Right…think I get that. How does the ol’ truism go? You can’t unring a bell. And in the Mideast, you evidently can’t unsnarl such ancient hatreds.” Ewwph, back in the bog. I really didn’t mean to keep poking this hornet’s nest; then again, I supposed I did. I mean, here we were, and there it be, buzzing away like mad.
Oleg’s aside, we circumnavigated a jerking circle of energized young runners outside the FootFactor store next door, there stretching their calves, Achilles and quads, jogging in place to the beat of their bicep-strapped I-Pods, oblivious to the generational divide within the side walls of the flat-faced double storefront façade. Running their mouths as much as their on-road Mizuno trainers, this was more a social than balls-out competitive crew, frustrated cubicle slaves working off a 60-hour week mining data at the corporate keyboard.
The runners’ material reward? Sleek, aerodynamic compression singlets and race-day gear shorts, sweat release mesh distance tops and Coolmax side-vented motion skorts: We cautiously rounded this bouncing post-grad scrum in their stretchy red sleeveless mock turtles, black nylon splice knickers, silver Madison track pants and yellow cross-back jog bras.
“Hmph, get that, do you? Praise be! It’s only been going on just about 60 years now,” Paulen said, stepping aside for a late-lunching reference librarian who had just emerged with frosted tips. “At any rate, what I was referring to was Israel turning away provocateurs of any stripe at its borders. We’ve ventured into freighted territory here, and there simply is no turning back.”
“That a fact,” I wandered. “Hmm, can’t remember if the salon was here when I first came to town…” So maybe Syd did pencil in there for a highlight rinse back then. All I knew was we were closing in on thorny, volatile territory, stretching back to way back, sweeping from Aquatic Park’s steamy bathhouse bleachers to the windy, rotting runways of Crissy Field—that whole first-round Saturnine meshugass.
“I’m talking about terror and violence in the Levant. How the Arabs have been attacking Israel all along.”
“Well, I do know a little bit, doc…enough to where I’m thinking I can hang with it some…” Sure enough, even with these luscious distractions, I could multitask, could walk and blather with the best of them…
Suddenly, a blur of water bottles, swooshed visors and overpronating Asics and Sauconys took our breaths away as these weekend half-marathoners heel-struck en masse up Chestnut, herding toward a breast cancer 10k on the Marina Green. Feeling so old and in the way, we paused for second wind by FootFactor’s running calendar kiosk—full of ads for upcoming fun runs, from Eugene to Big Sur, to San Luis, Laguna and Cabo—all that stretching, so much tensil strength and endurance before, beyond us. I almost wanted to double down in the crusty ol’ Horseshoe Tavern dead ahead and roll some bones.
“Honestly, you may think you know what is going on over there, Herbert,” Paulen said cryptically. “But you can’t begin to fathom what you don’t know. Clearly you could stand to be schooled on a few historical details concerning the Middle East today.”
“Okay already, what the hell do I know?” I averted to a sudden ruckus on the fringes of Steiner Street’s open market, beyond the dissonant intersection of organic fiber/fructose and the sugar fatty cholesterol of All-Star donuts and coffee.
“So let’s keep that in mind before we go waving watermelon colored flags, shall we?”
“Whoa, I’m not taking sides…” Either that, or I just still couldn’t make up my mind on anything this…freighted. “I’m more into forsaking sides altogether.”
Forget the banner headlines blaring Supervisor Jew’s city hall troubles. More local throwaway papers’ main front-page spreads lately had been on what was shaping up to be this particular farmer’s market’s last stand. Picketing at the event’s edges were a cordon of neighborhood activists for hire: busybodies with far too much time on their hands, reputedly under the direction of a leading Marina provocateur with an ambitious agenda all her own.
Their placards read, ‘Not Fresh!’, ‘Not Fair Trade!’, ‘Not Preservative and Pesticide-Free!’, claiming there was something rotten along Steiner Street. But how could anyone sniff out anything tainted or toxic amid that one-block stretch of canopied fruit and vegetable stands, collectively bringing wholesome farm produce from all over California to the Marina’s urban climes?
Even from this far side of Chestnut, doc and I could savor the collective aroma: baskets of sweet strawberries from Watsonville, leafy lettuce and spinach from Salinas and San Joaquin, tree-ripened cherries from Brentwood—peaches, plums and apricots from orchards north. Castroville artichokes, heirloom tomatoes and citrus from the southland, table grapes from Madera or Bakersfield—a soupçon of olives besprinkled about.
Corner to corner, curb to curb, Steiner’s instantly successful Saturday market was garnished with samplings of north coast salmon, farmstead cheeses from Sonoma, hot, doughy breadstuffs from mid-Peninsula bakeries. Toss in trellis racks of brilliant fresh-cut flowers, some banjo-picking folk singers—and city-bound shoppers could easily get carried away to Sebastopol and Kelseyville for the day.
“Very well then, if you are interested, my study of Middle East history affirms that the State of Israel was already under horrific siege on May 14, 1948, its glorious Day of Independence.”
“Interested, me? Of course…I’d have to be…” Really, what was I supposed to say? No thanks, enough, for chrissake, couldn’t care less. Come on, how could I not be interested? “After all, Israel is the swizzler that stirs the Mideast cocktail, right?”
“Hmph, you seem to act as though Jews have no right to their land,” Paulen continued with nary a blink, coursing us through a line of nibbling shoppers and over-exercised seniors. “But you can trace the Twelve Tribes’ claim to Israeli land as far back as the Old Testament Days of Prophecy. Consider Isaiah, Chapter 11: ‘The Lord shall assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth to the Holy Land’. Take the Book of Genesis: ‘God promised all of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, from the Euphrates to the sea’. This is all preordained, the stuff of antiquity—it didn’t just start yesterday.”
“Amen to that…as a matter of fact, I have long wondered about the Energizer Bunny nature of the whole Mideast situation.” Sure, I didn’t want to come across as inhospitable, or god forbid, anti…history. Yeah, listen up, this guy needs to talk for some reason, and there’s a part of me that says, be my guest—just like they told me. “Still and all, I mean c’mon, why can’t they just sit down and settle that mess like sensible people and move on?”
Problem was, Marina throngs in organic thrall: the prospect no longer smelled so sweet to immediate commercial concerns. Already tense over a rash of thuggish street crime, certain district quarters voiced alarm over the added market trash, the increased traffic congestion, but most of all the congestive conflict of interest. Whispered word over our shoulders contended that a cabal of Marina merchants had put the contra demonstrators up to it, sick of the cluttered street fair ambience, of street shoppers loading up on fresh produce, then shunning surrounding brick and mortar stores on their way home. Fed up with the whole nutty notion of indie growers siphoning off foot traffic from established supermarket agribrands, pushing recycled paper over retail plastic like nobody’s business.
But inciting this food feud even further was a neighborhood agitprop who was said to be sabotaging the Steiner farmer’s market to pave the way for her rival operation over by Fillmore Street’s middle school, along with the aid and comfort of a certain dress shopkeeper directly behind us. According to the local newsrags, any such conspiracy was bruited to be working, as the market organization running this certifiably successful affair had grown weary of the protests, entangled concessions, tired of greasing city hall palms—and was finally running out of permits.
“There see,” Paulen gestured toward the Steiner scene, “a homegrown territorial spat. These things happen, even here in San Francisco.”
“More like particularly here…”
So the farmers were now beginning to fold up their demo stalls amid the picketers’ shout downs and catcalls, already packing away their veggie baskets and fruit boxes, resigned to hosing down perfectly wholesome supply, even in the face of still-healthy community demand. Meantime Hop and Hap Hazzerd foraged maniacally through this scrounger’s delight. It appeared that nobody else really won here except the usual neighborhood kabobs of negativism, leaving a bitter taste in a good many other Marina mouths.
“So pu-lease…just research Middle Eastern history for yourself, Herbert. This struggle is Homeric,” Paulen stressed. “It has taken overcoming Babylonian Captivity in 586-538 BCE, a second Temple banishment by the Romans, ensuing desecrations, world wars, a hellacious Shoah and fanatical terrorism to actually begin fulfilling the prophecy of the Promised Land.”
“Ri,ri,ri,right—but like I said, promises in conflict…harder to keep.” There you go, bring a little good Mideast knowledge to the table, keep the ball bouncing. Yessir, we’ve gotten this far, so if the professor aims to continue with his bullet points, let’s see where else they land… “And haven’t I read where early Jewish gangs did their share of tormenting indigenous Palestinians from the get-go?”
“A necessary bit of freedom fighting, Herbert—insurgent Israeli pioneers struggling against British occupation and Arab hatred, whatever it took,” he acknowledged. “Especially when you bear in mind Jewish vulnerability and desperation at the time. What were poor, displaced Jews supposed to do, dog paddle their way to Greenland?”
“North Africa, the white highlands, I’ve heard Uruguay,” I said, pretty much off the top of my head—top of my splitting headache, at that. “But seriously, sometimes it is hard to figure why they ended up smack in the middle of such hostile territory.”
“Very funny—but is Uruguay the Jews’ ancient biblical homeland? Was it the land where the Kingdom of Israel flourished in 1000 B.C.? I think not,” he insisted, pressing his point over the electric rumble of a hard charging MUNI bus. “Any wonder refugees piled onto rust buckets bound for Haifa and Nablus in 1947, struggling to overcome their European nightmare…retreating to their ancestral home?”
“Well if you ask me, it’s like the postwar U.N. plan was giving a land of no clearly defined people to the people of no land at all.” The Stockton bus having trollyed along, I picked up on some banjo riffs over on Steiner, not bad, somewhere between David Bromberg and early Ry Cooder. “Pushing out a whole slew of Palestinians in the process…”
Such messy boycotts and demonstrations were the price of doing small business in hyper territorial San Francisco. Just the same, what were promoters thinking? Farmer’s markets on a Steiner Street already lined with restaurants, wall to wall? Bordering one side alone were Parma Italian, Hibachi Korean, Spanish tapas and French-inspired Montequilla, gourmet burgers, grilled skewers, Orecchiette with Pancetta, and saffron paella with nectar wine.
The west sidewalk of restaurant row fronted thin-crust east coast pizza, contemporary Vietnamese, country Chinese, rock ‘n’ roll Wasabi and wet-aged steaks & chops—never mind the nearby donut and gourmet sweet chocolate shops. For that matter, neither did organic farmer produce quite square with the Nudie Sushiria. What did granny apples and free-range rutabagas have to do with Edamame, Unagi, Hamachi Kama, Gyoza, Miso Walu-tini or Moriawase Plate? Doc and I chewed over that dislocation as we turned past the Bonzai grill and wine bar to shuffle once again out Chestnut.
“Your terms, not mine—but the sad truth is Palestinians never had constituted a recognized nation. Make no mistake, Israel is real, unlike some mythical land called Mandate Palestine by colonizing powers. Moreover, Arabs generally rejected that eminently fair U.N. partition plan in 1948 that Israel’s founder embraced, I might add. And Israelis have been fighting off their threats and attacks ever since.”
“Do you mean real, as in with facts on the ground?” And yet, this nudge didn’t quite square with my incipient shaking and rattling as we rolled on along. I could feel it down to my fingertips, deep into the side pockets of my neurological genes, whilst I was getting a bit wobbly in the walking shoes, what with so many motives and particulars seesawing under foot.
“Defensible borders, my friend,” Paulen said quizzically, seeming to re-size me up and down—qualitatively and quantitatively, as it were. “Secure, defined borders for their homeland—we’re looking at survival, pure and simple—you do see that, don’t you Herbert?”
“Yeah, but simple survival only gets you so far…this much, I know.” Personal knowledge—hard earned, to be sure. Still, this knot on my noggin was growing like a hybrid organic radish, along with a near migraine of Nietzschian proportions.
Pulsing back to Chestnut Street, I did happen to recall the safe harbor refuge a roomy, skylit book/café was back in those personal survival days. Now home to Rue Seine: how a funky/flannel farmer’s market might be soiling this haute designer dress shop’s business was anybody’s guess.
We passed that salmon pink and green double storefront, toward another Art Deco-style duplex. A more offbrand women’s fashion retailer anchored its street level space, with an old green eyeshade CPA-steno-notary outfit still cooking the books one flight up, as though there were long black Packards and Kaiser-Frasers full of bagmen idling curbside below, ill-suited myrmidons puffing stogies and flasking down for the count.
A much larger former bank branch served next door as a reminder that even on Chestnut Street, Pottery Barn rules applied. The crockery chain broke the place down, and were gutting, renovating the cavernous space 24/7: Transition, downmarket to relentlessly upstyle, in the rub of a drywall dust-styed eye. On second thought, maybe my bitter taste was product of the smoky tar wagon some roofers had planted between two sickly, misplaced sycamore trees overhanging the sidewalk, directly out front of the stone-glazed Barn. The store’s huge preview window posters already showcased florid draperies and mohair ottomans, white wicker patio tables and red leather easy chairs—not a whole lot of crafty pottery to be seen.
Defensive point made, Paulen glanced up at an array of massive rooftop billboards for assorted import beer and cognac, then digressed with a trace of consternation to reflect on how Boulder also had its share of food fights, only on a supermarket scale, before he sighed: “Scuttling a harmless little farmer’s market for godsakes. So much for San Francisco’s peace, harmony and Summer of Love…” As if Hippie Hill be-in’s had ever actually tripped on over to this plummier part of town.
“Hey, that all was San Francisco decades ago,” I said, after noting how Wild Oats Natural Foods couldn’t carve out much of a niche on Chestnut Street either. Momentarily catching my gaze once more, that had to be bad smoke rising up there on the Heights, again with the sirens, sure as the Divisadero inferno once raged down this way. “It’s not 1967 here anymore.” Much less some 22 years hence…
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Five. With the
discussion homing in on ever-more-relevant issues
Middle East, identities blur some, past altercations
closing in—albeit amid scaled-up surroundings…
“Where you think you’ve come
from may not always jibe with
wherefrom you’ve come…”
“That means you’re the problem…”
“How do you figure? I’m not the problem.”
“Then sign with us, walk the walk, show your support…”
“I told you, I don’t sign those things anymore…you get a name to sell and I get nothing but junk mail.”
“See? This is what I’m saying…”
Couldn’t say I relished this stopped-cold encounter with a snippy, rather confrontational young Cal-Berkeley activist scraping up fall tuition, line by dotted line—for some GreenPlanet Network, no less. He collared me here outside another franchised bagel palace, staying aggressively on message, recycled clipboard and soy ink pen in hand. Around us, long, hungry lines of coed Xers in their college sweats, bunched and munched about the Chestnut Street sidewalk, minding their strollered offspring and shelter dogs. Meanwhile, helmeted nosh hounds waited on the takeout line, their citified motorbikes and cycles compact parked curbside, DPT meter maids firing off citations from their motorscooters with every flip of the expiration flag.
“Get out clean and green—no more oily Mideast war machine…”
“Yeah? Well, how does that petition of yours accomplish that?”
“It’s not a petition, it’s an initiative. And if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. That’s the inconvenient truth of it…”
“Hey, I’m not part of the problem, OK? I barely even drive anymore….” I noted various parkers wiping chalkmarks from their tires once the DPT scooters chugged away.
No getting away from all that. But before long, Reese Paulen emerged from the New York deli-styled bagelry, bagging partial remains of a smoked salmon shmear and Andeuille Sausage on braided Challah, handing me a slice of Cinnamon Walnut Strudel to pick and peck. He smiled as though God’s manna and ambrosia had been delivered unto him from on high.
“Hmm, Mideast…oil machine, sounds awfully viscid to me,” Paulen sauntered over, joining me near a clutter of metal news boxes, the front page of yet another city throwaway leading with a story on how SOMA’s hot-headed mick supervisor had blunted mayoral criticism of Ed Jew by recycling the charges of Newsom’s whispered blow buys. “You know, the young cutie behind the counter there, in the paisley painters coveralls? She told me she just returned from Israel—a tour of early pioneer kibbutzim. God, I’d love to do that.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I ventured, flashing momentarily on that summer retracing my family roots in the ancestral homes and airy dairy barns of Ireland and Scotland. “There’s nothing like visiting your mother country, that’s for sure…”
“Ah, yes, Greater Israel, Land of Promise—the golden hills, luscious orange and olive groves, the glorious Sea of Galilee!”
“Another mother of a land, all right. But have you made it over to Italy and France to see your other people?” I particularly recalled resting my soaked, weary head on the brocade pillow of my great-grandfather’s Killarney straw bed. Could be why there were some underlying tensions here…maybe having something to do with my confliction, contrition, my lingering constipation.
So I’d be seeking more common ground, to draw him out—all the better to bore in deeper to his inclinations and pathologies. Pick a topic, any topic—NASA’s Cassini Mission, Bark Beetle infestation, legalizing reefer, chronic harassment, domestic affairs. We could have been talking about anything, anything else that is. Admittedly, things had not been going so well now. I wasn’t keeping up my end of the bargain—was gaining too few gotchas, giving too much ground. I lacked standing, held no position, posed too few alternatives. Yah, maybe I needed to thread a needle and stitch it, land a left jab or two while I was at it. For all things considered, I was hidebound to hold my own somehow, and was just glad I’d chalked up the bit of legwork that I had…
“Been there, done that, several times over,” Paulen dismissed, wet-napping his fingers. “Israel’s my new frontier.”
“The wild, wild east, huh? Kind of like that Dylan album picture overlooking Jerusalem—exploring your rewtz.”
“More on the order of a heritage celebration,” Paulen said curtly, tossing the tissue into a garbage bin, just missing an overripe street dude digging into the top-covered can up to his armpits, scavenging for leftover pastrami and lox before the likes of Hap and Hop could flush him out.
“Except for the rockets’ red glare…”
With that, I snapped to as we drifted over to Chestnut’s brighter side—nervously negotiating between a radio blasting full-dress Harley hog and the return pincer lap of that Ranger’s revving Ninja Z, dodging the claptrap spillover from Steiner Street’s embattled farmers market, skirting the top-heavy Acacia trees lining Chestnut against brilliant, increasingly breezy blue skies.
“Therein lies the problem,” Paulen trashed the remains of his shmear and sausage, stuffing the bagel bag into a phoneco-sponsored garbage can. “Still, I’d like to see for myself all that Israelis have to cope with as they go about their daily lives.”
“Why, for criminy sakes?” I said abruptly, having had my taste of war zones and martial coercion. I chillingly recalled sudden detonation that late Bloody Friday morning in Belfast—the close-call relief of just missing those downtown bomb blasts, only learning about the haunting IRA explosions after the fact, in the screaming next morning headlines at a Glasgow newsstand. “Why would you want to take your life in your hands?”
“To gain a first-hand understanding of what it’s like in Jerusalem, for instance… what they hold so precious and dear so as to give their lives for in Haifa…I’m sure you’re still enough of a sociologist to grasp that.”
Nearer to here, however, there were other days I could remember: hot, smoky days, when this street itself was functionally deserted, in the powerless, uncertain shadows of a Marina District gone all Loma Prieta softshell and gas-fire tipsy in 1989. The only real action along Chestnut back then was at the hydrants—fire hoses snaking up and down, criss-crossing the street in front of dark, mostly dormant storefronts, their proprietors anxiously restocking shelves, sweeping up seismic debris. Chestnut itself was pretty much on the faultline between liquefied old landfill and more stable, solid ground.
Still, the damage was done. Morning after, The District it most directly served was in chaos and ruins, and the sort of neighborhood building, hardware and houseware suppliers it so desperately needed were long, long gone. So on those earthquake-weather days, mainly hustling taxicabs, news satellite trucks and all categories of emergency and official vehicles cruised Chestnut, locals and outsider lookieloos having other, more urgently compelling things to do, places to see: dousing flare-ups, combing debris, generally mopping up the sudden wreckage of their lives. Residents wrestling with district-wide distress, instances of distinct valor under duress. But of course that was then, not here, today…
“Ri-ri-right, sociologist. Sociology in the field…or on the run…”
“Point is, I’d like nothing better than to witness first-hand what life in Israel today is all about…kibbutzim, the yeshivot and holy shrines, perhaps even combing the glittering beaches and cafés of Tel Aviv.”
“Right, you mean, what makes it tick…”
“In a manner of speaking,” Paulen sighed, as if probing my demarcations and faultlines, as though conducting a scratch sensitivity analysis. “If you must put it so…”
“Anyway, what makes you think you can just trip on over there? I mean, aren’t they starting to tighten things up—loyalty oaths and rabbinic courts deciding who’s who and really a Jew, and all that?”
“Right of Return, my friend, going back to 1950,” Paulen asserted. “In any case, I may be going gung ho—sort of reformodortho, if you will, but not quite ultra-Ortho or Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic. That is, I embrace the calendar and culture, just not necessarily the Haredim and sidecurls.”
“Really, too extreme?”
“No, the look just doesn’t become me…and hats or kippas give me pressure headaches.”
“OK then, what do you expect there is to see in Israel, sosh-wise,” I asked, still picturing Belfast’s Royal Ulster Constabulary bull pushing away my telephoto camera with the barrel of his semi-automatic rifle. Yah, you learned first-hand where Ulster loyalties lay, colonization all the way. Anglo-Norman invaders seizing huge swaths of Irish land in the 12th Century; London brutally, discriminately lording over the entire island for some 800 years, through Potato Famine starvation and all. Ewwph, headaches—that infernal throbbing again. “I mean safely…or are you just into a terror-tourism thing in your old age…”
“Not at all. I begin on the premise of how they have managed to build this modern, progressive democracy over there. That they are brilliant innovators in computer software and technology, how they excel at enviro-ag, biomed and electrical engineering. No wonder Israel’s stock market and venture capital industry are going through the roof, even in a volatile environment like that.”
“As in Israel Inc.—better that than Qassam rockets, huh?” Just trying to keep things a bit lighter, nervously gallows light. “I mean, going through the roof.”
We soon lit into another snootful of connoisseur-strength cigar smoke, smoldering stubs from an earlier epoch. I immediately choked on it, ingesting the premium-grade stench from stinking shit sticks, wending, ringing forth from a corner Humidorium. Street level as it was in a beige, four-story corrugated egg crate of an apartment building with the obligatory Victorian crown trim, here on Chestnut’s even sunnier side.
Paulen paused to look over a window full of oversized, chrome engraved cigar lighters and matching flask sets, inlaid ashtrays and gilded poker chips. I just grappled with inhaling the aroma of Partagas Sabroso Maximos and Sancho Panza Extra Fuentes, the second-hand fire of Sweet Dreams Cherry cigarettes and Djarum Bali Hai Naturales, while struggling to keep the Walnut Strudel down my piehole.
“Seriously, Herbert. That Middle East neighborhood is a perpetual war zone, a desert wasteland of medieval Islamic Sharia thinking that still can’t settle who rightfully heired on the side of Mohammed 1,400 years later,” he said, pulling a sterling Cross pen from his jacket pocket to jot down Humidorium’s number. “What are the odds of developing a vibrant, first world socioeconomy in a lost califate world like that? Poor little Israel is surrounded by people from the Dark Ages, who want to bomb it back there, too. I’d just like to see the country in one piece before they might actually do so, thank you very much.”
“Come on, Israel’s not going anywhere,” I said, “not when they’ve got Dimona and more nukes than god…”
“Really, says who?” Paulen’s scoffed, ducking behind the de rigueur Israeli curtain of nuclear ambiguity, dating back to at least ’67.
“The Prime Minister himself, right?” I yanked out a paper napkin to dab my dripping nose, stuffing same back in my jeans for future deployment. “Scads of Cruise missile warheads, along with an anti-rocket radar dome?”
“Oh, Olmert, that fraud, what does he know,” Paulen peered into the cigar store’s doorway, pocketing his pen and matchbook, seeming to check out the brands and bands, perhaps indulging a latently acute oral fixation, an odious one, at that. “Look at how that tinif shvindler bungled Lebanon last year. All Ehud’s done is make the whole country more vulnerable, while lining his and his cronies’ pockets in the process. He’ll get his all right.”
“Then how about Mordechai Vanunu? And I’ll bet Mossad knows,” I gestured, ever so abulionally sharpening the edges—elbows in, pressing the Times and Nate’s letter tightly to my ribs. “Like that Pollard spy dude…”
“Jonothan Pollard was railroaded and egregiously sentenced, to be sure. By which I mean, produce the evidence, my friend, let IAEA come up with the concrete evidence of espionage,” Paulen snapped, rather taken off guard. “In the meantime, Iran pushes on with its WMD nuke program and vows that it has begun the countdown to the neo-Holocaustal end of the ‘Zionist regime’. So to whom do you choose to lend credence?” He then ducked into the Humidorium to score a Salvia Divinorum and Padilla Miami 8 & 11.
Never much one for a good stogie, I remained outside, to breathe freely and ease gastric distress by shuffling along toward the next boutique shop down. Through the suspiciously Cohiban smokescreen emanating from an illicit backroom Cubador, I noted another legacy relic: an old-time family jewelry store—its plain and simple 70s-style turquoise-tile façade—as if never having passed it before. A Marina hold-out from quieter, more mannerly days, Duchinni Jewelers was modest, timelessly analog, its window cases displaying Longines, Bulova, some budget Seikos—no Breitling, Breguet, Vacheron Constantin or Jaeger-LeCoultre wound around here. But it was just a matter of time…
Paulen rejoined me as I checked out window displays of multi-color replacement watchbands, plexiglas showboxes of clasped earrings and charm bracelets, rows of holy cross necklaces and birthstone rings—traditional Italian style, which in today’s Marina was so rapidly dying off in today’s Marina, going so yupidly out of style. I caught his reflection in the shop window, seemingly one of dismay that so many of his childhood’s hometown anchors were chipping, sliding away.
“In any event,” Paulen refocused, slipping two metal cigar tubes into his jacket pocket in a rather fatherly way. “You must concede Israel has much better things to do than dig bodies out of Intifada-twisted Jerusalem bus wreckage and suicide bombed Tel Aviv cafés.”
“Well, concede, sure…so it would seem…” I found myself comparing the colorful hope of the 26-county Irish Republic to the dreary, bombed out six counties up Ulster north. Could have been why the Irish now sympathized, empathized with the Palestinian cause, seeing Eire history in their eyes: the displacement, struggle for liberation. Just a thought, albeit while again striving for common ground.
“Imagine where that country would be by now if it weren’t constantly under threat by mad, fanatical Arab hordes, or always having to grieve over Star of David-draped coffins.”
“Even more world class, right? Sure, sort of like the Celtic Tiger, a rich, dreamy bubble born of centuries of division and strife. Point is, if green Irish Catholics can work things out with the orange Protestant Unionists—maybe the Easter Rising and 1921 might be a template for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. I mean, Ireland has called for a two-state Mideast solution since the 1980s—even amidst its Troubles. Anything is possible, right? There’s gotta be some hope—’cause who knows what plights lurk over the rainbow?”
“Except there, you haven’t one tribal faction explicitly denying the other’s very right to exist,” Paulen nodded, tapping my arm in affirmation. “Hence Israel’s security fence, defensible borders. With 70% of Israel’s population and power infrastructure, one-third of all Jewry situated within ten-by-160-some miles—it’s a foregone necessity, Acre to Ashkelon, let alone Golan Heights to the Gulf of Aqaba. At least as long as the Palestinians persist in self-destructing, without lifting a finger to really reconcile with Israeli Jews.”
Several steps further revealed Chestnut’s more contemporary leanings. Pre-quake, post-quake, old school and new, back in the day to seize the hell out of today: that was this street in a nutshell. The Marina’s main drag was sort of schizy that way, reflecting a district in acute bipolar transition—sun-shade; segued and split screen, freeze frame-fast forward; with multigenerational Gaps, bras and bondeaus to preppy baby clothes, falling into any openings in this trendy commercial core, storefronts that seemed to stretch all the way out to the Presidio tree line.
Further along, that analogia transmogrified suddenly, wirelessly digital here, in competing side-by-side showrooms. Necktied young technoids aggressively pushed cels, PDAs, rollover minutes and network coverage plans to neighborhood newbies who knew nothing from earthquakes, much less 49er street celebrations before many of them were born. We fended off fevered pitches for no-strings Treo, Bluetooth and V-cast demonstrations from Red Bull-charged reps hustling us up like Broadway skin-show barkers. Smart phones, camera phones, EV-DO phones, slider phones: The bells and whistles had been hyper activated in both stores—blinking power lights and glowing LCD screens, TiVo Mobile, broadband platforms, video capture, GPS navigation, wireless sync and PIM, wall to wall.
“Really…” My head throbbed anew with technoverload, as if I could feel all the excess electromagnetism having a field day radiating my gray matter…yeah, shooting those electric impulses, bursts of colored light show to stoke up the cells and neurons. Couldn’t speak for Paulen, but the pressure pitches gave me the germs of technosis and digititis, left me in awe of the devices, playing hopeless catch-up, somewhere between phile and phobe—a zero-sum gamer…just sign on the contract line.
“Maybe then Israel’s a Semitic tiger in a cage of its own design…”
“Only because it’s an existential matter of life or death, Herbert…been like that from the very beginning…”
“Beginning of what?” I shook off a burning, tumorous sensation over my ears, wondering if those always on the phone could really have minds of their own. “The beginning of time, or beginning of trouble?”
Spinning away from the dueling cellmania, we were quickly blindsided by some blingy middleschoolers uptown from the Bayview via the 22 Fillmore bus line, hip-hopping their way out of a Jamba Juice bar. Cocked caps, ‘team’ colors head to toe, the kids were armed with jumbo Pomegranate Paradises, Mango Mantras and Peenya Kowladas, not to mention Vita and Burner Boosts—the citrus-colored store décor behind them pulsing with Nelly/Beyonce as they bustad their lil’ moves.
Noticeably twigging the sassed nubility of it all, Paulen grabbed himself another menu, ostensibly for future reference, but was soon poring over the Enlightened Smoothies. Me, I couldn’t pull my nostrils away from the fresh-baked éclairs, Danish and cinnamon twists at the crusty all-hours donut shop still there, holdover from the old days, just across the way.
“I’m referring to the beginning of Eretz Yisrael, land of Abraham and King David, of Moses and King Soloman, the Old Testament Promised land of Zion, rootstock of the Temple Mount.”
“Couldn’t be you really mean the beginning of, what do they call it? The Nakba,” I asked, a stitch, just in time—jabbing at a sore spot, not to mention by backside. “700,000 Palestinians fleeing their Mandatory homes for their lives.”
“Sorry, I don’t speak that language,” Paulen deflected with a sweeping hand. “Incidentally, you can hardly claim some historical bond of moral equivalency between Ireland and Israel. Your Irish haven’t exactly been models of hospitality, now have they? Coldly cozying up with Jew haters going back to Eamonn de Valera, virtually abetting the Nazis in World War II, carrying on through to Palestinian solidarity shenanigans today.”
“So then why are plenty of Jews still living on the Emerald Isle, Eastern Euro immigrants who settled in Midleton in the late 1800s? They must be drawn to Ireland’s greenery, huh?”
“Surely couldn’t be the climate or local cuisine…”
“Well, the Mideast is not the friendliest of climates itself, that’s for sure,” I snapped, peeling back the civility some, now all thumbs scraping to get under his skin. Meanwhile wait, I could swear I heard more fire sirens wailing through the Marina, and there uphill. Seemed I heard emergency sirens everywhere, spotted the Hazzerds closing in. “And yet how many Irish are welcome in Israel these days?”
“Cholileh, depends on how active they are—or politically active, as the case may be…”
“Yah, well, even so, it may be because such protestors don’t see much eye-to-eye going on there, doc. They only see eye for an eye.”
“I see. Which further persuades me to keep an eye on you…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Four. Enter gender issues,
which are quickly eclipsed by organic issues
on a local scale—feeding more worldly issues
of ancient history and animosities…
“Comes a time to
come to terms with the
meaning of your words.”
“There, can you hear me? Nearly lost you for a second, but… No, he’s not as bad off as I’d suspected. Still, it’s not clear he’s as good as was hoped. What was that?
“Yes…easier if he had an R.F.I.D. chip implanted in his backside! Of course… might have to… intervene…for his own good…
“Indeed…continue to work it…fill you in a bit later…oops, losing you…had better go…(CLICK).”
We intended to cross Chestnut Street with the walk light; that was the plan. But then there happened to be this…impediment. We got stalled at the slanted pedestrian walk by an onyx Nissan Z Ninja GT, with mag/chrome-spokes and vanity California palm license plates reading BLK PWR, blocking our path. Boy toy all the way, only behind the wheel was this buzz-cut middle-aged honky in a white AC/DC t-shirt, French inhaling his Marlboros behind chrome aviator shades.
Brandishing Airborne Ranger decals on his windshield and rear window, he could have been regular army retired, a hard-stripe sergeant type, Gulf War vet on cyclosarin disability, still working out his government issues over a Full Throttle energy drink or two. He seemed all hopped up on Kid Rock, clicking through his Kenwood tuner, red-lining the boombox speakers surround-sounding his twin-bucket cockpit, shaking Cynque’s sleek chrome exterior light fixtures, over twenty feet away. The vet glanced in my direction, then revved twice loudly in sneering salute, bottle scarred and half cocked.
So we backed off a bit more from the curbing when he flipped his stereo scan to replay Savage Nation. I overheard Cynque Lounge’s valet attendants cracking as how the joker had been right-hand turning a deep, ugly groove into this square block of pavement all afternoon—apparently riding out some aging venom and anxiety.
Likely as not he had been stationed at the Presidio somewhere along his strack lifer tour. Stable duty that, but now he was an IED in perpetual motion, as if running and gunning from far uglier flashbacks to places like Basra, Benning or even Fort Bragg. Here, he seemed so out of place and context, cutting us peacenik types off at the pass in a self-styled exploratory sortie. Round and round the Marina—stewing like Gary once had, minus the slight of hand, cruising Chestnut and Lombard the way Eric always did. I too knew the drill well, patrolling the perimeter, Fillmore to Pierce Streets and back again, spinning the radio dial—if only in a much lesser ride. Then as now, that was how guys in our state and stasis rocked…and rolled.
“Again with the phone calls,” I asked, admittedly fishing a bit, having overheard just enough of the phone gab, even through my tin-tin din, slight touch of paranoia creeping in. Heretofore, I had been killing these long minutes looking back on the lofty houses and condos heaped up the Fillmore Hill, gauging just how far we’d come today, how steep the climb back, realizing I hadn’t been down this way in quite a while, still fretting over that smoke up there—not to mention the Hazzerds busking our way.
I had particularly focused on Pacific Heights’ roof lines beyond them—schools and TIC/apartment buildings like a fiscal year bar graph—the billowing gray-black smoke in windblown vicinity of Webster and Laguna Streets. Flashing sirens raced up and across, converging somewhere in between; that prospect hitting me like a concussion grenade. “Can’t get away from the gadgetry, huh? Must have been pretty important…”
“You might say,” Reese Paulen pressed down the call light on his wireless Jabra. He motioned me away from the crosswalk, rather proceeding on this unsunnier side of Chestnut Street. “An old, old friend checking in…”
“About…” As in what the hell were we doing here?!
“Something about bridge burning. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“R-r-right,” I muttered, welcoming the change of course, as I really wasn’t excited about revisiting the scene of the Dame’s third Return any more than necessary. Still, I gazed morbidly upon the telescopic cordons of bay windowed pastel apartment buildings and cheesy two-flats extending out to the woefully familiar Marina shoreline and Belvedere hills beyond.
Along Fillmore’s right side were the red-tiled turrets of those white Spanish-style apartment houses; smack between the convergent rows was a middle lane of parked cars and arching light poles. Even from this overhead trolley wired perspective, I could re-picture the 2 Cervantes casket box of a building fatally genuflecting out into the intersection. Midway between here and there, just beyond that sheeting green canvas doorway canopy, the lady’s place had itself collapsed like a misbaked devil’s food cake. Christ, how could she get trapped in there, that whole dumpy duplex coming down around her that way? “You mean like bridges…and walls?”
“I should hope you are not alluding to Israel’s security barrier,” Paulen said, a Fisherman’s Wharf-bound 30 Stockton bus finally horning Ninja out of the MUNI stop. “You aren’t suggesting Israel has no right to defend itself, are you?”
“No, hey…come on,” I sputtered after him. “No way I…was just thinking about some…music…all in all, just another brick in the wall…”
“Look, Herbert, that is not a wall at all, little more than a neighborly fence…quite possibly a temporary one at that.”
“Sure, of course it is,” I backpedaled further. Yet time’s a wastin’, my head’s still throbbin’, back’s itchin’, and I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on with doc here. “I mean, you’ve got me all wrong…uh, how about we get off this anyhow?”
“Seriously, we are reasonably educated fellows, Herbert. Isn’t it incumbent upon us to give such vital issues a thorough vetting—rationally, on fairly neutral ground—can’t you see that?”
“Oh, it is, really?” This can’t be happening here like this—yet here we were—with what I expected to be just small talk getting seriouser and seriouser by the upscaling storefront.
“Good god, man, if not us, who?”
“No, if us, for godsakes why?”
The veteran ranger revved his 350-Z in militant defiance, burning through super unleaded at $4.25 per gallon, screeching like a teenage time bomb around the corner onto Fillmore south. Banging Motorhead through his subwoofer, he full throated the Ninja’s HKS Ti stainless flared tailpipes past some underwhelmed out-of-town honeys and the IsoBar Method yogaplex. Their verdict: Sorry loser, no Testarossa, that—but it rattled my pipes all the more.
“Too late to prevaricate, my friend. Next you’ll be backhand impugning the motives of America’s only reliable democratic partner in the Middle East.”
“Hey, who am I to question or judge…I have no skin in the game…” So out of line, out of context: whatever, shake things up a bit more. Not that I was an advocate or anything. Just keepin’ it real…even maddeningly real. So settle down, chump—you can do this…you have to do this.
“Would that it were so, Herbert,” Paulen glimpsed Cynque’s hefty early dinner menu, pointing to the flat-iron steaks and tiger prawns. “Nevertheless, take a number. Everybody and his blogger is jumping on Israel these days…”
“Actually, I don’t have a blog like that.” Just the same, I was once again confronted with this whole Mideast conundrum, even after all this time. Again, with the morbid curiosity, the confliction affliction: Trying to understand the hows and whyfors of this eternal combustion was still like bearing witness to some foreign car wreck from which I couldn’t turn away. “So, what’s that got to do with me personally?”
“You tell me,” he said, as we proceeded along a curt row of single-story storefronts that hadn’t changed much structurally since Depression days, but were gentrifying like crazy today. In turn, we passed a chic plunging dress salon aside a drab, cluttered Italian dry cleaners that had been there forever. “Anyway, it’s all basically bigoted grandstanding. What is the country supposed to do? Israel’s been under siege at least since Chaim Weizmann first lobbied UNSCOP.”
“Huh? Who said it wasn’t,” I groused, guessing he was looking about for the equally ageless next-door magic shop, which had recently pulled a Houdini disappearing act rather than joke around with the practicality of a gargantuan rent raise. “If we are going there anyway, I do wonder why we keep hearing about that temporary security…fence being a solid 25 feet high and rigged with hot-wire electrodes and razor wire—like, 500 miles long…what’s so temporary about that?”
“It’s called containing the explosive West Bank—more precisely, Judea and Samaria,” Paulen looked askance, as we paused at the side of this busy thoroughfare, exchanging information, getting our second wind. “And most of what you’re hearing are typical anti-Israel canards. You don’t buy all that hateful media drek, do you?”
“Me? Hey, no…I’m only trying to wrap my brain around all this for once—I mean, if we are determined to scratch old sores, that is,” I propped myself against a parking meter, thinking up to speed outside this slender little fresh fish grill, hot as an unlocked, blackmarket iPhone, catches of the day being everything from Chipotle Mahi Mahi to barbequed Unagi and Ahi Poke. “Although I must say, I have seen pictures of the teeming camps, famished refugees, Israel controlling everything. And which hateful media exactly?”
“Pick your poison. I can only say, let those Palestinians build a healthy, productive life for themselves in Gaza, like Israelis have done next door,” he said, seeming to inhale the Thai Coconut Shrimp from the nearer of the grill’s sidewalk tables. “But no, instead they insist on fighting amongst themselves and taking aim at Israel from all directions.”
“Sure, but putting up a separation barrier, or whatever you want to call it,” I replied, nothing short of jim-jams setting in. Once again, the confounded complexity—nope, sorry–too, too much to this very day—any wonder I was once again shaking my head, beside myself at the utter hopelessness over there? But if this was the topic at hand, so be it. I was on the clock, hook, and might as well cop to having done some reading on this stuff over the years. “By the way, why do I keep hearing that the U.N. and World Court call the barrier illegal? Isn’t this bringing Israel more trouble than it’s worth? Why not just engage the region and hammer things out fair and square already? It’d be win-win, getting peace and happiness all around—instead of being beside itself with rage. Isn’t that what’s truly in Israel’s self interest?”
“Win what? More radical terrorists on the attack?” Paulen and I sniffed the aromatic commingling of skewered and marinated seafood with a longboard surfer taqueria/pizzeria pouring Island Lager. “You’d think the Israelis are fashioning some glorious gated community for themselves! Look, the country is under constant existential threat in that nightmare of a neighborhood…we’re talking about self-preservation, utter life or death…”
“Granted, but some people are concerned about not just what the barrier is, but where it is. They call it a land grab, right? Or at the very least, one whopper of a spite fence…”
“More along the lines of a despite fence,” he remarked, now angling over toward a local megabank branch, to pull down some walking-around money from its ATM.
“How do you figure?” I followed him, though keeping civil distance as he punched in his PIN and transaction interaction, fixing on colorful Teatro Zinzanni circus banner fluttering on the utility pole above.
“Despite all Israel’s best efforts toward peace and stability, it still has come to this,” he continued, pocketing his cash and paper trail. “At least the separation barrier can give Israeli citizens some semblance of security, protection from all the dangers surrounding them.”
“That sounds like a no-win situation, if you ask me,” I fished my own pockets for a bankroll of any consequence, coming up dry. “I mean, in the long run…”
“Truth of the matter is that fence only goes where the trouble is. Now, there’s been nearly a 90% reduction in terror attacks from the West Bank alone,” Paulen said, leading back into the sidewalk flow, nettled by a burst of gameday cheering from the old Horseshoe sports bar across Chestnut. “Besides, the U.S. is doing the same thing along our Mexico border—without such tangible results, I might add.”
“Yeah, and it looks like we’re paying for it, either way.” I gave ground to a pack of baggy young Mexican day workers who had just finished off some disposal jobs for a new Apple store further up the street. “And swimming against some pretty strong demographic tides—sociologically speaking. Not that that makes it right…or is making things any better.”
“Better for whom?” he halted in the face of a firemist red Mercedes SLK darting ahead of us into the bank’s U-turned drive-up lane. “Sorry, but Israel simply can’t afford to let Tel Aviv end up like Ciudad Juarez or Baghdad.”
“Or like Gaza City…how that’s ending up?” I squnted over my shoulder for some sign of Hap or Hop having turned the corner, witness tampering on their bloody docket.
“Oh, I see, blame it on the Jews,” Paulen sneered, somewhat taken aback by a reckless roadster steering into the drive-up bank lane, then averting from the snidey wave by its likely Larkspur-bound driver. Doc then turned around to the boldface headline of a throwaway city newspaper gone unnoticed heretofore. “There, see? ‘Jew Charged, Mayor Wants Him Out’. It always comes down to the Jews.”
“Actually, that’s about City Supervisor Ed Jew. And I believe the guy’s Chinese,” I pulled a copy from the bright blue freebie newsbox, wrapping it around my Times.
“Hmph, likely story—but who says two differing things can’t be equally true?”
“That what she said?” Had no idea where this came from, or did I?
“Depends on what she you are referring to, now doesn’t it…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Three. A brush with
idealism sparks rough analogies and the
comparative legacies of disputed lands…
“A confluence of influences
can distort the music
to your ears.”
“Agh, Polk Street—they’ ve got every little spot marked off—can’t stand here, that doorway’ s mine…”
“What about Market Street?”
“Store pigs—put up no trespassing signs, hatin’ on the homeless, call the pigs on you. I’m, like, don’t go tazin’ me, bro .”
“Civic Center?”
“With all them hardcore stinkin’ homeless?! I’m tellin’ you, it’s murder out here…”
It felt like the traffic lights had been stuck on red for hours. Reese Paulen and I had fled the Town Tavern without further incident, bypassing touch-and-go tourists who scuffled around this stretch increasingly as the day wore on. Which delivered us unto Lombard Street—its straight and narrow, not famous corkscrew stretch—however crooked this touro-ghetto may have been as well. Here, a dozen or so short blocks of tasteless restaurants, charmless shack-up motels and pseudo-San Francisco nightlife bilked captive out-of-towners with slimmer budgets and even skimpier imaginations or appetites for adventure.
We soon stalled along with a herd of Middle Americans at a yellow, waffled handicap cut-out for the Fillmore Street crosswalk, just outside a greasy KFC/Taco Bell on the brink of demolition in favor of a new, improved, transfat-free facade. Waiting out the pedestrian timer, our slumping little bunch quailed at the two-way roar of Highway 101’s traffic—the parade of weekend-packed SUVs—inhaling diesel smoke spewing from decapitated open-air busloads of tourists bound back and forth from the Golden Gate Bridge and Muir Woods, not to mention the artery clogging aroma of fried chicken and spuds.
Tailgating the northern flow, a black bar windowed hard-time express up from the LA Department of Corrections, fumed toward for the Big House at San Quentin. I could only flash on a jaundiced, joint-liberated JT, once reigning over in Aquatic Park. Then there was this mouthy panhandler squatting stoutly between The Colonel and a MUNI shelter, jobbing a mocha-clutching visitor in a teal Sharks hockey jersey—the same chucklehead we’d seen tangling with the liquor storeowner up on Union Street, a street person I recognized I had spotted many times, in way too many places before.
“So, you stay at the shelters, or…”
“Naww, man—them places is snakepits.” Hap Hazzerd, a prematurely toothless beggar now bundled in oversized Goodwill winter layers covering his tracks and a flat-billed BevMo ballcap, cradling an ‘I Am A Diabetic Depressive’ sign, dragging heavily on a scavenged butt, talking shop with a stroll-by Frappucino-lathered sightseer. “Me and my brutha got a system…”
“Brother?” These latter inquiries came from a wheelchair and crutch case respectively, waiting to board the next 22 Fillmore south, to demand their rights, hold up the jam-packed bus and be raised on the front door’s handicap lift, grinding traffic to a bitter halt—if need be, even fixing to make a Federal case out of it.
“My older bro, Hop—he got the corner across Lombard there, playing the Jew’s harp,” said Hap. No musician he, but Hap did sport a tiny transistor radio in his coat’s vest pocket, nothing but the hits. “We split an SRO on our combined SSIs…the rest is gravy.”
“Mouth harp,” Paulen corrected, as we waited out the wail of an emergency siren rapidly gaining decibels up Lombard Street, nudging bumpers along the speedway lanes of this teeming armrest-tourism berth canal, creeping frantically through traffic hell bent on the Golden Gate, if not the redwood paradise beyond.
Hap’s tinny AM radio signaled a newsbreak bulletin, on the latest devastating car wreck beginning to block traffic up on Doyle Drive’s approach, further details squelched by the red and white blur of an SFFD Heavy Rescue Van. The very thought of another bridge ramp crash-and-burn took me groggily back to my first San Francisco visit, longer ago than I dared recall. That time, a Sausalito-bound Porsche Targa compacted into three grisly pieces against the curving toll plaza guardrail on a foggy Friday morning, its driver’s bodily whereabouts up in pre-dawn smoke and flames. Upon reflection, the sight of that sheer vehicular disintegration may well have been something of a personal omen: doomed projectile Porsches and the Marina, all over again.
“You know, I’m sorta getting a headache here,” I said, dome feeling as if it were a honeydew melon in the Jaws of Life—occupational hazard, freelance assignment notwithstanding. In a residual TBI haze, I felt my ears ringing, or was it all the rubbed-raw meat in between them, the whole bell chiming in? So I was doing a personal concussion protocol: How many fingers? Where are you? What day is it? What are you doing here?! “Think I might peel off and head back up the hill…”
“Nonsense, isn’t there a drug store somewhere near here?” Paulen fiddled with his phone.
“I guess, around the corner down Chestnut there…” Yeah, hmm, that grueling climb back to whatever remained of a roily old house…maybe, on second thought…
Lombard traffic slowly re-merging up to a red light, we prepared to cross, though not before ingesting one last snootful of Extreme Quesadillas and Burritos bel Grande, and a breaking newsradio report on Israel’s latest rocket strike at Gaza’s Hamas targets. Giving ground to the passing ambulance, then a silver Chevy Tahoe wheeling out of a cookie cutter motel across Fillmore into the Lombard back-up, we nervously traversed six wide yellow-striped lanes of agitated motorists and a center divider of sooty, exhausted shrubs.
“So then we’ll go get you some Tylenol,” Paulen said, looking both ways, gauging the braking distance of an oncoming Golden Gate Transit coach. “Honestly, you can’t strand me here in tourist hell. Besides, you were going to show me to that other jazz venue, were you not?”
“Oh, right—the ’Trane Tribute,” I rallied, feeling the squeeze from another angle, ducking in behind him, just ahead of a whale-painted San Anselmo bus, with its two trail bikes racked on front like the cow catcher of a Willits steam locomotive. Odd, this jazz riff, when the tune actually rocking my head at the moment was Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab, no no no’. “It’s over at the Palace of Fine Arts.”
“Fine, Saint Coltrane, it is,” he said, as we safely reached the opposing curb. “In the meantime, you ask what’s to know. Well, for one thing, there’s Gaza, with Hamas acting out over there again. Seems we can’t get away from the Mideast business, now can we…”
“Can’t get away from the harp over there, either,” I snapped, glancing across Fillmore to brother Hop, twanging away, albeit with a bloodied, rag-wrapped hand, stomping his toe-scraped, heel-worn combat boot to a bluegrass beat in the doorway of a weekdays-only Honda service center, harping for pennies or the dollar tourists dropped into his floppy beret. Like his brother, Hop had long ago progressed from feeding the pigeons to getting these pigeons to feed him. But Mideast business? Can’t get away? “Mideast? How ’bout let’s not, and say we didn’t…”
Truth was, I did feel a bit shaky, concussive woozy about then—putting one and one together on the Moulton Street rebar hit, Hop-wise. No help were the diesel smoke fumes from a transplanted red double-decker London bus, wavy with ‘jump on-jump off’ tourists up top. Maybe I would be better to stay the course here anyhow, rather than trudging back uphill empty handed—path of least resistance, not to mention the hazardous duty pay.
Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to see where he might be going with this Mideast stuff—whether his second Rendezvous rang true, much less mine. Dame Thornia wouldn’t have it any other way, wherever she may be. What, for instance, did this fascination with Jewishness say about him? This had nothing to do with me, per se—right? Really, who was I to say? What was I to know about it? But how could I blow off the issue of Israel and the Arabs without coming off like some kind of nazi symp? On the other hand, what did my curiosity say about me?
“Easier said than unsaid, my friend…especially depending on your perspective.”
“My perspective? No thanks, I’ll pass,” I noticed how the elder Hazzerd brother was drawing a small crowd between him and the outbound MUNI stop, locals apparently waiting on the bus up to the Marin Headlands and Tennessee Valley, paying for the musical privilege with their nickels and dimes. I was just wary that he might be making me hip-wise for bearing witness, or that doc was uneasy himself. “That bro’s not bad over there, huh?”
“How can he go wrong with a Jew’s harp,” Paulen said drolly, now that we had passed traffic-snarled motel row comparatively bedbug free. Although he instead seemed to take keener note of the roving, mini-skirted whorology. Today, these usually solo streetwalkers were being herded, escorted by a legion of protesting slutwalkers, all virally aroused by rumors of a pole tax on city strip clubs, chanting the likes of, ‘Don’t assess our asses’ or ‘No tax on our racks’. “And what exactly do you mean…pass?”
“Nothing,” I wished I knew why the hell he would pick me to lay this on. Anyway, remember, let him do most of the talking—seemed like he was wont to do that anyhow. But he was going to be springing for the pain relievers, that was for damn sure. All right then, here goes nothing…pushing buttons along the way. “Just how the Israelis and the Palestinians keep pounding at one another, that’s all…”
“Well, shouldn’t you care to know that for Israel’s part, it has been getting Qassam rocket shelled every day for months now, and it’s finally firing back,” he said, pausing to windowshop at yet another cell phone outlet. “Palestinians incinerate buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv cafés with their suicide girls and rabbi masquerades. Arabs turn everyday life into grotesque, twisted ruins, and drive Jewish citizens into bomb shelters and safe rooms. So Israel has no choice but to target the terrorist cowards. It’s retaliation, plain and simple, biblical eye for an eye…”
“But you’re an expert sociologist, doc,” I joined him in scanning the corner store’s display, full of cellular coverage maps, new Blackberry Curves, MP-4 Pod knockoffs, flimsy keyboards and wireless Jawbone hand/ear attachments, not unlike his own. “How are negative reinforcement and zero-sum annihilation getting anybody anywhere over there?”
“Look, I don’t care for the cross-border raids and air strikes anymore than the next person, but what else are Israelis supposed to do,” he plained, as we moved on past an office front of a tech-savvy neighborhood dentist who pulled out all the gadget stops with video screens, poster perfect cosmetic smiles, sidewalk gag chopper implants and animated funhouse mirrors. “This transcends social science. Israel is a little Jewish lifeboat in a welling sea of Arab hatred, which is precisely where their neighbors repeatedly vow to push it.”
“Into the sea, you mean,” I said, my poor teeth ached just thinking about the place, air-abrasion painless treatment, or no—while the air outside was now thick with the homesick, deep-dish aroma from a Chicago-bred pizza parlor right there across Fillmore Street. “But haven’t Muslim militants tried that before?”
“When have they stopped trying? And this, after Israel agreed to give back Gaza in ’05—unilaterally, yet. Whatever happened to land for peace, for godsakes?!”
“You tell me, you’re the expert,” I recoiled. Here we were, the two of us trading takes, body language and facial ticks—Paulen’s will-you-tell overture. And who knew what he or I actually thought about the subsoil they might reveal? “I only go by what’s in the news…”
We stepped around two lithe, flexing young women sweeping into an IsoBar Method yoga/exercise studio with pink and purple mat rolls slung over their shoulders. Frame straightening, core muscle toning, hip slimming, orthopedic isometrics for the younger, exclusively distaff side. I could recall when this place was a freeweight, no-holds-barred body bar, the district’s most notorious pick-up scene outside of the Marina Safeway. Paulen leered in as though he had never seen the likes of this before, unlikely though that was.
I drifted back to circling this block in my clunky Volvo sedan, compelled to catch a glimpse of Her coming out of the hot and sweaty Nautilus Workout Center, whether and with whom she’d be toweling down with next. I remembered there was a laundromat across Fillmore Street there, where I would frantically wait out that heavy damn load.
Speeding up, heating up…like my white-matter brain was Schizoaffective Bipolar on a nitro-methane overdose, my aching cranium gripping atop its brainstem like a shrunken skull toggle on a Speed Queen rotary control. Running myself through the ringer, spin cycling around the tumble dryer in my mind. Her, Chicago, hot and sweaty, just friends: It was all such dirty laundry—still is, swirling and twirling around…
“Besides, that Gaza gesture wasn’t easy, I’ll have you know,” Paulen added, dwelling upon studio photos of the firm female buns, tight abs and Speedo thighs IsoBar’s Method promotionally promised. “Even for an Ariel Sharon—there’s been a heavy political price to pay at home.”
“Seems like he’s paid a heavier price than that,” I said, as we encountered the fishy smell of a sleek, minimalist sushi bar, saki bombs away, which had just finished windowdressing its Yellowtail, Hamachi Poke, Red Dragon, Tonkatsu and Sea Urchin Roe—so real, and colorfully raw, a glassy display that all but took my appetite by storm. “I mean, you know, stroke-wise…”
Yes, stroke-wise, round and round the block back then to a loopy Bob Seger beat, timing her high-toned escapade, catching a glimpse: The amalgamated aromas hereabouts were now making me dizzier, queasier—the mainline artery up my neck throbbing, suddenly starving for the salutary oxygen a passing 43 MUNI bus was snuffing out as it accelerated toward Lombard Street, ‘Justice for Palestine’ billboard on its side panel. Smoky diesel fumes clouded my view up Fillmore, prompting my imagination to run cloudy wild with submerged imagery.
“There see,” Paulen pointed to the bus ad, “the outrageous, unmitigated gall.”
Sudden sirens… beyond Chestnut Street, there emerged anew an abject collapse of Dame’s stucco frame digs out into Fillmore’s southbound lanes, dire, precious minutes after Loma Prieta, ’89. Days later, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio himself was standing stoop-shouldered on line outside that massive white and aquamarine middle school, the Yankee Clipper waiting humbly for post-quake relief like everybody else down here.
Then there was a magic Sunday night more than eight years before that, when the long-suffering 49er Faithful roared back, exploding through this very intersection in anarchic celebration a lá Montana-to-Clark, torching furniture mid block, ripping down trolley wires and parading along Chestnut Street in ’Niner colored convertibles and full football regalia. Endlessly honking airhorns…so much going on: recalling a boozy, Maui Wowie cheer and smear of 49eer banners or Cowboy potshots that crazy January night.
Caught up in such super victorious mayhem, we had all ducked into fabled Marina Joe’s. There at the street corner was an old-school Marina staple where we’d gorged on Anchor Steam drafts and Hangtown Fries, toasting a brewing ’Niner dynasty amid a euphoric, chaotic tide of the NFC champ’s red and gold. But that was then. For by now, Joe’s joynt had devolved through the years and belly-up eateries into a slick young dinner club painted boulevard black, cooly serving up Caprese Skewers, Bearnaise Benedict and bottomless Mimosa sans the swagger and swag.
Diesel plumes slowly dissipating, about all I could spot beyond Chestnut Street today, however, were more tangled trolley wires and the return of that Saturn airship—well above block after Fillmore block of retrofit Spanish-style apartment houses. The blimp glided over them like a salami sausage toward the Marina Green, as though it were ghosting giddy, awestruck promenade throngs at the 1916 Pan-Pacific Exposition. Just the same, Marin’s hills provided backdrop to this day, beyond the free-floating, sailboating Bay.
“Losing Ariel Sharon was a tragedy of timing,” Paulen slid past a stalled shopping cart woman, recycle can bag bulging off one side, bottle bag off the other. “Since then, Israel has been desperate for genuine leadership… for any real sense of safety and security.”
“Aren’t they working around that,” I coughed. So let’s see if I can earn my keep, hang with doc here, as in the olden days—playing a bit of cavil’s advocate. Like a balloon releasing pressure, I just blurted without a moment’s thought. Mind adrift, where was my inner spam filter when I needed one? “Fact by fact on the ground?”
“Hmph. Look, all you need to understand is that shelling nonsense and suicide tunneling had better stop soon,” he suddenly tapped his earphone, stabbing into his jacket pocket for his cell phone, quick on the draw. “Israel can only afford to put up with it for so long.”
“Whatever…sounds like you would know better about that…” I could now hear a bit more from ‘Back to Black’, the soulful beat of ‘You Know I’m No Good’ crying out from the brown-on-black side door of the Cynque Lounge, reverbing off those same boxy apartment buildings across Fillmore Street. High time for an OBAMA ’08 billboard/megaphone campaign truck to be rolling on by: ‘Yes we can, damn straight, sure as hell can’…
“You know about his Kenyan father and Muslim ties,” Paulen said with a jaundiced eye. “Chances are he’s got some bias in him by birth. That can’t be good for Israel and the Jews…”
Heady days, pounding headache, I was hopefully disentangled, then hopelessly engaged all over again. Homeless in the Marina—looking for any angle or escape route, spinning between my sideburns like an IsoBar Method aerobic hamster. Cynque’s stereo system was tracking into ‘Some Unholy War’; and due respect to Newman, Siebel and Bromberg, I was thinking how much I really dug Amy Winehouse.
How could Ms. Back to Black could be Lady Day reincarnate under all that juicy ink when—oops, snaaaping back: I instead picked up a twang of Jew’s harp accompaniment Hopping our way up Fillmore. Which only summoned forth the rework of a late-70s Pinko anthem, a taunting little ditty I’d heard that troubled Berkeley troubadour-provocateur play outside Mecca Java up there a couple of months before. Ah, yes, Mecca Java—but scat, out of my head with that, get the whole twisted refrain the hell out of my skull—those cold, cold running Waters—before I start going off in some kind of echo-karaoke seizure, right here on the spot. Losing game—no, shake it off—I said stop it this minute!!! Roger that…
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Two. A sudden turn of
corner yields fuzziness and bluster,
bringing this Middle East exchange
sharper focus.
“A rash escape, to lift
the spirits, can hit you
like a ton of brickbats.”
“Having a little flare-up, are we?
“No, maam, we’re good…”
“In denial, huh? Been here, done this…that’s why I’m doing this now.”
“Look, lady, our table’s already under mission control, alright?”
“See? Moody, restless, irritable…why don’t you kiddies come on down to the Dri Dock before it gets any worse? Recovery is but twelve short steps away. Coffee’s on the house.”
Flare up: knew the feeling—namely, the inner buzzsaw triggered when one gets down, but has no easy option or opportunity to get a good buzz back on. Madame outreach was an aging Janis Joplinesque flower child, these days patrolling the Marina neighborhood in roomy tropical print shorts and top, above drugstore shower clogs. Her card read Phyllis, Phyl to you, and she was a rosy nosed chain smoker who perpetually camel-brushed her waist-length graying strawberry hair.
Phyl knew her potential recruits like pelicans know their schools, seldom failing to troll San Francisco’s Bermuda Triangle for new business, particularly on parched, sunny weekends such as this. By title, she was head resident de-nabler for the Dri Dock, an alky rehab/support group based in an avocado green two-floor storefront several doors down from the Triangle—hugging close to the heat of battle, the belly of the beast, the battle of the bottle—tapping into the heavy action right here on Main Street USA/A. Good, sober planning: Willie Sutton would have toasted and banked on it.
“We’re down, we got it down. So howz ’bout we buy you a brew?”
“Sorry, but the only answer is total abstinence. I’ll leave you some of our literature. We’re non-profit and accept donations. Or you can even donate your car.”
“Check, granny—I’ll drop off the keys to my Lambo over there, just as soon as we kill this pitcher.
“Hmm, well, better do so before you end up wrapping that baby around a utility pole…catch y’all down the road.”
So near, and yet so hard—the Dri Dock itself was a step not taken lightly, and it had the four puked-out medial doorways each morning-after to prove it. Out front, clutches of dry drunks commiserated over cigarettes and black coffee, struggling to fend off their own flare-up periods, stiffly fighting themselves to a stand-off draw amid oddly timed bursts of forced laughter. Inside, ostensibly clean, hang-dog Dockers lounged around in silent, self-intervening headlocks, staring holes through their recovery magazines and bored games, bracing for the intensity of their relapsive urges, if not the regular weekly cameo appearance, er session, by Robin Himself.
The A/Adage: Once addicted, always addicted—thus age, creed or color did not appear to be at issue Dockside. Still, all presently on deck were somewhat older than the six pack of pick-up hoopsters pounding down mugs of draft Corona at the table from which Phyl had just spun away. And all six were clearly younger than Reese Paulen and me, headed for a future detox boot camp, nevertheless.
“Anybody here 28, or turning 29,” I asked one of the partiers, striking up some diversive conversation, not knowing why. Passing us was a tattoo-armed gym banger, chain choking two bloodthirsty Staffordshire mixes. Top heavy in a sleeveless stretch tank, he used much of his upper body strength to restrain the rowdy black and brown dogs, yanking to keep them away from a smiley, puffy sheepdog bounding ahead of us at the leash hands of a sundressed kind of gal.
“In your dreams, gramps,” sneered the seated power forward, as he toasted us with his salt-rimmed mug. “Ain’t even close tuz old as you.”
“You know, a lot of this bingeing nonsense starts in college,” Paulen noted, turning disdainfully toward the intersection.
“Like the frat brats in Boulder?” I asked, then holding my breath past a semicircle of nicotine fiends milling around a cast-iron smoker’s post. Still didn’t get the concept of those things.
“Precisely. If you ask me, it feeds a good deal of campus unrest and other shenanigans. Just a bunch of rutting little agitators…”
“Whoa, you mean in the athletic department?” I followed several steps behind as we reapproached Fillmore Street. “What I’ve read about Buffalo footballers and sexual harassment…”
“No, I’m referring to demonstrations against Israel.”
Could easily have called it lusher’s lane, this tipsy row of surplus plastic wood chairs and tables lining Town Tavern’s Greenwich side. Town was the Triangle’s shallowest corner—quick, easy hook-ups over the hiccups of wholesale, value-priced hooch. Where Northside and The Buoy Cafe were at least outwardly atmospheric, Town Tavern stood functionally formulaic. A stark, minimalist bar front under a nondescript second story of office suites, the Tavern seemed a bit more rough and tumble, a better fit for the younger, budget-boozer crowd, as well as slightly older lechers at the margins who fantasized about all these hang-out party girls going wild.
Such potential action chicks were sprinkled liberally about Town’s breakaway outdoor tables, tossing their long-tressed heads back in squealing laughter, smiling up at the clipped, peeling Tavern signage above. They were more pastel racerback tank types, cut-loose alumna of UC Davis, San Mateo, Sonoma and Chico State—filling out their T-shirts with distinction, nonetheless. Even doc couldn’t seem to get enough of it.
Also eyeing these and other trick bait strutting the corner sidewalks, caressing, sweet talking their cel phones, were the horn toady guys getting hungrier and thirstier by the round, in patchy pocket shorts, toe tapping their flip-flops to the speaker-fed sound of techno and some ludacrisly loud rap-hop. Feisty, tip-pinching waitresses skirted in and out of the Tavern, eager beaver primed to slake them all—with discount promos such as TankedOut Tuesdays, Wasted Wednesdays, SuperSuds Sundays and Sotto Saturdays like today.
Guzzling Dos Equis by the pitcher, sloshing boxed Cabs and Pinot Grigios, not to mention splitting Patron Shooters and Jell-O Shots while bagging afternoon rays, could turn any of these Townies a bit too frisky and raucous. Which is why we abruptly decided to cross over to Fillmore’s winier side, Paulen wanting to case the place where FatJack uncorked its empire.
“Against Israel?” I said warily, stank eyeing a crosswalk-crowding Toyota 4-Runner. Remember, listen more than talk…
“Yes, against Israel—more than once, I might add,” Paulen stuffed a wind-tossed Carnaval parade flyer into the trashbin, looking this corner store over, setting course. “Right in the middle of Norlin Quad. The latest one swelled all the way over to the Dalton Trumbo Fountain. Nearly as big as the 4/20 smoke-ins…”
“Wow, by UMC…” I instantly recollected graduate study lunches in the CU Memorial Center’s faculty cafeteria, feeling so intellectually industrious over spinach salads and Buffalo Burgers, readying for the twice-weekly transition from bookish pupil to servile teaching assistant for Professor Tennent—had to have been academic epochs ago.
“Times change, even in Boulder,” he said, as we approached the Bermuda Triangle’s scalene, quieter side. “And this whole Middle East situation has everything turned upside down.”
“Right within sniffing distance of Packer Grill yet,” I groaned, waving on a long-snout Excalibur that was already accelerating midway through the crosswalk.
The familiar deep purple roadster was manned by a stogie-chomping, self-styled former rock idol living through a Texas-sized trust fund, cruising the Triangle on a lone-star booty call—as he had been for way too many time-warped years. Still teasing out a wild, bushy mane, he was yet another transplanted Texas mess: that is, either a gaudy lunatic ranger reactionary, or ranting high tower escapee, desperate to disown W. and LBJ without DeLay. “I just remember noontime acoustic folkies six-string strumming out in the sun.”
No whisky brown storefront on this cross corner; here: FatJack’s was a wine shop, through and through. FatJack Central had its curiously vintage oenological attributes and a Gavin Newsom cache, just the same.
Anchor to a light gray apartment building, the flagship store bore a large, freehand FatJack crest and matching logoed vine brown awnings identical to those on its companion bar and cafés downstreet. Casually disheveled, quality nonpareil—with a sanguine sophistication about it all: The wine shop was having none of the sophomoric hi-jinx and drunken excess across the way.
“It’s been so sensitive in Boulder, even the esteemed Jewish Studies program has been loath to touch it,” Paulen added, peering around the shop’s Greenwich side. “Not part of the curriculum, JSC maintains—as though it hadn’t been happening at all.”
“Wasn’t that sand-head routine patented by the Holocaust deniers?”
“Careful there, Herbert,” he studied a side window displaying an Art Moderne-style poster for a champagne charity reception at the Four Seasons Hotel, garnished with curvilinearly arranged bottles of Tessas Cuvee Chardonnay. “In any event, it is not properly informed. Which is partly why I began researching all this Middle East business on my own.”
“What’s to research? You’ve got one holy land, and two lords, right? Ah, the combustible art of conversation, buckling my inferior frontal, igniting my dormant dorsolateral prefrontal cortex…
“Is that how you see things?” he snapped, rounding the corner down Fillmore. “Would that it were so irreducibly binary.”
“No, hey,” I stammered, straightening my back up, following closely in his wake. “I’m just sayin’…”
“Point is, those people were claiming that Israel is the bad actor over there,” Paulen said. “For the life of me, I can’t get past that, can you?”
Around the Fillmore side, storefront windows overflowed with photo blow-ups of hillside vineyards and grape presses, of a FatJack retreat in the heart of Napa Valley. Its spread of luxury cottages, hilltop dining and an award-winning spa comprised a companion photo collage, with open gift cases of Chandon Blanc de Noirs and Coppola Diamond Claret resting below it on tufts of equestrian-grade hay.
We daydreamt on, past a flower box of rose petunias, to a middle window uplifting us away to FatJack’s ski resort in Squaw Valley—lofty shots of champagne powder and chalet hearth dining over the top of Sierra Tahoe.
“Me? No…no way…” Then again, I could lay it on the earaches I was cultivating, his assertions howling through my outré auditory canals once more, vibrating the ossicles, thumping the tympanums, banging the malleus, hammering the incus as they galed toward my aching cochlear ducts and eustachian tubes…
“I mean, after all that poor country has been through already.”
“Uh, I don’t exactly think of Israel as poor…”
“I’m referring to the long years of suffering and strife. I just believe those bashers need to understand what’s ultimately at stake in the Levant overall.”
Paulen drifted over to another, far window layout of posters touting a range of wine clubs, backdropping a miniature semi-formal linen, stemware and silver table setting, along with British green painted wine cases, their gold typography suggesting custom corkage and cellarage services—Traina, Haas and Getty, to a fault.
Between the place setting display and another window—the latter with a wine country picnic motif overlooking Rutherford: red checkered cloth, wicker basket and an array of tumblers, goblets, corkscrews and sterling gourmet utensils. The shop’s entranceway was framed by burgundy-stained wine casks topped with premium price lists, brochures illustrating the breadth of FatJack’s northern California empire.
We peeped inside to rack upon rack of A-list wines: Zinfandels, Cotes du Rhône, Pinot Grigios and Cabernets to name but a few. Rustic wooden tasting tables were scattered about the store, suggestive of open-air markets outside Oakville and Yountville. Logoed wine wear and gear covered vined and lattice-wooded walls, further selling the total FatJack culture along with the viniculture.
“OK then, so what’s at stake there exactly,” I rallied some, scoping out a burgundy price sheet, quickly placing it back on the barrel head with a hopeless sigh of disbelief. “I mean, why the student protests?”
“Why do you think?” Paulen looked me up and down.
“How should I know?” The Levant? “But I’ll bet it had nothing to do with wining.”
“Actually, in one small way, it did,” Paulen digressed. “A shame Merlot is sooo 2005. Breathe me some hearty Pinot Noir.”
“Sorry, not much of a wino these days…” R-r-right, I’ve sort of pretoxed, prehabbed the progress-not-perfection route a hush-hush time or two on my own. So then how come my ears are now rattling my temporal bones, playing my tympanum like trap drums all over again? Deflect, deflect… “You drink much anymore?”
Yet before long, FatJack’s bouquet became overwhelming, the wine shop’s structure too fleshy and supple, its texture too complex and smooth, the overall nose trifle plummy, the tannins a bit too velvety from mid-palate to finish. Fruity and fragrant an experience though the store was, we were soon drawn away, back to immediate reality by the whirr of a speeding Muni trolley bus, if not the scratchy French language tape of a tourist Go-Car passing by.
I just hankered to catch some ball scores on Town Tavern’s wide-screen overhead television sets back across Fillmore. Several weighty, Darwinally selected mancave types were tossing dice cups; others were glued to ESPN SportsCenter on Town’s larger-than-life projection screens—crunching the over/unders, breaking it all down over schooners of Hefeweizen and baskets of salty corn nachos.
“So noted, Herbert…and define much while you’re at it,” Paulen moved toward the Springboard Pilates studio next door to the Tavern. “But moving on, nothing more to see here. I’ll meet up with you up the street.”
“Gotcha, be right there,” I pulled back for momentary relief. “Giants apparently are getting lit up by the Dodgers again anyway.”
“Sorry, baseball’s not exactly my game,” he glanced rather wistfully back over at FatJack’s Wines, as if laying out a spread of Camembert, baguettes and cherry noted Bordeaux for two somewhere along the Silverado Trail.
“So what exactly is your…game?”
“Hide and Seek, Herbert, good ol’ hide and seek,” Paulen shouted in my wake.
“Well I’m more a Tag, Your It guy myself…” Whoa…ewww uuufff…
This all happened so fast, quicker than a ‘Light My Fire’ chord change. We were treading past a women’s shop and letter white former post office turned Kinkoplex, on approach to half-block Moulton Street, when we heard the frantic male shrieks echoing up through the all-but-alleyway. One sneak peek around Kinko’s corner revealed a crumpled, battered body along the building’s sidewalk shadows. It looked to be an elderly man freshly splayed and bloodied, cold-cocked if not demised, unlikely to have screamed that way. But given the machine noise, stereo bar blast, Lombard Street biker roar and Fillmore Street snarl, his feeble moans wouldn’t have been heard anyway. Nevertheless, a middle-aged jock sniffer in full-dress Warriors gear did cut through, running up Moulton in yowling fury, nearly tripping of a stray length of double-gauge rebar near the curb.
“Sorry, mate!” That was when I got flattened by a burly Cal rugby type who was leading a storm of bar brethren across Fillmore—Phyl’s force included—who were merging with rustlers from a darkly bordering rawhide lounge. They all encircled the scene, consoled the hellacious screamer, scoured grimy parked cars and steel barred windows/doorways along an otherwise deserted Moulton Street, out toward the towering palms of Mel’s Drive-In. The blindside blow sent me stumbling into mind-altering shock and awww, that only worsened as I slowly rose, steadying myself against a heavily handbilled telephone pole.
Still, before going down so hard I had glimpsed the victim’s mug—which was frozen into a horrific trial sketch—thinking I’d just seen a face I couldn’t forget the time or place. Though appearing to have aged grimly into his 70s, he had me flashing back to that Lafayette Park face-off with his likes in 1978, a chilling late-night encounter that had dogged me ever since. Soon dusting off, I shuddered to recall how desperate and violent it could get down and out around here. With the crowd somewhat calming the man as he sobbed and succored the comatose body, word spread that the Warrior fan was attending to his own stricken father—that territorial imperatives and grouchy bear spray altercations were involved here as well.
“You all right there, Herbert?” Paulen sidled up, having stopped short, then sidstepping the entire affair.”You surely did get tagged, didn’t you…shall we move on?”
“H-hey, no problem,” I settled down for a moment, head throbbing from concrete contact as squad cars and paramedics arrived. “Didn’t feel a thing…” Except for the contrecoup concussive snap-back in my brainpan…I could but feel the TBI pressure mounting against my cerebral cortex, swelling the wrinkled cortical quadrant lobes, bulging each groovy gyrus and sulcus—laterally frontal to occipital, steaming down the double yellow corpus callosum medial strip. “I’m good to go…totally…” Straining to collect myself, all I knew was I didn’t like where this deal was heading, no matter what.
“So do you know that old-timer?” he replied, already stepping lively toward the Lombard corridor.
“Uh, I’m not sure I…”
“Because you do seem rattled, like you’ve seen a ghost. That what you’ve seen, Herbert, a ghost?” Paulen drew and speed dialed into his black Razr cell, eager to uplink a call. “Honestly, when did this area become the nastier part of the nicer part of town…”
“Sorta like what’s been happening up around Boulder’s University Hill, huh?” I parried, haze setting in, noting how numb doc appeared to be in the face of such physical violence. “You keeping abreast of those…developments?
“Can’t say, Herbert,” he said with a double-take, pressing buttons, no less attentive to my palefaced dubiety. “Haven’t a clue what you mean by that…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-One. A familiar figure
summons haunting reminders,
as the talk turns gauzier, summarily
to bomb slingers and missile strikes…
“It’s not what’s given away,
but what’s taken away
that counts up…”
“Ever heard of Luba Kadison?”
“Nope.”
“Ever heard of Jacob and Stella Adler? Abe Schwartz, the King of Yiddish Swing?”
“Can’t hear much of anything right now…”
“I rest my case.”
As Google maps and local lore would have it, we’d hit upon San Francisco’s answer to the Bermuda Triangle—Remy and rum-soaked though it was. And if the Swipe ATM sign was any indication, this scene was neither league’s deep nor shark free, in any way, shape or form. The mad-money machine was attached to an ornately gingerbread-trimmed, coffee brown on lighter brown corner Victorian—a last-stand two-story beauty that had added half again its size in remodels over the years.
Ambient noise ranged from piped out reggae and Latin jazz from the Northside Oyster Restaurant, and an over-revving tangerine Testarossa parked directly before it, which had just backfired like a multi-year baseball contract. Sandwiched between them was a cordoned row of seven outdoor tables, jutting forth from the Vicky’s blue/gold-on-brown storefront, consuming nearly half the sidewalk, slowing foot traffic to a pub crawl, us included. A fast young crowd chowing down, they huddled over the sun-drenched tables, splayed lobster red extremities on wobbly wood and metal chairs, sipping caramel apple Martinis, swizzle stirring Chivas and S. Pellegrino with a definite twist.
“So, who are they?”
“Early Yiddish theater, my friend,” Reese Paulen told me, far from oblivious to the casually baking flesh on display. “Pure theatrical genius.”
“What, you mean like Borscht Belt, or…” Admittedly, nor the hell was I.
“Please, a modicum of higher historicity, shall we,” Paulen stared me down. “Luba Kadison was a legendary actress, originally from Lithuania, who starred in everything from Ansky’s ‘Dybbuk’ to ‘Brothers Ashkenazi’ by I.J. Singer. And Jacob Adler played lead in ‘Shylock’; then his daughter, Stella did ‘God of Vengeance’ at Yiddish Art, before she founded her foremost acting school.”
“Yeah, well, where was all this happening?” Dybbuk…no, not that again…hopefully not going there, not even close. I glanced away, scanning table to table, silver platters of appetizing dayboat scallops, tri-pepper Ahi and grilled Pancetta prawns.
We then gave narrow ground to a snippy twentyish waitress in cloppy island slides and everywear black, serving broad trays of shellfish from Northside’s raw bar, charge slips cocked in her apron holster, a fistful of dollars wrapped around her sticky little fingers. She delivered overflowing platters of fresh-catch oysters and littleneck clams on the half-shell, and half-cracked Dungeness Crab to a table of four chatty L.A.dies sipping Blanc de Blancs in their UCLA tank tops and Laker hats. Curiously, they otherwise bore no conspicuous tongue jewelry or bodily inking beyond a discreet flower or insect here and there. Above them, Lura’s Cape Verde rhythms resounded from compact loudspeakers tucked under a blue overhang, which was trimmed with strings of bronze-colored decorative bulbs, tinkling in time to the on-shore breezes.
“Yiddish theater actually is rooted in Eastern Europe (think Abraham Goldfaden) from Romania to imperial Russia,” Paulen replied, inhaling the confluent seaborn aroma. “That is, before immigrants transported it to New York’s Lower East Side. It flourished there at the turn of the century, in houses like the National Theater and Folksbiene. Was the main entertainment for the tenement masses.”
“Oh, like Al Jolson…” I reflexively grabbed for a stray bag of oyster crackers, several levels of hunger panging in.
“Au contraire,” he said, somewhat startled by my scrounger move. “This wasn’t merely baggy clothes and blackface, but serious performances by Schwartz, David Kessler, Jacob Ben-Ami…Molly Picon. And the immortal Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky.”
“But what about Eddie Cantor? My mom loved his buggy eyes.” Caught dead to rights, I set the crackers back down, on a potted palm—old habits dying hard. More to the point, I couldn’t help but hear him out. Doc was a teacher, he was teaching—taking me back—taking me aback, in the Aristotelian tradition, at that.
“There you’re talking minstrelsy, dialect recordings like ‘Mammy’ and ‘I’m a Yiddish Cowboy’—big clay noses, Jolson, Roda Bernard. Incidentally, rabbis happened to hate such self-stereotyping shund.”
“Then what would they make of Borat’s ‘sexy time’?” That’s it, but key in good measure to his verbosity and non-verbal cues, just the same…
I strained to peer through the restaurant’s brown wood slat window blinds, bicycle racing and Cal-Trojan football on the bar tubes, behind a vast, brightly illuminated aquarium—the main dining room otherwise cast in darkness and shadows. Outside, however, the Northside radiated life lived very large. The tangerine Ferrari revved anew, as though gearing for Laguna Seca, noticeably thrilling the younger women sprinkled about Northside’s brimming sidewalk tables.
For their part, the starlets alternately tipped Steely Bubbly and dabbed Bullfrog sunscreen on any skin surface not covered by Daisy Duke shorts, tube or halter tops. Serious rackage, lithe and legs up to here: These D-D G’s were getting immodestly wasted in the UV heat, basking away behind oversized Prada shades, their companion party boys munching Cobb salads with Reggiano and Spanish anchovies, mixing in so smoothly table after table, like Compari, Noilly Prat and Pernod.
They appeared to be whispering amongst themselves as to whether these guys were catch as catch can, or just the usual toss backs. Which further prompted other wracking questions, namely dudes’ calculations going something like: Were they pushed up? Hell, were they even real? Why run the risk, why the fuck bother to find out? Safer to stick to beer pong, to the Lotto tickets and Vegas spreads.
Northside’s ornate Victorian boasted a scale model P-51 Mustang weather van flying high on the rooftop above this oysteria’s corner front doors—steady on its chrome pole stand, propeller blades whirring into the teeth of somewhat stiffening breezes. A brief gust back drafted one turned-out hottie who was skipping across Fillmore, fresh from a cocoa mist-on bronzer and a quick French oil pedicure.
Copious cleavage, sporting something of a whale tail—a little Hermes silk gypsy look going—this insta-tart hit the bistro scene like Paris herself. She slid over to a crew at table two, past scurrying waitresses and the sassy drama queens burning up their cel phones with idle ‘Omigod’ and ‘You know what’ chatter, as precious overage minutes dissolved somewhere into the ionosphere. Whatever, neither doc nor I could take our sly roving eyes off it all.
“Well, curiously enough, Jewish audiences ate it up back then, too,” Paulen dodged, while eyeing her, as though proctoring a mid-term exam. “Even singing along with ‘I Want To Be An Oy, Oy, Oyviator’. Seemed as though it was the lower brow mishegas that beat the legitimate Yiddish theatre out of Lower Manhattan to reach broader audiences, and infused Vaudeville like it had never been before. I do trust I’m not belaboring all this, but…”
“No, no way,” I stifled a yawn, feeling so peripatetic about now. Just keep on educating me, doc— the meter’s still running, wheels are still turning. So I’ll keep picking and probing, tuning in for hot spots…gotta hold it together, press those buttons, cling to the knife edge of my whipsaw concentration. “You’re a professor, right? You’re professing…that’s what you do.”
“Very well, it’s simply that we’re not talking chopped liver here,” Paulen lightened up some, tapping my forearm to drive home his point. “Yes indeed, European Jews brought their genius and initiative to the garment industry and theater. And look where it led.”
“You mean like to Moe Ginsburg and Myron Cohen?”
“Hmph, I’ll have you know Myron Cohen and the ‘Toastmaster General’ paved the way for the likes of Carson and Letterman. Anyway, as I studied Jewish-American culture more thoroughly, I was struck by the talent and magnitude of the accomplishments—the sheer pantheon of brilliance. Just stop a moment and think about that.”
“Will do,” I fixed instead on the exotic sports car, taking in its detailed finish, the powerful smell of Armor-All and Carnuba wax. “Only what say we don’t do so at these decibels…”
Between the LeManiac revs of his Testarossa, rear deck now lifted to expose its racy, turbo manifold V-12 mill, we could hear laughter bursting out all over into their Nokia and Ericcson phones. So could the liquored and oystered up guys, ripped as they were, busting out of skin-tight pocket T’s branded Berkeley to Pepperdine. They be posing in back-ass ballcaps and basketball baggies, balancing their clam and beer-steamed mussel combo platters atop parking meters and the hoods and trunk lids of Audis and Benzes marking metered time to either side of that tangerine Ferrari. Itemizing IT spreadsheet geeks up from the Valley were hovering, hatching strategies to bust moves on those studiously annoyed post-coed, pre-coital goddesses.
The lower rent studded flunkies among them got their aphrodesia across Fillmore at Orgasmic Pizza, manning up with take-out slices of Romeo & Juliet or Adam & Eve, if not a First Kiss calzone for two. The worst among them were simply the usual around-town lounge lizards, bagging rays when and where they could, scoping out myriad purses and work-out bags hooked carelessly over chairbacks of the loopier markettes, while feinting curbside fascination with the throttling Testarossa.
“Just consider how legitimate Yiddish theater transformed the Broadway stage,” Paulen said, holding his ears as we pressed slowly forward along Fillmore. “Joseph Lateiner and Jacob Gordin begetting the likes of Harold Clurman, Kurt Weill, Arthur Miller and Neil Simon—Tevye the dairyman, for godsakes.”
“’Fiddler On The Roof’—saw that flick once,” I also noted a lightpole poster for the Jewish Film Festival’s showing of a Selina Soloman documentary. Then we momentarily paused at the corner to rearview the whole Bacchanalian scene. He dwelled opon the curvatures, I on ghostly triangles—feeling as we did so old and in the way. “Was ages ago…”
“Ah, motion pictures. Almost entirely a Jewish-built industry, why they made Hollywood—from Louis B. Mayer and Paul Muni to Lee Strasberg and Steven Spielberg, much less Kubrick and Polanski.”
“Yeah, caught ‘Meet The Fokkers’ on the tube last week,” I said, joining him in a measure of audible relief. “Hilarious, funniest I’ve seen since ‘Mad, Mad World’.”
“Yes, well, moving right along, Herbert…nothing more to see here…”
Yet we did stall a bit near Northside’s portal meeting post, waylayed by a yappy little dog fight between some grant writer’s Yorkie and the Shiatsu of a double-pressed casual Asian woman heading to the nail salon for her full set, pink and white. She shrieked and scooped the butterscotch crème furball up into her raglan cashmered arms, huffing across Fillmore, drawing my attention toward that Buoy Café on the opposing Greenwich corner. Social circles of sated, full belly brunchers lingered around this single-story neighborhood landmark, with its simply faded, rusty old cola signage.
Outlasting just about every other watering hole in the Marina District, the Buoy remained cigarette paper white, perhaps grandfathered in, even in this brown FatJack world. Still harboring its staunch Manhattan and Bloody Mary clientele, the cafe was party to the sclerotic Perry’s, Washbag, Ed Moose’s circuit—so sedentary, set in its well-drink ways—PGA tour on oak-backbar Zeniths, Olympic Club on the cardigans, regulars feeding at linened oak tables over cholesterolic bar food, par for the course—misrutting toward demographic extinction. Dow Jones willing, only a prodigal generation of neocon duffers tabbing their martinis would continue to bring signs of J. Crew and Izod life to the place.
“And look at the musical sphere,” Paulen continued, furling at one of Northside’s folded take-out menus wafting by. “Going from Hebrew liturgicals to Katzy klezmer bands to the Gershwins, Aaron Copeland. So quintessentially American, like Horowitz, Hammerstein and Irving Berlin—those wonderfully mournful brass and string tones. To the Barry and Feder Sisters, the Irving Fields Trio, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, a second King of Swing…”
“Anything like Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building—Manilow, King and Diamond?”
“Personally, I’d prefer to think in terms of Heifetz, Darius Milhaud, Erich Korngold and Izak Perlman.”
“Actually, I don’t get much beyond Dylan, Newman, Simon or Leonard Cohen. But how about George M. Cohan, huh—or James Joyce on the classical guitar?”
Quickly seizing out attention, however, freezing us at corner’s edge were the erupting sirens from that Greenwhich firehouse, an engine company and hook & ladder roaring our way, emergency lights ablaze. Traffic froze, inadvertently clogging the intersection as motors raced, sirens wailed deafeningly, so as even to pot down the Testarossa and loudspeakered chanteuse. Befuddled drivers finally climbed curbs and sidewalks to clear the way for the exercised, red flag-waving first responders. I could but wonder how, through all the commotion, Northside’s sidewalk crowd didn’t seem to miss an orgiastic, Saturnalian lick—whilst I myself was aftershaken ever deeper, to the bone.
“Hmph, small potatoes. So let’s focus upon the finer arts, shall we,” Paulen pocketed the paper menu and held his ears. “Renowned sculptors such as Jacques Lipschitz, Ya’akov Epstein and Louise Nevelson. Painters the likes of Cubist Max Weber, and abstract expressionist Mark Rothko…”
“Painters…Jewish painters,” I muttered, head beginning to swirl in this overload of mixed aromas, sorely quaking memories Syd-wise, but most of all doc’s torrent of cultural information. At the same time, all this stimulation was reverberating, ricocheting off my occipital, side to side, crashing in and out through the globus pillidi, super colliding with my subthalamic nuclear core. So just hold on tight… “A topic I remember a little about…second hand, of course.”
“And that doesn’t begin to address seichel, the very intrinsic quality of Jewish thought: Walter Lippman, Hannah Arendt, Freud and Spinoza. My god, look at the writers—Kazen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Bellow and Doctorow.”
“Whoa, excuse me…” Circuits frying, I was a getting a bit short. But remember, dodo, get past his words a bit, check out any ticks, tells, telltale signs—you know he must be doing the same with you. “How did we get there from Vaudeville?”
“Point taken, but even those baggy drawers farces informed the golden age of radio and TV,” Paulen lectured, his facial expression of confidence turning reflective, slowly bereft. “Berle, Benny, Ceaser, Burns & Allen: Again, all that genius, all that creativity and inspiration.”
“Guess that’s another reason why you’re taking such pride in your Jewish side now, huh?”
“Who wouldn’t? What with Jews elevating and so richly endowing western culture, and influencing so many lesser mortals who could only derivate and abscond,” he asked rhetorically, then turned somewhat plaintively my way. “Hence why all the enmity? Being sullied and bogged down in such muck and mire. See what I’m saying?”
As the fire sirens faded, a 43 Masonic MUNI bus honked and turned the corner sharply before us, Fillmore onto Greenwich, its full-body decal for a ‘Spiderman’ movie sequel blurring by. So there it froze us in step, both ingesting a plume of diesel fumes like Point Reyes oysters and so much sea salt, gasping for some open air up there on the Bay.
That motorcoach’s sweep through the already agitated intersection jarred loose images of San Francisco’s earlier Grand Prix bike race: Scores of colorfully Spandex-skinned cyclists pumping their grotesquely bulging elephant legs fiercely along Greenwich, peloton banking tightly around the bend here into the inclined straightaway. Bunched team riders would be all emblazoned with head-to-toeclip corporate logos.
The evenly matched wheel spoke-thin men would be shifting sprockets, sucking waterbottles, as though racing for their very lives—shadowed by crew cars and motorized emergency escorts up the ball-busting Fillmore hill, cranking past cheering course-side devotees. None were more colorful than the canary yellow Saturn team—if only the GM cars themselves could have been as racy and energized as their cyclists.
But smoke lifting, we made our way uneasily across Greenwich into a descending level of revelry, a marginally choppier angle on the local Bermuda Tri—with a zero-heading seemingly nowhere, ultra fast. All I knew for certain was that this wasn’t Great Abaco—much less Athens’ Lyceum. And I hadn’t a clue where Professor Paulen was going with his lesson plan, nevertheless remaining hidebound to stick it out.
“Hey, no…enmity here. And bogged down? Where…how?”
“In the Middle East, where else?”
“Oh, that now…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty. Sophomoric indulgences are a
gateway to the choicer, private label stuff–
all of which only shortens fuses
and fans topical Mideast flames…
“Wax spiritual, wane
political, you’ll still be
whistling back over your shoulder.”
“Look the hell out, fuckface!”
“Hey, up yours…”
“Move it, asshole…I’ll rip your throat out!”
“Come and get it, mutherfucker…”
Honnkk…honnnnkkkkk… And then they were gone. Horns blaring, engines revving, rubber burning in a cloud of gutter dust. Having had their little intersection interections, the two carnivorous drivers backed off their disrespective throttles, withdrew their dueling horns and swords, falling into snailish traffic with adrenaline accelerating, urban manhood frayed but intact.
The pizza delivery guy in an azure Nissan Sentra with a suction cup sign on top had blown through Pixley Street’s crosswalk behind the Audi TT, nearly taking us out, looking to cut ahead of a seemingly mild-mannered clown in a white Isuzu Rodeo SUV, cutting it way too close. Now, there were deductibles to calculate, chickies to impress, but most of all male honor to uphold. So began the screaming: down cranked the side windows, open popped driver doors—that Sentra nearly wedging under the Rodeo’s high-riding front bumper.
“Whew, you all right?”
“Hmph, like to have killed us,” Reese Paulen fumed, brushing off his lapels, no more favorably impressed than were the put upon womenfolk. “Right there warrants a prescription for a serious anger management seminar.”
“You know from anger, huh, doc,” I nodded as we regrouped, standing our ground on this side of Pixley, carefully scanning the atmosphere and traffic flow—hmm…anger…now the kind of ‘losing it’ I’ve gotta see here. “That’s why I don’t drive much any more. Yep, hoofing it is my way lately, not the highway…”
Such streetwise cockfights were all the rage these days—not least here along narrow Pixley alley. Flash: they flared up in a rush-hour minute, then were over, like so many chance encounters around here, just so long as they didn’t involve automatic weapons. Couldn’t really tell who’d blinked in this latest bout of chickenshit brinkmanship, but the dented, primered Sentra had cut hell-bent on through. Then each vehicle proceeded to screech brakes, idling impatiently in opposite directions along Fillmore Street.
Still, the taunting, territorial pissing fits, the showboat showdown between a part-time delivery boy and telecom cold caller didn’t seem to register much with their female companions—each now re-cinching shotgun shoulder harnesses and repinning back their hair. Chalk it up to drive-by dysfunction, blacktop pavement primacy, or to clinical premature ejerkulation. And where was Eric’s ingenious ‘FingerFugger’ at a time like this, when his late-’70s rear-window brainchild was needed the most?
“Nor do I. Adapt or perish, hey?” Visibly shaken, Paulen slowly followed me across Pixley’s pedestrian walk, toward the yawning front door of a low-profile espresso café with discount coffee, microwaved munchies and a silent, fixated, laptop-crunching free WIFI clientele. “And you were saying before we were so rudely interrupted…”
“But it really does make a body want to get religion, huh?”
There we paused at one of Cafe Med’s tottlish sidewalk tables, under the shade line of a wind-ripped striped canvas awning. That way, a flustered Paulen could check his extremities and catch his breath. Meanwhile I ducked in to hit the head, longing to pause and unload some, however hidebound and hard pressed to rejoin the professor. He who had eased down on a wobbley wrought-iron chair, plopped his attache on a cramped table top, apparently sharpening his points.
“Religion, yes indeed,” Paulen said, catching a remedial whiff through open cafe windows of re-heated spinach-mushroom couscous. “Just not the way Mick Jagger and Demi Moore presume to do—by tiptoeing at the shallow end of the pool.”
“As in pop goes the sacriligious culture?”
“Or uncultured, as the case may be…”
Where MeccaJava was heatedly swimming against the survival tide, Cafe Med here was stolidly drowning in imminent demise. Barely hanging on in this Cimmerian single-story khan in a frothy multi-story block, Med was sub rosa bookish with Middle Eastern spice and seasoning. The cafe could have been in Berkeley or Bernal, yet here it was, out of step, nearly out of time—black flagging, prime for a dirt-level teardown on location, location, location alone.
Thus its bearded counter-baristas had logged their undue share of idle time. After pulling capps, prepping broiled chicken sandwiches and olive-sesame salads, steam washing chipped dishes—snubbing and shorting customers, they’d gather out a Pixley Street side door, smoking their sore, scornful heads off. Suspicion fanned like Med’s ceiling blades over who was bankrolling, if not money scrubbing through this Starbucking money pit, and what this bushy, arabesque crew might be hatching out the there on Pixley, not least the private dick who had recently hired me.
“You see, in a JS survey course I’ve audited, this honest-to-goodness Kaballah business is something of a study in metaphysics. We’re looking at 2,000 year-old texts, beginning with Moses receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai, no less than the divine truth Word of God. By the Middle Ages, Judaic scholars cited secret scriptural knowledge, rabbinic writings from Ezekiel and Genesis. These medieval Kabbalists espoused sefirot—ten divine emanations—the theosophy of Zohar held that every word and number in the Bible has a hidden meaning. That is genuine history for you.”
“Which is where the trope about cabals comes from?” I asked, taking in the immediate street scene, particularly a pair of early retired merchant leathernecks two tables down, penciling in Cryptoquip newspaper puzzles and chomping the stubs of their stinking cigars. And yet, all this tedium didn’t quite square with, account for, my incipient shaking and rattling as we rolled on along. I could feel it down to my fingertips, deep into the side pockets of my neurological genes. Steady there… “The whole secret cult thing?”
“Heavens no,” Paulen stooped to re-tie his mocha off-road walking shoes. “Because in fact the operating Kabbalistic principle is ultimately redemption, that a person’s individual actions influence the divine order and Structure of Being.”
“So, no global conspiracies then…” I noticed for once how so many of the buildings in this half-block had turned varying shades of tan and brown: Cappuccino tan, tobacco brown, bourbon and Compari brown with a definite twist. Call it the FatJack Effect. “But still mystical stuff, huh…”
“Forget such despicable blood libels…serious stuff, my friend—pure theoretical esoterica. It was an elite science then, pursued only by mature men who had already mastered the Talmud. Kabbalah also goes to explain why Jews are People of Words, studying the deeper mind, unlocking the puzzle of that which is before them. It is not some sort of mystical faddism or spiritual tummy tuck.”
“You mean, like, with Madonna…”
Actually, this cluster of mudville hues could have been called the Gavin Compound Effect. In a previous life to his political one, the current mayor had poured Getty money into a micro empire fairly drunk with Demostablishment power. Seeding with a pricey wine shop on a choice Greenwich Street corner, he leveraged his ‘FatJack’ brand image into bars and grills up and down this block, then painted their buildings unifying, light-sapping shades of brown, raking in the big-play dough nonetheless.
“Precisely,” Paulen said, taking a faceful of cocoa-colored curtain, which was flapping out of sliding front windows. Through them, we could hear how the café was soberly Jonesing for Rickie Lee and Norah, crooning along to the tapping of keyboards by the pharma reps, BarBri preps and freelance MarCom consultants grinding away inside. “These phony showbiz types think they can meditate on a chosen letter and wear a red string bracelet to ward off the evil eye, presto…they’re instant devoted Kabbalists.”
“Instant gratification—gotta have it, gotta have it all now,” I offered, while remembering Gavin Newsom stumping on a flat-bed truck at this very Pixley corner, white sleeves rolled up George Moscone style, on a platform of new-generation thinking, squeaky clean government and a plan to solve the indomitable ‘homeless situation’—dismissing the irony that his kind of businesses might be sip-to-binge feeding the problem.
“Yes, if not sooner: expecting God-like symptoms, inner peace, less stress, better sex and posture,” Paulen brushed the curtain aside, then rose to his feet, clutching his attaché. “What snake oil and hogwash. And that shiksa character has to stop with the seductively donning teffilin in her music videos. It’s nothing short of blasphemy and desecration.”
“God’s speed with that…”
“Then again, people have always been appropriating Jewish ideas and culture, from bibles to lox and bagels,” Paulen said, as the Arab ambience and nearby panatella squalls finally smoked him out. “Shall we go…”
“Really, who has?” I followed him up along Fillmore, as the café’s music track segued eclectically to the Doors through the next half-ajar sliding windows, accompanied by the mixed aroma of toasting Prosciutto & Mozzarella Melts and Espresso con Panna.
An inbound 22 MUNI bus whizzed by, on a behind-schedule tear until Filbert Street traffic stopped it cold. I tracked the trolley past FatJack’s brown Bistro across Fillmore, past that stealth residential hotel above a generations-old dry cleaner at Pixley corner, remembering the meaty steam-table Edwardian Restaurant that so saved my starving ass once or twice those days—now yet another juicy sushi and sashimi bar. But back to this side, Ray Manzarek’s honky-tonk ivories on ‘Love Street’ jarred loose memories that ran a whole lot deeper.
“Who hasn’t,” Paulen countered, watching an Australian Shepherd hike its leg against a top-down Beemer. An overage skateboarder howling by to the tune of his own Podcast, was nearly mashed up by a burnt orange Kia wagon pulling out of its parking space as if making its getaway from a heisted B of A. The resulting trash talk brought us to the very brink of another culture altogether.
“Got me,” I said, as we reached 3138 Fillmore, a big, brown barn of a place adjoining the espresso café. “But what I do know is that they used to serve some mean hot dogs in there. We used to come here after softball games for brewskies and free bar food…I mean, when it was the Pierce Street Annex.”
“Well, I happen to remember it quite differently,” he replied, peeking in smoky dark front windows to a gas fireplace roaring in the center of the spacious room. “Long before that, it was The Matrix.”
The Doors’ tune lingered when we paused at this pathmark to the Marina’s rockier past. We recalled as how Marty Balin opened San Francisco’s first folk-rock nightclub here way back in 1965, with the Jefferson Airplane soon performing live before spare, stoner crowds. In time, The dingy Matrix marqueed Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, the Dead’s Jerry Garcia—even debuted Springsteen’s ‘Steel Mill’ band, before truckin’ away in the early 1970s.
Beside drawing spillover from a venue much further down Fillmore, the original Matrix catered to a bridge-and-tunnel crowd not keen on hassling with the primetime Avalon scene. Take when they meandered into Balin’s cramped, echo chamber of a club on a damp late-winter evening in ’67—W-O-M happening on through Matrix’s doors to sit-in amid its shipboard nautical trappings. There they tippled from the whiskey bar, toking deeply away, chomping grub from the soul kitchen while checking out a callow Jim Morrison and company, just up here from L.A.
This, while the Doors swung onto a tiny platform stage in the low-ceilinged venue to light fires with ‘Back Door Man’, ‘Crawling King Snake’ and ‘Twentieth Century Fox’—poised as they were to break on through to the other, legendary side. Jamming and rejamming, playing for keeps, the music never over: whether that Tuesday night’s slim, benumbed gate were into the Doors’ raw, poetically mind-bending trip or not. Maybe San Francisco hipsters three sheets to the din weren’t quite ready for the Morrison Hotel’s oblique ramblings and Manzarek’s manic keyboards right about then. Then again, people are strange.
“Alas, suffice to say I was in the throes of a rocky little relationship at the time,” Paulen sorely recalled. “Sort of missed that love boat.”
Anyhow, the Pierce Street Annex took over the joynt in 1978—that’s what I remembered of it—becoming a sports and singles magnet as the 80s buttoned down, turning guacamole sour in the 90’s once dot-com techies flooded into this end of town. Gavin Newsom then rode that wave to Matrix 2.0—that is, Matrix/Fillmore, this Stanlee Gatti-designed lounge, slicker than anything Gracie could have surrealized.
Smoked glass, dark wood and sexy mauve sectionals and ottomans, huge black floor pillows mounded about the wood-pilinged hearth, a back wall plasma video screen and sleek, stainless steel-trimmed bar: This Matrix iteration piped in world jazz, fusion and techno rather than living, breathing rock ‘n’ roll. It served not beer and doobies, rather Mojitos and Sugar Magnolias on DJ party nights, Sweet Cherry Pie and Chocolate Purple Haze drinks as the evenings wore on. Still, Pearl and Garcia would scarcely recognize or take Southern Comfort in the place.
“Well, I remember going when the Annex was dealin’ one-buck pitchers,” I said, noting White Mocha Martini specials in the menu case. “And their potato salad wasn’t bad either—like, after seven innings of fogball out at Crocker Amazon and Sunset Playgrounds.”
“Yes, but was it kosher,” Paulen chided, two wet-combed, spread collar waiters and a black bow-tied, white oxford bloused barmaid slipping past us to open up the shadowy depths, likely for a Mat/Fill matinee. “They probably purloined that recipe, too.”
“It wasn’t that good,” I said, catching a more full-bodied snootful of vastly Orgasmic pizza and garlic emanating from over there on the shadier side of Fillmore Street. “Anyway, how do you figure Jewish culture has been so ripped off?”
“Why does it not surprise me that you are so curiously unawares,” he sighed, as we peeled off from Matrix/Fillmore toward the comparative bacchanalia one brown building down. “Let me recount the ways…beginning with whom do you think has shepherded Hollywood and the vast music industry?”
“OK then, recount away,” I relented, Josh Gravaneck springing to mind, as I fought off a sudden mind to bail on this gig altogether and hike back uphill, no matter what. “But this better be good…”
“Good and plenty, my friend, like dipping into the cultural candy jar—just too blamed revelatory to resist…”
All told, guess I did suddenly feel a bit more bounce in my step, and had him singin’ like a jay bird, right? And we were now venturing further along Love Street, penetrating deeper and deeper into the testosterzone, one Doors closing as another opened wide. BAAammm…If only there hadn’t been this abrupt, power-packed burst of backfire or buckshot dead ahead…
“I see you live on Love Street
There’s this store where the creatures meet
I wonder what they do in there…
La, la, la, la, la, la, la.”
Care for more?
Chapter Nineteen. Boom–a deeper
exchange on accomplishments and
accolades turns sharply plaintive
upon a brighter light of day…
Know more/Know less:
This chapter contains detailed
dialogue regarding comparative spirituality
and the Jewish religious calendar. Here you can
scroll down, skim or click to a briefer Saturn ‘flyby’.
____________________
“Saturn’s not concerned
with denominations, you see,
but with domination.”
“But speaking of religion, take this Kabbalah nonsense.”
“What about it?”
“I cannot countenance the neo-falsity of it. Case in point, that Madonna person. Beware false idols, Herbert. There are fakirs, and then there are fakers.”
“They’re fake?”
From Filbert Street on, our Socratic methodology got a bit more physical…metaphysical, as well. Reese Paulen’s Velodrome reference was apt enough, given that across from that endive green health food store, a high-performance running wear outlet, was yielding its storefront footage to an even speedier competition cycling club. Sporting a vintage gray Citroen crew van as its welcome wagon, Pedalier was intensely Euro-Touro, streaming gruelling major bike races the world over on wide-screen video walls into the high-end cycling outfittery’s retail space—Vel d’Hive be damned.
Therein stood racks of aerosuit jackets and mesh jerseys—baselayers, bib shorts, Brevel gilets—GT gloves, Apidura musettes, embrocations chamois creams, warmers for an arm and a leg: Everything save for the performance bicycles themselves, served with high-test coffee and paddle sacks of protein carbs.
Out front, a racing team of gran criterion bikers in fully logoed kits sucked on Vitawater bottles like mother’s milk and polished their carbon/titanium Cervillo and Pinarello frames after a rallye up and down Mt. Tam, their cleated shoes clattering like baseball spikes on dugout concrete. Upstairs from Pedalier’s big gray-slate office box, hack-job remodel style building was the office for one of my joblets. This entailed news curating for a political hitman and blogosfear mongerer with a Burton-Boxer clientele—culling periodicals for his clip file, aggregating around the Internet, on casual remote. The part-time gig kept me reading through everything—left and right, right and wrong—fodder for his ricinous campaign pamphlets and assorted hit pieces. Not that I was keen on owning up to the professor here about that.
“Seriously, you’re the one who brought religion into this, along with that astro-spiritual space junk of yours,” Paulen said. “I can just imagine what sort of idol looms over that whole Saturn business—am I right?”
“Idol? Don’t ask me, Saturn Return’s little more that idle curiosity to me,” I hedged, eyes down. “But Madonna just popped into my mind when…”
“Pop indeed, because I can assure you the religion aspect I’ve been exploring runs a whole lot deeper than mere celebrity culture. And I am barely scratching the surface of what there is to know about it.”
“Amen…still, isn’t she Jewish by choice, like Robin Williams?”
We eased around Team Schwab, cooling down about the storefront, lubing derailleurs and torqueing spokes with Odwalla and Naked juices on hand. Across the way, a mostly empty DVD rental dispensary ground floored a light moss and pewter corner Victorianesque building, victim of Netflix and the BitTorrent download blues. An upstairs suite housed a second-story Spade & Archer-style detective agency with window blinds perpetually drawn—opening so very occasionally, if only a crack. Fraud and infidelities mostly—en delecto flagrante indiscretions: still, rumor was these no-dice private dicks were ever keeping keen eye on all things Fillmore, ear to the street below.
Yet there was nothing that mysterious about the walk-up stairway behind black iron-gated bars: This Eisenhoff Agency had been around since the wanton Sixties, so testified its bleed-out red bay window signage, complete with fingerprint and spyglass iconography. Sy and his broad-beamed PI snoops had putatively cut their teeth on Lucky Strikes and major cases—particularly the haunting and harrowing variety, once flower children began suspiciously pushing up daisies around Buena Vista and Golden Gate Parks.
Safe to say, I had unearthed that little tidbit first hand, working up momentary conversation with the head dick one time while waiting in a locksmith line at the vintage hardware store. Although on balance, Sy mined studiously more from our exchange; so I had but nodded warily to him in passing ever since. Eisenhoff was known to skulk the neighborhood in his off hours, ever in black suit, vest and topcoat, cowboy boots trimmed in gold.
The whole package made him a perfect noir cartoon caricature of himself, if he weren’t so spot-on Scalia with a porn stash, a real pot boiler in the making, cynically spitting pumpkin seeds into his stained coffee cup. Sy was a little too stocky, a little slicked back; a trifle crooked, known to pack. He knew the cops, he knew the crooks: he knew everything about everybody.
I pried that concealed weapon gem out of one of his operatives, who tossed a measly crumb or two my way every now and then, a lick of opposition research and the like. I scooped them up like Comstock nuggets, hoping to further hustle some Website design work or something on the agency’s behalf.
Now, a dagger-eyed blonde in a black twill anorak descended from the walk-up, through the iron gated door, furtively carrying fiber-taped, bubble-wrapped manila envelopes to the Saturday pick-up at the local Lombard Street post office—retro old school mail drop, analog style. About then, the raising of one of those bay window blinds up there caught my eye, as did the opening of a vent glass panel. Sy’s full shadowy figure steely peerinfg down toward me, his meaty, black shirted arm extending straight out through the opening—twisting, turning counter-clockwise at me, as if to get a grip, tighten the screw. A not so subtle reminder of my partially pre-paid duty and obligations, staring me down in the face. Either that, or he was just flicking away all his cigarette ashes, self winding his two-way watch.
“Hmph, Madonna’s phony as Shabtai Tzvi. Caught up with that Rav Berg huckster peddling Kabbalah as just another Werner ESThard New-Age theosophy. Honestly, what do such dabblers and dilettantes know about classical Jewish mysticism and Rabbinical Judaism,” Paulen ducked under branches of a scraggly sidewalk ficus tree that had suffered its share of dog doo. “About Divine Election or the Zohar and 613 Laws? Have they familiarized themselves with the Siddur like I have?”
“She could always do a video about it, I suppose, but…” I dutifully turned my lower back toward the detective agency in grubbing honor and acknowledgement. Yeah, then after this, bring on snoopydix.com, Sy—a little CSS, XHTML and Flash action on the side, anything short of C++ or Ruby on Rails. And I’d ramp your site up but good, some extra WYSIWYG body and header work, yah, I could do that. Had to make my nut here, anyway I can, Sy—livin’ and dyin’ by the basic gig and code.
“Hmph, how could any of them possibly do justice to imitatio Dei or the Torah and Deliberate Choice? Or be aware that the cornerstone of Judaism is justice in this life? Or that the faith doesn’t recognize hell, per se—rather, multi levels of heaven…”
“Uh, totally…” My head was beginning to swell with this unmediated input. A quick passing glance up at Eisenhoff’s Agency netted the sudden down draw of the window’s Venetian blinds. “Deliberate Judaic justice, that sounds about right…”
“On the other hand, what would someone like you know about the Pentateuch or Eighteen Benedictions?”
“Who me? Nada at best,” I sputtered, looking away toward the backbone of a chiropractor’s window display. “But you know, I did go to a Bar Mitzvah once—back in Boulder, believe it or not. Oh, and vaguely recall sitting in on a…saber up in Marin.”
“That would be seder,” Paulen said, giving ground to several German-looking hostellers fixing to jaywalk across Fillmore. “A ritual and feast plate celebrating Pesach…”
“Right, seder…Pesach?” I wondered how we got from Seinfeld to this potential minefield, yet relieved it was about religion, rather than geopolitics.
“Passover, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt to 40 years of wandering the desert—to Moses and Mount Sinai, and onto The Promised Land—the veritable birth of the Jewish people. Rest assured I have become quite well versed in the lunisolar calendar…the grand holidays I have been missing all these years.”
“I just remember bitter horseradish and holey shingle bread.” My cranial pressure was mounting along with this expanding volume of unsolicited information. C’mon, reveille time, sport—wake up that sleepy, anesthetized melon, breath it in, slowly swell those EEG waves, get the high-frequency hertz kicking in, reforge those neuro pathways until it hurts if we’re going to get through this unscathed.
“You mean unleavened Matzo…part of the kosher Haggedah,” Paulen replied, smacking his lips. “Passing from the bitter herbs of slavery to the sweet wine of freedom and covenant with God.”
“I think it was, like, a few small cups of Manischewitz,” I recalled, as we negotiated sinuate foot traffic along the gentle sidewalk decline. “We stopped at four. Then somebody said, ‘the Egyptians tried to kill us—we survived—so let’s eat!’”
A truer, beige-on-tan Victorian stood—more accurately leaned, next door to Sy’s agency like Pisa tower in repose, gimpy no doubt from too many termite binges or minor aftershocks. At street level, on its equally weak foundation, was a black hole of a Comet lounge that had long been reputed to bear watching by somebody. Propping the three-story Vic up on its lee side was a squat stucco-frame bandbox, mustard yellow with wood stain trim—those days a Scandia design store, furnishings rustic yet urbanely clean of line.
But a sidewalk plaque standing out front an adjacent Taco Loco bar commemorated an earlier incarnation. Paulen seemed far too theologically absorbed to recall that a plain two-story retail space across Fillmore had once been home to the Six Gallery, which so long ago hosted a poetry night to Beat the band. Speaking of religion…
Because OMing over here from North Beach that epopic evening was no less than a 29 year-old philosopher king, Allen Ginsberg—who stood up, stroked his beard prophetically, Saturnally, then unleashed ‘Howl’ on a dissolutioned new generation. His first full-length public reading of the provocative poem spanked the sleepy 1950s to life, sowed the rebellious 1960s—potent, plaintive verse that still pulled hopeless romantics everywhere into the existential alienation first expressed so freely that legendary night:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning
for the ancient heavenly connection…”
In the here and now, however, German hostellers bowed before, studied the reverent brass memorial, its pedestal Sakrete reinforced and sunk two feet deep into the cement sidewalk to keep uninhibited GenNext drunks from trashing or carrying the sucker away for dorm-room trophy display. What hell-raising hath Howl wrought, even as the transcendent Ginsberg spirit still rang youthfully worldwide, and fellow traveler Ferlinghetti continued raking in the dead Beat Era’s literary spoils under bright City Lights?
“But I have to admit it was a pretty awesome spread up there in Marin,” I reconnected, getting past searing memories of that CHP checkpoint headache near Nicasio as the Passover seder of Her cousins toasted to a close.
“Not to mention the Shavout harvest festival to top it all off,” Paulen marveled, taking in the long view up Fillmore, all the way to a patchy telephoto snippet of the Marina Green open space and San Francisco Bay beyond. “Oh, the fasts and feasts cycle is so inspiring, capiche? Little wonder most observant Jews spend the summer months fasting in preparation.”
“Now that one doesn’t happen to register memory-wise.” I myself avoided a vista that was all too painfully familiar, instead just glimpsing the broader background Belvuron hills. “Then again, I can barely keep track of no-fish Fridays or when Easter rolls around.”
“Yes, I’ve discovered there in fact are five fasts, from June through Labor Day,” Paulen recited, from rote. “Let’s see: Asara be-Tevet commemorating the siege of Jerusalem through Tammuz, Av and Gedaliah honoring the disastrous sacking of the temples and such. So pay attention, a spot quiz may follow.”
“Wow, you’ve generated the bandwidth to study about all this?” I breathed in the vapors from Orgasmic Pizza wafting down Fillmore Street. “Makes me hungry just thinking about it, preferably for pepperoni and mushroom.”
“Yes, well, don’t get too fat and sassy, because right around the corner come the Ten Days of Penitence and introspection ushering in the New Year. That runs from Rosh Hashana in early autumn to Yom Kippur, the last and most solemn of the Days of Judgment—no washing, eating, working, eating or drinking allowed on this holiest of holidays—or sex, for that matter.”
“Right, celibacy, the root of all upheaval…” Present housing condition excepted, however…
“Ahh, but the festivals. I’ve learned Rosh Hashana days are a lavish remembrance and celebration, after all that—complete with sweetbreads and apples dipped in honey as part of the delectable meals…”
“Hmph and all I get for my confessions are a measly wafer and sip of weak vino.” My appetite was tempered some by this cerebral grip infecting my instincts, stirring my emotions—the whole psycho-survival stew “Fascinating, doc, but you’re killin’ me with info overload here.”
“To be sure, I know my high holidays, now you do, too. See, I’m endeavoring to keep you honest, Herbert. You wanted religion? You’re getting religion.”
“Sounds tempting, all right. But I have enough problems with a religion of my own…” I glanced back over my shoulder, toward the steeple of Saint Vincente’s Church. But no more time for sidestepping sensitivities and splitting hairs; for some ungodly reason, the pressure was on. I was out of my depth here, let alone my comfort zone. Still, I had to dial it up a notch, pay closer attention, get up to speed, so to speak. Time to deliver as planned, even if it that forced me to poke and provoke…
At that moment, I spotted a dowdy neighborhood poet also from the Ferlinghetti school, familiarly gray frizz-haired, loosely clad in embroidered denim on denim—a perennial Beat Era throwback, osteo-slumped over her walking stick, pausing for wind at the Ginsberg plaque with a wistful, mystical grin. I’d crossed paths with her for years, not least up at the house, thusly now hoping she wasn’t visualizing a histrionic return up there. She’d taken on a shrunken, cronish posture all too familiar, enough to make me look askance, up Fillmore, toward seismically retrofitted Chestnut Street and the Marina District.
“As did I, until I saw the light and heard Shofar’s ram’s horn,” the professor appeared more mindful of the caped, henna-haired young acolyte helping her along by the elbow. “And I haven’t even touched upon Sukkot music and fall harvest feasting in Tabernacle tents. Then comes Hanukkah: How could one night’s worth of Temple lamp oil last eight? An absolute Maccabbean miracle against the Seleucid empire—ergo, the lighting of a menorah candle for each Kislev evening. Devotional? You bet, but along with that rolls out an ongoing festival of treats, songs, gifts and games—well before Santa Claus is even dusting off his sleigh—making Christmas as we know it somewhat painfully subordinate, if you will.”
“Painful,” I heaved, noting I couldn’t have said it better my own self. I reflected upon Yules past up on Boulder’s University Hill—one chilly, a later one downright chilling. “Guess a bummer Christmas can hit a body especially hard.”
Yet this was a markedly different Fillmore Street by now. Sure, there was an acupuncture/RX office and kiddie clothes store in that nondescript cube of a commercial building we were presently passing. But aside from a corner brown-green Victorian across the way, with its timeless Japanese print and silkscreen shop, we were coming upon Pixley Street, the threshold of a wide-scale spiritual and demographic shift.
Architecturally, we had all but reached the end of the Victorian era; culturally speaking, the Beats were history—banished back to North Beach’s Kerouac Alley. We were treading guard-down into seculand: a different, youthful energy altogether, attitudinally and anatomically into another place and time—likely as not unmoved that Paulen and I kept bangin’ on this religious vibe.
“What’s more, you can work off some excess Hanukkah calories after the first of the year in the Fast of Esther. But you’ll likely pack it back on again during the Purim festival.”
“Pour ’em?” That seemed to be the operative phrase hereabouts. Still, I kept my wits just enough to remind myself that as long as he was gonna keep laying an epic lecture like this on me, I might as well begin pushing buttons a little. Maybe even play contrarian—for sake of argument, for sake of the arrangement, minus arraignmen…
“Pu-rim,” Paulsen replied. “It commemorates the sparing of Persian Jews from yet another pogrom by Mordecai and the King’s Jewish wife…none other than Esther. This is a time of reading from the Megilla scroll and more joyful celebration—beaucoup food, wine and sun, plays and masquerades, the merriment can last for days.”
“Hey, who said it didn’t, right?” At this point, I couldn’t even remember exactly how I got roped into this, but the deal was: make note, take names, mandated reporting, get it down cold. Wasn’t gonna get paid another thin sandwich dime unless I delivered the dish. So fake it, if I must…
“Precisely what I’d like to know,” he pressed, as we abruptly pulled up to the half-block intersection of cozy little Pixley Street, a pumpkin Audi TT ragtop blew through the narrow crosswalk, hanging a hard-body right. “In any case, add Rosh Hodesh festivals and weekly Sabbath observances, and one pretty much has the whole religious lifecycle, year after year—from bris to Bar Mitzvah to Shiv’a, Kaddish and burial. In all, it makes for one glorious faith, wouldn’t you say?”
“L’chaim, the holy megillah,” I grabbed his elbow to void us being hit on the roadster’s drive thru. Though feeling lofty as hell, we probably should have been looking closer to home, as reality would soon hit street level—tripping us up like the cracks in this tipsy, jagged sidewalk.
Sure, it did seem like I got religioned, all right—civilized, not quite so sure.
Care for more?
Chapter Eighteen. High culture or low culture,
there was no backing down to the beat…
“Between The Lip and
the gloss, therein lies
Saturn’s Shadow.”
“Here, gimme dat, in youra pocket dere,” shouted the corner liquor storeowner, a middle-aged Mr. Clean, minus the aura and earring. This sudden dust-up unfolded right before us once we started across Union Street.
“No, whaa, bro,” screeched a would-be shoplifter, trying in vain to pull closed his patched-over field jacket as he plotted a front door getaway. “Jussa lil’ missundastandin’…”
“Don’t you be comin’ arounda my store thievin’…” A serene-to-way serious Syrian, depending on his daily intake, the proprietor reached deep into the local streetcomber’s coat for a Roaring Thunder Malt.
“Wasn’t, bro,” pleaded the young, shorter vagrant, shaking his shaggy, matted dishwater hair. “No lie…”
“Now getta yur filty butt hell outta here,” the XXXL storekeep stuffed a ten-spot into the drifter’s breast pocket, waving him off with a generous grip on the long-neck bottle, waving it like a virago’s rolling pin.
“Much bless…mah bad, bro,” smiled the scarfer, who hopped a few steps away, then dropped his dirt-caked gray drawers, mooning the owner with some hula-hula shakes of his hairy can. “Musta slipped mah mind…”
“Vel d’ who?” I diverted, chagrined that we were forced to endure this rude, crude spectacle up close and personal—which hit me too close to homelessness past.
“Vel d’Hiv,” Paulen instead warily eyed the string of VW Cabrios, Mini Coopers and boxy Scion Scs, antsy to zip through the crosswalk on their way up Union. “The infamous Parisian velodrome…”
“Velo…” I asked, as we reached the sunnier side of the street, where I attempted to ditch this whole petty distraction—crushing memories sorely jogged and quashed—instead returning to our topic.
“Vel’ d’Hiv—the bicycle racing stadium where French police herded nearly 14,000 Jews in July, 1942—over 4,000 children,” said Paulen, who like me had turned quickly away from that bare-ass display. “Kept them in there for days with no beds, food or water, utterly inhuman conditions, before deporting them to death camps like Auschwitz. You know, a person like you really needs to be schooled in such history.”
“Like me? Hell, how is it you know all this stuff?” Meanwhile I couldn’t help but notice the liquor storeowner still trying to kick that bought-off shoplifter down the block.
“The bounty of a heartfelt, righteous endeavor, my friend,” Paulen instead noted the two young women giggling and pointing from a sunlit bench outside Union Liquors, licking away on cups of the store’s extra-creamy frozen yogurt, fresh from its neighborhood’s-best soft machine. “And I know more than you know.”
“What does that mean?” I followed him closely along Fillmore Street, by now rethinking our comical situation, innocent antics versus inherent anti’s—pro or no. Wondering whether doc here was being unduly testy or somehow testing me. Either way, there was nothing funny about it.
We squeezed around a mini transit shelter and this grume of random bus talkers. Huddled masses of bus-waiters crowded the Union-Fillmore corner, milling about the cognac-postered shelter and rickety news boxes. Elderly by and large, most were likely aiming for doctors’ appointments or estate sales, tortuously late on the draw. Disrupted by JazzStreet re-routing, no 22-Fillmore’s looked to be crackling overhead wires down from up around the Broadway-to-Steiner turn any time soon.
Besides the rank acidic grumbling, more pointed bus stop sarcasm centered on the irony that when one was not looking for MUNI’s finest, they were was always right there, blocking traffic, cutting cars off left and right. But the minute a body needed one—nothing, no MUNI show-up for what seemed like hours. Yet all this bus-bound grief often amounted to a four-block ride to the Marina. Howbeit at least these minions were getting a breezy contact high from roasting Celebes Kalossi coffee beans, if not the cherry draw and burn of full-bodied Dominican Fuentes from that cigar store over across Fillmore.
Still, no more empathetic could I have been, even as we scooted further down Fillmore Street at the first sign of pedestrian daylight. For I myself had once stood there, sworn at that, having been so sleep-deprived and hopelessly stranded in bus zones too many inopportune times. Slow, frustrating decay by driver abandonment, demise by noxious fuming, death by paper transfer expiration: Thankfully, my MUNItive scuffles were mostly a rabid dog’s life ago.
“It means I’ve done my homework, Herbert,” Paulen said, having edged away from the plaintive chatter as though he had never boarded public transit in his life. “Simple as that…”
“C’mon, this isn’t just common everyday knowledge your layin’ on me here…” So I felt conflicted no end. Really, did this mission call for deference, difference or indifference altogether? At any rate, it was getting to be too much—too much varied input, too much stimulation, too much aggravation. Nope, gotta re-focus—get back on, stay on the beam here. “Where’s all this stuff coming from?”
“From right on campus, where else?” Paulen gestured. “Look, one learns these things in such an environment, remember?”
“Not those kind of things—not in any sosh courses I recall…”
“That could be because the wellspring for most of my learning hasn’t been the sociology department at all, but a Jewish Studies Program.”
“Jewish studies…when did…”
“Oh, it’s been part of the curricula for quite some time now,” he said, soaking in the lingering, liqueur sweet aroma of Union Liquor’s creamy yogurt from a sidewall ventilation fan. “I involved myself about the time of mother’s ‘awakening’.”
“Involved, involved how?” Now I couldn’t shake the ancient 7-tesla imagery of a Union Street Fair gone bad, my fears and anguished reckoning amid the festive stands and counter-culture displays. One more cross-country escapade that had gone bust back in the day.
“Oh, I see. You are clearly blind to the flame of enlightenment, my friend, even after all these years,” Paulen bristled. “Fortunately, you have met your match. Indeed, I’ve found the JS Certificate program to be quite helpful and inspirational in that regard.”
“Hey, no offense, I’m sure it is,” I said, somewhat relieved to put Union Street conflict and commotion behind us, much like the many fashion mega-boutiques ramping off to greener suburban outlets in the face of plunging business and choking commercial rents around here. “But what does a program like that study exactly? I mean, Jewish-wise?”
“First of all, JSC is multi-discipline, administered within Arts and Sciences,” Paulen explained, appearing to note a couple of familiar storefronts across Fillmore, the incorrigible Mauna Loa cocktail lounge and Fredericks of Hardware’s turn-of-two-centuries houseware emporium —that nuts and bolts icon of the more practical Cow Hollow of his youth. “Although this can’t really be of that much interest to you, now can it?”
“Who, to me? I…why wouldn’t I be? I mean I have done a little reading and following…” I eyed that Victorian general store as well, still full of wares handy and domestic. “Anyway, Frederickson’s is kind of like Boulder’s McGuckin’s, right? Cluttered aisles, soap to hex heads, machine tools to kindling and fine twine…”
“Sorry,” he stiffened, “don’t happen to frequent that establishment myself.”
“No, no—not apricot. Make them more citrusy…” This wasn’t about booze or frozen yogurt any longer, for we were well beyond the corner liquor store. From what we could see past the MUNI stop, a young hottie’s nails shone like cubic zirconium in the westward sun. Seemed the twenty-something escrow administrator was on lunchbreak from her Saturday stint at a nearby real estate office, fitfully prepping for an after-hours cruise of The City’s dance club scene—up against a nagging gender imbalance resulting in competitive desperation.
A stacked, island-toned pistol possibly commuting in from lower Marin, she was hyper-critiquing her wet-gloss polish—a slight, smiling Korean manicurist ever so patiently nodding at the sudden turnabout in hue. Such were the wrenching machinations here along silicone alley, where gorgeous, self-styled local sirens and starlets could swipe themselves a glam makeover at body shops up and down Fillmore Street until their brows arched haughty approval or credit cards maxed out altogether.
“Guess she’s going for the exotic baby doll look,” I said, poking Paulen’s suede patched elbow. “Drawn to that, are you doc?”
“Careful, Herbert, beware the Chiquita Lolitas—heroine chic, quite intoxicating that,” he then caught himself mid leer. “In any case, JSC is a much-heralded program, so I began nibbling around it—even some classical Hebrew. Before long, I was devouring it whole.”
“Besides your full teaching schedule?” I asked, soft stroking my nascent lumbago. Yeah, finally we were getting into even juicier territory—Hill country, here we come. “How did you find the time, and what about now?”
“Let’s just say I’ve…adjusted my hours,” Paulsen rather dodged, “auditing JSC courses and culling reading lists primarily on my own time, and online.”
“Wow, sounds like real dedication,” I wanted to know more, but no more than I needed to know about his downtime and other passions—recalling where that kind of ethnic curiosity once got me, out there on the Irish avenues.
“Indeed, I’ve had major catching up to do.”
“This polish has to be more like nectarine!” Stop by pit stop, the shapely Latin nail-biter and other dollies among us methodically sized up the pumps, slings, spikes, espadrilles, ballet flats and ankle boots in open boxes that Roma Shoes, there across Fillmore Street, had stacked in and outside its store. Over here, along Vanity Row, working gals and idle goddesses alike could hit the sleek white-walled hair salon with its tell-all front windows for an art perm, a soft brush relaxer, some highlight streaking, a quick tint and trim.
Next door, it was up on the nail rack for paraffin manicures and gel fills or satin-padded toe clips and a full set pedicure with white tips—soy milk baths, Ayurvedic Oil or Udvartana Herbal, and hot Brazilian Bikini Waxing available more discreetly in bamboo-curtained backroom tubs, and vice squads knew what else.
Across Fillmore, the full skin treatment was in order, a medical-grade spa advancing beyond, micro-current, Kamalaspa Dosha and deep-pore facials; ear candling, Shiro Basti scalp massages or biological peels to full laser vein oblation and photodynamic restoration. For the harder core cases, there were always Silskin and Botox injections, higher-quality face time—with the rumored second coming of Hymenoplasty referrals.
Then back over Fillmore here to the designer studio for a clingy little black party dress and jacket set. Venus on the platinum Visa—soooo lush, so positively luxe: Whatever it took, anything to get fabulous, naughty as J-Lo and Lindsay Lohan, outrageous like Kim, Britney and the Hiltons. Then they’d post that hanky spanky thong action up on MySpace or Facebook from the smartphone, for all the world’s players to leer and love. No lie, the eye candy was to die for, even through sly, fuzzy edged retinas like ours—his lingering notably longer than mine.
“Tell me about it, doc,” I sighed. “So…what kind of courses, what’s the catch?”
“Gad, ‘catch’, he says. Given that revelatory slight, you might well need an impromptu lesson yourself.” Paulen slid his readers up the bridge of his nose, eyes nailed northward toward the distant bay. “Well, I primarily perused the courses as inspiration, then lit out on my own, sort of an independent inquiry. For example, I looked into Jewish Antiquity. Here we have this extraordinary roll of historical events and figures. Just think of it! Shiloh, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Sinai, Kings Saul and David, Solomon, the Pharisees and Sadducees—Esther and Uncle Mordechai, Cyrus, the Essenes, not to mention Yetwah and the Maccabees, who beat back Antiochus and the Seleucid Empire!”
“Dunno know about all that, but I do recall having picked up a bit of Mideast history myself,” I nodded, his name drops already glazing me over. Still, something clicked in again. By all means, keep him talking, see what soaks through, like it or not. Proceed with your lecture, professor—on with the core lesson plan, let’s see where it leads, if we’re on the right path. We paused briefly beside a mid-couture boutique’s blooming flower boxes, fixing to carry this tutorial forward despite overhearing some overachieving China girls sounding so deliberately like underachieving Encino guurrls.
“Seriously, Herbert, then what have you actually learned about the Jewish People and heritage all these years? I, for one have learned about…”
Know more/Know less:
Explore this shorthand take on
Jewish history, or just skip ahead…
…Canaan to New Canaan, Abraham and Aramaic to the Zealots and Zion.” He proceeded to relate, in synoptic classroom manner, the underlying Judaic narrative, as in Cliff Notes on khat. “…About descendants of Jacob, Divine Binding Covenant, sacrificial son of lamb, Exodus from enslavement to Genesis and the Promised Land, twelve lost tribes, ten Egyptian plagues; conquering the Philistines, storming the walls of Jericho, fostering the First Temple of Jerusalem per the Book of Kings.
Paulen also ably recounted the strife of Samaria, chronic warfare with the Assyrians and Babylonians—Harod’s corrupt Hellenizing influence, so Greek to the poorest Judeans, which led to Jobe’s sackcloth and ashes, to the theologic stirrings of Torah versus Oral Law. Then there was David’s ungodly royal fling with Bathsheba, cuckolding Uriah the Hittite warrior, augering the Israelites’ untold sorrows to come. So go ahead, let Judah the Hammer break the shackles of exile; see him ordain and purify Jerusalem’s Second Temple. God’s Chosen, ancient residents of the Levant, the people of Maimonides, were doomed to find Romans choosing to knock down their sacred doors.”
“Whew, Torah, that rings an ancient bell,” I gasped, “And I do recall seeing ‘Exodus’ back then, for that matter.”
“All the same, I should hope you’ve also discovered how the evil Roman Empire pitted rich Temple Jews against the common beggars— even routing rebel Jews from their caves,” he continued, refocusing his ponderous gaze from female anatomy to the cluttered architecture above.
“You see, Jesus eventually came to clean out the money changers, but Judas Iscariot took care of that matter, betraying him basically for pocket change. Zealots later revolted to challenge Roman authority, but legionnaires sacked the Second Temple for that in 70 A.D.,wholly banishing Jewish life from Jerusalem, for god’s sake—the Pharisees fleeing with their Talmud and Mishna toward Dead Sea hiding and martyrdom. Then Bar Kokhba leads a messianic rebellion against Hadrian, and over a half-million Jews perish, getting plowed over like the Temple Mount—meager survivors diasporing to the Sephardic and Ashkenazic winds…”
“Uh, not in so many words, maybe…”
“But point of personal privilege…European Jews were first expelled from my father’s France as far back as 1306,” Paulen continued, with lecturnal certainty. “And even though they introduced Haskala enlightenment in 18th century Europe, who can forget what happened to the ‘Juden’ a hundred and some years later in the Shoah. Beginning to detect a pattern here?”
“Who me?” How was I supposed to know about historical minutia like this? Way, way over my head: At once numbed and dumbfounded, I surely couldn’t tell the proverbial fact from fiction, yet I had to keep on keeping on—I mean when does a spill beget a stain? All I knew was this was already more than I needed to know. But how could I even think of saying so in such a situation, without coming off like some…kind of…
“Don’t you get it? The infernal yin-yang nature of this all,” Paulen said, resetting us in motion down Fillmore Street’s comparatively modest downslope, glimpsing fire engines racing out of the Greenwich Street firehouse, lights flashing, sirens blaring across Fillmore dead ahead, but hopefully not uphill. “Triumph begetting tragedy, greatness inviting fatal grudges…it’s utterly Shakespearean.”
“Well, certainly can’t say it’s kosher, that’s for sure…” By now I felt I might at least have posed a cogent question or two, at least maybe should have been taking more notes. “Interesting stuff, though…must be quite some courses…maybe better taken MOOC or pass-fail.”
“Merely interesting?! You could say that in spades. After all, look at how this paradox has haunted Jewish civilization—indeed, the entire Jewish experience over the centuries—surviving hatred, persecution, diaspora, even genocide, in spite of it all.”
Maybe there seemed to be so much cosmic cosmetic energy along this stretch because Fillmore Street hereabouts exhibited a higher level of vibrancy. Even through another maze of trolley wires and power poles, we noticed that the Victorians were more vividly color-schemed—brightly commercial plotted with four-five tones, gold leaf detailing here and there. Olives, wines, tans and browns stood side by side with mixed-use Vicky mutants in aqua, okra, baby blue, purple sashes and green-on-oatmeal.
Beaucoup gingerbread and bay window dressings—the tidy, trendy storefronts anchored them, street level to mezzanine; solar panels and skylights sprouting from pitched roofs three and four floors above that. Once past a digicamera and cellmania outlet that was struggling to wean itself off one-hour photo processing, we hit upon a endive-green corner auto repair garage-cum-healthfood center, where logo-shirted staffers were handing out samples of MegaMint vitamin water and granola energy sticks—so we obliged.
“Civilization?” There, a question—concise, if not exactly cogent: it had to have earned me the right to tear into the foil wrapper of a Nine-Grain HoneyBooster, while I noted a pair of underpaid healthfood clerks outside the center’s rearside loading doors, cigarette smoking their work breaks away. “I’ve been led to believe that Judaism had to do more with, like, religion.”
“Have you really? Paulen twisted the cap off a silver-sleeved water bottle, that scruffy shoplifter running past us, loaded pants on fire. “Led by…?”
“Ah, it really doesn’t matter.” I eluded him and the professor’s stare by glancing over at a goose-down comforter store, on the ground floor of a tall grey and pudding yellow Victorian, its windows full of cushy pillow piles, of matching quilted vests and bedroom slippers. Then came those two girlz in pink NYC hoodies and pummeled jeans toting recycled shopping bags of strictly organic, preservative-free fruits and veggies out of Real Pure Foods, chestily brushing us off in passing.
“So…what then? You mean like your Northern Ireland troubles are just about religion?”
“Well, when you put it that way…” I continued lagging as we gained on the Filbert Street crosswalk, self-consciously avoiding a cater-corner glance at the heavily blinded windows of a shifty second-story office, instead trolling by force of habit for another round or two of marketing samples. But now it was go time, no turning back. Yeah, I’d checked my notes, boned on up some, time to home in all the more. Still light of head, wobbly of knee, I could have used all the energy I could get.
“Tell me,” Paulen asked, voice rising as a fully loaded, double-deuce diesel MUNI bus lumbered on by. “What other way might you suggest I put it? Do you consider Judaism just about religion?”
“How would I know…” Maybe I should have snuck in the back door of that thing, crammed onboard with the straphangers. Then again, it would only have delivered me unto even deeper shit due south, and all that was going down up there.
Even so I began to wonder who was in the driver’s seat here, and who was being taken for a ride. That was when I first spotted the warning sign…
Care for more?
Chapter Seventeen. Coming face to face with
matters at hand, verging on the spiritual,
the metaphysical, the borderline
maniacal–laying a foundation,
or just plain digging a hole…·
“Ain’t just numerology or
rocket science, bub. And
there’s nothing funny about it.”
“…Making my life a living hell!”
“I’m sorry to hear that…”Square…”
“I’ll bet you are…”
“No, really, just watch your step there…”
“Very funny…”
I only knew that we were coming down the Fillmore stairway to Green Street, and a huddle of map and newfangled iPhone waving tourists trying to figure out whether they were aiming for Union Street or Union Square. The South Asian father suddenly scurried to keep his Mickey Mouse playsuited daughter in tow, an Intel badge clipped to his waistband, likely a new H-1B systems engineer, already earning more than the prof and me combined. No fantasy, that was tomorrow land here—all about the numbers, absolute integers and chipset divisions.
The nuclear family now gave way to a young woman trudging toward us, shlepping over Green Street with a shopping bag load from Fredericksen Hardware, heaving and heavy handed as we crossed paths at the stair base. Neighborly nods turned furiously familiar when she blew a lock of streaky auburn hair out of her tired eyes in passing, leaning forward to hike uphill.
“What pray tell was that about?” Reese Paulen asked, as we shuffled around her, regrouping to cross the intersection.
“Aww, nothing,” I winced and gazed straight ahead. “Just some unfinished business…”
Still, that was Union Street we were approaching, not Union Square: no cows here, but plenty hollow. With the professor and I pausing before traversing Green Street, things finally began to level off. Frozen momentarily at the curb by a string of party staging and rental furniture vans, we surveyed the scene, like public utility chieftains on vacation at Shasta Dam.
From there northward,, the comparatively spacious aeries of well-networked upper Pacific Heights hauteurs gave way to the wall-to-wall clutter and jumble of more commercial apartment houses. Vantage-wise, building flagpoles elevated from our sightline, rooftops lowered to walk-up facades. On our right, an ultra-chic neighborhood boutique hotel from dot-com 1.0 days had been gutted for refurb, now tightly wrapped in white plastic, prettier than a sweetheart birthday present.
“Speaking of unfinished,” Paulen sighed, moving on. “What about reconciling?”
“You know, clashing loyalties—like in Ireland,” I closed in alongside him, trolling for cause and effect. “Switching teams mid-stream. I mean your conversion must have been pretty difficult—trouble and trauma wise…”
“Well, granted it has given me a rather new perspective on things, a somewhat different approach. But believe me, Ireland is not in the same league, Herbert. The Irish people aren’t under siege worldwide.”
“Under siege? C’mon, everybody loves Jewish folks nowadays.” I looked west out Green, beyond two shaggy, sickly old palm trees, and a block of witch’s capped Victorians and twelve-unit TICs.
Beyond that, I eyed up the steeple of Saint Vincente Catholic church—stuffy, suspect St. Vincente—lording over Cow Hollow from every conceivable perspective. I could only wish I had benefited from some of those overlordly sacraments back when I needed that spiritual guidance the most, instead of the blessed come-on I actually grinned and bore.
“Loves? On what planet have you been residing?”
“No, really,” I said, respindling my newspaper. While the tinnitus eased some, more low-level anxiety was now broadjumping hemisphere to hemisphere across my corpus callosum. Along with that came a widening divide between what I’d say and what my brain might so arbitrarily replay… “Look at how popular people like Streisand, Spielberg and Adam Sandler are.”
“Yes, an elite American few, maybe…hold a sec,” Paulen said, pausing to set his attaché atop a covered trash container. Particulates apparently having lodged underneath his contacts, he methodically removed them, pressing them into a small black lens case. He then pulled out a pair of round-frame tortoise shells, slipping their hook backs over his ears, around his earphone, with careful professorial authority.
“And what about Seinfeld, huh,” I pressed in another pop culture vein, as we prepared to cross Green Street. “Who doesn’t love that?”
“Ah, Seinfeld…don’t get me started…” Paulen snapped up his attaché.
“C’mon, Jerry, George…Elaine. Show’ll go on forever—the Seinfeldophiles can’t get enough of it. Can you blame them?”
“Enough what? Enough of Newman, Uncle Leo…enough of the moyle?”
“To me, it’s a hoot…Jerrrrrrrry, got it on ya?, Frank and Estelle Costanza, hilarious…”
“Sure, laughable—like that recent episode of the good Kramer vs. evil Kramer racist rant in an L.A. comedy club?”
“Weird, all right,” I pondered, following him into the yellow-striped crosswalk. “So Richardson could have some rehab issues. What’re you driving at?”
“That the show may be more popular than ever. But what if I told you I’ve come to think of it as something of an embarrassment?”
About mid street, St. Vincente’s gothic gabled roofline and soaring Norwegian-style belfry summoned my other, quite personal denominational issues back then; for the most part, far from spiritually uplifting, as I recalled. Somber, catechistic rectory, sober Irish parish priest: Could the father confessor have been any less observant and helpful on that cold, empty morning? Aw, leave it the hell alone, already—who knows any more?
Maybe he had other things, other subjects on his mind that time. Other priests cross-serving the diocese, turning the school kids into devoted altar and choir boys, pamphleteering for back alley coathangers, bookkeeping and bake-saling the collection plates, keeping flower baskets and candle shrines away from the padlocked front doors.
The eternal stream of ungodly revelations were enough to drive any former scapular-squeezing confirmation boy to question his church age faith. Oops, venial candor—mortal guilt and shame—that’ll be five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, m’boy, and light a devotional candle.
“What…embarrassment,” I instead diverted, “embarrassment to who?”
“To any thoughtful, self-respecting Jewish person, that’s to whom,” Paulen said, gazing upon this post-Green Street block of mismatched Tudors and Edwardians, nondescript windowboxed three-flats, and 1920s-era mongrels chopped up beyond recognition in the 1950s and 60s—by and large over priced, bleached-out white, taking Fillmore into the more congested commercial zone.
“Talk about a killjoy, you’re joking, right?” I quickly refocused. “I mean, how does that work…”
“Look, Seinfeld makes the world safe for Jew-bashing—complete with all the usual ugly stereotypes, only in this case played for hip-ironic grins. Might as well call it Mentshes Behaving Badly.”
“But…they’re Jewish…despite the fuzzed-up names.” A training cyclist in full Olympic Club racing regalia was pumping his 18-speed Cannondale, gearing up for the Fillmore hill, the bike already meeting near total gravitational resistance with every hyperkinetic down thrust of its pedal clips. “They’re permitted…”
“Hmph—as though that somehow makes it right.”
Otherwise, nearing us up the comparatively mild incline from Union Street, a young couple looked to be bickering something fierce. Dude was bleeding from the back of his head, and had rubbed his girlfriend’s face in it— literally all over her puffy blond face, by this time fairly dripping in type O-negative.
“You happy now,” he kept screaming, “see what that bastard did to me because of you?!” From what we could glean, the pair had been going at it in broad daylight outside a nearby beer pub, and some goodbar Samaritan had gallantly intervened—cracking the dude’s melon against a brickface wall.
I couldn’t meet the gal’s eyes, nor she mine, so we merely exchanged awkward nods—as though this encounter was totally out of context and character. After all, we had had the same stormy history up hill at the house, hadn’t we? As if I hadn’t told her this hasty hook-up would never synch in and hold. Yet at the same time, I was somewhat bleeding for the guy: this latest victim of another Union Street bludgeoning.
Odds were, the next step was back to their trusty crib for a little killer make-up sex—some tuff enough love—at least until the DV unit arrived. Heavy petting and heavier hitting—that’s what seemed to happen these days, at least once a neighborhood—even this gentrified turf—trended generation younger. Where mind-altering substances were once used hereabouts in the service of higher consciousness and self-awareness, now monied Xers and Nexters were just getting high as a NOAA kite, or stumbling numb, for the mindless time-burning buzz of it all. Meanwhile tremors of indignation, if not revulsion appeared to overtake Paulen at the specter of sorely engendered household violence before he quickly regained equilibrium.
“I’m sorry, but I’m still hooked on Seinfeld reruns,” I resteered, figuring neither of us wanted any further part in this wholesale domestic strife. “Bubble Boy, Soup Nazi—the whole shmeer.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Paulen sniffed his affirmation, glancing back at the fun couple as though he’d seen this all before.
“But c’mon, they’re classic, like M*A*S*H and Cheers, totally gut-busting funny…no matter how many times you watch them…and Seinfeld’s goofing on everybody, cashing in doing it.”
“Look let’s simply call that show what it is, shall we? Seinfeld is a farce—a brilliant farce, mind you—but nothing more than middle brow comfort food, a pop cult vehicle for the projecting of gentile prejudices. I know. I’ve internalized both sides of the show my own self.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you,” I peered back a moment at the dramatic duo turning, arguing their way east down Green—nothing I hadn’t seen before my own self, not that far from here. “I mean, that’s not how people see it. They’re laughing with those shows…especially if you like cereal or Pasta Primavera.”
“Serious as a strip search and TRO. And if only that were the case, my friend,” Paulen shook his head.
“Huh?”
“Just a figure of speech. But hear me out: could it just as easily be that Seinfeld is the Amos ‘n’ Andy of Jewish comedy? Jerry is Amos, George is Andy, and Newman is Algonquin J. Calhoun. The analogy couldn’t be more apt if Cosmo Kramer were Kingfish Stevens, Elaine Sapphire, Uncle Leo were Lightning, and Monk’s Restaurant, the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge Hall.”
“Aww, you’re reading way too much into this,” I dodged a two year-old future trust fund baby blanketed in a titanium super stroller being wheeled by her busily tucking Filipino nanny. “Jeezus, lighten up, will you? It’s just satire, a harmless sitcom…”
“Laughing with, laughing at. That’s what they used to say about Sanford and Son,” Paulen said, adjusting his frames. “And you know what happened to that ‘classic’ as time went on…”
“Oh, I get it—this is what academia calls critical deconstruction, right?”
“No, more like decoding, dispelling a too-cozy latent mythology,” Paulen said, his bookish eyeglasses seeming to concentrate his vision overall, or else weak, miscorrective readers had distorted his vision overall. “Maybe even in the service of healing some divisions by facing too uncomfortable truths.”
So much the better to see a few more of the architectural mixed breed apartment houses on either side of Fillmore Street: ficus-shaded glimpses of skylighted Tudors and barrel-bay windowed Victorians, with several counter-intuitive dark brown four-unit 50s cardboard bandboxes and a sleek teak Tokyo bento sprinkled in. Problem was, it also became clearer that either unsightly fire escapes, windblown sea flags or tangles of overhead trolley and power wires would be splintering the Marina haciendas and aquamarine bay water view from this point forward.
That’s about when we came upon a crème de cocoa Victorianesque retail/rez building—eyewear, aromatherapy shops fronting Union Street, an off-brand coffee roaster anchoring the corner space, complete with a colorful Savona-muralled Fillmore side wall. Upstairs, bay-windowed flats rose two more stories.
I peeked through the iron gate of their backside entrance, then recalled floating up to #302 that foggy summer night, lured by the celestial smells and sounds. There, Jay Jacoby Jacobson was holding forth, a hayseedy huckster from just south of the Ozarks who dispensed dog-eared chart readings with the pass of an offertory hat. Hokey though his hourly sessions may have been, the late-70s cosmologically curious flocked up to his apartment for the hothouse ganja-laced date nut squares and lightly spiked punch, along with the stereo-cassette sound track of New Age atmospherics and Charlie Pride.
He was gaining a following, but losing his financial tunic doing so. In my case, I munched and remained in listening mode back then—comparing and contrasting his shtick with Dame Thornia’s rituals, a little oppo research, sizing up the local astrology arena in general. In retrospect, this was quite possibly where my entire Saturn game plan split its rings.
“Hmph. Now, if you want to discuss real comedy—forget about potty-mouth dialects and baggy drawers,” Paulen continued, “let’s talk Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Billy Crystal on Oscar night …even Jon Stewart today. There’s cutting, worldly wise wit and sarcasm for you.”
“You mean the brainier types, like Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen…” We can’t really be having this conversation. Suddenly I’m puffing on a Panatella at the Friars Club, feeling all of 75 years old. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
“Oy, poor Alvy Singer? How about Borat, while you’re at it,” Paulen sneered, reaching into his jacket to cut short his increasingly recognizable ringtone. He flipped out his cel phone to screen a voicemail caller ID, then repocketed his RAZR, picking up the thread. “Self-loathing or loathsome either way.”
“And this would be coming from your…Fritalian side?” I wondered whether his ears were compression popping, as mine now happened to be as we touched down from a loftier plane.
Precious seconds ran out on the crosswalk timer as we pulled up to the Union Street curb. What an intoxicating confluence of aromas: roasting coffee, cigar smoke from the gourmet shop across Fillmore, distilled spirits from the liquor store the other side of Union, straight ahead. Suddenly with the turn of the traffic light, yet another one of those motorized cable cars passed before us, gaining speed up Union toward Van Ness, the very same route She and I had waded through when its street fair was so long ago in bloom.
Unsettling as that memory was, it all but blinded me to the haunting figure who appeared to be huddled on the trolley’s rear bench, caped in a Grayline Tour blanket, leaning forward over the brass safety railing—all bundled up for a sizeable dressing down—soaking in the current scene, albeit minus me. Could that have been She too? But before I could ID her for certain, the cable car had motored halfway to Webster Street, long and hopelessly gone.
“Now I do happen to admire young Sarah Silverman’s chutzpah —as a social phenomenon, professionally speaking, of course,” Paulen winked, having buttonholed me back to the topic at hand. “She’s no Joan Rivers in her prime. Still, I could definitely see feeding her a dirty punch line or two, as it were…”
“What’s up with this stand-up stuff, anyway?” I dodged, reflecting on visages better left caliginous, waiting for the pedestrian signal to flash white once again, focusing instead on that ‘tourist’ lifting his daughters onto the Union Square bus, before recalling as how the Disney Store had recently closed—but that’s what iPhones were supposedly for. “Are you writing a book on it? Or some kind of post-doc study…”
“Academic study? If things were only that uncomplicated.” He traced a tandem of buff Trek and Gary Fisher trailbikers pumping past us up Fillmore Hill.
“Well, at least you can take comfort in knowing that your French side will always love Jerry Lewis, huh?” I strained to check out what remained of the fog line, up there on what we could see of the bay.
“How very funny, Hee-bert, funny as Major Vidkun Quisling or the Vel d’Hiv…”
There we remained at an imperfect Union, cornered with ambling missions and mutual misgivings galore.
Care for more?
Chapter Sixteen. Drifting into
the valley of the doll faces, they
further the French connection…
“No matter how far you may
ramble and roam, family matters
will continue to hit home.”
“No, you see, I thought all along it was in Salzburg.”
“Really, all the way in Salzburg?”
“When in actuality it was Strasbourg…major difference…”
“Yes, right smack in occupied France,” Paulen said, measuring me anew. “A rather modest ‘Aryanized’ apartment house it was. Nevertheless…”
Concerning subject, re-predicate: There was a peculiar polar magnetic, circular structure to our entire encounter thus far, GPS compass holding true to its conversational coordinates. Still, a geography lesson was not my dutiful aim here, any more than Johnny Streeks up there expected his off-season snowpack to last through the Indian summer night. Reason enough why I gently nudged Paulen across Vallejo Street, to the hump crest of Fillmore’s next block downhill.
“You see, I was always aware there was a little family money, granny-wise, even way back in our Boulder student days,” Paulen said, steadying for a moment against a pipe railing that followed the curve of red-painted corner curb—intimating, though I had no idea why. Guess he just needed to post-Saturnal vent and spill. “I just wasn’t certain from which family bubbe it derived. Whether zayde’s Brooklyn fix-it shop ever amounted to anything—God knows, they were just lucky they fled Europe before the worst of it. But of course that was when I was still living in my father’s world.”
“And you were saying about your mother?” I idly shook the stand of a yellow traffic sign, looking up at its icon, a black image of a truck descending a triangular wedge—graphically understating the hazard ahead, to say the least—however much this line of questioning challenged my attention span.
“Well, father always fudged the subject, dismissed it rather heatedly, as a matter of fact,” Paulen added, moving us toward the next concrete stairsteps, circa 1915, as a smoky mattress delivery van wheezed its way to the hillcrest, bucking and braking up into the crosswalk, clutchplate burning like holy Hades, truck driver cursing out loud. “And mother wasn’t really able to set me straight until toward the end.”
“Why would she not tell you something like that?” Concentration quickened, much obliged, price of admission: I pinched and pushed myself to follow along on this Judeo-Christian track, no matter how squeamish it, or he, made me now.
Where Fillmore fell off from Vallejo Street, the view was no less steep, but with somewhat less of a grand, breathtaking sweep. Due west, we could see more rollercoaster rowhouses and blocks of glistening, parallel-parked cars. Immediately before us, apartment balconies overhung the cement stairs of Fillmore Street’s sidewalks on either side.
Downhill rooftops sported satellite dishes, tidy deck chair configurations and shuffleboard courts, apartment house flagpoles crowned with yacht club colors and whalebone weather vanes—no further snow drifters in the neighborhood wind.
“Who knows? Perhaps she was uneasy, self-conscious about what her parents and other relatives had gone through to warrant it,” Paulen said. We continued down past those dark-brown brick corner homes sucking up more than their share of daylight—the corner house adding another brickface story up top, much less the tomato-bisque Venetian-plastered gem next door, spoiling another sterling view.
We descended toward a period mix of nondescript pastel boxy moderns and Cape Cod frame SFDs, mostly sharing exterior decors of bright chalky white, bunched together like milk and egg cartons in a West Marin creamery. “She could have been in denial about the Holocaust reparations for losing bubbe’s family house and all—building in some psychological distance until reality demanded otherwise—sort of a generational thing. That’s just how she was…”
“Denial?” About then, I flashed on my mom’s deathbed confession of her latent epilepsy, that dreaded Falling Sickness, scourge of the mid 1500s—spawning petit and gran mal seizures at any moment, say, from hitting her head, scarring her brain tissue—or tumors even—how that started me anticipating the worst at the gravest possible time. Then I recalled my dad in her bedroom doorway, muttering about his wife of 40 years meeting up with Uncle Chad again in the Great Above and Beyond, his long-lost brother still crooning and sobbing in his bloody battlefield fatigues.
“Of the reparations, Hee-bert, Grandmother Paulenberg’s resettlement settlement,” Paulen side-eyed a pair of rock-hardbody uphill runners, sculpted bustlines and chiseled cheeks bouncing tightly in their Lady Nike work-out wear. “Not the kind of Holocaust denial with which I suspect you are familiar…”
He wouldn’t let it go for long. In any event, I just yearned to change the subject, but didn’t know what other subject we had buried in inactive files. I thought as well that—pro Jew, no Jew—this was really none of my business, objectively speaking; yet I shuddered to think that in some deep, circumstantial yet tactical way, it subjectively, inevitably was.
Truth be told, since September 11, 2001, anything and everything Middle East was everybody’s business around here in one way or another. Not that some amorphous war on terrorism did much to explain why I felt so singularly defensive, tacitly or tangentially. There was more to any vaguely guttural uneasiness on my part than a media-hyped, apocalyptic clash of civilizations. It was incrementally stirring with the on-shore breezes—that much, I knew; question was, how and how well did he surmised it, as well.
“Your mother’s denial, that’s what I meant,” I sputtered, eyes front once more, righting my step, mind sloshing around in my brainpan. “I meant your mother…”
“Be that as it may, poor dear was finally growing less conflicted about it. Then, she was gone,” Paulen pressed, gazing off to the copper Infiniti SUV angling back out of a cockeyed parking slot, to the warning horn of an unbound cable guy apparently just off the clock. “Still, she…we deserved every penny of the windfall, especially tuition-wise.”
“Sure, hey—who’s to say she…you didn’t?” Windfall? How…windy was it? “I mean, under the circumstances—not that I profess to know the circumstances, or anything, but…” Suddenly, I could see buildings tumbling into Marina streets down there, just like October, 1989 were yesterday, not going on 20 years ago today.
“Ultimately, my father did…that’s who,” Paulen said. “Another thing mother said was he never could have actually accepted that a French government might be accountable for any, how did she put it? Supposed acts of survival under such wartime duress. I only wish she hadn’t have kept so mum on their simmering differences until she was on her way off this plain.”
“So maybe your mother was just trying to keep her household together…” Keep a family household together? What the hell would I know about it? Whatever pleasure I might have generated in my visual cortex was abruptly torn asunder back in my limbic regions. That mere tinnitus was turning to the aching of my vestibular canals and cochlear nerves. Loud and clear.
“Well, that goes without saying, and father’s temper tantrums didn’t help,” Paulen adjusted the shoulder strap on his attaché. “Look, misplaced modesty or self-abnegation are certainly endearing qualities. However, I’m discovering that full self-awareness and acceptance are a far healthier path in the long run…wouldn’t you say?”
“What…hey, I’d say—couldn’t agree more,” I stammered, mostly over the word, acceptance, if not the wet-combed auburn beauty carrying Saks bags from her jet black Jag, in through the electronic gates of a set-back spread mid-block reminiscent of Hepburn-Tracy’s place in ’Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’—all glassy and airy with palm trees, circa 1963. “But your dad’s blow-ups must have really pissed you off, huh?” As in not far from the tree.
“Anger? Well, not exactly,” Paulen continued quizzically, pausing to gaze out upon the gated action to our left, then abruptly to the vista dead ahead, panning away from my prying eyes. “Still, certain…reckonings weren’t, aren’t without costs. To wit, how do you suppose these awkward family revelations make me feel”?
“You?” Was he really laying this on me? And how could it be getting this much easier to listen, given that our stairway descent was now hastening decompression earaches worse than some Aeroflot death bucket on approach to Krasnoyarsk from 30,000 feet, while giving me the bends.
“Yes, me,” Paulen said, growing more mildly demonstrative than pedantically detached. “All these years I’ve been saying my family is a little bit Italian, on the French side…”
“On your father’s side…”
“Correct, when in truth I was ignoring the Jewish side of my little bit Italian on the French side…”
“On your mother’s side…”
“Precisely.”
“Hmm, I recall running into some of those kind of identity issues myself,” I hung closely on his every word, painfully reflecting upon how tough it can be changing colors, choosing sides. How easy it was back then to split the difference—particularly amid block upon mental block of dark-brown brick and darker alleys—soaking in as I long had, a wee dram of Scottish malt with my Irish Cream, Noraid and Orange chaser on the side for all their Troubles.
“Well, imagine the inner discord,” Paulen replied. “What with my French-Italian side selling out my Jewish side back in World War II.”
“But that was…c’mon–over half a century ago…and didn’t Chirac apologize for all that…”
“Look, there is no statue of limitations on official betrayal,” Paulen said, as we forged ahead, mindful step by down step. “I mean, how in heaven do I reconcile my own inner personal clash of civilizations? What am I to make of it all?”
“It’s still ultimately you, right? You are you, no matter what…”
“And yet which me is it, for godsakes? Is it the Jewish me or the French-Italian me any more? Am I Ben Gurion or some cruel-and-unusual hybrid of Mussolini and functionary cowards like Louis Darquier or Maurice Papon? Does my blood run to nationalist or Free French Resistance? Did father’s kin defend mother’s or deliver them to Vichy collaborators? The only thing I’m sure of is that mother never dared ask him such things; but lately it has become terribly important to me. Hmph, only in San Francisco could they have gotten together in the first place…like it is to this day—that gumbo pot up at the jazz fair.”
“Believe me, I understand, could even see how you might inherit your dad’s… temper from it all,” I backstretched some for reassurance, Cassini’s Division once again springing to mind, that red dirigible gliding right on through. “Time was I struggled with something like that myself. My Scots-Irish conservative protestant side doing battle with my rebellious Irish-Catholic side. But it eventually works itself out…especially here in The City.”
“Temper, nothing, Herbert. What’s more, it’s apples and olives—not even close,” Paulen countered, holding us back suddenly, what with a 7-Series Beamer crossing our paths on its way out of its hill-tilted condo driveway. I hadn’t even noticed the silver blur. “This situation is far different, by definition and degree. It isn’t just about religion, and it clearly isn’t getting any better. Good god, man, do you realize neo-Nazis are on the march in France as we speak?”
“Neo…”
“Sure and begorrah, my Celtic friend. Jean-Marie LePen and his National Front jackboots are fire bombing Jewish community centers these very days, spray painting Jewish cemeteries with swastikas.”
“Neo-Nazis? I thought I heard it was Muslim radicals doing that…” Swastikas: just what I needed to dig up were those long-buried visions of placards and tattoos in Marquette Park.
“Them, too—when they are not busy torching cars and protesting head scarf bans,” Paulen said, as he sidestepped a squirrelly heartland guy and wide-brimmed woman rushing uphill, apparently to catch a glimpse of bay splendor, with or without the slowly erasive curtain of fog. “But it’s getting even worse than that. Synagogues are being trashed, from Sarcelles to Marseille. The thugs are attacking innocent Jewish students, have even kidnapped one boy and killed him outright.”
“Jeez, you do sound really pissed.” Taking the couple’s cue, as locals often do, I focused on a dredging barge being tow-boated down there mid bay. ”I mean, how do you know all this? Le Monde, the Herald Tribune? Do you read French, and who is Louie Daiquiri?”
“Darquier…the fascist Vichy stooge—you know, Petain’s patsy, Hitler’s Parrot…’The Sorrow and the Pity’,” Paulen said, alerting me with a tap on the sleeve to dodge the mossy seepage slickening much of three cement steps directly down. “And I know just enough Francais, my friend, and all about anti-Semitic bigotry. These days, I make it my business to pay attention to such things, because it is a large part of who I am now—or am not—as the case may be.”
Again, with the dreaded A-word… Me, I still couldn’t take my eyes off the bay. Always, at such curious moments, came the cruise ships: so ephemeral, so fleeting, so escapist—tugging away from the finger piers in their leisurely, free sailing fun. Passing the anchored silt platform for and aft were an in-porting Coast Guard cutter and outgoing Princess Ecstasy—the latter decked out in white cap hull and aquamarine trim to the waterline. Not nearly so stately as the QE2, but plenty champagne buoyant, just the same—streamer confettied, summoning visages of dockside parting shots and au revoirs, good and bad..
Sailboats salt and peppered the bay; its main ship’s channel was turning busy amid the afternoon tidal flood. Ecstasy’s upper decks and funnels soon vanished altogether into the easternmost tail of the bay’s finger fog, headed out the Golden Gate, presumably for ports of northern call. Tough captain’s call indeed on a day so chromatically brilliant, so strollingly mild—condoed Tiburon and Belvedere hills glowing calico beyond the bay shores, Mount Tamalpais poking up behind the Marin Headlands as though painted on tormentor wings. Just inside the Golden Gate, a soupcon of Sausalito spilled down the lee side of Marin’s coastal hills. She couldn’t have timed things better if She were still sitting there brainstorming at that Pier 35 watering hole, now could She? “But I read their president was clamping down on…”
“Look, the Jewish people have been legitimate French citizens since the 1780s, and are still considered ‘salir des juifs’ in many quarters. “A lot of it has to do with the yellow press, mocking the ‘Zionist conspirators’, trivializing the Holocaust, baiting on and on about the Dreyfus Affair. Little wonder Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to do aliyah.”
“Doing who?”
“Emigrating to Israel, as early as possible for their own safety.”
“Wow, neo-exodus…” However eager to ride his winning side, I couldn’t catch my tongue to save my life.
More immediately, Fillmore Street plunged toward Cow Hollow, then seemed to vector back upward, a dark asphalt strip boring through a dense sea of rebuilt white on tan on pastel Marina District stuccoplexes—priced beyond all reason, given the landfill muck of their foundations, in fact. Loma Prieta belied the district’s seismic stability, ruptured any pretense of its invulnerability.
Sitting pretty, standing firm: just ask Her all about that. But, hey, take your escape valve anywhere you can get it. I took to counting the cars and trucks crossing Fillmore down before us, in either direction, at well-trafficked intervals, Union to Lombard to Chestnut Streets and Cervantes—leading my eye up to Marina Boulevard, across the Green to the general vicinity of once havenous Washerwoman’s Lagoon and Gashouse Cove.
“Quand meme, Ariel Sharon’s remark was taken out of context, blown entirely out of proportion—twisted in translation, left and right.”
“Slow boil, whatever, fine by me.” By now my whole head was floating as well, inner ears oscillating like mercury diodes in an overheated household thermostat. “All I sayin’ is, wasn’t that about the time some Parisian gal admitted her anti-Semitic attack story was really a false alarm?”
“Yes, well, let’s just say that incident wasn’t helpful…to either of my sides,” Paulen said, a bit off guard. “I have found it rather difficult to reconcile…”
“Difficult? Try reconciling the likes of Jerry Adams and Ian Paisley for the last 25 years like I have…”
“I’m afraid you’ve but begun to reconcile such straits with difficulty, my friend—more than you’re likely to know.”
Care for more?
Chapter Fifteen. With all such
comparisons ringing hollow, they
descend to form an imperfect re-Union…
“Sometimes you have to scale
the Heights before you can even
begin to feel the depths.”
“It’s not the same, dude…”
“No way, bro…”
“I mean, we really had it goin’ here, Johnny…it was epic.”
“Yeah, champagne powder, this monster hill with the killer views, and all those ski groupies…skiing in The City during a heatwave…ESPN…it was totally awesome.”
No stoner pipedream here; this was no mere pedestrian snow job. Johnny Streeks was an Olympic medal winner, and there he stood before Reese Paulen and me, on the first full Fillmore Street landing—all but lamenting his recent downhill spill. Nearly a year before, Streeks’ Ski Francisco 1 had been a mash-up of city and Sierra slope, with a hot Indian Summer basecoat.
Really, who wouldn’t have gotten off on 200 tons of Truckeed in snow—amid 80-degree weather, with not even a hint of a breeze? High country contractors had laid in barricades and gray outdoor carpeting, from Broadway on down, cabling it all together to hold the deep shaved-ice ‘snow’ in place. It was the biggest off-season ski jump freak show since the 1938-39 Treasure Island Fair—way, way back in the day.
Along wooden shoulder rails had crowded some 5,000 tres degage gawkers and wannaskis rattling those sideboards in baggy shorts and tank tops, hangers-on hooting from the balconies and rooftops lining either side of the Fillmore hill ‘half-pipe’, blissfully cheering on the ski freaks chuting by within Skoal wad spitting distance at 30 m.p.h. up to 35. Ski Francisco 1 even had sponsorship, from High-Ball Tonic Water to Sing-Sing Bail Bonds. By most accounts, the kick-off event had basically caught sex-waxed lightning in a squeeze bottle. 
Johnny Streeks and his Marin/Tahoe posse of X-treme skiers and Sugar Bowl boarders launched off a chartered motorized cable car up here on Broadway, bustin’ mid-air switch 1080-truetails and rodeo 5’s downhill against a brilliant blue sky Bay. Video choppers hovered, Sirius speed-rock blared, grandstandees scattered as these scurvyass hoedads turned totally sick 20-foot backflips and 360-degree barrel rolls—dicing up a real smooth line.
Lesser freestyle dawgs bounced off shoulder barriers, wiping out in a slushy landing at Vallejo Street, POC goggles and nut belts flying, heaping into snow-melted hay bales on Green. One wedding day couple schussed down in full white tux and matrimonial gown, exchanging vows enroute to a Whistler honeymoon. Gnarly, dude: just another rousing event in a perpetual event-junkie town. Who wouldn’t have gotten off on all that?
“But then these cretinous ol’ farts around here started raggin’ the mayor and Supes, protesting our permits. So now Ski Francisco II’s stuck in a friggin’ ballpark—fake hill, fake snow ramp, fake ski freaks—freebies gone to $50 paybies, for shitsake…”
“But it is the bigs, the Giants crib, Johnny. Fuckin’ major leagues,” said Streeks’ snowboard wingman—Ronin ASYM-suited, droopily overdressed. “Still, it is kinda corporate bogus, dude…you just gotsta keep it real…”
“You want real? I’m, like, 29 years old, and don’t see any more Olympic gold in my future,” carped the North Face trim skicon, with a Coppola sweep of his arm. “And these senile coots are forcing me to totally sell out my dreams to a corporate plastic rip-off catapult farce in a closed up downtown stadium. And I still don’t know how the fuck we’re gonna pay for all of it.”
Who wouldn’t buy in? The Pacific Heights Neighborhood Association, that’s who. First of all, there was City Hall’s chummy bending of established permit regs and safety ordinances, allowing for Ski Francisco 1’s oversized crowds. Then there was the appalling prospect of being snowed in for 48 hours on the hottest days of the year, being stranded in or away from their million-dollar abodes, shuttled about in sweltering stepvans—herded around by the overtime cops, firemen and security guards: All for the PCP-popping, dope-smoking glorification of a bunch of narcissistic A.D.D. slackers—mostly from out of town.
Add to that the throwaway beer bottles, wind jugs, ski-wax flyers and Starbucks cups—the stiletto heel and ski pole spike punctures on hillside flat-roof condo buildings in this way-buttoned-down part of town—Bobcat tractors and dumptrucks hauling away slush piles and debris well into the night:
“I’m hip, hear Castro Halloween is gonna be shoved down around there, too—in the ballpark’s parking lot—corralled and censored like some protest pen, so there’ll be more cops than queens. And wait’ll you see the hatchet job they have in store for Bay to Breakers. Bucks, Johnny—you know it takes megabucks to move mountains in this town.”
“No shit, Sherlock, and that’s just wrong,” Streeks snapped, as they turned uphill toward Broadway. “But I still think that with the right juice, anything goes in San Francisco.”
“That’s what she said…”
Rumor on the stairs had it ‘Johnny Ski’ was bailing this whole light-headed downhill scene, anyway—for a Wall Street equity fund training program, no less—cutting out on his losses, cutting back his shaggy, streaky blonde bun to a tight, grown-up Big Board crop and grease job, once again going for the gold.
Paulen and I attributed the Ski Francisco row to a clash of energies, of higher raditudes—of San Francisco, old and new. Which nevertheless had landed us on this streaming downslope, slalom stepping with stairclimbers and street fair fleers crossing paths up and down. At the next small lookout level, there we paused.
“Caught some of that ski thing here myself,” I said, turning my gaze downhill. “A total media circus…”
“Yes, saw some of it, as well,” Dr. Paulen replied. “The Boulder paper ran a link to the wire story on its Website, and a gallery of photos. I suspect they were using the coverage to jumpstart the Colorado ski season.”
“Gotcha, the good ol’ Daily Camera…”
“Oddly enough, that’s where we…I first spotted you, in the background of a photo of Mr. Streeks sticking his half-pipe. There you were, in a sea of colorful Patagonia and Burton mesh tops, looking on midway down hill, a vaguely familiar face amid all the displaced mountain types. Took a major zoom-in—aged some, but it just had to be you.”
“Really…imagine that…” I shuddered, dripping in armpit perspiration. “Must have been taken with a telephoto lens…”
“Truth be told, that picture spread set me to thinking about revisiting San Francisco in the first place,” Paulen said. “I kept staring at it over low-fat pastrami and blintzes in the New York Deli on The Mall—between a 201 lecture and grad seminar, to be exact.”
“Well, like you said, a body can’t help where he’s from, huh?”
“Hmm, yes—although of course I was eventually coming back out here, anyway,” Paulen replied, taking in the broader view. “Mother’s condition, and all…”
“Sure, I know how that goes,” I said, jogging, kickstarting some more pivotal flashbacks—Boulder, San Francisco—and mother-wise. “You and your mom were close, or…”
“Only toward the end, sad to say…”
We hastened to clear off the landing, what with the abrupt warning ping of an opener signal, and out swing of the high-rise’s fume-gate garage door. A balky, pitted olive Mercedes 240D sedan angled out, loudly tapering down Fillmore hill, brake lights aflame, its silver-coiffed driver heatedly waving today’s pedestrians out of her pathway.
Among them were some plucky Aussie mates puffing up past us in rugby shirts and cargos, likely day-trippers from the Fort Mason hostel. Roughly on a sight line with the brims of their bush hats, the Marina rolled out in bright whites and pastels, only a foreground row of dark brick houses sucking up the daylight like a lower row of bad teeth halfway down on Vallejo Street, where Johnny Ski’s first rank of snowbanks used to be.
“So, you said you grew up around here,” I asked, as we proceeded down Fillmore’s mossy concrete stairsteps, visibly intermittent and slightly askew though they were, sea breezes picking up to somewhat carry us along.
“Yes, this hill, these streets, summon up all sorts of ancient memories,” Paulen said, pointing about, right to left, with mounting distance and disdain. “We pretty much lived all over down there.”
“Really, you mean literally?” I explored, trying to picture growing up here.
“Indeed, as I recall, we at one point lived at Webster near Filbert. Then we had a tidy two-flat over there at Green and Broderick. Later, we moved up on Steiner, close by Alta Plaza Park. Even Baker Acres for a spell.”
“How did that work, exactly?” Tipping forward, hanging tentatively on every step, we descended with all due circumspection, given the wavy, broken concrete of Fillmore’s weatherworn stairs.
“Look, father was sort of a jumparound. Fancied himself something of a man-about-town. Then he’d turn the page on a dime, drag mother and me along for the ride.”
“Gotcha. Had a painful move or two of my own back in the day…”
“But moving wasn’t the half of it,” Paulen took in several come-lately luxury residences on corner lots west across Fillmore. “Father was constantly reinventing himself. He went from the shipping business to a stint in life insurance to wholesale wine distribution. Then he’d bon vivant around Financial District gin mills like Harrington’s and the Hoffmann Grill, trying to shmooze his way into financial planning, prepping for tests he never got around to passing.”
“Sounds pretty ambitious to me…”
“Yes, well, none of it ever amounted to much. Being Gallic-Italian, he had charm and bonhomie to burn…always ready to hug your shoulders, pump a promising hand, but fall though on the follow through. Seemed most people took his measure before long.”
“San Francisco’s a tough town that way, good at ferreting out the phonies,” I noted, with some residual chagrin. “Funny—I could never get my ol’ man to express much of anything unless amply lubed.”
Paulen continued scanning like a copter pilot, left to right, taking in the wider view. As for me, I quickly adopted rather a tunnel vision approach. The pitch and counter pitch of this staircase gave me waterbed wobblies like I hadn’t experienced since crawling on all fours out of that copy shop whipsawing seaward during Loma Prieta’s 7.2 Richter rock ‘n’ roll. Sweeping, panoramic memories: Couldn’t find the horizon line to save my life.
“Sadder part was, mother took the brunt of it. He always made certain she played the Euro-domesticated role—as in gracious, vivacious, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…”
“Sooo, that made you, what—Fritalian?” I yielded to intimate discomfort, feigning interest the best way I could, as if to lighten things. “Guess that would make me Scirish.”
“As it were…on father’s side, at any rate,” Paulen snorted, barely breaking recollective stride. He spirited us around a pair of misshapen young Euros, panting at the next driveway pause down, a cheeky fraulein muttering that if she had wanted to climb hills like this, they could have holidayed in Tyrolia. “Mother did well enough with what she had—seeing as how she herself never had such a cultivated mother figure to school her in the social touches and graces.”
“Somehow, I can relate to that…the mother of a raw deal.” I just grew edgier and queasier on our way downhill, on increasingly shakier ground. Paulen and the young Hessian trekkers alike appeared to see a sparkling Marina and Marin County backdrop across the Bay—albeit with its ermine collar of fog fingering in from the Pacific Ocean, increasingly tickling the Headlands and bridge towers.
Instead, I wrestled with older, more hellish images of MUNI buses stalled powerlessly in place up and down Fillmore, of Lombard traffic snarled with panicked drivers fleeing the damage all around them in October, ’89—toward whatever remained of the Golden Gate Bridge at the time.
Of a stucco bandbox at Fillmore and Beach Streets, kneeling forward into the parking lane, devouring a yellow-gold Beemer 325i. Of 2 Cervantes Apartments collapsing altogether in the gelatal liquifaction—terra infirma beyond Chestnut Street, burying who knew how many tenants in and under the shredded stud framing and debris. Of myriad other Spanish-style two-flats teetering into hopelessly stalled traffic, succumbing by unnatural selection to their domino fall—good God, possibly even Hers.
“Oh, but he never forgave mother any of her beau monde shortcomings or the slightest hostess faux pas. Still and all, she worshipped her hot-blooded romeo charmer, and put up with his bullying–good trooper that she was—to the point of being a Jewish mother in denial, if not exile.”
“Wow, how rare are women like that anymore,” I tread lightly. Bay fog, brain fog: A certain psychic fuzziness was settling over my three-pound cerebral mound, tipping me forward, upending my equilibrium, making me pathologically woozy headed like I hadn’t been for ages. I flashed all over again on those Scientific American mags and neuro-psychology texts I used to thumb through in Norlin Library, their graphic mind/brain illustrations. Still—focus, dickhead, focus. “But it all must of made you angry as hell, huh?”
“Angry? Well, let’s say I never felt especially comfortable with their whole asymmetric relational dynamic,” Paulen said, catching the tic in my eye. “It isn’t easy to trade-in one’s parental role models, now is it? But thank God I inherited her mitochondria.”
“Well, don’t ask me…” I backed off, gripping some for reassurance. Couldn’t help it, couldn’t shake it: I could still smell PG&E gas escaping the Marina’s ruptured mains from way up here. I re-imaged firefighters rushing to the 1989 Divisadero inferno, struggling to keep it from turning into some notorious ‘steak and eggs benedict’ fire, as in replays of the post-quake inferno of 1906.
Hydrants gushed into the street gutters, paramedics scrambling amid the heat and haze to help heavy rescue trapped dwellers. Eventually converging on what little remained standing of 3465 Fillmore with the Jaws of Life.
“But then, father’s massive heart attack took care of all that. I suppose it was the overextended Martini lunches and fat cigars in his Montgomery Street watering holes…who knows? I was completely snowbound in Boulder at the time.”
“Really—parent bound…in Boulder…” By this time, the misty mental fog of ’78 was pouring over my Prefrontal Cortex, rolling back toward my Parietal and Occipital Lobes—thick and ponderous, mainly at will.
“Buried up to my desktop,” Paulen replied, reaching into his jacket, quelling the vaguely familiar Rare Silk ring tone of his cel. “But at least his little insurance policy helped pay for mother’s condo—which is right down Broadway aways, by the way.”
“You mean in Karr country?” Flashing images like these only stir-fried my hippocampus even more, plumbing the gut-level, long-term memories layered deep in my cerebral cortex. Still, I jumped at the chance to shift focus.
“Don’t follow…”
“John Mark Karr—you know, the JonBenet confessor who was arrested for peeping into Sacred Heart girl’s school windows.”
“Oh, John, Con—that twisted little tabloid fraud, a fool in creep’s clothing, a lot he really knew about it,” Paulen snapped, quickly checking, collecting himself.
“Really knew, how so?” I leaned in.
“How on earth should I know? Anyway, wouldn’t you know it was bubbe on mother’s side who had quietly salted away a bit of family money all along. A genuine coup de foudre—these things happen to certain people.”
“Granny warbucks, huh?” Not that this flippant digression could damp the high-voltage buzzing between my ears, this damn tinnitus distorting the sensory feed into to my misreading auditory cortex.
We continued down past the peachy pastel, comparatively sprawling Vedanta Society temple across Fillmore—a full half-block deep—which evidently had settled back into mantric bliss inside its new Swami Centenary Hall. We then negotiated a narrowing, shadowy passage to Vallejo Street, between overhanging curbside trees and the untrimmed shrubbery of a 1950s Mies-modern glassy apartment building—its iron garage gates swinging open for an incoming indigo Lexus ES.
Thereupon we squeezed around some scaffolded window washers. Beyond a couple of stairclimbing power runners, the blinding bright Marina vectored up past a picket fence of boat masts lining the harbor, out toward a fog frothy bay.
“Hilarious, but it appears that’s not the half of it…”
“Half of what?” No comment; instead, it was just more simmering gray matter over mind. Still, catching my eye down Vallejo Street were a couple of refashioned mansions in the Milano and Florentine styles respectively, tangerine faux finishes and Renaissance frescoes shipped in from Bologna and Toscana, bay view palazzos years in the remaking—no architectural shortcuts, no reconstruction expenses spared.
“Nothing, nothing—just a slip of the…er, I should say figure of speech,” Paulen stumbled some, sighing to reload. “Funny, I can recall growing up when you could see clear to the bridge from here without all these dreadful condos.”
“I remember the night gassy smoke wiped out this bridge view even worse.” My brain commenced to spinning like a disc drive hell bent on anti-thermic shutdown. Which only got me glancing once again over my shoulder, as if to make sure the ol’ house wasn’t afire uphill after all.
“I take it you’re referring to the earthquake…”
“Yep, black smoke covered the Palace dome, too,” I said, pointing over to the Palace of Fine Arts, which anchored blocks of sunny low, level roof tops. “Down there in the Marina, below where that red airship is hovering right now.”
“Looks like there is no escaping that blasted blimp of yours.”
“Not a snowball’s chance of that…”
Care for more?
Chapter Fourteen. A little family
background takes on the trappings of
historical conflict…
“Confront past demons, face
current truths. Not that it’s
all downhill from there.”
“So, what might this be?”
“Oh, just a letter from an old, old…friend back in Chicago. I’ll take that off your hands…”
“Heeb-ert? Since when do you spell your name Heeb-ert?”
“No, no…Nate’s still always jerkin’ around…you know, just old schoolyard stuff….ancient…”
“And Kikerooski? What’s this all about?!”
“Uh, I really haven’t had a chance to read that yet…” Can’t believe he’s calling me out for being called that, when that goddamn old gym-class nickname’s never been exactly my call anyhow.
Now, as I had told Reese Paulen amid our walk across Broadway, if we were going to do this jazz thing justice, we should check out all the venues, city wide, boom-bass begone. I had unrolled the throwaway program, which trumpeted that the greater San Francisco Jazz Festival was as vast as it was venerated, a stellar, logistically challenged affair that had gained all-world stature in its less than quarter century of existence. Thumbing through the booklet, I saw we could bop to that Charlie Parker Revue at the Bill Graham Auditorium.
We might just as soon have caught the Jazz Collective with Joshua Redmon and Bobby Hutcherson over at the Herbst Theatre. We might very well have savored the Wayne Shorter idiom at Masonic Auditorium, followed by a Dexter Gordon and Yusef Lateef kind of groove. We could have taken in the likes of McCoy Tyner and Pharoah Sanders at Davies Symphony, or done a Jack DeJohnette number at the War Memorial Opera House, then toasted a bit at Pier 9 with the ragin’ Zydeco Flames.
Take your pick; pick your passion. Instead, we had earmarked this scenic route. That Coltrane tribute down there at the Palace of Fine Arts sounded copasetic to Paulen, as were rumors of a high-voltage jam with Bill Frisell and Vernon Alley, or group sax playing the eccentric asynchronicity of Ornette Coleman. But of course that’s when a sudden wind gust had blown open my morning Times, that damned letter falling out onto Fillmore hill’s top sidewalk step, then skimming the professor’s way. To paraphrase the Old Gray Lady, ‘Expect the Worst’.
“So tell me, what is the meaning of this?”
“Meaning? What meaning?” I picked up, recollated the newspaper, commencing to sleeve the jazz program around it. “That letter’s just something from a long, lost friend, from totally another place and time—as they say, from a superannuated galaxy far, far away.”
“Really,” Paulen stood his ground there at the corner. “Couldn’t be Saturnian in origin, could it? And what’s this clipping stapled to it…an obit?”
“Uh, I’ll just look at that later,” I grabbed the letter from him, quickly exchanging it instead for the Jazz Fest guide, cover silhouette visible, playing stand-up bass in a Ron Carter posture and entranced state of mind. “Care for a souvenir?”
“You know,” he said, making the trade-off, stuffing the program into his valise. “I think this little faux pas might help explain some things…”
“What things,” I scraped my foot across a studded yellow wheelchair safety tile embedded in the sidewalk’s handicap ramp, cramming the letter back inside the Times. “What are you saying? And what is this preoccupation you seem to have with…”
“Strictly academic, my friend…call it a little applied exercise in field research…”
Not exactly immeasurably flummoxed, I looked past Paulen westward from this postcard, almost promontory corner. Vibrantly colorful Victorian gingerbread houses, and boxy pastel apartment buildings with varied dormers and sundecks, troughed chock-a-block down to Steiner Street, then stacked back up like a Farralon tidal swell to the Divisadero ridgeline—mansions upon mansions, piling up on high—decleating my equilibrium some, nearly casting it adrift.
More immediately, a MUNI trolley bus bucked the steep climb toward us, voltage drops, or no. The Double Deuce-Line coach turned fully loaded off Broadway, south down Fillmore in power-switching fits and starts. But not before passing the Mrs. Doubtfire house, then the old Francis Coppola spread, where little Ms Starstruck so unceremoniously dressed me down at that gallery gala seemingly a Saturnaeon ago.
“Field research,” I sputtered, “should we be—I mean, why are we even talking about this, even clinically?!” I stepped aside a small clot of rubberneckers congealing at the corner—milling, up-and-down hilling, pausing at this grand, sweeping view upon the Bay. Here, the high terrain slanted, dipped, dropped and rose like a roller coaster in all directions, tightly crammed rooftops and dormers crowding the sightlines, adding a wobbly gyroscopic tilt to the wraparound panorama. Getting woozy, losing my bearings, taking it on the dome, something to do with a cerebellum back on the fritz. Growing lighter headed at the same time things keep getting heavier. Gotta hype my thalamic to somehow process the mitigating signals. In other words, steady, sport…steady as she goes.
“Why? Because one person’s taboo is another’s talking point,” Paulen replied, staring right through me, even as I endeavored to gaze away. “Question is, how could we not be talking about it these days?”
“These days? I don’t follow…” A low-slung Camaro with Petaluma plate frames—evidently some Metallica-bangingers in town for a little big city action—snagged my attention momentarily as it scraped bottom up over the Fillmore verge, here at this hilltop, of a street that dropped like a Shoot-the-Chutes down toward Cow Hollow. They looked to be junior varsity knuckleheads, just like Natorious Nathan and me.
“When you’ve got people openly denying the Holocaust, and wanting to blame Israel off the face of the earth,” Paulen cast a jaundiced eye upon some Austrian-sounding tourists huffing, puffing their way up the final top steps of a Tyrolian-grade climb that began down at Union Street. “Who in good conscience dares tolerate such intolerance today?”
“So, what’s that got to do with you and me?” A Yellow Taxi pulled up Broadway behind us, honking everyone back away from the curb. Within moments, the front security doors buzzed open, those of a milk-white blockhouse of a corner building, nine stories of rear-balconied view spreads, with a wind shielded pool deck up top. This man servant in a long dark duster and captain’s lid guided his charge into the waiting cab: A stoop-backed fogy in a sagging three-piece gabardine and half-Windsored red tartan tie, under a weathered London Fog maincoat and gray Mackinaw cap. Likely a cashiered attorney at leisure, he was inching along, shuffle by painful shuffle, propped up on his titanium walking cane, no doubt swimming in prescriptions.
“Look, I follow the news as well, my friend,” said the professor, fidgeting with the zipper of his wide-grain leather attaché, his periodicals tightly inside. “I’m telling you, I’ve seen the rallies and teach-ins. Which is why I’ve begun focusing in earnest on Jewish issues, with a little help from a dear, dear friend in Boulder. That, and the fact I’m finally, fully embracing my Jewish side at long last.”
“Your Jewish side? Think I remember you were, like, French-Italian, or something.” I dodged the leaky hydrant puddle splashed by that departing taxi, whisking east toward the Broadway tunnel, probably to some chilled Gibson-soaked reunion at Sam’s Grill. I ushered Paulen to the top step of the Fillmore hill, stepping around the doorman, who was now retreating to his lobby station. Between us and the stairs stood a visitor from Atlanta, cell circling with his picture-phone, shouting, “See? Here I be, looking out over San Francisco Bay”, as if compensating for any sudden signal drop, just shooting the breeze beside us into stiffening winds.
“Why, yes. Father’s side, but matrilineal line otherwise: my mother is Jewish—or was, as the case may be,” Paulen asserted, once we commenced our descent. “Her maiden name was Mildred Paulenberg. I have her Brooklyn birth certificate, and everything. Even the Israeli Knesset has deemed someone like me to be a legitimate member of the tribe.”
“I see, shorthand name change—Vernier to Paulen. That’s really something, believe you me,” I said, on the downstep—abashed, pilot-eyed panning for an out—no exit lane in sight. “How d’ya say it, mazel tov…”
Here at Broadway, there were times when tension was all the more palpable, primarily between the hilltop people and climbers. Aerie dwellers on all four corners heaped scorn on virtually any plans for the Fillmore hill that in any way portended a breach of their inalienable right to rarified peace and unobstructed passage. The neighborhood association, NOMSHYD protested Grand Prix bicycling, railed against Fleet Week Blue Angels’ overflights, thwarted X-gamey skateboarders, and now were battling city hall over some hair-brained stunt to once again snow pack the street for off-season downhill skiing. It went something like, ’We rocked in our day, but you’re blocked. ‘Not On My Shining Hill You Don’t—Pac Heights elders rule’, or die trying.
“Dear Mildy was abidingly secular. Her marriage and I came first, at least until her later years,” Paulen said, over the roar of a smoky tour bus rumbling uphill from a stutter start down at Green Street. “For my part, I’ve lately been ardently seeking to explore, learn more about the heritage she so ambivalently bequeathed me. Unfortunately, I’ve spent most of my life running away from my Jewish identity. But if I’m one of the Chosen People, I now choose to be chosen. I’m even planning my Bar Mitzvah online.”
“That all there is to becoming Jewish? Pretty amazing, all right,” I coughed amid the plumed fumes of the retread Nipponese-packed coach, must have been positively gagging the old nags several floors above us.
“Naturally, why wouldn’t it be? After all, we of the Book are such a welcoming people.”
“You’re asking me? How should I know,” I sidestepped, suddenly flashing on a seminal Bar Mitzvah way back in ’78, half wondering why else he may have gotten religion at his age. “I mean, not that I’m in any position to say…”
“Moreover, all this hate toward Jews and Israel these days only motivates me to embrace that heritage all the more. In fact, some of the things on my calendar here are to attend a fund-raiser for the new Jewish Museum in Yerba Buena Center, and a pro-Israel rally.”
The diesel smoke began to lift as we descended step by concrete step, but not the fumes. They were sooty enough to set old-timers hankering for the Fillmore Line’s streetcars that climbed this steep 24% grade from its Marina Boulevard terminus.
Alas, a groundbreaking steam/cable counterbalance system, cleanly tasking a downhill trolley to pull the Broadway-bound car uphill, was smoked out by postwar diesel buses. But strengthening breezes cast the tour buses’s gritty particulate matter eastward, clearing away a stunning panorama, Angel Island to the Golden Gate Bridge. Schools of tiny Laser sailboats raced about buoyed Bay courses, bobbing like whipped cream dablets on an icee blue sorbet. Larger yachts negotiated excursion boats and maniacal wind surfers for righteous channels and currents.
An outbound freighter handed off to a Chevron super tanker just this side of the gate, where early wisps of coastal fog were beginning to feather on in. Backgrounding it all was the haughty, naughty topaz lore of calico hillside Marin. Day-trippers paused on steps below us, where wooden plank steps once made the grade, turning breathlessly to soak in the view.
“Hey, who could blame you? I mean, under the circumstances.” It was all I could do to right a head helium-balloon dizzy with the residue of cut-rate diesel fuel. “The whole Middle East thing is so…”
“Indeed,” Paulen said, not missing a step, scanning, sizing the vista below us, yet seemingly numb to the Bayscape, as if having seen it too many times before, however long ago. “Let me tell you a little something, Heeb-ert.”
There he paused, as we encountered Fillmore’s first downhill landing. Where upwardly mobile tourists saw wide-scale beauty, I flashed on buildings collapsing out over curvate Marina streets down there like flimsy rooftop deck chairs in ‘89, the Divisadero fire blazing in the hot après-earthquake night, which only made me quaver all the more.
“No, see, the letter just got my name wrong, that’s all,” I blurted on the next downstep. “Nate never could spell worth a damn. Probably just a typo—I mean, it’s been such along time…aeons ago.”
“Of course,” the professor followed, “then perhaps I should have said, ‘I’ve something to tell you, Kikarooski…’”
“Wait, that’s not what you think it…” I really didn’t know where he was headed with all this Jewish business, but I did know he wasn’t about to let it go. “That was just a handle they hung on me in high school. Our crew all had loopy handles—it was the midwest suburbs, nobody actually knew what the word meant. Or whether there were any Jewish students there to offend, for that matter.”
“Well, I suppose a person can’t really help where he’s come from, now can he?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” W-w-wait, I shuddered. I didn’t bargain for this—wanted no part of it again, nossiree. Needed a quick change of subject, of venue. But a deal’s a deal, couldn’t afford to bail out now…
“Nature-nurture, Herbert, nature versus nurture. I could see that from your letter there. We simply are a product of where we’ve been, now aren’t we—wherever we are today., in mental sickness and in health—wheresoever that may lead…shall we?”
Care for more?
Chapter Thirteen. Further descent
into the Hollow brings sharper issues
and divisions into focus, with a view…
“Animal urges bring dire
consequences, but out of dark
thunder canyons come shards of light.”
“Her fault?”
“Totally her fault…”
“But how in blazes could they…”
“Pheromones, scent of a lesbian,” I said. “Ripped her to shreds, claimed she was to blame.”
Now then, coming off either a punchy little phone conversation or animated, time-sensitive voicemail, the professor had rejoined me at Pacific Avenue, gazing upon one painfully infamous six-story apartment building dead across Fillmore. A Moorish, faintly Art Deco fortress on the north side corner, this high-rent address was by now the closest morbid landmark Pacific Heights had to Rockingham, Dealey Plaza or New York City’s Dakota. And the continuing fascination didn’t only come from out-of-townies.
Staring back at us, shades mainly drawn, was a bit torrent of searing imagery. My mind took to racing like a particle collider, jaw clenching, teeth on edge. We watched a stocky, bearded docent lead his gawkier assemblage to that cater-corner, where the dozen or so architecture-cum-horror tourists—largely a graying, white socks and sandals bunch—encircled a bulk mailbox, gazing straight up at the beige building’s roofline.
The guide, looked to be a retired history teacher, had them in thrall as he baritone bellowed his well-rehearsed spiel—gesticulating heatedly, for morbid effect. The routine worked: As his story echoed within eavesdropping distance across the intersection; we couldn’t take our eyes off him, either.
“So ladies and gentlemen,” the docent proceeded, flaring and flailing for the dramatic. “Picture some neighborly afternoon dog walking, an after-school run…pricey corner apartment house in fashionable Pac Heights, six floors up…chance encounter, fateful collision course, beauty and the beasts with a Tarantino twist. Two-time all-American lacrosse champion, NCAA player of the year: five-foot three, 110-pound college coach with a live-in bankerette lover. Raging bull mastiffs breaking free from leashes, 112-120 pounds of Presa Canario rampaging menacingly down the top-floor halls. Sniff, snarl, sudden lightening strike: Bane of her existence, unnatural attraction, snoot up her crotch like she was a mongrel bitch in heat.
“Fear biter, highly aroused, feeding frenzy, massive haunches, sabre teeth of steel: ‘Your dog jumped me—help me, help me’…grabbed her neck in his foaming jaws—‘no, no—get off, off’…crushed her larynx, chomping nearly two inches into her vital arteries and veins…gruesome, horrific, huge gashes all over….girl next door crawling out her doorway, naked and alone, bloody hand prints all over hallway walls, collapsing in her bodily fluids in full cardiac arrest, clothing shredded like wet toilet tissue.
“Beyond mere nightmare, frantic 911 call by neighbors and strangers, Code Three emergence, nine squadrols converging on this breezy Pacific address, animal control wrestling with the killer dogs, vomiting paramedics removing the mauled-over prey—dog catchers perp walking the more bloodied, vicious Canario through a polished marble lobby under long-pole restraint. But that wasn’t the half of it.
“Right here, this pretty nutmeg edifice, vertical window cases leading up to the now notorious building ornate pilasters and spires: I now replay the bizarre images and angles which followed that chilly January afternoon. The spunky athlete as grisly victim, the odd, delusional lawyer couple bottom feeding at the public penal trough. Their back-east, rent-controlled resentment—overstayed and overplayed by tormenting this sedate, pet-loving neighborhood with these lunging, growling dogs of war. Deny, deflect…blame, blame, blame: Her lover didn’t protect her; helpless neighbors be damned, they can move; just a timorous, mousy blonde who could have saved herself by just closing her apartment door.
“Misplaced dogs, misfit lawyers digging deeper and deeper to rationalize this ‘incidental contact’ away. ‘Loving, docile’ dogs suddenly turned crazed man-eating monsters: It was a twenty-minute battle; they just wouldn’t stop, maintained the paramedic-trained wife who apparently spent the victim’s crucial final minutes missing in action, searching for her own housekeys.
“The stone-cold husband dropping that pheromone bomb, dismissing any notion that he knew those fighting monster dogs were dangerous in any way. ‘Just behaviorally neglected and psychologically abused on arrival, they’d become like kids to us—simply playful, real sweethearts, certified licking specialist machines’—never mind blurring the boundaries between humans and canines.
“Then came still another family unit, cornfed bestiality, a triangle of death reaching to the solitary cellblocks of dreaded Pelican Bay. Project Adoptacon involved bonding with the body and mind of no less than the most dangerous inmate in California, assuming parent-child relations with a thirtysomething prison gang boss—all rights of inheritance and intestate succession with a white supremacist lifer bent on breeding these Mastiffs as meth lab guard dogs for the Mexican mafia—nothing but child’s play. Seemed, however, that what the fun couple really wanted was to adopt the guy. Hence the Frenchy love letters, the medieval dominatrix décolletage photos, whispers of full-frontal peep shows during Pelican’s visiting hours.
“Specious filth, the defense counsel claimed, as the manslaughter trial ensued, nothing but a tawdry little flag. The re-venued L.A. courtroom was crawling with lawyers, the unrepentant couple reduced to separate tables and matching jumpsuits of jailhouse orange.
Berserk crazy dogs, nothing more: Was she callous, indifferent, criminally negligent for losing control of them, then doing too little, too late to prevent the gore, with conscious disregard for human life? ‘Nonsense, she struggled heroically against her canine kids,’ cried her mouthpiece, crawling like a simulated rat terrier across the courtroom floor.
“Was he devious and archly contemptuous? Pul-eeze, he wasn’t anywhere near the alleged crime scene at the time. Indeed, this entire sham trial was just San Francisco’s DA carrying political water for the homosexual crowd. Playing the gay card, motion to dismiss for cause: So went the venue change, the juiciest Tinsel town-style show trial since Mark Fuhrman and the Simpsons. Witnesses were intimidated, prosecutors were threatened—even the defendants split at the matrimonial seams. Guilty, guilty, guilty. He sat stoically through an involuntary manslaughter verdict. His high royal mistress, that once fleshy seductress in black corset and opera gloves, collapsed in the face of murder two, sobbing toward her parents, ‘help me, help me, help me’. Each got four big ones, joining their kindred ‘son’, albeit in separate facilities, The Bane-ster already needled off Animal Control’s death row.
“Word had it, this was San Francisco’s first recorded human death by dogs; their defiant lawyer/keepers had become The City’s most despised couple. Lawyer pere was last seen playing dominos with some three-strikes transvestites and a convicted pedophile priest. Their model Nordic son was placed ‘in the hat’ by gang cronies for bringing the white snitchin’ heat of publicity to their cellblock enterprise. Hera, that furry queen of the gods, ultimately joined her Presa gladiator via the big put-down in the sky, her descendent litter grand-pups selling like Third Reich memorabilia on E-Bay.
“The vic’s same-sex partner filed a wrongful death civil suit; the prosecutors became mayoralty and media darlings. As for the lawyer mere, she had shrunk from vamping neo-Nazi dog moll to drab, scowling co-defendant, to needy sob sister in wheelchair and neck brace as her appeals continue to twist and turn through judicia—somewhat the timorous, mousy little brunette—reinstated murder rap still hanging over her shrinking head, along with an unappealing 15-to-life. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of what happened in the gorgeous horror den that lay before you. Next stop, bawdy house to the stars…”
Whew, what an earful, rightly spun: it was San Francisco’s dog mauling tale of the decade, a bloody tabloid dream. Or so I told Paulen, watching the tour group move on downblock toward Madame Sally Stanford’s lusty old mansion of ill repute. “Point is, newspapers had the lawyer guy somewhere between 58-59 at the time,” I continued, as we turneed to cross over Fillmore toward that handsome twill-tan building with the white Arabesque-style frescoes and mace-like spires, now haunted by the whole grisly affair.
As if that dog mauling spiel wasn’t rattling enough, we nearly got clipped by a flat-black Chevy four-door gunning for a right turn down Pacific Avenue, full iron bumper guards, swivel twin spots, cluster of tiny antennae on its trunk lid. The sedan’s grill lights flashed red as its tail lights, two front seaters popping a little friendly beep as they blew through the white stripes ahead of us the moment we paused. They looked to be the duo who had been sucking down double Macchiatos in MeccaJava. Their move flustered the hell out of me, all right—like a hard slap in the brain pan with a sock full of slugs. But Paulen seemed shrug it off, perhaps way past mindful of San Francisco’s yield-to-pedestrian laws.
“Wouldn’t you know, the press also played up the Jewish angle quite prominently,” Paulen replied, in passing the building’s garage bays, opening and closing like game show trap doors, lots of prized imports inside. “Wouldn’t you know. Nice girl from Brooklyn under fire and a microscope—Holocaust survivors in the family. Talk about relevance—media just had to highlight all that, didn’t they. And not necessarily in the empathic sense.”
“Dunno what that has to do with it, but…” Again, already—why’d he keep looking through that prism? Otherwise, I wondered which stall held the lawyers’s semi-classic motorcar vengeful neighbors had keyed and trashed. “Think it was her lawyer who brought that up, actually. Although I must say her attraction to the Aryan Brotherhood did seem a little…bizarre—I mean, for a middle-aged woman…”
“Perhaps she was some of your Saturnian damage,” the professor said dryly. “But her husband still has to live with it, too…”
“Hmph, a lot he bloody cares. He got off way easy with an early parole. And even though they both lost their law licenses, she’s headed back for a second-degree murder rap to this day.” I guess it wasn’t so much the Semitic, the gay baiting, or even the species vs. species nature of this story that made me queasy as the underlying triangularity of it all: a presumably committed domestic relationship abruptly going to the dogs.
“Well, who knows where a person’s demons might reside?”
“Roger that,” I said, over the rumble of re-routed traffic up Fillmore. Between the buses and horny taxis, a tricked-out metallic lime Escalade slow rolled along, crankin’ deafening Jay-Z through its twelve-speaker Bose set-up. Homeboy in velour loungewear jammin’ his steering wheel to the sound, the Caddy EXT’s gold spinners whirring counter clock-wise—snuff on tapes, pump ’n’ run—a Rottweiler doggin’ shotgun, its black leather muzzled snout growling out the SUV’s aqua-blue tinted side window. “But then you’ve had your own scandal and spectacle in Boulder, right?”
“Me? What on earth do you mean by that?
“Whoa, nothing, I’m just talking about the neverending JonBenet Ramsey thing.” Sensing an opening, seeing some daylight, I snapped to, kneading my aching back—digression being the better part of candor.
“Yes, so what about?,” Paulen replied, even as the Escalade torqued up his latest Kanye West, which reverberated in this canyon between two multi-story apartment houses, with their subtle exterior variations on permutations of tan on tan.
“I was thinking about the similarities…”
“Similarities? Look, two freakish, untimely deaths, inexplicably bizarre circumstances, that’s all. What’s your point?”
Tsk, these…people, this traffic: as if the infernal jazz music circus weren’t bad enough, now came all this outré debris. Residents of these lofty apartments got rent gouged for the privilege and express purpose of remaining comfortably above such street-level refuse, critically observing it from the safety, sanity of their pricey middle-aged spreads. Hush! This was Pacific Heights, after all, not Seamy Valley.
The august, right proper tenants—predominantly cognac-sipping coupon clippers—sneering down from those windows most assuredly couldn’t, and shouldn’t have been bothered so. Not when there were retrospectives to open, a symphony series and chardonnay—oh, that gorgeous MTT—at which to be seen. When there were so many Blums, Swigs, Haases and Gettys to keep up with in the Nob Hill Gazette. Soiree cards to covet from Danielle Steele and the Trianas at their old Spreckel’s mansion, those ballet-box tickets to beg, borrow or steal, that invitation to wheedle for the Lake Tahoe workshop weekend up on the North Shore. Rully, keep it down, would you please…and put on some proper apparel.
“What I meant was, you know, tiny blonde victims, slain at the throat,” I said, as we pressed further up Fillmore Street, in the seven-story shadows of a chalky white apartment house. Then, of all things, a vintage Volkswagen Squareback chugged past, carrying me back momentarily to Chautauqua Park dog runs and the lonely open road. “Parental figures as vilified suspects, flower vigils for the vics, all the satellite TV trucks…”
“Boulderdash, utterly preposterous,” Paulen dismissed. “Next you’ll be positing that this is all Saturn’s doing. Good god, man, where’s your reviewable evidence of that? Forget the correlational hooey, show me some valid causal data.”
“Evidence? You’re looking at it, and who knows where all Saturn’s demons might actually reside?”
“Or what they may hide,” he nudged, “as the case may be…”
With upper Fillmore Street having crested at Pacific Avenue, it was all downhill from here. The shadow canyon gave way in short order to a broad blue expanse, opening fully across Broadway to San Francisco Bay and beyond—Belvedere’s condo-laced hills backdropping sailboat-clustered straits and channels, commandeering the horizon from sea to Berkeley, to where it looked like we could reach down and touch the water.
The sudden splendor of it all was numbing in scope, at least until some overaged, undersexed hack job turned left, Broadway down Fillmore, trolling in his Viagra-blue Turbo Porsche for stray JazzStreet snatch somewhere about his likely estranged daughter’s age, scoring his gym-buffed exploits with full-cockpit surround sound Eminem, heavy on the sub-woofer and power chords. We could but share a thin, rather dodgy chagrin.
“Anyway, I saw where a new investigation back there has some fresh leads on the ‘intruder theory’,” I stoked, noticing a bit of a pick-up of the on-shore breezes as we closed in on the Broadway intersection. “So, who do you think did JonBenet in, ‘umbrella of suspicion’ and all that…”
“Who in fact knows anymore,” Paulen shrugged, soaking in the emergent view, where Fillmore Street appeared to be tipping forward chin-first into the Bay, cars vanishing down over the hilltop before the Marina began to largely reveal itself, shoreline on inward. “We Boulderites are just glad the media zoo is mostly over, wishing foothill winds would just blow the whole tawdry episode back to Dixie where it came from. I for one have certainly washed my hands of it.”
“They still doing candlelight vigils at the Ramsey house every December?” That cumulative pounding music only re-triggered my latent tinnitus, flapping pinnas, rattling temporal bones, banging the tympanums clear to uncoiling my cochlears, penetrating vestibular canals and Eustachian tubes deeply enough to rattle my middle brain auditory cortex. Namely, earaches to the beat.
“Sure, and probably will continue until the case is finally solved, I’m afraid, whoever the killer may actually turn out to be,” the professor said tersely. “But enough. So, are you interested in partaking more music back there, or…”
“Actually, the jazz festival is happening all over town.” I covered my ears, as if an ICU-bound ambulance were screaming by. “In fact, I think there’s some sort of ’Trane Reaction thing at the Palace of Fine Arts downhill there.”
“Coltrane? Sounds like a splendid plan to me,” he beamed, “let’s do it…”
“Us? No, why don’t you just go ahead,” I panned down over Cow Hollow and the Marina, my virtual vertigo seemed to be setting in again, along with a dutiful ambivalence, while bracing like a high hurdler for an out. “Really, I’ve got a lot on my platter these days, 24/7/365…”
“Nonsense, Herbert,” Paulen said, steadying against the afternoon gusts sweeping up Broadway hill, hooking my arm. “The weather certainly seems cooperative…I insist you join me…for old time’s sake.”
“Right…” Bluff uncalled, I followed on along, against my judgment, better or worse—as if I was at war with myself all over again. Only this time any remaining symmetry felt way long gone. I checked my cheapo digital watch, then looked up and down that last ten-story condo tower just across Broadway, the oyster white one with the wide-screen panoramic view. “Guess it would be good to get away from all the high-rise jamble for a brief bit.”
“Careful, this neighborhood is home turf. Mother’s had a two-bedroom co-op several blocks away from here for years.”
So, like, totally impressed by that Nakamichi throbbing Porsche roadster—that boy-toy cruising machine in midlife crisis mode—were a giggle of Catholic schoolgirls huddled at the street corner. We gained warily on these teeny angels, filling out nicely in their uniform gray skirts and burgundy sweaters, feisty after an extracurricular prep assembly over at the Convent School. They ostensibly were letterbox gaming the block for planted Scavenger clues—but by all appearances seemed keener on searching nearby stunted trees and bushes for the cigarettes and nose candy they had been stashing away. If they weren’t smoking, toking or tabbing, these little latchkey ingenues were now busy comparing navel piercings and hidden thigh-high tattoos. I couldn’t help but notice; the professor could barely turn away.
“I see a lot of that in Boulder, too, especially on the buckskin fringes of the Hill and Pearl Street Mall,” he mused, “junior Olympic flame-outs, abdicated little snow queens, ex-yoga/granola bad girls rebelling against their hippie parents—all crazy enough already without the 4/20 drugs bringing out even weirder sides in them.”
“Yeah, who knows what that stuff can make a body think they can get away with…”
“In a manner of speaking—say, what have we here,” he abruptly diverted, pausing at a portion of the corner sidewalk catching his eye.
“Memorial…I first spotted it about a week after the crash.” A full concrete square outside this beige near-corner 12-flat building had been perma-painted in red, white and blue. No mere guerilla graffiti, its inscription read, ‘Dearest Regina, love forever—United Flight 93’.
“How touching, indeed…you know, no Jews died in the World Trade Center or anywhere on 9/11,” Paulen sniffed, staring intently at the sidewalk as the jailbait snickered off for some underage coffee. “Yessir, they were all pre-warned by Mossad, the proverbial fix was in—just ask Al Jazeera.”
“Huh? Well, I wouldn’t know anything about…” Now what’s up with that? I snatched a spindled jazz festival program left atop a corner mail drop. We followed the amber traffic stripes across Broadway, as Saturn’s blimp drafted further westward toward the Golden Gate.
“At least that’s what some people would have you believe. Is that your thinking, Herbert?”
“No, uh, really haven’t paid much attention…” Jesus, how should I know…why are you asking me? Just more subterfuge, pressing, prodding me, getting me to guessing—catching me off guard—gotta step up my game. But hey, whose Q&A was this, anyway? Who was the canvasser and who was the subject…really, who the hell was the hammer here, and who was the nail?! “Must be some sort of urban myth…”
“More like urban mythtake, wouldn’t you say? Bane, indeed.”
“Tell you the truth, I don’t know what to say.” I raised my elbow to finger flick a dust spec out of my eye, what with the stiffening onshore winds. That’s when the newspaper slipped from my under arm and grasp, dropping like a 49er fumble with goal to go.
Care for more?
Chapter Twelve. A spilling of the ink
prompts some backlash and backfilling,
then revelations that run deeper still…
“In matters of faith,
Saturn transcends friends,
foes, denominations or families.”
“Get a damn room, why don’t you?”
“And make it a clean room…a silicon clean room.”
“Silicone? My Zoe here? Get real, padre, feel free…”
“God help you, son…”
“Forget it, pops—you gotsta help yourself.”
No time for hostile wallbangers. No time for harridan harangues back at the house. Not yet, not now, since first there was this scrum going on…
We had lingered at StreetJazz’s barricades a mite longer, soaking in the aroma of eggplant pasta and coffee lattes wafting uphill, the cumulative block after block of sheer volume and colorful variety, the whole long white-capped spectacle stretching from here down Fillmore to Ellis Street. Stormy had since been hitting the bottle, RCane gaining its youthful stride, dancing crowds gathering along fake shrubbery on either side, to where even Tally’s aging sippers had been drawn out, clapping and tapping their walking stick in 4/3 time.
Finally crossing Jackson Street under a thatch of trolley switches and wires, I steered a still somewhat ponderous professor away from a new clamor of political ironing boards out front of Granos Corner Grocery across the way. There, dogged and defensive Democrats Hoping for Obama scavenged for signatures and counter shouted ‘Yes We Can’ at hopelessly outnumbered Republican operatives, lackeys spewing the latest Rush-O’Reilly line. Instead, we’d doubled back to the west side of Fillmore, where foot traffic had thinned considerably, leading us to this exchange between two elder Calvary docents, and a hot ’n’ heavy young couplet all over one another on the church’s august front stairs.
Before long a church elder, ushered between two warning, wide-eyed rent-a-security guards, answered Paulen’s interfaith inquiry in passing, noting that Calvary had always welcomed all comers, and simply offered forth its transept and nave because Congregation Beth Zahav’s equally majestic temple was closed for seismic retrofits. Nothing new, the deacon explained, as Calvary Presbyterian had done the same for Temple Emanu-El in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake some hundred years before.
“That’s con…silicon,” spouted a nearby deacon as he approached the en fuego apostate duo, wagging his clerical index finger, shaking in his black ministerial collar and threads. “As in con-gregation…our congregation.”
“Yes,” a brown-suited lay usher added, an octogenarian pipe organist nodding at his side, “this is a house of worship, for godsakes!”
“So I worship Zoe, OK,” the young man said. Part Goth, part grunge, part give-it-all-up, he and his current ‘friend’ resumed their consecration between Calvary’s towering right-side granite columns, under a lotus blossom-like rendering of scriptural stained glass arching high above.
Spindly, nail file-thin, he wore too small, too dark denim and a motley vest sweater and scruffy Skechers bowling shoes, nearly the same shades of color as his spiky yellow-orange hair. Beneath him, his hook-up, Zoe was similarly on the darker, although plumper side, bright-striped knee socks and black sneakers worn through and through. Her charcoal smoky-eyed mascara and plasma blush highlighted unchained piercing about her tatted neck and cranial cavities, right up to that navy-gray banded knit cap pulled down just over her ears.
“May God be with you,” said the deacon, piously turning away, back up into Calvary’s sanctuary. The church’s massive oaken doors remained wide open, revealing intricate, polished pews, woodwork and balcony supports delivered from its original location: the now St. Francis Hotel site on Union Square—back when the grand Edwardian-style masonry edifice before us opened in 1901.
“Yes, easy there, son,” Reese Paulen sternly cautioned, over the thunder of Calvary’s pipe organ, which was shaking stained glass windows depicting Old and New Testament stories all around the cathedral. “How about a modicum of respect?”
“Get over it, pops…” Late twentyish, attitudinally bearded, the guy winked at the blushing usher, then shot a stank eye Paulen’s way. “I’m tellin’ ya, God helps those who help themselves. So I don’t owe your sceevin’ ass zilch…”
“Bingo,” I mumbled under my breath. Help…themselves: well, wasn’t that a moldy oldie from a long-latent temblor, one prime for some renewed seismic activity. Every side-eyed glance over at Granos Grocery and that cultish little trattoria next door made me dizzier and queasier, particularly during replays of the Greek-turned-Jordanian corner market remaining open that long Loma Prieta night when no one else dared.
Jamel over there had dutifully lit his store aisles with camping lanterns until all dreadfully dark hours, selling out his bins and shelves without gouging one penny over everyday prices. He had cornered the market on neighborhood gratitude that aftershocking night in 1989, as evidenced to this very moment by that fave trattoria’s lengthy wait-liners ducking in and out of the grocery for tide-over munchies.
But all this earthquake revisitation just got me thinking real fuzzy, feeling a bit dizzy with the complexities, the contradictions, the infernal counterintuitions, as sludgy blood and glucose flood my brainpan, besot the prefrontals, drilling down on any normal functioning of my brainstem, raising jim-jam hell with regular reticulary formation—axon and dendrite spines fixing to glow. By this time, I could visualize it like the bright thermal colorations of a PET scan. Whoa, then again, better perhaps to project this disorienting surge onto the next best social scientist at hand. “You all right, doc? Having little problem with…?”
“Me? Cum si, cum sa—small world, just a little…local blowback. But of course I’m all right,” Paulen muttered, glancing back at the feisty couple as Calvary’s portly usher summoned a cycle cop to help swat them both away. “What was that you said about bingo?”
“Down there, in Calvary’s basement,” I pointed, when actually I was thinking more along the lines of paydirt. “Sign says they’re running a charity bingo parlor event tomorrow night…”
In retreat, Zoe spun like Mary Poppin’s darker self around one of the church’s antiquated tri-globe street light, blowing kisses to the arching, Gothic columned facade as her boyfriend flipped off the Presbyterians, the patrolman—even the professor. She, by appearances old enough to know better, flipped off Paulen and me as well.
“Uh-huh—well I’m simply re—acclimating,” he sighed, visibly shaken as Zoe then bent over to spread her cheeks his way. “I suppose everything slows down a trifle when a body hits 58 or so.”
“58, huh?” Let’s see, I did a quick bit of ciphering as I nudged him away up street: Two times 29, carry the one—no, two goes into 58—two into five, twice, bring down the eight, two into…aww, hell, however I mangled the numbers, it all came up stupefyingly clear. “So that’s it…”
“Turned 58 a while back, actually. So what’s it?” Paulen looked away, shaking his head in dismay. He locked on that red dirigible again, now hovering high over Pacific Avenue, gliding slowly north and west. “And what is with that blasted blimp up there?”
“No ordinary blimp, doc.,” I steadied, “that’s the Saturn airship lording over us now, just like the planet itself is been lording over you now.”
“Saturn, quite the car, Colorado’s loaded with them. Or the NASA Hubble/Casini project…you know they have their telescope site right up in Boulder’s hills. But what’s that got…”
“Just ask George Harrison, Andy Warhol, Tim Russert, H. Rap Brown, Senator Paul Wellstone—the Zodiac killer guy, just to name a few,” I spewed, tracking the dirigible’s every tack and downturn. “One way or another, Saturn can do that to a person, I’ve been scuffling through it again myself of late, hanging on for dear life, hoping I can come out the other side in one piece.
__________________________________________
KNOW MORE/KNOW LESS: revisit, the Saturn Return “Session” or simply read on…
_______________________________________
Spacious sidewalk notwithstanding, unknown, seemingly lonely women darted aggressively toward us, smiling oddly as they stepped directly into our paths—shaking my equilibrium all over again. On Fillmore itself, diverted traffic quickened near Pacific Avenue, re-routed trolley buses zapped and crackled along their overhead wires—making up for fares and time lost to StreetJazz’s long-play disruption.
Paulen and I continued pensively beyond Calvary’s adjacent education center, its sleek, beige concrete linearity contrasting smartly with the multi-floor, white-to-tanner shade of the neighborhood’s boxy bay windows, alongside condo buildings’ matching ladder-and-landing fire escapes, chock full of potted planters and shrubs.
By mid block, we were rendered speechless even more: a first glimpse of the vast open sky beyond Broadway, as if civilization and urbanity dropped off right then and there, the Bay and Marin hills beginning to reveal themselves. That’s about where the airship was now headed, slicing over apartment towers and backed-up traffic—slowly, deliberately, like felony manslaughter on further appeal.
“Yessir, Saturn Return—I saw where there’s even gonna be a big New York play about it and everything,” I said, steeling myself anew. Then I started hearing sirens, sounded like up the block a ways toward Van Ness Avenue. Must have been ambient ambulance, racing to PMC Hospital emergency—no, shit there’s another one, with a rumbling pumper diesel roar, echoing through crowded hi-rise Pac Heights. Premonition, post-mortem: good God, it couldn’t have been there, could it? I scanned the eastward sky for billowing black smoke. No, she couldn’t have, not again, forgetting her cache of psycho meds. Just like her, getting EMT’d for another hypo coronary or half-brained stroke on the upper floors…
“At any rate, nice Vickys,” Paulen said, shifting course. Coming up to Pacific Avenue, he pointed me toward a triad of last-stand stick Victorian houses—light blue to gray to understated gravel tan—all trimmed in cupcake crème, highlighted in the most appropriate richer shades. “Look better than I remember them to be.”
“That corner spread there, the one with the city flag and Tri-Color up its pole,” I noted, over the smoky racket of a substitute diesel shuttle bus. “Ex-Mayor Frank Jordan’s place.”
“So why is he the ‘ex’,” the professor asked, stuffing his new magazines into his attaché.
“Oh, you never heard about the mayor’s infamous shower scene?” Cue taken, I crammed my folded newspaper more tightly under my right arm, flashing back on how Jordan was a true reactionary republicrat, the closest San Francisco politics came to right-of-center since Supervisor Dan White—until his notorious ‘Showergate’ interview fiasco brought the former police chief low.
“Yeah, he invited a couple of radio jocks into the stall with him to hold a press conference in the nude. Instant laughingstock, political suicide—Willie Brown ridiculed the hell out of him, The City laughed him off the stage…”
“Yet he appears to have arisen reasonably well from the ruins,” Paulen ran his hand lightly over the spear tips of Jordan’s iron-gated digs.
“Helps to have a financier wife, a choice filantrop banker who’s really connected and sees to it the ‘Mayor De-elect’ lands junkets to the hilt.”
“But of course,” Paulen admired the corner Victorian’s gilded gingerbread. “After all, that’s what such sugar mommas are for.”
“Gotcha…anyway, not bad for a calcified ol’ Irish cop. If only Dan White had been so lucky back in the day.”
“Yes, for want of a Lifesaver…so what are you saying? That Jordan was 58 when his shower scene hit?”
“Close enough,” I said, as we passed beneath a lone scraggly overhang of Monterey Pine. “Maybe he was collateral Returnage, could have been the radio guys’s first rendezvous, for all I know.”
What I did know, however, was I heard more wah-wah sirens. Wait, what if that was a sidewheeling hook ’n’ ladder, flashing full-blown yellow and red? Could just picture her nodding off to burning incense and candlelight in her pitch-black curtained room, torching the ’ol place, once and for all. Reflective turn-outs storming the blaze, running hoses, slinging axes, ladders soaring four stories high into scorching flame-overs. Rolling out caution tape by the roll, barking orders over squawking radios, the thrum of idling diesels. Naw, snap to, dodo—must have been a false alarm, another case of your Pavlovian panic and paranoia. Really, that had to be another place, another time, if not a whole other story…
“Bit of a stretch…you make it sound as though everybody’s in Saturn’s crosshairs. Honestly, are you proselytizing, or just confessing something here,” Paulen probed, in lock step. “Besides, it all seems to be so anecdotal, where is the science in that?”
“Proselytizing, who me? It’s only that I used to think the same way. Just dig into it, you’ll be intrigued by what you discover,” I glanced up at a Maypo-colored apartment building over across Pacific Avenue—fortress looking, with tall gothic spires, where a small crowd gathered on the far corner. “By the same token, there is at least one notorious second Saturn act I haven’t mentioned, doc…doc…”
But by then, Paulen was once again tapping into his earphone, circling back down Fillmore Street several steps, apparently to raise his bars.
Care for more?
Chapter Eleven. Be it one,
two or three times over, Saturn
seems to dog them all along…
“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…