“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents, Stanford UP 1995

“And for those of you who don’t know what Barnard is,” says LaTonya into the microphone, hands on hips, “let me tell you: it’s Ivy League, aright?” Everyone laughs. She’s earned that swagger, along with the scholarship that promises to put her all the way through graduate school before she’s even started her freshman year. Now there are hundreds of grown women in the hotel ballroom, eating salmon to celebrate her and her GirlSource sisters.

GirlSource hires 150 poor girls a year, aged 14 to 18, mostly from the Mission, Bayview, Hunters’ Point. They’re trained—and paid—to run a chatty health information website, by girls, for girls. They design, research, write, and code the whole thing, picking up skills they can sell. “We’re not from the kind of communities where we all got the internet at home,” one explains. As part of the program, they also get tutoring, help with college applications and scholarship research, and a safe place to hang out with other girls.

“Can you imagine that I used to be so shy I didn’t want to open my mouth to strangers?” Marisa says gleefully to 600 strangers. “ I’m Filipina-American. We’re raised to obey authority, but not to have high self-esteem. That turned me into a hater. I didn’t know how to appreciate my own qualities, so I hated on other girls to make myself feel better. Girls do that. They hate on people until that person’s confidence is totally destroyed, and that makes them powerful. But when I’d hate on people and bring them down, I’d still feel empty inside. GirlSource taught me to flip the script. When I met the other girls in the program, I was de-fen-sive, wondering what they were thinking about me. Now I look at these beautiful girls, and all they can do, and I feel sooooo proud to be a GirlSource girl.”

In America, just 4% of Hispanic 12th-graders can read at their grade level. For African-American students, it’s even worse. But in spite of poverty, pregnancies, family problems, and sometimes even homelessness, 96% of GirlSource girls graduate from high school. 80% get to college—and most are the first in their families to do so. The organization directors believe that the best way to change a community is to pick a small number of individuals and stick with them. In their turn, the girls tend to stick with the program.

18-year-old Cristina tells how she’s worked to help support her family since she was thirteen. How she took BART for an hour and a half each way to get to school, and worked after school, and made time for GirlSource, and still kept up a 4.2 grade-point-average.
“There was this one class where I got a B. But it was AP so it counts as an A, right?” She had always dreamed of going to New York City. The hardest moment, she said, was one night when her father was sick and she brought him something to eat in his bedroom and he cried that he was so lonely, that things were so hard in the United States. How could she think about leaving home when her father would miss her so much? And then she remembered what she had learned at GirlSource, about standing up for herself, honoring her own needs, using her new confidence to set boundaries. It made it easier for her to make the choice that was right for her. That’s why, she said—with a delivery Steve Jobs might envy—she was going to Columbia in the fall.

There were whistles.

I clapped too. How can you not clap a girl from Richmond who gets herself to Columbia University?

“It’s crazy, right?” she says, eyes shining. “I mean, they’re gonna pay for my tuition, my housing, my books—I’m even gonna get my own psychologist.”

I walk around the Mission a lot, sharing the streets with Norteño gang kids, Salvadoran toddlers, junkies, vendors selling brain and cheek tacos, tattooed hipster gringos, Sixties acid casualties, street preachers, broken hookers, and slumped day laborers hoping to get hired on Cesar Chavez Street.

In the Mission, fruit and vegetables are cheap, and the buses are studded with nuts. Mariachis strut from restaurant to restaurant in white cowboy hats. Full-throated ranchero songs float out from the bars, but when you peep in, there might be only a few old guys on the barstools. On Sunday mornings, dressed-up families walk to church, the stocky kids exact half-scale copies of their parents. Once in a while I follow a little Mexican or Peruvian family a block or two, enjoying kids who are so sure of themselves that they don’t need to come up with snot-nosed demands just to prove they still exist. I like that these families seem to like each others’ company.

(My friend Alex is principal of a bilingual charter school in Silicon Valley. Though it’s in one of the richest towns in the country, 97% of his students live below the poverty line. Their parents clean houses and mow lawns for the engineers and Biz Dev Directors. “Americans think poor people don’t care about their kids’ education,” he says, “but no one wants their kid to read as much as a parent who can’t.”)

Last Thursday night, in a week when hundreds of thousands of my fellow immigrants had marched for respect in cities across the country, a shy young guy invited me to stop for tamales outside a storefront church at the bottom of my hill.
“De puerco o de queso?” said the old woman with the mantilla, almost hidden behind her styrofoam cooler.
“Meat or cheese?” he said, trying to help me out. He was from the Yucatán. I asked if he missed it. “Claro que sí” he said.“Pero hay que ir adelante.”

Hay que ir adelante. You’ve got to move forward. I suppose that’s what drove our forebears out of the primordial ooze, onwards and upwards towards seven-fifty an hour. It’s what pushes Cristina from Richmond to New York City, armed with a precocious biography of self-esteem and boundaries. But still, I’m uneasy for her. Her story is too neat, too Oprahfied. I don’t know how it will serve her when she’s surrounded by slick, expensively-trained classmates at Columbia. What will it be like when she’s three thousand miles from the family who so wanted her to have a better life—and who needed her?

Cristina’s not leaving a village in the Yucatán. She’s already just a BART ride away from one of the best-loved cities in America, and from Stanford and Berkeley. Choosing Columbia means that she’s grasped the California mantra of personal choice, and so her decision brings you-go-girl cheers: distance equals independence equals strength. But I want more for her, and from her. I want her to show Americans how to include love and family in success.

Maybe she still can. Her own Oprahisms are as sincere as they are canned. She’s of a generation that knows how to try on and package identities, and this one is wrapped up for the convenience of the busy women in the hotel ballroom. We’re looking to feel good about throwing a few hundred bucks to young women fifteen years or twenty years behind us, and it works. I believe in GirlSource enough to set up the direct deposit donation, to read through their essays and wonder if I could tutor, or hire some of these girls as interns. (They’d find out what the snacks are like in an innovation consultancy, and we’d learn more than we’d teach.)

But even as I write the checks, and cheer Cristina and her friends, I think, oh baby, you’re going to need that Columbia shrink…

Classic Eames lounger and ottoman – $xxx (haight ashbury)
Reply to: sale-131113385@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-02-03, 10:09PM PST
I have a classic Eames lounger and ottoman for sale. Bought it from dwr for xxx. Will take xxx for it. Was a gift but can not afford to have such luxuries. cherry finish with black leather. in perfect condition. rarely used. * This item has been posted by-owner.

• no — it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

The orange sofa was demoted to the kitchen when we moved to the new house. Although it was born in the seventies, the shade wasn’t that 1970s burnt-orange, exactly; it was more the marmalade tan of old Florida ladies. Its leathery skin had crackled, and it sagged. It was homely.

You could drape yourself across the top, and then roll-flop down onto the cushions, like a sea-lion cub. The back would support timid headstands, and while you lolled upside down you could pull fluff from its (belly)buttons. Or—and this was what I liked best—you could burrow into the left-hand corner, safely sandbagged by the wide leather arm that came up to a seven-year-old’s chest. That’s where I sat for hours with Enid Blyton for company. In spite of all the scoldings for reading in the dark, my shoulders are still rounded from those winter afternoons.

I read about The Enchanted Forest and The Wishing Chair. “Mollie and Peter have a thrilling secret. The chair in their playroom is a magic Wishing Chair. When they sit in it and wish, it grows wings and takes them on lots of exciting adventures.” When they finished their adventures, I’d turn back to the beginning and start them again—chewing strips of the pulpy paper as I went.

My grown-up sofas have not been squashy. I own two: both built for two, and neither built for lounging. Over the last year, it began to occur to me that I live alone, and that I might like to lounge once in a while. A chair arose in answer. It would have arm rests broad enough to balance notebooks and cups of tea; low enough to keep my typing elbows free; soft enough to pad my bony arms. There would be a place to drape my legs. When I sat down each evening, the chair would remember me like an old lover. From this chair, I could gaze out at Twin Peaks and the Golden Gate Bridge, or watch a whole season of Six Feet Under in a single weekend. It would grow wings and fly me to the woods to talk to pixies when things got rough.

I tried out friends’ favorite chairs: La-Z-Boys and Saarinen wombs; Jennifer Leather and IKEA. Either they looked good or they felt good. Then Keith let me sit in his vintage Eames lounger. He claimed it was the best chair for nursing, though he lacked the boobs to be convincing. Still, the old baseball mitt was a comforting cradle, and it was the first seat in years that made me want to reach for an Enid Blyton. (In chairs, as in music, my tastes are those of a middle-aged man.) I dug out Charles and Ray Eames’s exasperated letter to Henry Ford, and remembered how likeable they were.

I started to type their name into Craigslist every few days; another idle surfing tic. There was a lot of junk. Like “web 2.0,” “eames” is now a code for raising cash. Every swindler with a particle-board bookcase adds “eames herman miller midcentury” just to bump the search results. After eight months I found Truong’s ad for an Eames lounger, several days after he’d posted it. I guessed it was gone, but a few days later I got a terse reply. The first guy had flaked. He would show the chair to the next three people at 10am on Wednesday, and the first one with cash could take it. I explained that I had the cash, but had to be at work at 10. After several exchanges, he relented, and let me come early.

I thought about his post as I biked up Haight Street, lungs bursting: his frank (stern?) admission “can not afford to have such luxuries;” the chair for sprawling that was “rarely used.” Why did I think a chair was worth a month’s rent? Did I think I could sprawl more than “rarely?” I pictured a tough-minded Vietnamese accountant who would barely hide his distaste for my American self-indulgence.

But of all things, Truong was a poet. His bay-windowed apartment was stuffed with furniture that would have looked good in the modernist Reunification Palace in Saigon. He sold pieces from time to time to raise cash for poem-writing. He showed me his books. “Are you a dealer?” he asked, and was pleased when he learned the chair was for me. I wanted to ask him about Vietnam phone cards, but instead we talked about poetry. Poets always seem surprised to meet punters who read poetry—most don’t themselves, as far as I can make out.

A few weeks later, my friend Kevin helped me pick up the chair his truck, on a night when I was so frazzled that I left my bag at the office and he had to pay my taxi-driver off. He carried my chair up the stairs and then left us alone. I sat down and swung my legs up, and the cool leather unfrazzled me. I burrowed in and read Truong’s poems.

A chair should feel like home. A chair should have some history. This one does. Now I’m waiting for it to get its wings.

yes the stories are at times overwhelming but would i stop listening the answer is no for without the stories there would be no history and without the history there would be no people where then would i be if not for the acronym the oddity the visitor the native
—Truong Tran

“We don’t have the shields here like they have in New York,” says Joe. Not the plexiglass variety, anyhow. His arm is draped over the passenger seat and he keeps turning right around to talk to me, as if he’s backing up, or we’re having brunch. But we’re not backing up. Nor are we having brunch, though it’s Sunday morning. He’s driving me to work down Folsom Street, which is smooth as a desert highway at this hour.

“Driving cabs is mostly pretty safe,” he says, with his back to the oncoming traffic. Some years ago there was a spate of armed robberies, but they’ve had little trouble since the drivers took care of ten or a dozen guys, he says. I ask, cautiously, what that means.

“There was one guy, Blackie, he was a legend. He picked up a guy at the Greyhound Station once; guy was acting funny from the minute he gets in. They’re a few blocks away when he pulls a gun. Okay, okay, says Blackie, and makes like he’s getting out his wallet. But he has a clamshell holster under his arm.”

Joe slides his left hand across his chest, then cocks two fingers at the empty seat beside me. “Shoots the guy right through the seat. He drives round the block straight back to the Greyhound Station, dumps the body in front of the guy’s buddies, and stuffs the Red Cab receipt in his mouth. ‘Anyone else need that kind of a ride?’ he says, and they’re just sta-a-aring at him. So he says, ‘Tell the cops I’m at the Black Crow.’”

Blackie got off. Word got around that drivers would radio each other and hunt guys down. Word got around that there were easier pickings than cab-drivers.

“These days it’s quiet. We have the camera right here,” he says, tapping the little eye above the rearview mirror. “If someone gets in and they’re acting strange, got the hood pulled down over their face or something, there’s a button I can push on the door handle to take another twelve photos. Anything worse, I’ve got a panic button between the gas and the brake. We got GPS in all the cars now, so they know where I am.”

There are a lot more women driving cabs these days, he says. “It’s not a bad job for them, especially during the day. You get a run of good fares, and by that I mean in the nine- to twelve-dollar range, you can pull down four hundred bucks on a long shift. Flexible. Not too much trouble.”

“Your drunken Irish brothers are okay, colleen,” he says, craning around. When he smiles it’s plain our faces have borrowed features from the same drawer. “They just get in and say, ‘I’m drunk, mate, I won’t give you trouble, just take me home and if I have to puke I’ll let you know.’ You know where you are with them. It’s the Marina yuppies the cabdrivers don’t like. I won’t pick up anyone at Bush and Gough after eleven at night. First they’ll hold the door open and say their friend is on his way out—and you know he’s in there still throwing up his beer or hitting on some woman who’s not interested. Then they finally get in, and they want to go three blocks to an ATM. Then they want to go another two blocks to some pizza place with a line out the door. They want to drop someone off. And when they finally go home, it’s maybe six blocks total of a fare. They wonder why the taxis keep passing them by…”

I tell him about the rates posted in Dublin taxis. It’s $35 to go to the airport, and $75 if you puke up your paycheck. Typed up and laminated, though not in those words. The drivers shrug. It just pays for the cleaning, not for the loss of a night’s business, and so they hope the barfers and the bleeders stay away at least until the end of a shift. Nobody seems to think it’s odd that there’s a standardized charge for getting too pissed to hold your dinner.

He asks my favorite Irish bar, and when I can’t name one, he prompts. The Dubliner? The 32 Counties? The Oscar Wilde? Perhaps to make me feel at home, he starts a tangled story about meeting an old IRA guy and his sister in a raw juice bar on Haight, and I become convinced he’s talking about Jimmy Smits from Law & Order. It’s a familiar feeling, holding up a slippery conversation with smiles and nods, and for a moment I pretend I’m back on the road in Peru rather than heading to an office in SoMa.

“You know, sometimes people get in, and they have no idea where they’re going,” says Joe. “I picked up this one guy, he says, ‘I want to do a round trip.’ No problem, I say, where to? And he gets all mad. ‘Here, of course, where do you think, I said round trip.’ Well, I tell him, sir, I think you’re already here. “Oh,” he says, and gets out. Twenty per cent of the time, people act surprised to find themselves in a cab. I swear, it didn’t cross their mind until they saw a taxi that they wanted to go anywhere. And these are normal, ordinary people. Just acting on impulse.”

He’s been driving cabs for twenty-five years. “I love it,” he says. “People tell me stuff.”

“Should pretty boys in discos
Distract you from your novel
Remember I’m awful
In love with you.Come back from San Francisco
It can’t be all that pretty
When all of New York City
Misses you”

—The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back From San Francisco“

“INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN, BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNCESSARY CONVERSATION.”
—San Francisco MUNI bus system sign

I moved from New York to California a year ago today. It was raining when I got here, and it’s raining today. The address of my temporary corporate housing was Saint Francis Place, but that wasn’t what anybody called the street, and so I spent the ride from Oakland Airport squinting not at my new hometown skyline but at its paper representation on the map my Meetup friends had given me. I traced and retraced the length of Third Street, and couldn’t find where I was going.

“Saint Francis Place. Don’t you know where that is?” The taxi-driver’s friend; the over-tipper who coaxes confidences on their hopes and fears for our adopted country, was now crabby with anxiety.

It was after midnight when we found the apartment complex. The sign outside read “Live the Downtown Life. Love the Suburban Feeling.” I staggered up the steps with twice the JetBlue baggage allowance; and not all of it in my suitcases. The concierge didn’t take her eyes off the TV as she handed over the credit-card key.

Eighteen hours earlier, on the other side of the continent, Gus of Tom’s Diner had fussed over my last Brooklyn breakfast. I shared it, googly-eyed, with a man I had met on the evening shift at a crisis hotline not long before. Between calls I’d listened to him soothe people in trouble, and his tone and dimples were enough to make me shuffle hopefully while he packed up. Oh, are you walking to the subway too?

He lived in Fort Greene, my favorite Brooklyn neighborhood, a Q Train fact that made me as woozy as a Meg Ryan ditz. He’d played bass in a band I remembered from my Boston days. He was a reformed advertising man, now a trainee therapist. He read good books, ran trails, and called his family.
“Can you…make things and fix them?” I asked him; an absurd and primitive measure of manliness that has somehow taken root in spite—or because of—my own lack of interest in the tangible. He used to be a carpenter, he said. He was American. It had never occurred to me that your chosen person could be from the inside, not the periphery. I tried to explain what it meant to be from the outside. “We like the same music,” I babbled to my best friend, though I had already faxed a signed contract for a new job to San Francisco.

We didn’t have much time to merge stories. Over breakfasts at Tom’s Diner we told and retold our short story—what he had thought when we first met; what I had thought; what he had said to his friends; what I had said. We compared a few weeks’ impressions, shaping “I” into “we” as quickly as we could. I moved my flight to San Francisco out another four days. We grinned into a cameraphone in my emptied apartment: look, we existed.

The movers had packed my coats, and I was swamped in his borrowed sweaters when we walked to Prospect Park a year ago today. It was so cold my face froze, the more so because we couldn’t stop smiling. My teeth hurt, but it only made me grin more; gazing like a newborn in the nearly-empty snowfield. We jog-trotted back to Fort Greene, whooping against the cold. Then he dialled a car service—Atlantic Avenue to Queens; Friday rush hour. We said goodbye beside the shoeshine stand at JFK.

(My mother says that my first real word, after the “dada-baba-mama” pleasantries, was “perfection.” Someone nearby said it, and I grabbed onto a guiding principle. It might as well have been “methamphetamine,” for all the promise of lasting contentment that it held. For those of us crippled by ideals, love is most possible when it’s already circumscribed by departure, or safely past.)

New York had a blizzard last weekend, while I sat outside at an Ocean Beach beer garden with friends from Limerick. The wind has picked up again in San Francisco, and the local radio presenters warn us to bundle up and bring the pets inside.
“Brr! It’s a cold one.” But it’s 45 degrees. In place of February bitching about dog-shitsicles and slush puddles, we have California’s enforced sunniness.

Like the range of weather, the scope of my life is smaller here, and dampened. Maybe it’s because I’m still new in town, or at the age when the breeders hunker down. Maybe it’s because consulting doesn’t leave much room to collect all the stories and people in this city.

Last Sunday I walked to work, up over Bernal Hill, then over Potrero Hill and down to the bay on Third Street. It was t-shirt warm, but even on beautiful days San Francisco has a way of seeming empty—car-rich and flesh-poor—and there were no walkers but me on the waterfront. I was watching the alcoholics fish in front of a giant cruise ship and thinking of Red Hook when a white stretch Hummer pulled up beside me. The driver leaned out.
“Are you lost? Do you need a ride?” he said. I said no thank-you, and smiled. I’m protected from all kinds of craziness and help by a reflexive refusal of support. “Are you sure?” he said, shaking his head, “It’s an awful long way from here to there, wherever that is.” It is.

Los Gatos used to be a farm town, prosperous enough to raise fine 19th century brick buildings. Now it’s home to some of the most materially successful people on this planet. It’s northern California, not Manhattan, so you can’t tell who’s winning by Blahnik shoes and Chloe dresses, but those are probably Marc Jacobs bags that the yummy mummies swing from their Australian strollers. “Win a trip to London!” say the posters advertising a black-tie library fundraiser, and it’s hard to square the cheesy prizes—interpretations of cats by local artists—with the casual, unassuming wealth of Los Gatos.

There’s a shop for “Metaphysical Needs,” where Feng Shui for your Kitchen and Numerology for the Teenage Soul jostle with the I-Ching, Sufi truths, and the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha’s head is also for sale, along with crystals, Tibetan prayer flags, drawstring pants, and inessential oils. None of it comes cheap, except for the stack of secondhand books just inside the door that are sold to raise funds “For Nunneries,” according to the sign. Los Gatos is a big market for spiritual accessories. Also haircare.

I walked around a branch of Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenwares store that seeks the same dollars as Smith & Hawken and Sur La Table down the street. After twenty minutes’ consideration of pie weights and estate-crystallized sea salt, I wanted to congratulate someone on how quickly they had sold me discontent. It wasn’t really the Riedel glasses, the sugar-almond toasters, or the German chef’s knives I wanted; it was the fantasy of well-bred children and friends laughing in my sunlit kitchen. But if you make the money to buy the life they box up so neatly, you almost certainly don’t have the time to live it. In Silicon Valley, no one works harder than the people who don’t need to.

At the traffic lights in the main square, a boy racer turned heads in a Lamborghini. The thing growled like a caged beast. “Doesn’t the noise bother him?” I asked, missing the point as usual. Perhaps he was taking it to the nearby valet carwash place, which offers a cleansing car mud-mask followed by a waxy massage for just $120. Los Gatos doesn’t support an independent bookshop or a record store—this is Amazon country—but the car dealerships are right in town, a block down from the beautiful French wine store. One sells Jaguars, Aston Martins, and Bentleys. Another, Maseratis, Lotus Elises, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. (Business looks slow for the Hummer dealer.) Anyone can walk around and stroke the M&M-colored sports cars—even a shy and scruffy woman with a learner’s permit is a prospect around here. Who knows what venture capitalist boyfriend might be paying my way through psychology grad school, or what Web 2.0 pixie dust I just flogged to some behemoth up Route 85?

The cafés see more action than the bars. Coffee is excellent, and Saturday morning is brisk. You can sit with a macchiato and watch the weekly quality-time appointments with the stroller-bound bosses for whom everyone works. They are sweet, mostly—and wouldn’t you be, with so much trouble taken to please you? They seem glad to have their mommies and daddies around in daylight. Little blonde girls skip in and out, flouncing their ponchos and sucking on smoothies.

The laptop jockeys stay hunched and focused. I like to think they’re polishing sestinas, but TPS Reports are probably closer to the mark, or perhaps business plans. In 2006, big money has come out to play again, and venture capitalists hear out supplicants over eggs and cappuccino. If you tune your face to a vacant expression, you can pick up a choice of pitches in any Los Gatos coffee shop. (iPod earbuds, with the sound turned off, work well. So do the large mirrors in the Los Gatos Coffee Company.) Entrepreneurs exist to convince you that their dream is your dream, and since I’m susceptible, I prefer to sit a safe distance away, now that I know for sure their dreams aren’t mine. They can imagine a different world; I want the imagination to be content in this one. Still, the casual passion of a Valley pitch draws me more than gossip.

Successful VCs wear their brains and money lightly. They’re so assured, so genial, so enthusiastic, that you believe they couldn’t imagine anything more fun than deciding where to place their bets. Most are charming—and wouldn’t you be, with so much trouble taken to please you? It’s a game. It’ll be fun. Silicon Valley is predicated on the belief that nothing is more fun than work, and that progress is good.

On the peaceful Santa Cruz Mountain trails that start on the edge of town, few people stroll. They run, in CoolMax, or they huff up on mountain bikes and careen down. Even at their leisure, well south of all the cubicles, they subscribe to Paul Graham’s belief that you can cram a lifetime’s worth of effort into a few years, if you’re smart enough. After that, it’s voluntary—but why stop? As the CalTrain conductor says, “Don’t forget your belongings, and have a productive week.”

Sundays should be like that more often: sunny enough to warm your bones in January, and to make California’s distance from Brooklyn seem like a good idea.

Up above Twin Peaks, the red-tailed hawks were randy. I saw them dancing in the air with their legs cocked like landing gears. They swirled, so intent on each other that the field mice were safe in the heather. It is almost hard to watch a freedom we clodhoppers know only in our dreams.

Eventually, the female folded her cinnamon wings and nosedived straight to a perch on the radio tower below. She was poised. He continued to swirl, legs tucked back in, less purposeful now. Then he aimed himself, a little feather missile, at the spot next to her. For a moment they were like strangers on a bus. Then he mounted her, clinging to her bigger back. She sat quietly until he finished fucking, which took no more than ten seconds.

There’s something ridiculous about a male half the size of his bird, and perhaps it was regret or a sense of inadequacy that drove him to the other side of the tower, where he perched with his back to her, observing the rowdy ravens on the other peak. She continued to scan the ground impassively. For mice? For nest-building sticks? Well, they were together now, and it was nearly spring. It’s a rare day when you can hunt on Twin Peaks.

“Do you know where I can buy clean socks near MacWorld?”

“In October, a schizophrenic homeless woman threw her three young sons into the San Francisco Bay. The mother, Lashuan Harris, had been living with her children in an Oakland shelter, and had stopped taking her medicine because she believed she was cured. But voices, she later told police, told her to throw her sons into the water. Relatives told the press that they had sought custody of the boys, but that social workers had failed to act. Less than two weeks later, a homeless man, Johnell Kirk junior, died after being set on fire by another drifter, who was said to suffer from schizophrenia.San Francisco has struggled to deal with the many homeless people who come to the city for its temperate climate and generous welfare programmes. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco�s mayor, has made the issue a priority. His controversial �Care Not Cash� initiative, which offers homeless people services rather than welfare cheques, took effect in May 2004, and there are signs of success. The programmes have reduced the street population by 28% and housed nearly 1,500 people…But the city has a lot more work to do.”
—The Economist

“You heard what she did? Three little kids. They struggled, man. She had to work to do that. That took hard work, harder work than she’d ever probably done before in her goddamn life. They found one of ‘em, but I don’t know if they’ll get the other two, tides and all. Filthy water. Can you imagine? She just walked away, pushing a fucking empty stroller like no big deal. Said she heard voices. Said the voices told her to push her three little kids into the San Francisco Bay and hold them down until they drowned.

“And you know what’s going to happen to her, right? You know, right? She’s not going to jail. She’s going to go to some psych ward and get the medication and the good food and the gym and the therapy. She won’t do a day in jail. And she’s going to sit there, her and her voices, you and me paying for her doctors, and she’s not going to pay for squat. Not for rent, not for her dinner, not for her occupational therapy, not for her doctors, and sure as hell not for what she did to those three little kids.

“Know what I’d like to do to her? I’d like take a manhole cover—nice big round one—and explain to her how the voices told me to chain it to her ankle and roll it off the pier, right there in front of the sea lions. Or—no, wait—I’d put her in a giant microwave. Rig it up in Giants Stadium so she could sit there in her chair in her giant microwave, and I’d set it to High for as long as it takes to drown three little kids. Multiplied by two. And I’d bring the whole city out to watch her cook, so they’d get the idea it’s not smart to listen to the voices. Or, know what I’d do? I’d stake her out, tie her down, so she couldn’t move a muscle, and I’d pour sugar syrup over every fucking inch of her. And then I’d bring out the fireants, man…Real slow, that’d go. Wide awake.

“You know they don’t even use the electric chair any more? Said it was inhumane. It took a whole five minutes to die. And they’re doped up with valium, having sweet dreams. Oh, what a crying shame, to take five minutes to die, after you probably tortured someone for three weeks. These people with the prisoners’ rights, man. You give up your rights when you take someone’s life, all right? I’ll give ‘em rights: hang ‘em with an American flag. That’s their right. It’s God’s job to condemn, not ours, but let’s just go ahead and arrange the meeting, you know what I’m saying? Fire up Old Sparky, cut the crap.

“I hear they tried to rape Scott Petersen already. I hope he’s getting it good, after what he did. Know what I’d do? I’d let five of the largest, strongest relatives into that cell, armed with baseball bats and let ‘em blow off some steam. Or maybe a very large, sexually-deprived silverback gorilla…”

The train slowed. A woman stuffed headphones into her bag, stood up, and excused herself. He jumped to his feet, head bowed, voice soft.

“No problem, ma’am.”

“You’ve been pumping a lot?” his friend asked when he sat back down. He pushed up a sleeve, examined a bicep and frowned. His scalp gleamed.

“Eighteen inches. But I want to get it to twenty. It’ll take a lot of work. A lot of focus._ I wanted to get to the gym tonight, but my little guy has a soccer game, and it’s important to me to be there. Sends a message. My dad never made it to my soccer games. I know he was working to put a roof over our heads, so it’s not like I mind. But I’m going to be there for my little guy at his games. It’s the kind of role model I want to portray.”

He squinted at his bicep again.

“Takes a lot of work to build up the right dimensions. But it’s fun to have the size. Especially in bars. I am not a violent person. It’s part of my credo. I’m very controlled. But I get some guy in a bar, someone inappropriate, maybe being a jerk to some woman, and you know what I say? I say, real quiet, “You’re going to apologize. Or I’m going to break your arm.” Total control, total calm, total polite. And my friends say, ‘Uh, yeah, he will.” And then you just get to watch this asswipe back down…”

He folded his arms in satisfaction.

“Only bad thing is it can make it hard with women. You meet these women who just like big guys, that’s their thing. Makes it hard to tell. They can be fine as a person, quality people, but they’re not necessarily candidates for a serious long-term relationship if they’re only with you for size. I’m seeing a woman right now, she’s a quality person, but she’s not over her divorce, she’s just getting used to dating. And she’s really into the muscles. Likes the big guys.”

“Not over her divorce? Fuck that shit, man. Get divorced, move ON.”

“Right. Move the fuck on.”

They looked out the window. Palo Alto passed.

“Karl Rove. You know what’s going on there? You been following it? Karl Rove is guilty of treason. He deserves to share a large, smelly cell with the most horrible inmate…”

Let the Nobs stay up on their hill and the hipsters stick to Hayes: Visitacion Valley is the most evocative name in the city, and as a neighborhood, it’s preserved, for now, by those nose-wrinkling write-ups. It’s the last stop before you leave San Francisco for the cubicles of Silicon Valley. Perched above it, on the San Bruno Expressway, a cocked martini glass invites commuters to stop for one for the road at a Russian cocktail lounge.

Some neighborhood history is written in the streets: the Mexican names, the boarded-up restaurants that used to sell Louisiana chitlins, the Indian Baptist Church, the Chinese and Vietnamese-language dailies in the newspaper vending boxes. It’s half Asian now, and most of the residents were born in another country.

On Leland Avenue—storefront churches, nail salons, and lunch shacks—I dithered over what to eat. Fried chicken or beef pho? It turned out that the Sunflower Blues Cafe, with its improbable indoor picket fences and yellow gingham table cloths, wasn’t opening until next week, though Marcus, the owner, was proud to show off how good it looked already. Everything made from scratch, he said, and healthy ingredients, salads and grilled stuff, though of course they’d do fried chicken, too; no sense being extreme. He’d started his family young and brought them over to Vis Valley from Bayview. They were grown now, though he didn’t look more than forty. He owned a few properties in the neighborhood, and his wife ran the beauty salon up the street. Julia here used to work for her, he said, and Julia was the best. Could I figure out how to get her to come on board with him?

Julia shrugged and giggled, not yet convinced.

At the Vietnamese place next door, my beef pho came with tripe and tendon, and a bush of basil leaves. The fish sauce was given out without asking. I ordered ca phe sua da and thanked the waiter in dredged-up Vietnamese. I was proud, but he was baffled until I gave in and pointed to the number on the menu. The broth was as good as Hanoi, and the decor very nearly worse.

A gnarled Chinese lady, bent low, haggled in the 99 Cent Store. I paid full price for a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, some Chinese birthday cards, hair clips, and a flashing bike reflector.

Up the road, in Portola, there’s an old cinema that’s a Baptist church now. I’m a lapsed-Catholic-aetheist-Buddhist, but even I’d go to a church with a drum kit behind the Hammond organ. A nearby diner looks untouched since the 1920s, apart from the laminated waffle menus in the window. But in keeping with the neighborhood changes, those red vinyl booths and swivel stools are now wiped down by owners who got here from Seoul four years ago. It was closed, on a Sunday morning, and on the store window next door, a poster warned residents to be wary after several recent attacks.

In the supermarket, frogs squatted in their tank, eyelids heavy. Sunday must be frog night, because they were stacked halfway up each other’s backs like toppled dominos. Three aisles over, you could choose from six brands of canned quail eggs, five kinds of canned rambutan, and a fridge full of sticky drinks. In the checkout queue, with an armful of mangosteen jellies and Vietnamese espresso, I almost wept at the sight of a box of durian fruit inside the front door. In deodorized America, it’s stinky, oozy, primal, pheromonal durian I’d like to offer instead of Altoids.

The other day someone asked me if I still had the travel bug. Truth is, I never did, even—and especially—when I wore a backpack for a year. I’m a homebody; at most a reluctant daytripper, and sniffing a durian on San Bruno Avenue is all I need before heading back to my rocking chair to look down over the city.

The City suddenly looks mighty fine. It’s the schlumpy, second-best guy who shows up one day with a decent haircut and a crisp t-shirt, making me bat my eyelashes and say, why, San Francisco, have you been working out?

It might be new freedom, or the autumn sunshine that took its sweet time this year. Nothing like sunshine for making strangers flirt at bus-stops; for getting people out of their goddamn cars; for making girls look good. Whatever it is, I’m glad to wake up in love again after eight months of pining for Brooklyn.

This week, as every week, some wireless technology conference had hundreds of blue shirts spilling outside the Moscone Center, so busy tapping on their phones that they didn’t notice the fog had lifted. It brought some New York friends to town, and over dinners they said all the things I’d said. Wow, the panhandlers are scary aggressive here. I’ve never seen so many homeless people. The buses suck. It just doesn’t have the energy of New York, does it?

These things are true, but don’t seem important any more. Other things are also true. San Francisco is a boomtown, and in a boomtown every street has a story, if you’ll listen. The surf crashes, the mountains rear, and the bridges are handsome. There are enough immigrants from enough places to make it interesting, and an outpost of my hometown warm enough to swap stories about four-inch bathwater and childhood sweets. In San Francisco, even people with day jobs weld giant robots, play thrash metal, write bad novels or—God forbid—start baby companies. Sometimes they turn the biggest hills into ski runs, just for the hell of it. San Francisco is daft enough to come up with Burning Man, or the Idiotarod, or Bill Graham’s Fillmore.

There are five fine second-hand bookstores within fifteen blocks of my house on a hill. Nearby there’s a yoga studio that does that funny but soothing No-Cal chakra chat, while the sixty students practice sighs and groans right out of a Ron Jeremy movie. Down the street, Phil makes handmade coffee by the cup.

The threat of an earthquake reminds us of all we have to celebrate and all we have to lose.

I’m a simple woman. It takes only these things, and eight months to notice them, to make me happy.