Aesthetics

Time zones do horrible things to my body, even a few.  Whiskey and fatigue and the drone of the flat screen t.v. put me to sleep around nine.  Twelve my time.  I hadn't bothered to wash, brush my teeth.  Woke to a gray San Francisco morning.  Looked out the window at the waking streets.  Saturday.  I remembered the broken fender.

I put on my clothes and went to the lobby's Starbucks for the largest coffee and a butter croissant.  How can they charge this, I wondered, knowing it was cheaper than the twelve dollar three-cup coffee that room service would provide.  All around stood sleepy people, some ready to head out for the day.  Back in my room I read the news, responded to some email, wrote about the trip so far.

"I am in no hurry," I told myself.  "I will take my time.  This is a vacation."  And slowly I dressed and found the hotel gym.  It was full of the dutiful and three pretty young girls running on treadmills with the waistbands of their shorts rolled up high enough to barely show the bottom of their round cheeks as they ran.  Oh, my.  I will not quit looking, I feared, and someone will call the police.  Filled with nervous energy, I worked out harder than I'd planned, and within moments had done something awful to the middle of my back.  Shit, fuck, goddamn.  O.K. O.K.  Maybe it wasn't so bad.  Take it easy, I told myself feeling the muscles around my tenth vertebra begin to contract.  I looked over at the girl's behinds.  As always, there was one we could call the Queen.  She was perfect in every way.  I hobbled over to another machine trying to stand straight, gut in, chest out.  A fellow my own age suddenly spoke to me:

"It's a great way to start the day, eh?"  

I didn't know if he was talking about working out or the other thing.

"Beats working," I said.

Quit it, I told myself, quit it.  But the room was small and there were mirrors everywhere.  I would have to close my eyes not to see her at least in reflection and my eyes were no longer connected to my brain, they now having taken on a life of their own.  Meanwhile, a girl speaking French to her boyfriend kept looking at me.  She was pretty and normally I would have been looking back, but. . . .  It went on like that for another twenty minutes.  Finally, exhausted not from the physical exertion but from the emotional torment, I was done.  I liked this gym, I told myself.  I will work out every day.

I decided that I would walk across the island to Fisherman's Wharf.  I needed to begin to get my legs ready for Yosemite.  Up Powell to Columbus, then cutting across to the water.  At Bay Street I turned uphill to find the Patagonia store.  I had not packed right.  I needed some things.  But Patagonia was not on Bay.  I make that mistake every time, walking up that big hill only then to go down one street that is not so steep.  It is O.K.  It is good for me.

Then down to the water to bump around with tourists, out to the boat museum on the docks, then back to the little bay the swimming club uses lined with small buoys and floats.  I once dreamed water, dreamed of seas.  In high school, I saved my money and bought scuba equipment.  I made deep water decompression dives into strange limestone caves, dove in the blue-green waters of island reefs, saw sharks and barracuda and eels and grouper.  Later, after college, I bought a sailboat and was a sailor, lying in the cockpit at night reading by lantern light, dreaming of single-handed voyages around the globe.  Later still, I raced sailboats in competition on the same boat with an Olympic champion winning the Lipton Cup Series for our class.  I was a champion.  Traveling in New England, I would make diversions to famous wooden boat yards just to see the beauty of the thing.

But now, standing on the docks and looking at the water and the ships, I had only a passing interest.  No, I would not like to crawl into one of those again, not alone or as a crew.  The damp and the cold held no attraction for me now.  Looking at the images of old sailors in their wool caps carrying their belongings slung over their back in a gunny sack--well, they were tougher than I am now.  It would take more rum than I need.  I would not like to be Shanghaied.

Moving away from the water, I spied a restaurant that promised "Award Winning Crab and Corn Chowder." Award winning.  How could I go wrong.

It was a cafe and I sat outside.  It felt good to sit after walking so long, and now I wanted some wine.  Wine and sour dough bread from San Francisco and a bowl of Award Winning chowder.  I looked around at the other tables.  Families.  Couples.  Groups.  Again, I felt the difference.  I'd traveled alone all my life.  I'd hitchhiked across the country for months after college.  I'd traveled on my own in the Amazon jungles with only native guides.  I've been in the mountains alone for weeks at a time.  But now I was becoming melancholy with it.  I thought of Sir Richard Burton after Africa, marrying and taking a post as a minor official in South America, becoming quiet, his career directed by his wife.

Now it was afternoon, and I was across town from the S.F. MoMA, so I decided to take a bus back in order to see the Steins exhibit in time.  As I boarded, I read the sign: Exact Change Only.  I looked at the woman driving the bus, big bills in my hand.

"I don't have correct change," I said meekly.

"O.K.  Get on," she said.

I almost said "Gracias," but she was not hispanic and it made no sense.  "Thank you," I said.

In a few stops, the bus was filled with Chinese.  The smell of garlic and other to me exotic spices filled the small space.  Many were sick, crippled, suffering from some malady, taking herbs and drinking special soups as bromide against their ills.  I wonder why some Americans are so taken with Chinese medicine.  It doesn't seem to work.  Maybe it is all the ancient symbols, the muted colors of the packaging, the mystery of it all.  But what I know is in both China and Chinatown, people limp and cough and spit up sputum by the bucketful.  I can't see any evidence of health.

But maybe they live to be a hundred.

The MoMa is packed and tickets are sold in hour blocks.  When I get to the window, though, the woman says, "Maybe I can get you in now.  Wait.  Let me see."  I am wondering at this when she says, "Yes, here, you can go in now."  I smile and hand her the money.  I am either lucky or cursed, I tell myself.  There never seems to be any in between.

The Steins--the entire family--collected art from the early 20th century on.  For a family of limited means, it has to be the most impressive collection every assembled.  The show was remarkable for that, just to see the amazing numbers of Renoirs and Cezannes and Mattises and Picassos not to mention a prescient collection of others, too.  The rooms of the museum were filled with paintings and drawings and lithographs and furniture.  Even the furniture that filled their rooms in Paris was grand.  That is what we envy, that--an aesthetic existence, a decorated life.

After viewing the show, my body worn from walking and standing all day, having moved through the other four floors of the museum to look at the collected art from the 20th and 21st centuries, I could only think of the museum cafe.  I love museum cafes.  I love the museum crowds.  I bought a beer and took a table near the back so I could view the room.  Beside me sat a table full of men, articulate, handsome, sophisticated.  They spoke warmly to one another of art and culture.  In front of me were two couples.  I could not stand them and wondered why they were here.  The men were obviously men of business talking too loudly and moving about too aggressively like fraternity boys posturing for one another, big watches and freshly cropped hair.  The women mimicked them in a "feminine" way, speaking assuredly, they too well coifed and well dressed.

Then I saw her across the way.  She wore a beautiful contemporary hat styled from the twenties and a soft jersey top with horizontal stripes and had dark hair cut just above her shoulders.  When she smiled it was as if Eve had never been punished for eating the apple, as if she only found reward.  She owned a profound and intellectual countenance, her face devoid of sin or guilt, without awareness of any of the deadly sins.  The  man she was with was taking her photograph.  It was what I wanted to do.  Just one, I thought I would plead, but they would never understand.  If I had a giant lens. . . .  I sat and watched her through the movements of the two couples in front of me blocking my view as they talked their bullish nonsense.  In flashes I could see her smile when she spoke, her mouth, her eyes, even her shoulders and hands.  She was the sum total of the Steins collection, a perfect vision of a profound aesthetic beauty.

I walked by her table on my way out.  She didn't look up.

Back to my room for the whiskey I told myself I deserved.  A lone whiskey in a lone room.  It was quite enough.

I decided to go across town to the Castro district for dinner.  The friend I am staying with in Yosemite loved the area around Delores Park.  I met him there at a cafe one trip sitting outside in the sunlight waiting.  He was staying with a friend in the neighborhood, sleeping in his V.W. camper.  I met him there a number of times, he taking me to wonderful working class restaurants where the food was cheap and good.  And I had a yearning to drink tea at Samovar once again where I had once had a thousand year old green tea.  And so a quick Muni ride put me in the heart of it.  The Castro district was once known for its gay culture, and that is still there, but so is everything else.  Times have changed.  I walked the blocks past Delores Park, down the hill to Sanchez, down further to Valencia.  I saw a small Mexican restaurant.  Just right for tonight.  Pork shoulder with black beans and sangria.  I watched a woman making tortillas with a press like the one my girlfriend and I had in college, mixing the masa harina and water and placing little balls on wax paper in the round metal jaws, pushing the handle down flattening it, then tossing it onto the hot grill.  Over and over and over.  She looked at me and smiled.  The food came and was perfect, big chunks of meat, the beans without grease, the tortillas tasting like fresh corn.  And more sangria with little pieces of fruit in the bottom.  Happy, I wandered back.  I was thinking about an ice cream shop I had passed on the way to the restaurant.  The line went 'round the block.  I would stop.  I wanted to see why.

The line was still there.  It was a permanent line, moving and filling forever.  I stood.  Ten minutes.  Twenty.  I listened to the conversations around me, again happy couples, groups of friends.  Silly talk.  Happy talk.  Finally the counter girl was grinning at me.  It was my turn to order.

Outside, I ate the ice cream among the crowd.  It was good.  Really good.  Was it worth standing in line for?  Absolutely.  I'm sure that standing in line made it better.  I, now, ate with the privileged.  Nothing could be as good and profound right now.  It was a victory of sorts.  I had won.

I walked by Samovar on my way back, but by now I wanted no tea.  I looked in and thought of the times I had been there before, and that was enough.  I was full and tired now and wanted to get back to my room.

And just before the Muni stop, there was a small crowd standing before the alcove entrance to a small shop.  There, a cello quartet was about to play.  They were students at the conservatory, they said.  And they played.  And oh, what wonders they put forth there as the last rays of light went off behind the Twin Peaks, the music making starlight in the purple night.  Again and again.  I wanted this, wanted it with me always.  They were young and talented and happy and content, and after every song they giggled and smiled and talked with the gathered crowd who filled their cello case with piles of paper money.  And finally, with much regret, I turned my back and walked away heading back to my room at the Hilton and the night's last whiskey that waited for me there.  It had been good, the day.  I surely must be content.