“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.

It’s a blown-up snapshot from 1980. The print has a reddish tinge.

A dozen eleven-year-olds cluster on the steps of a pebble-dashed estate house. In the middle, two sit with arms around silver trophy that stands as high as their scrawny shoulders. One is Gareth, whose dad has just captained Waterford to victory in the FAI Cup soccer league. The other is John.

They’re all skinny, with skim-milk Irish skin and the slightly hunched posture of a rained-on tribe. It makes them look cold, though the sun is shining. Several wear identical tracksuits, navy-blue with red and white stripes on the arms. John says it wasn’t a soccer team strip; that’s what Dunnes Stores was selling that year, and so that’s what the Dooradoyle mammies bought.

You can see the excitement of the day in the way the boys tamp it down—the smirks that bite back smiles. The faces are blurred, partly because of camera shakes, partly because they’re too young to have taken shape yet. The best-looking boy does smile broadly. “Well, his dad was English,” explains John.

Whenever I go to John’s house in the Sunset District, I look at the picture on his living-room wall and ask him to tell me again who each kid is. Twenty-five years on, a core of them are still best friends in San Francisco, and he is still in the center. Armed with Morrison visas, they reassembled here a decade ago, drawn by surfing, mountain biking, and a technology boom. It wasn’t planned. John and Conor sold their hoopty and crossed the country when winter took their jobs as landscape gardeners back east. A few weeks later, their funds had almost run out when they saw a face from the St Joseph’s Boy Scouts on Market Street—Kevin, who was well-established enough to share a roof when they needed it. Later, Gareth showed up from Chicago. Then they they added a Dublin chapter to the tribe. Each will tell you that they never set out to find an Irish crowd. They’re sleeker altogether than the drunken nostalgics you’ll find in the Sunset bars. (And I mean that literally. I’ve heard them reel off their body-fat percentages in Limerick accents.)

They’ve hiked, biked and backpacked together; shared apartments and survived; married, bred and babysat; carried each other’s boxes into new houses; taught each other how to drive on the San Francisco hills; started companies and weathered wealth and layoffs. They meet for Christmas pints at home, and weekly pints in dive bars in the Lower Haight or the Mission. “We’ve known each other since we were three,” says John, as his own three-year-old son sing-songs his ABCs. It’s love.

On the Sunday morning phone call, Dad asks what I did last night. For ten years I’ve lived too far away for him to have much sense of my daily life, but now I can tell him I was out with the Dooradoyle boys, who first knew me as Seán Hanley’s daughter. That’s how I think of them, though they’re nudging forty. I remember these guys from school; my friends’ big brothers, lanky fellows in navy-blue uniforms, playing guitar or hanging out by the Sixth Year radiator in the Central Area. Dad remembers them too. “Oh, yes, and wasn’t he a brother of Maeve? Did he go off to UCG?” he says. Teachers with a generation of experience have sharper memories of students twenty years gone; it’s the recent ones that blur.

Growing up, I dreamed my parents would relent and move us to Dooradoyle, the little housing estate where everybody lived. We lived three miles out, facing a farm whose tang of slurry and silage assaulted the Hanley sisters’ metropolitan ambitions. In Dooradoyle, you could hang out under the street lights—there were street lights!—until way past dark. Adolescence is about waiting around for Things to Happen, and in Dooradoyle, there existed the slight possibility they just might. But how could anything happen in a place called Mungret?
“Town mouse and country mouse,” my mother would tease, and though she would drive me anywhere, any time, being collected just wasn’t the same.

So they’re glamorous to me still, the Dooradoyle boys, the big brothers. Their circle reminds me of home because it is home; an Irish outpost based not on banding together against the new culture, but on hundreds of years worth of banked friendships.

Bonus musical link: John and Gareth play “Outside Looking In.”

Nora rode a Raleigh bike. It was black and basic—three gears, hand brakes, a pump for the inevitable punctures. A gray leatherette bag hung from the handlebars. Every day or every other day she’d ride into town for “messages.“She would return with some muttonchops and rashers, the day’s provisions, staples and necessities, ten Woodbines for Tommy, Maguire & Patterson matches, and a newspaper. The spuds and onions and cabbage all came from the haggard out the back door beyond the whitethorn trees. The eggs came fresh from her own hens. Bread she made—plump loaves of soda bread, crossed like a good Catholic, baked in her covered cast-iron pot with turf coals on the bottom and on top. Milk was their business. Every now and then she’d kill a goose.

But it was that trope, “going for messages,”—not marketing, not shopping—that best described the difference between the “custom” in West Clare and “consumers” in Michigan.

…

By then in America we went to “super” markets for the stuff that filled the back of cars with a month’s provisions and spent the time at the checkout watching the charges as the clerk rang them up, or rummaging for the coupons, or sighing in commiseration with our fellow shoppers and sellers fro whom the transactions had become just work, just getting it—the money and the stuff. In trade for “messages” we got discounts, “paper or plastic?” and “have a nice day,” all in the one monotony of corporate good manners. The market is common, global, and dull. We buy in bulk, bank by machine, and couldn’t care less about the name on the sign. More and more, we point and click our way past any human interaction.
…

Nora came home the long road from Kilkee with a small bag of things—a day’s worth of perishables, a night’s worth of news—her messages. We return bulging with our bags and boxes of stuff—our newer faster brighter bigger better-than-ever-right-priced stuff—laden and empty, grim and wordless.

—Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage

For the first time in what seems like months, Twin Peaks is unblurred by the fog. I’ve missed its humps, which last night were as sharp as my reply to my mother when she asked—again—if the weather was hot in California. (I was instantly sorry, but didn’t say.)

I walk up brown Bernal Hill and look down over the city, out to Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands, and over to Twin Peaks again on the left. The first Bay Bridge carries people to Target and IKEA. Next to it, the second Bay Bridge is still a disappointed pier. The other major landmarks, or maybe timemarks, are two giant billboards, one pink, one blue. In silhouette, a man and a woman fling their arms in solo bliss, a mile or two apart on Highway 101. They are slender, oblivious, and plugged up. I want to rip them both down, but instead I strike an aerial X through each one, and skip to the next John Prine song on my own goddamn Shuffle. We are mistaken, the iPod ciphers and I. The yellow labrador and the Maltese sniffing each other’s arses by the park bench have it right.

At the bottom of the hill, where the freeways tangle, the Bernal Farmers’ Market gathers every Saturday. You can buy heirloom tomatoes for $3 a pound from the white farmers, or disposable tomatoes for fifty cents from the Mexican growers. The Vietnamese sell flats of duck and quail eggs, and knocked-up chicken eggs. There are lemon cucumbers and cling peaches and honeycombs and tamales, and Vietnamese herbs “for diabetes.” It’s a hike to get there, over the hill, but I like to watch people getting excited about vegetables.

Charles the baker has a stand next to a man in an orange turban who pushes his overpriced Sukhi’s chutneys so hard that I don’t go near him any more. Beside him, Charles is still, even a little forbidding. I watch him as middle-aged women wave at the racks of breads and ask for “one of those.”
“Which one?” he asks, and they don’t notice the tiny edge, frayed from hours of vague demands. I try to have my order right, and ready.

But he took a shine to me a while back, and each time now he surprises me with a sudden smile and a yard of flattery. “Where have you been?” he asks, and makes me wonder. Where have I been? Not doing the good stuff—scribbling, seeing pals, cooking food bought from other human beings who grew or baked it. I ask him for a loaf of black olive bread, because even though he’s chatty now, I don’t want to hold up the line.

Charles says he’s the only seller at the market who lives in San Francisco. Everyone else drives in from the Central Valley farms before dawn. He has a bakery over on the other side of town; I’m not sure where. His olive bread is good enough for Bernal, but truth be told, it makes me miss the loaves that Caputo’s on Court Street sold out of by noon—the ones Nicholas Cage dripped sweat on in Moonstruck. But the Brooklyn Italian bakers were surly, and Charles makes me feel like more of a hot young thing than I’ve felt since I used to gatecrash the geriatric nudist camp for morning swims with Tim.

He wraps the loaf and says I look beautiful today. “Damn, girl, you got some kind of portrait in the attic?” I realize Charles thinks I look great for 47. Then I scrabble in my bag and tell him, worriedly, that I think I’ve forgotten my wallet and I’ll just go back home and pick it up and maybe come back later for the bread. He shakes his head, cocks an eyebrow, and hands me the loaf. I wave it off, mortified.
“Take the bread,” he says. “It’s four dollars. You can give it to me next time. That way you’ll come back.” I hem and haw, and take the bread. “Do you have more shopping to do at the market?”
“Em…”
“Do you have more shopping to do? Yes or no?” I hear his tiny edge again and admit that I do. He reaches into his cash box and hands me a twenty. “Here you go, sweetheart. Now go on, and eat that bread when you get home. You got skinny since you last came by.”

I stuff the bread and the gratitude and the goddamn white earbuds into my rucksack, and nose around to see what else looks good today. The egg man with the aviator glasses packs six white and brown ones in a paper bag of straw. The fruit lady offers bruised peaches for ten cents off. A woman with a basket of baby aubergines shares her ratatouille recipe. I tot up how far Charles’ cash will get me if I buy the Mission figs. I’ve made the same happy calculations in Bangkok and Lima, Chiapas and Hanoi, but never in the swipe-your-loyalty-card Safeway at the other side of the hill. At the farmers’ market, no one has shopping lists. That’s because markets are conversations.

A day out with Tim usually involves some combination of getting dirty, eating soul food, trespassing, scrambling, decayed waterfront, poison oak, housing projects, bushwhacking, and a canoe. This life has taken a toll on his car, a 1991 Honda Accord station wagon, which was once admired by the Puerto Rican kids as a potential lowrider, but is now beneath their attention. The windshield is cracked. The rear-end has been replaced with a slightly different shade of charcoal, after a disagreement with a garbage trailer up at Lake Superior. The color doesn’t quite camouflage the caked mud and dust from its daily commute up a dirt road. Strewn inside are all the necessaries—canoe and kayak paddles, firewood, mosquito netting, tools for fixing the car’s many problems, bags of laundry, dozens of magazines, pads and ropes and bungee cords, oil, coffee mugs, and several changes of clothing. There is often a canoe strapped to the roof, in case the Ontario plates don’t explain enough. It is unstealable.
(more…)

San Francisco is a divided city, and the African-American neighborhood of Bay View/Hunters Point is where it projects its fears and its power-plant pollution. Tim has wanted to take me there for months. It’s Red Hook without the architecture or the Statue of Liberty, he says, but 3,000 miles from Brooklyn we have to take what Red Hook we can get.

Nosing around the Allemand Brothers boatyard, we meet El coming back from a jog around the India Basin Shoreline Park. He is imposing and friendly, with long white hair and sideburns, and a sports announcer’s voice. Tim asks him about the rumors that the boatyard is going to close.
“This used to be a full union boatyard,” he says. “John and Flip, the brothers, have been here for sixty years. John died in December. He would have been 93.” He jerks a thumb at the office shack, and we hear radio sports. “Now it depends what Flip wants to do with the place.”

He points to a tall crane. “John was driving that thing until two weeks before he died.”
“Sounds like Sal,” I say.
“My 78-year old landlord is like a mountain goat,” Tim explains, “Still running a sawmill and a dozen building projects.”
El shrugs. “See, Flip would say he’s just a kid.”

El lives on a houseboat moored to the boatyard slip. It’s far removed from the architect’s million-dollar restored Icelandic car ferry a few miles up the bay, but even though it looks like a floating toolshed, Tim is drawn to it. For as long as I’ve known him, he has wanted to live on a houseboat. “I take it out once a year to scrub it down and and repaint it,” El says. “Wooden boats, you have to maintain them.”

We have permission to wander. Tim admires the lines of the Taba II, a peeling wooden sailboat. Tacked to the transom is a faded photo of its glory days under sail. It turns out to be the first boat that John and Flip built, in the 1930s, and it got them their first boatyard jobs.

“To me, this is the heart of San Francisco,” El says. “The water. The bay.”

It may be, but its arteries are clogged. Allemand Brothers is in the shadow of the huge Navy Yard, once the largest shipyard on the west coast and now toxic landfill. On the other side, there’s a huge, coal-burning electricity plant. They’ve built a narrow concrete path around it that goes out to a pretty but polluted salt-marsh, where the shore birds pick their way. Fishermen of the apocalypse haul catch from the power plant’s cooling streams.

The few factories add more filth to the air, and on the radio later that day we hear a fierce Hunters Point grandmother talk about what this has done to the kids. Asthma, itchy welts, and nosebleeds. Stunted growth. Learning trouble. Visits to the emergency room, where doctors hesitate before bringing out expensive oxygen tents for the Medicaid patients. She believed them, she said, when they told it her it was caused by genetics, ignorance, and poor diet in their community. Only when the healthy Asian immigrant kids came down with the same illnesses after a few years in the projects did she start to fight to get the power plant closed down.

A Saturday farmer’s market opened in Bay View a few weeks ago. It’s struggling, but it marks the first time in years that fresh fruit and vegetables haven’t been a bus ride away.

We passed a store that was as dark and low and cluttered as a Bolivian bodega. The sign said “Keys cut”, so I went in. Inside was festive, with kids milling around the soda coolers and loud weekend chats. The owner belly-laughed when I asked him to copy my mailbox key.
“Oh, I gotta change that sign,” he said. A very old man in a walking frame stood at the counter.
“WHAT?” he said.
“Just a second. He don’t hear so good. I have to tell him again,” said the store owner. “I said, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOUIS. MAY YOU HAVE BLESSINGS ON THIS BEAUTIFUL DAY.” The old birthday boy shuffled out, and the owner turned back to me. “Now, I had a key cutting machine. Then I gave a guy the key to service it. And he never came back! Can you believe that? He took my key!” He shakes his head. “Same thing—I had a salting machine. You know what that is? Well, I gave it to a guy to fix—and he never came back.” Belly laugh. “I say, let it go. It’s not worth caring. They didn’t take from me that which is most precious to me, my life, or my faith.”

He looked just like Cedric the Entertainer. A small boy tried to take the bag of snacks he’d paid for, but the store owner held it. “Now, just a second. I was talking, and I didn’t pay attention to who paid me. Was it you? I gotta make sure the right person gets the change.” The kid nodded, still trying to slide the plastic bag from under the huge hand. “See this boy? This boy is a great fisherman. Been fishing his whole life. And he’s getting pretty good. The bigger he gets, the better he gets. Ain’t that right?” The boy nodded again, and escaped with his change and his bag of treats.

“My name is Sam,” said the store owner, and we shook hands. Sam held up a empty sachet. “None of that soda for me. I’m drinking an energy and vitamin supplement. GIN-seng.” I examined the empty packet. “I take no sugar, no refined flour in my diet. No sir. See, I used to weigh 495 pounds.” I goggle, and he laughs again. “I’m down two hundred.”
“You must have covered that wall of coolers.”
“That’s right! He sure did!” Sam’s friend said. “There’s a photo of him from a few years back in front of this great big pick-up truck, and he just about covers it.”
“Covers it. That’s right,” said Sam, and preened. “And never had a health problem.”
I asked what made him change, and he took it as a diet question.
“I’d tried just about everything. Nothing worked. Then I finally found this thing—it’s kind of like the Twelve Steps. With a spiritual aspect. With faith, I can take each new day, count my rich blessings in this beautiful life. I’ve been running this store for thirty-one years. Thank the Lord for every day.”

There’s a sculptor’s yard next-door to Sam’s. It’s stacked high with ship’s containers, each rented out to artists who weld and twist and hammer giant sculptures for Burning Man. The entrance is festooned with metal stars. An middle-aged white guy in rainbow braces showed us some kind of a cage, possibly for giant desert squirrels. When he realized blowtorches weren’t part of our repertoire, he lost interest faster than I did. We watched a nice young man strap a huge glittery mattress to the top of a truck, and moved on.

Outside, Louis, the old birthday boy, watched his family load picnic supplies in the back of their car.

On 24th Street, a full-size salsa band struck up joyous Saturday afternoon music. Traffic stopped to watch. So did the beer-in-brown-bags brigade. In in the apartment overhead, this little girl joined her dad. (Photo by Tim.)

Across the street, these neighbors swapped gossip. That’s Bernal Hill in the background.

At five in the morning, a woodpecker sets up the kind of racket that panics householders. Bang! Bang! Is it the boiler? Or a burglar? Bang! Bang! Bang! The fat neighbor cat who clicks across the roof at night never shows up when you need her.

After an early-morning gatecrash swim at the nudist camp next door I hang a towel on the clothes line. Soon the bugs with red underwings turn it into a page in a fully-illustrated bug kama sutra. Afterwards they weave around the garden, drowsy with sex and sun. A flycatcher takes up a sniper post on the clothes line above them, her head jerking as if under a strobe light.

Below, a pair of housefinches browses branches on a white-blossomed bush, like newlyweds at the Pottery Barn curtain rack. A hummingbird sizes up the possibility my red shirt is a giant blossom. Eventually he decides I’m a timewaster and whirrs off, dropping into some aerial calligraphy to impress the girls.

A doe and a fawn stumble through the trees. Lucky, the ancient, anxious chow down the hill, has no interest in female dogs, but he loves does. He looks up, interested, and then worries his boner. I wish he wouldn’t.

The garter snakes are shy.

We hear Rocky cantering back up to the stable.

    “I wonder what the poor people are doing today,” says Tim, as he always does.
    “We live like kings,” I say, as I always do.

Sal was thirty years old when his apple-green ’56 Jimmy truck rolled off the production line. It sits next to his pick-up, his battered convertible, his cigarette boat, and his catamaran. Like Tim, they are part of the flotsam that has ended up on his ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Sal says it’s no way to meet someone, cussing like that, especially not a young lady. But James keeps leaving stuff all over the workshop so’s a person can’t find a damn thing, and it aggravates him so, and well, shit. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and steps out of the workshop into the sunshine, and says hello.

“Where’d you find her, anyway?” he says to Tim. I say, San Francisco, which is true for today and saves time. “Awn’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he says, in an old Long Island accent, admiring my dirty green tracksuit from neck to ankles. Correctness has made social eunuchs of my generation, except when we’re as hungry for attention as half-weaned babies. We don’t know what to do with a frank Fifties once-over, except laugh.

“She’s an Irish girl, Sal,” says Tim.

“An Irish girl! Look at you, all out like a little leprechaun. You know what a leprechaun is?”

I admit to having heard of leprechauns, most of whom probably now consult for Google in Dublin.

“There was a fella playing golf who hit a leprechaun,” he tells me. “Knocked him out cold. Fella gets down on his knees, gives him the kiss of life, and eventually the little leprechaun sits up and rubs his head. Hardly remembers what happened. So he wants to give the fella three wishes for saving his life. Guy says, aw, you don’t have to do that, I’m the one who hit you in the first place, I can’t accept three wishes.

So he goes on his way, and a year later he’s back there playing golf and the leprechaun recognizes him and asks him how it’s going.

‘Pretty good! I’ve been having a good year, he says. Leprechaun asks him about his golf game. Guy says, it’s the damnedest thing, he went from a 36 handicap to a zero nearly overnight. Leprechaun nods and smiles and says, how’s the money? Every time he puts his hand in his pocket, guy says, he pulls out a couple hundred dollar bills. It’s amazing.

Then the leprechaun says, what about the sex life?

‘Oh, you know,’ says the guy, ‘once, maybe twice a week.’

‘Twice a week?’ says the leprechaun. ‘Jeez, we can do better than that for you. Let me figure out what’s going wrong there and take care of it.’

‘God, no, no, no,” says the guy, “Don’t be doing that. I’m just a priest in a small village.’”

Sal says I’m the best-looking woman Tim has brought to the ranch in three weeks. Tim brings thirty or forty women up to party in a month, he claims, and they’re usually four hundred pounds apiece. “I think he gets ‘em in the bulk department at the Trader Joe’s” he confides.

He has a shock of white hair cut like JFK’s, and the hard belly of a Chelsea boy. For years he taught shop at a school in East Palo Alto. Somewhere along the way he took on this ranch, and hammered together a batch of cabins and a diesel generator and a gravity feed from a ridge-line spring. He takes in strays—mostly human, mostly harmless.

He wanted to show Tim his saw-mill operation, housed at a friend’s sprawling ranch further up the mountain. He vaulted into the back of his white convertible and then waved at imaginary crowds while we sat in the front; a touring dignitary from Nassau County. On the winding roads I made myself carsick turning around to ask questions.

“What was your role on the PT boat, Sal?” I ask.

“My ROLE?” he says, and I hear the dippiness of the question. War isn’t a school play. “Well, I was eighteen years old. My role was to be scared out of my wits.” Then he says, “We figured out pretty quick I wasn’t much good for artillery. So they put me in the engine room, which was probably where I belonged.” I ask him why he volunteered for PT boat duty instead of something quieter. “When you’re a kid, in great physical condition, you go where you think the action is,” he says. “Then you’re sorry.” He talks about Kennedy. “John Kennedy had already written one of his books by then, he was older than us. He was known. People used to go just to hear him talk. Real smart guy. He wasn’t elected anything back then, but guys knew there was something about him.”

I ask if he saw Marilyn when she visited the troops in Korea. No, he says, he was stationed at a base in Alaska for most of that one, but he saw Bob Hope twice in World War Two. We chatted about Higgins’ landing craft, and Churchill, and why it took so long for the Yanks to get into the war.

His Tuscan father had never learned to read, in English or Italian. His mother was much younger and smarter, he said, and when Sal went to college on the GI Bill, she went too.

“Do you skate?” he asks, as we stand in his lumberyard and watch him feed a log into the saw-mill. “What size shoe do you wear? James and I are going rskating tomorrow.” James lives in the cabin below Tim’s. He is a golden, 30-year-old yogi, whose prep-school manners have buffed rather than eroded a natural ease that has let him move from Beverly Hills to the Bronx to Sal’s world. They are pals.

Size sevens, I say. He opens the trunk and shows me two pairs of white rollerskates, the kind I dreamed of when I was ten. “They’re size sevens,” he says, a little gruffly. “Fancy case and everything. Betty put a few hundred dollars into them. But I guess you’re going to work tomorrow.” He closes the trunk before I say anything.

Betty was Sal’s girlfriend of ten years. She died of a heart attack last month. He hasn’t talked about it much, Tim says, though I’m not sure if it’s because the guys haven’t asked him. Sal is handsome, and he knows it. He turned down dinner on Saturday night to go on a date. “That guy gets more ass than the rest of the ranch put together,” Tim says.

At the ranch he lives in a near-constant state of exasperation with the tenants he shelters from a crueller world. Geoffrey has long, tangled hair and beard, and carries on long, tangled conversations with himself as he walks the grounds (sometimes belly-laughing at his jokes.) He is gentle and paranoid, and hand-paints lovely traffic signs that are as off-kilter as the surroundings. Sal says he doesn’t mind Geoffrey coming into his house and using his telephone to make four dollar sixty cent long-distance calls to his sister, but it gets aggravating when the chief of the Baltimore Police Department starts returning messages about The Plot on Sal’s answering machine. “I’ve told him, I’ve told him, no more calls to Washington. And now he gets registered letters from the NYPD instead.”

Susan was in a car crash fifteen years ago, and a head injury left her so disoriented that she was homeless for a while. Now she potters in her little garden, chatting loudly to her worried-looking dog, Lucky, and to any neighbors who pass by. When Tim plays music, she dances.

Bob has the wizened watchfulness of a civil-war deserter, and he doesn’t much like to talk, at first. He’s just here to tend to his horses. 25 years ago he was the world champion endurance rider, and these hills right here have the greatest trails you’ll find anywhere, he says. In the mornings, his two-year-old horse follows Tim’s car with a toddler’s hopeful curiosity. He’s not broken yet. It’s wrong and cruel, Bob says, to ride ‘em before they’re four or five. The cartilage isn’t set, and the bones aren’t ready. Racehorses don’t make it much past five or six because they’re ridden too early, but his first horse is just coming into his prime at 22. He brushes the pair of them with a fierce tenderness that makes me cry.

Rick is a master plumber and woodworker who helped lay Tim’s new floor. He drinks alone, mostly. He says this is the most stable group of tenants he’s seen in his fourteen years here. Sal’s savior trip has lightened up a little, he says, and it’s made it easier on the rest of them.

“Jeez, he used to drive around Oakland or East Palo Alto and find people in a terrible state and bring them back to the ranch. They’d have real bad mental problems, drug addictions, alcohol needs, you name it, and they’d be stuck up on the ranch with no transportation, off the grid, no means to get the food and medicine. And he thought the rest of us should take care of them. This one time, I came back from a trip, and he’d parked two crystal heads in a trailer in my yard. You want to have heard those fights, man, those domestic disputes. It was bad. Eventually I said, Sal, I can’t have a meth factory in my yard.

Then there was the time he brought this guy in from the streets; real bad alcoholic, just roaring. Rarrr-arrrr. Sal thought he could dry out up here, try his hand at learning a few skills, but the guy just kept drinking and yelling all hours of the day. Eventually Sal just hitches up the trailer, with the guy in it so drunk he doesn’t even notice, and drives him down to the road. After that he kind of eased up a bit on the lost causes.”

“Why do you think he does it?”

“Compassion, mostly. But he’s on his own trip too, like the rest of us. He has a program. If they’re not progressing fast enough for his liking, they’re out.”

Tim has rigged up solar panels and storage batteries, and takes a gravity feed from one of the mountain springs. There are 12-volt track lights, a stereo system, laptop and phone chargers (though little phone signal), and even—at Sal’s insistence—a TV and DVD player for Netflix evenings. Since he ripped out the bathroom to retile it, the shower is outside, fitted up with a stock-tank hot tub. (Sal growls, ‘When you gonna finish that bathroom?’ He is used to cleaning up when his tenants’ attention span runs out.) Everything works on the solar power except blenders and coffee grinders, so he uses a pestle and mortar now. Sal’s diesel generator powers the common washing machine.

He is Sal’s most promising tenant in a while; a solvent, cheerful sort who can and will fix things; a life-long pet of woodshop teachers. In spite of his day job in San Jose, Sal harbors ideas of having him run the ranch so that he can turn to other things. There’s a lot Sal wants to do. He wants to see the movie Crash, the new one about racism in LA. He wants to go to Australia. On the PT boats he supported the invasion of Borneo led by the Australians. They were good soldiers, he says, and he’d like to see the place. He never got to go anywhere metropolitan in the service, he says, unless you count Manila, and it wasn’t much then.

Three weeks ago he bought a boat—two, in fact; a deal from the one guy. There’s a little Hefner-style speedboat with red vinyl seats, and a small cruiser. He wants to pull the cruiser up to Oregon and putter around the lakes up there. He thinks the other boat will be great for waterskiing just as soon as he tunes the engine and replaces the fiberglass with something really nice.