Tyerra Green, BAYCAT filmmaker, taken by michaele, Yahoo! Teacher of Merit, July 2006.

The first thing you see when you walk into BAYCAT‘s loft—once Villy lets you out of a hug—are the photos. There’s a wall of signed Polaroids of everyone who has ever visited: students, instructors, preachers, clients, donors, Bill Strickland, Jeff Skoll, and our fine-looking mayor, Gavin Newsom. Names and smiles; bigwigs and smallwigs.

BAYCAT trains young people from Bayview-Hunters Point in art, design, digital media, filmmaking, and human decency. These neighborhoods have by far the highest concentration of children in San Francisco, but the rest of the city doesn’t notice that that’s where we warehouse the future. “Historically-underserved comunities” seems to be the vogue term, but however you put it, these kids have had a raw deal so far. They are poor. Their schools are chaotic and badly equipped. The houses were built next to a power plant, on landfill where decades of toxic waste have built up, and so the children get sick more often than they should—but there’s just one pediatrician in the area. Until a Farmers’ Market opened last year, fresh food was a bus ride away, though liquor stores are plentiful. The gangs are armed.

Photo by Tim, 2005

Those are the problems, but there are 33,000 solutions. Bayview-Hunters Point also has artists, musicians, leaders, dreamers, preachers, businesspeople, and teachers who have it going on, and there’s no shortage of kids who want more. That’s where BAYCAT comes in. BAYCAT shows kids that they have a voice, and gives them the skills to give voice to their community. These are also, the theory goes, the skills that San Francisco and Silicon Valley employers want: design, video production, editing, and motion graphics.

Villy is the founder and CEO. She went from the New York projects to become an equity derivatives trader, then a corporate lawyer at a fancy firm. What she wanted to do was take these skills to make kids’ lives better, so she trained as a fifth-grade teacher. She was the kind of educator who teaches the Constitution by letting her kids draw up a class constitution: pushing them to move beyond because-I-said-so rules to identify the lasting principles behind them; encouraging them to test rewards and penalties and consequences; stretching ten-year-old minds around the notion of collective responsibility.

But she couldn’t reach all of them. Ten years old is too late. Five may be too late. No matter how much work you put in, how much you dig into your paltry salary for extra supplies, food, and field trips, no matter how many nights you lie awake with racing thoughts, you can’t save every kid. No Child Left Behind is the name of the federal act that has set public education up for guaranteed failure by mandating that every single child must pass standardized reading and math tests by 2012. Its goals are admirable, but no system improves by measurement alone—especially in California, where public education is still crippled by the staggering selfishness of Proposition 13. Where the principles of No Child Left Behind really live is in the hearts of dedicated teachers, who live in a war zone between hope and discouragement.

Villy left the public schools to start BAYCAT. She found an early supporter in Bill Strickland, the Pittsburgh social entrepreneur. I met Strickland (and Villy) when my company hosted a conference that brought together innovators from Japan and the US, and he held us rapt, as he does every audience, with his slides and his story. His power comes from his insistence on the elemental. The worst thing about poverty is what it does to your spirit, he says, and the cure for this spiritual cancer is to expose people to the best of the natural world. Beauty. Light. Water. Music. Art. Good food. Flowers. In the No Child Left Behind era, where principals are forced to force their teachers to drop everything but math and “language arts” drills, this sounds like granola-dreaming. But over the course of thirty-odd years, he has succeeded.

Strickland was a 16-year-old from the Pittsburgh projects, on path to nowhere good, when an art teacher introduced him to ceramics and took him to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. When he found his calling as a grown man, he persuaded a student of Lloyd Wright’s to build a cathedral-like training center in the middle of the projects in Pittsburgh. That’s where he trained students in the ceramics he had come to love. He loved jazz, so he built a concert hall as part of the center—and Dizzy Gillespie came to play. They started a jazz record label that has won four Grammy awards. He wanted the kids to see beauty, so he built a greenhouse to grow Japanese orchids—and now they supply the Whole Foods grocery chain with flowers and hydroponic tomatoes, grown in the projects in Steeltown. He worked with local Pittsburgh businesses, Heinz and Bayer among them, to set up facilities to train a new generation of workers in food service and lab technician skills, so they could find jobs—and eat good food every day. Sunshine, he insists, is for everybody on the planet, not just for rich people. Good food is for everybody on the planet. His Manchester Craftsman’s Guild trains students in art, not academics, but his students’ graduation rates are so high that the city of Pittsburgh recently asked him to take over a failing high school. His first action will be bring in fresh flowers. People understand those kinds of messages. We are creatures of expectations, he says, and once you put people in the light, they shine.

Villy is an artist and musician too, and the BAYCAT loft reflects their shared belief in the power of beauty and high expectations. It’s spacious, light-filled, and stylish, and designed for people to work together. Buildings have emotions, I think, and BAYCAT’s place is warm and playful. It’s in the Dogpatch neighborhood, between Bayview-Hunters Point and downtown San Francisco.

Across the street, my friend Celine has opened a wine bar, one of several new small businesses drawn to Dogpatch by the mirage of the Third Street Light Rail, which will connect Bayview-Hunters Point to the city that has ignored it. That’s where Villy and I drink Rioja and Viognier from time to time. Dogpatch reminds me of Brooklyn’s DUMBO eight years ago, with its waterfront light, beautiful old warehouses slowly converting to design studios and apartments, and mostly peaceful agreements between the artists and the crack dealers. “I talked to the crackheads and the drunks from the beginning,” said Celine, who is as matter-of-fact as you might expect of a woman who can both pass two kidney stones and open a wine bar in the last two months of her pregnancy. “I told them, I have no problem with you being here, but you just can’t piss in the doorway any more. I can’t do business if you piss in my doorway.” They are obliging. Now they piss in the bus shelter at the end of the block, and greet her warmly as she opens up.

Last July, a team from Yahoo!—my favorite clients—hired the BAYCAT students to make a documentary about a project we were working on, a weeklong summer camp to celebrate 60 local teachers and introduce them to blogging, Flickr, and other web goodies. Every day, Villy drove Tyerra and Jason from Hunters Point to Sunnyvale in her green VW Bug. They interviewed dozens of teachers and Yahoo! staff, including Terry Semel, the CEO. They filmed it, shaped the story, and edited it in two weeks, with the help of BAYCAT instructors. Tyerra’s 14. Jason is 16. That’s Tyerra speaking on the BAYCAT homepage. Yahoo! liked the results so much that they sponsored a BAYCAT “Oscars” to show off the students’ work at the end of the summer. There was plenty to celebrate: graphic design for local businesses, a new design identity for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, documentaries made for Yahoo!, for the Mayor’s Office, and for NetDay; a film about the Alice Griffith Housing Projects; an interview series on obesity they filmed at local McDonalds. They’re learning to bear witness: by shaping stories, you can shape a future.

Villy has huge plans for BAYCAT. Every time she tells me about them over Italian wine, my brain starts fizzing with her spirit—that’s the Villy effect. She believes that change starts with personal connections, with asking open-ended questions and being willing to listen to the answers. This autumn, she’s going to let me learn how to teach writing at BAYCAT. It’s a tiny commitment—once a week, a couple of students a time—but I want to be there to watch her dreams bloom.

“And one last instruction, my brothers and sisters, before we travel together the roiling white path of this river of crazy,” said Toobmaster. He was standing on a picnic table, with a blue ‘T’ painted on his bare chest and a small inner tube tied around his forehead. “Keep your butt up…” he intoned.
“…and keep your beer high,” said Toobhedd, who was half a length shorter. Below them, 65 souls awaited immersion in the American River. Our lifejackets were snug against bellies full of Toobhedd’s campfire pancakes. We were ready to follow them into the rapids.
“A-men, Brother Toobmaster.”
“I bee-lieve.”
“Say it with me: beer high.”
“Buddup! Buddup!”

Some just slapped their rumps and raised their cheap suds reverently as the leaders climbed down. If only all paths were as simple as theirs.

We had huge truck inner tubes, some of which had swollen into tortured croissants under pressure from the compressor. We had duct tape, body paint, spangles, and rope. All morning, each campsite had improvised, improving on black rubber and air. We experimented with handle designs, rejecting Shea’s suitcase-style prototype for Gareth’s loop, through which you could hook a foot or an elbow or even an extra beer. We pitched our successes to other tubers—talking up a design that conserved materials (because it turned out that only Toobmaster had remembered to bring duct tape), or one that worked even when the tube flipped. We debated the platonic form for an ass-basket, to cradle the main concern of our journey downriver. And what would it take to build a floating spit, for barbecued chicken? Gareth tied on our mascot, Ducky. Next-door, they made sparkly blue superhero capes and bikinis, and tarted up their tubes with paint.

“We need someone for the front of the beer train.” Someone stepped forward and took hold. They had lashed five coolers to five inner tubes, and now the strongest voyageurs carried them sideways down to the bank. The rest of us followed, ducked under our tubes like dung beetles. We laid them in the sun—a few burst spectacularly—and climbed up on the rocks to watch the dozen who had decided to start the trip with a run through the Troublemaker rapid before joining our caravan.

Bright yellow rafts, bright blue and red kayaks, inflatable beer coolers with built-in cupholders: the river was full of bath toys made in China. The South Fork of the American River is the most popular rafting run in California, and all morning, professional rafting operations had paddled clients through. Troublemaker is the highlight, a Class III+ frappuccino that makes the punters squeal. Just below, the outfitters have built a wooden platform on the rocks, where a photographer waits to catch the rubber-ducky bounce of each vessel. The guides perch at the back of the rafts, shouting “Left! Go! Go!”

The rafting companies traffic in thrills for the deskbound, so it can’t be good for business that tipsy tubers can bob through Troublemaker ahead of them, trailing intrepid beer coolers. Troublemaker mostly keeps you on the straight and narrow, and even if you offer yourself up in an unsteerable rubber doughnut, you’ll likely do okay. The guides are good-humored about these traffic jams, though, catching tubes on their paddles like SpaghettiOs when the occupants get flipped. “Butt up,” we shouted from the bank, but it’s bad advice for the face-down.

“It’s not as interesting as kayaking,” complained Tim. “You can’t see anything from the tube.” Or, in his case, out of it. He missed the exit and kicked to shore fifty yards beyond, where a furious man waited on a deckchair.

“This is private property,” he yelled, and it was, though it would have taken them seconds to leave. Instead he kept them for fifteen minutes, loosing the anger of a day and a lifetime. “Thirty years I’ve lived here. Thirty years. And you fucks have ruined the river. I can’t enjoy my house any more. Yesterday two people nearly drowned in that rapid, and let me tell you, I’d just as soon they did. Keep more of you Bay Area assholes away. Fucking flatlanders.” Where Tim comes from, there were mountains two billion years before these upstart California rock-pimples, but it seemed better to nod.
“Peace, man, peace,” said the other tuber who had washed up. That would calm anybody down, of course.

We all reunited below the rapid and made ready to set off. There’s no graceful way to get into an inner tube. You back up to it, legs splayed, and lower your backside like a pregnant woman hitting the sofa on a Friday night. Kathleen took my hand. I draped a leg across Natasha’s tube and tucked a foot in her armpit. With my free hand, I held Shea’s Teva sandal, and he grabbed the handle of Gareth’s tube. We drifted.

“That stuff will kill your ambition” Robert DeNiro tells a stoned Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown, in one of my all-time favorite movie exchanges. Fonda looks up from the couch and exhales.
“Not if your ambition is to lie on the sofa and watch television,” she points out. Tubing is like that. It’s at once very American—the long roadtrips, the gear, the preparation, the activity—and then fundamentally not. Unlike rafting, with its frenetic paddling and cheerful teamwork, tubing takes a bit of getting used to in such an active culture. We get to just…lie here? And drink beer in the middle of the day? And eventually we’ll get where we’re going?

Natasha had left three toddlers in San Francisco, and now she flopped her head back. “When you have kids, you don’t get to be yourself. You have to be this person who keeps telling people to do things they don’t want to do. This is so unbelievably nice.”

“Rocks! Separate!” someone would call from from time to time, but the sociable ones ignored it, preferring, like true loves, to hold on through the rocky patches. What harm if a few of us always ran aground? Why not hang out with friends, trying to wobble ourselves free while cool water rushed past? Eventually, we would stand up and stagger through, holding our tubes by duct-tape leashes, while the rafters gawked. Easy for them; they had paddles.

Sometimes our lack of ambition kept us in an eddy for minutes before we noticed we weren’t moving. But we yo-yoed around the faster rapids, spinning backwards, then forwards, six of us joined by feet and hands. “Butt up! Butt up!” we howled, as we were smacked against the rocks. When Shea’s ankle slipped out of my reach I broke into “My Heart Will Go On,” only the latest in a dripping medley that had included “Reunited (And It Feels So Good),” “Islands in the Stream,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and of course “California Uber Alles.“ When I am queen, there will be karaoke-tubing for everyone.

We fantasized about opening a bar where you could sit in circles holding your friends’ feet, swiveling in and out of chats as the mood took you.

We persuaded Shea that he could stand on two inner tubes, rodeo-style, and he managed to get a knee on each one before they popped him up like toast. “Like a harp, Shea. Those tubes are just playing you like a fuckin’ harp,” we told him, making fun of his Chicago-Irish street toughs.

We imagined our grandchildren’s complaints about Gen-Xers. Mommy, I don’t wanna go to Grandpa’s house. Old people smell like Tevas and chai lattes. Daddy, why does Grandma give us Red Bull?

The takeout point was a little beach under a highway bridge. Last year Kathleen had missed it, and the others had to send a posse to rescue her and the beer cooler before they went to Sacramento. Mindful of this, we aimed in early, with splashy kicks and weak swipes at the water below. Before long all the tubers were gathered on the bank, passing out the last of the bad beer while the hardy ones jumped off the bridge in another tradition.

The bridge was 40 feet high, maybe more. A rope hung from one of the girders, and each raft that passed below it had a customer balanced on the bow, waiting to grab it. They climbed a few feet if they had the arm strength, then dangled, then dropped into the water, where the others waited, paddling backwards. We watched our jumpers. Only one spot was deep enough for a safe landing, and they paced up and down trying to pick it, while the crowd directed them.

“You can’t think about it,” Toobhedd explained to me, safely below. I had no intention of thinking about it. “Just doesn’t help to look down and start thinking. Pick the jump spot and step off, feet together, arms by your sides. Hit the water like a pencil and you’ll be just fine.” Above, some jumpers yawped and pedalled like Wile E. Coyote. One guy, new to the tubing weekend, did a hummingbird’s backflip, and word quickly went around that he was a stunt diver up from L.A. An old-timer stayed down “long enough for people to look forward to seeing me,” then popped up, waving, with his sunglasses and bandana back on. We winced as Gareth smacked the water, arms out. He waded out with sore, pink hands.

A girl with ringlets climbed up the bridge path, twirled her yellow bikini top with a whoop, then let it drop to the bank like a gingko leaf. Her breasts were pretty, but she immediately thought better of showing them, because she clutched them and ohmygodded for a bit. Her friends coaxed her over to the jump spot, stepping sideways, still holding her breasts as though they might fall off. We could hear the two guys encouraging her, and the bankside tubers cheered her too. Eventually, she took their hands and climbed onto the railing. A few cars on the bridge slowed. Someone raised a countdown. “Ten…nine…eight…” She lifted a foot, testing what a leap might feel like, but squealed and shook her head instead.

One woman groused. “This Girls Gone Wild crap. I hate the way it changes the tone of everything. Ooh, look at me. And, yeah, you know what? They will. It’s bullshit.”

“There are children up there. Not cool,” said someone else.

The girl peered down, in her little yellow boy-shorts. Most of the tubers were chatting now, debating when exactly the pot cookies had really kicked in, and the strengths of the Black Eyed Peas. “Wait, whaddya mean you don’t know London Bridge? Don’t you ever listen to the radio?” If her free spirit didn’t extend to freefall, they were no longer interested. One of her two companions dropped her hand, and jumped. Midway through the third loyal countdown, a fire truck stopped and the driver got out. She hopped down, and made for the river path. We could see the fire chief still wagging a finger.

A couple of high school boys had somehow climbed across the bridge struts to slouch on the support pillar. “Hey, is the water hella cold? Like, hypothermia cold?” one called eventually. It’s okay, one of our jumpers shouted back. He shrugged and pitched himself into the water, forty feet below. His dripping skate shorts hung even lower.

“I’m a mother of three,” Natasha warned the guy who was set on getting her to jump with him. “You’d better be right that I’ll come out in one piece.” She did. Twice. “It wasn’t even scary,” she said, shaking off the water.

It was the 19th year of the Toobing trip, which started with a few college friends and has kept going long after they’ve started driving new cars and buying homes in Tahoe. Every year they welcome friends of friends, like me. Toobhedd and Toobmaster book the campsites, buy the tubes, rent the vests, arrange shuttles, count heads, paint chests, and check off spreadsheets. They are the cheerful mayors of the campground. Toobhedd cooks bacon, eggs, pancakes, and toast for every single hungover camper. That’s the Bay Area way, from Craigslist to Burning Man, and I’m still getting used to it. Pitch a tent, pitch in, take your shirt off, share your intoxicants, share your munchies, light fires. Forget the zillion-dollar fogbound house you’re paying off, and sit around a campfire with your friends instead.

I like it.

This barn-raising mindset is more generous than my own. “Give it away now! It’s a natural thing,” their invitation had said. “So bring your special something to share with everyone. Past years have included body paint, baked treats, lipgloss necklaces, paint pens for toobs, flaming sambuccas, etc. Ignite a new tradition for 2006!” All weekend, people offered up vodka jellies, cookies, fruit, firewood, costumes, beers, and buttons. Tim had brought a generator, a compressor, and fuel to share, and the backwoods know-how to use them all, but I sat behind my acrylic camping wine glass, hoping that these strangers would stop embarrassing me with kindness. I had brought pounds of Marcona almonds and pistachios, but had no clear sense of how to distribute them beyond my own little gang of familiars. Though I can write fat checks to charity, and pamper friends and family once in a while, I have pinched, hoarding instincts around hors d’oeuvres and strangers.

As if to teach me, a man with German glasses visited every twenty minutes to offer platefuls of melon cubes and peaches. His superhero cape sparkled, but his eyes were sad. I took his melon first gratefully, then guiltily, aware of the peaches that filled our coolers and—oh shoot—the melon that sat, uncut, on our picnic table right in front of him. But Melon Man seemed to want to give, and looked for nothing.

I guess we’re supposed to be scared these days. Scared of the quake, the terrorists, the warming ocean that will rise and turn San Francisco’s hills into islands. Scared that house prices will fall—or that they’ll keep going up. Scared of another tech bust, in this whitewater working culture. Scared of the panhandlers who own the Tenderloin and would sell it for a rock; of the immigrants taking either all the jobs or all the social services, or both. Some days I feel it too, but mostly I’m still fascinated by this country, by all these cultures I haven’t learned. There is still much more to love than fear on this American river.

Bill flipped up my visor.

“Is it not human nature to fear that which might harm us?” he said gently. “Motorbiking can harm us. Your fear is natural.”

Mute eyes say plenty, especially to teachers who stopped counting at 10,000 students. Though they could barely see our faces, and we hadn’t yet straddled the bikes, Bill and Bob had already sorted the class. They knew whose testosterone pride had to be brought low, who couldn’t follow instructions, who needed no more than mechanical guidance, and who needed encouragement, above all, to quiet the mental gabblings of failure.

I’m braver than most, but only because I’m scared of so much. My comfort zone goes from my nose to the nearest printed page, and going any further affords daily scope for courage. Like the Italian villagers who discovered new worlds (and new hotties) on their post-war Vespas, I was hoping that Class C California Motorcycle Drivers Permit would expand my range.

Bill and Bob had parked their Goldwing tourers front-wheel to front-wheel; twin monuments against the wind that shunted rolls of fog into the drained reservoir. The reservoir is a vast parking lot for City College now, and at 6.45 on a Saturday morning it stood empty except for the orange cones and rows of bikes of Bay Area Motorcycle Training. Next to the Goldwings, the students’ 250 cc Kawasakis and Hondas were rolling hairdryers (though still scarily potent compared to my bicycle). None of the borrowed bikes had mirrors—they’d break when we dropped them.

First we walked the bikes across the park, lumbering in neutral with the engines off. Then we found the friction zone and moonwalked in first gear. Finally, we planted our feet on the pegs and woozily crossed the range, like a row of bowling balls let go too soon. This was fun until I tried to stop the thing. The throttle roared; I dropped the brake and lurched at Bob, then grabbed the brake and roared and lurched again. He gave a matador’s hop.

“Stop riding the brake! Stop braking! Clutch. Clutch! CLUTCH!”

I clutched. It felt so fucking unfair. Whose idea was it to stick the throttle under the brake, ready to roar at you like a junkyard dog?

“You can’t. Ride. The brake,” said Bob. “The clutch is what?”

“Your friend,” I said sullenly. Every morning I freewheel down Bernal Hill squeezing my true buddy—the back brake. I hate not knowing what to do.

“The clutch is your friend. Don’t grab it. Don’t drop it. Squeeeeze it. And get your fingers off that brake. Head up! Head up! Look where you want to GO.” We crossed and recrossed, with laborious three-point turns, until we had established that all twelve of us could putter at lawnmower speed without damaging the parking lot. Then we lined up in two columns. Bill lectured us while Bob demonstrated our next challenge.

“Old people riding. Makes your eyes mist up, dudnit?” said Bill as we watched Bob weave through the cones. “Or could be the fog.”

Our class was relatively elderly. In the other group there were a handful of cholo kids who had boasted in the classroom sessions about not being afraid to get hurt. They did great ghetto rolls on the way to the PortaPotties, even as the day wore on and we were all near-hypothermic in the dank fog. If you’re under 21 you can’t get a California Motorcycle Licence without completing a safety course, but the wily old men must have manouevered them into the other instructors’ course.

“Five months? Aw, you’re just a puppy,” Bill said to the cute newlywed as we waited for all the students to finish the lesson. “I’ve been married 38 years. And here’s what I learned: women go to Wife School when they’re five years old. This is true. No matter where you are, 30,000 feet up in a plane, filling up your tank, sitting in a bar, whenever you get two guys together and the subject of marriage comes up—and I don’t know why it should come up with strangers, but it does—guy will tell you the same thing. “‘Yew never listen,’ she says, or ‘Yew only pay attention to the newspaper.’” That’s because they all went to Wife School and got the script, and the guys are just shambling along without a clue. A guy, see, he’s got a line in the sand. You don’t cross it, you’re fine.”

He drew an imaginary line with the gripper stick he uses to pick up the tiny cones that mark our courses. “But women, see, they got a line that goes like this.”

He broke into a little trot and drew a line that wriggled like an inchworm, the kind of path we were supposed to be able to weave by now. “You cross that line, and you’re dead. And if by some tiny chance you’re actually right for once—and this is very rare—she learned in Wife School what to do. She’ll go back twenty years if she has to, drag it all back up, mess with your head until she’s in the right again.”

“Twenty years?” sniffed Bob, “Try thirty. Try forty.”

“I just start with ‘Sorry’ now,” said Scott, who was 35. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry.” He told me earlier that he’s wanted to ride a motorbike all his life, but first his parents wouldn’t let him, and then his girlfriend wouldn’t. Now they’re married, and she’s relented, figuring he was old enough not to kill himself.

“That’s good. You’re learning. First step is, you’re always wrong. Wanna know what I do when the lectures start coming down?”

“I’m trying to teach a class here, old man,” said Bob.

“I’m passing on a lesson too,” said Bill.

“You’re cutting into my lunch break…”

“I get down on my knees.” He got down on his knees, leaning on his stick. “And then I grab her around the knees—this I won’t demonstrate with you, Scott—and I press my cheek against her thigh, and I say, ‘Please please please, don’t beat me no mo’.’ Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she tells me to get out of her sight. Either way, it’s a win.”

He hopped on a borrowed bike and demonstrated the course for our lesson on Swerving. Then he stood ready to coach our individual runs, until we rode back to our parking range for further instruction. Engine-off-key-OFF. Dismount CORRECTLY.

“Know why I do this dog-and-pony show?” he said. “It’s not because I need the attention, or I want everyone to love me up here. I could give a shit about that. It’s because you’re going to perform better if you can relax and get out of your heads, start focusing on the skills. So I goof around to try to get you to look up, pay attention to me and your surroundings instead of to that voice in your head that says that you’re going to mess up. Bob and I rarely, rarely have a student fail.”

Bill comes from a line of Marines, though he’s retired now. Below the cod-acting he has the coiled Zen calm of Special Forces soldiers I’ve known. They’re a breed that seems more thoughtful and engaged with the world than the consumers they’re trained to defend. Bill looks a bit like Dennis Hopper. Not the young Easy Rider, but the stoned and placid grandpa in Fishing With John: ready to make fun of himself, and readier still to smack down anyone else who tries it.

When I came back from a break, he had placed my ignition key on the seat. “Understand, I do this not to humiliate you,” he said, “but to draw your attention to the practice of shutting down. Bikes like that, battery’s flat in no time flat. Get a jump from a car and you’ll destroy it. So, be mindful.”

My mind was full. I missed my bicycle. Its muscle-engine needs no choke.

By the second day we had all got more confident. Bill and Bob took turns coaching us through the exit for each activity.
“Watch me. I said, watch me. You don’t get this right, you’re not going to pass the test, and you’re going to have to come back to spend another weekend with the old people.” Bill hobbled behind an imaginary walker.

U-turns.

“DerVAla,” Bob said, mangling my name, “you’re going to have to speed up or the cars will run you over. Hell, cats will run you over. Going faster is easier. More fun.”

Accelerating into a curve.

“DerVAla. Stop riding the brake.”

Riding over an obstacle.

“DerVAla, how do you feel about yourself now?” I’d made it through a box of u-turns and bounced over a two-by-four plank, backside raised a cautious inch. I said that I felt better, with a huge grin he couldn’t see.

“Good girl,” he nodded. “You’re doing fine.” A hit of praise made me drop the clutch in excitement and cut out. He waited while I scrabbled to figure out what gear I was in. “Okay, just hit the starter and start again.”

“I don’t even call it riding,” said Bill.“I call it practice—unless I’m just going down the freeway to get somewhere. That’s commuting, which I don’t care for. It’s practice because you’re always trying to perfect your skills. And you never do. You’re never perfect, at least if you have a mind like mine.”

When I made it through the last training range, Bill flipped up my visor again and peered in. “Learning to be a good rider will change your life,” he said. “In ways that have nothing to do with motorcycles.”

For the test, we entered a box of cones and described a figure eight. Then we puttered up to a line of cones that forced us to swerve around an imaginary bus. We accelerated into a curve. Finally, we each came to an emergency stop, where Bob sat in a deckchair grading us like an skating judge. “Three. Zero. Six,” he called when I clutch-gear-down-front-brake-rear-braked to a halt.

“You went outside the box with your U-turns. You went too slowly into the turn. And your stopping distance was three feet too long. But you passed,” said Bill, when we had all finished and were lined up in front of his clipboard. “You are now qualified to ride in a parking lot. Good girl.”

I babbled thanks, telling him I didn’t even know how to drive a car.

“Listen to me,” he said seriously. “I hear your thanks, and I’m glad you feel that way, but you need to understand something. I didn’t pass that course. You did. You can do anything you want. If you want to become a good rider, you can. Has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with your own expectations.”

Over the last few years, several people have trained me in new skills: to listen actively on a crisis hotline; to sit in silence on a ten-day retreat; to scuba dive and sky dive; to fast for seven days. It’s uncomfortable to be a beginner. It’s an exercise in trust; in faith that these people know where we’ll end up even if we don’t ourselves. Usually, they’re kind and brisk, used to calming fretful beginners so that they can get their jobs done and go home. How quickly we reduce ourselves to types when distracted by an unfamiliar task.

This morning I dreamed that my motorbike class was trying to get to the Motorcycling for Dummies Training Center, somewhere in downtown Brooklyn, or maybe Dogtown. I was separated from the pack, and found myself spinning out of control in front of a biker bar, scared and embarrassed on my little hairdryer bike. I took a breath, and coached myself through the dream. FINE-C. Fuel-Ignition-Neutral-Engine-Choke/Clutch. I drove—up the hill, miraculous competence—to find my classmates painting canvases about how motorbiking made them feel.

“You can’t teach a human,” said Bill in our last lesson. “It’s been proved. You can tell them, you can show them, you can warn them, but in the end all you’re doing is putting the information in front of them so they can figure it out for themselves. That’s the only way humans learn.”

“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?”