Letter #3
Is change your only constant?
Dear San Francisco,
Is change your only constant?
Actually, another Heraclitus quote – less celebrated over the millennia than the one above – fits you better: “Everything moves.” Heraclitus got flux.
What? No, I don’t think I got flux … not before you and I got close, anyway. I came to you circuitously, remember? Six years into California – four cloistered on a country club campus, two stuck in the bowels of the Peninsula’s all-night diners and donut shops, a booth over from the down-and-out sleeping it off – I was still an east coast kid: too stifled and rigid.
I was slow to come around. Slow to get to know you. San Francisco before the summer of 1995 to me? A quirky, chilly place. You kept me at arm’s length the few times I came. And that was OK. We didn’t click at first. Until I moved in with you, I was more agitated than agitator, less revolutionary than resentful. I wasn’t a rebel; I just wanted a job, desperate to soothe a trunkful of middle-class anxieties – about money, security, a spot in the sorting – that took decades to shed. After our first summer together, I thought you’d help me do it. And maybe you did. For a while. Before you pulled the rug.
Hey, you know what really hooked me that summer? The Haight after Jerry Garcia died. Now, I was no Deadhead. But in August of ’95, the Haight was transformed, and I was transfixed. Swept through a frenzied weekend. Launched on a weeks-long funeral, wake, and memorial: tear-stained, tie-dyed, celebratory. Whole families – with pets! – descended. Remember how many pitched tents on the street? Ben and Jerry’s stayed open 24-7 … or do I just think it did? Anyway, I’d never witnessed such a shared, public outpouring of grief and joy.
The best part? Though an outsider, I was welcome to come eat, drink, dance, smoke, and toke. Or just be. Either way, welcome to join. You grabbed me and held me.
That summer, I haunted the Castro and the Haight. In situ in the Cove; struggling up Seventeenth; winding my way around Buena Vista; browsing Bound Together … I felt like I belonged, surrendering to the soft, creeping flush that arises when loitering leads to love. Oh, and drinking in your bars. There’s a constant: San Francisco’s drinking class – at its best, cutting beautifully and savagely across demographics. Hard to beat a quiet cocktail in a Castro bar full of singles and couples. Or draining beers and airing gripes with the world’s last TV repairman (double-parked out front), a grandmother (plastic grocery bags underfoot) from the block, and an underage bike messenger (delivering God-knows-what to Haight & Stanyan) inked enough to add a pound to his rail-thin frame.
Unblended or stirred, your contradictions were intoxicating.
I think those things have changed – your contradictions and your invitation to join – and not for the better. The atomization within your 47 sq miles bears a dispiriting resemblance to countless other cities cleaved into pods – by race, class, and income. Never thought you’d become one. Why did you?
Two sides of the same intersection last week:
Maybe back in ‘95 I didn’t get that money always lurked behind it all, backstopping the carefree chaos, bankrolling the bash. Those who had money, dancing around a dying bonfire with those who didn’t, poised to destroy what we’d all come to love about you. You opened your arms wider and wider to the business class, to wholesale redevelopment, to …. To money. And the thing about money? Don’t act like you don’t know! It’s a divider, a wrecking ball, a semi with no brakes; and then comes stasis; and then—
—OK, too dramatic. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a Gen X-er. So, no illusions we all join hands singing Kumbaya. Or, if we do, that the music keeps playing. But it felt like it could have. Not anymore, though, right? And we haven’t even talked about tech yet. But we will.
More later ….