You Come Too

There is a lonely time when traveling unaccompanied, usually at the end of the day when you are hungry and you are ready for dinner and there is nobody with whom to share it.  That is when you notice that the only single travelers are not travelers at all but crazy street beggars who somehow recognize and approach you.  I walked by the famous seafood bar, Scomas, on the wharf and saw a lone man sitting at a table by the window.  There was one place setting.  He had that look in his eye that I know too well.  It made me realize how little you see such a thing.  I looked around, of course, at all the couples and families and wanted to go back to the room.  It had been a longish day and my knee was swollen and hurting in a new way, so I hailed a cab rather than walking the hour up Nob Hill and down.  I gave the cabbie $12 USD and was glad.

I had spent the day with Ed Ross (here and here) whose photography I greatly admire.  He said to meet him at Sightglass Coffee Roasters at one thirty.  I consumed the morning roaming about the Union Square area taking pictures and going into shops, then climbed down sixth across Market and Mission through the piss streets of the crazies and the drug addicts that at one time in my youth I thought somehow an authentic indictment of capitalism and now think of mostly as a place of crazies and drug addicts.  It is the willing if not enthusiastic acceptance of the conditions that are so unappealing, that and the transparent resentment they have for those who do not live in this particular misery. I had my camera but no inclination to use it.  I have been closer to it than most people for longer than I care to mention, and I leave the documentation of this to those for whom it is a spectacular show of the miserable human condition.  There are many who are good at it.  For now, I'd rather show the other.  

Sightglass is in one of those strange San Francisco neighborhoods undergoing a slow transition from dilapidated poverty to something else.  What that something else will be is still not quite clear, but it looks too much like what is considered clean, upscale parts of Omaha or parts of New Jersey, too blanched and sterile to be interesting.  I walked into the large warehouse of a store with its open beams and spacious floor plan looking around hoping I'd recognize Ed from the one picture I had seen.  I looked up to the railing of the second floor, and there was a man giving a slight wave.  He was sitting with a striking woman, a friend visiting him from Paris.  

You never know how such things will turn out, but we sat and chatted and soon got over the awkwardness and talked about photography.  His friend was strangely quiet which was a little disconcerting, and I tried to include her in the conversation when I could until I realized she didn't understand English well enough to follow the conversation without great effort.  

"What are you doing after this?" Ed asked.  

"I don't know.  I thought I'd go up and wander around North Beach." 

"Let's go," he said.  "I used to live up there for years."  

A couple bars, some fish tacos, and coffee at Cafe Trieste, and the afternoon had waned.  Sitting on a sunny sidewalk on another perfect San Francisco day, Ed said he needed to go if he was going to beat the traffic, so we said our goodbyes with handshakes and hugs and kisses from the dogs.  I looked forward, I said, to seeing photographs of the great Frenchwoman, I said, in cowboy boots and an American flag.  She smiled and he said of course.  Then as quick as that, once again, I was on my own.  

I walked down Broadway toward the Wharf, passing all the landmarks that never seem to change.  I walked by the Bohemian, the little boutique hotel where I stayed in Allen Ginsburg's old room and learned to like drinking Sherri at five.   There was Coit Tower which I didn't feel like climbing up to see again today though it is always worth it to feel the cold breeze coming off the bay, and there was Washington Square full of families and bums.  I walked down Mason Street passed the old wooden San Remo Hotel where I used to stay in one of its sixty-seven rooms with hall baths and creaky floors, a laborers hotel in the early 20th century that is now an affordable place for adventurous travelers.  A girlfriend once came up from Palo Alto to spend the night with me there and wouldn't take off her clothes.  She lay on top of the covers all night with her eyes open wide.  She wasn't crazy about the place.  

I wandered around the Wharf because that is what one does sooner or later, walking among the families from South Dakota and Arkansas and Ohio for whom this is Valhalla, buying t-shirts and knick-knacks and eating in tourist restaurants where they are served fish chowders and sourdough bread while giant t.v.s silently broadcast sports events that make no sense at all, walking down the the little sweep of beach by the Dolphin Club for swimmers, 

looking up the grassy knoll to the big Ghiradelli sign in the background then turning back to the bay to watch the swimmers as they circle the long row of buoyed flags, then turning around and walking down to the docks to gaze upon the few working fishing boats that are there remembering how you romanticized this life when you were young and knowing now that there is no romance in it at all, looking at the beat men who work so hard to make a living, bailing dingy sea water out of holding tanks and smelling the diesel fuel and rotten fish remains, looking at the peeling paint and rusting motor gears and thinking of all the work it takes to maintain things that are coated in salt forever and realizing now that the rugged gaze in the eyes made transparent by a million hours at sea is mostly madness and loneliness and longing, and that those rugged, weathered faces that once meant one thing means another now, that the faces in magazines and movies are faces never beaten by a day in bad weather but are faces that have been lathered in sunscreen and restoring creams and lubricated with expensive specially oxygenated waters.  

As I walked back up toward town, I remembered coming here in 1975 and standing on the docks where fishing boats were docked street side and fisherman sold their catches from big folding tables while crowds of cooks and chefs picked out the day's fresh fish for that evening's offerings.  And I remember seeing Asian women dressed in party dresses from the night before, hookers, I was told with a laugh, roaming about so very early in the morning.  

Six-thirty, the sun still warm, my knee beginning to throb for unknown but scary reasons, I decided to hail a cab to take me back to my room, something that I would never have dreamed of doing before.  But I remembered my vow to baby myself this trip, to take it easy and to be nice to myself and to live this way.  So I climbed into the back of a cab owned by some Arab Steve McQueen who gave me his version of a "Bullitt" ride over the streets of San Francisco.