I Spent a Month There the Other Week

San Francisco, September 2011  

God had the shakes when his hand created this city. And considering what I’ve witnessed over a week of walking its streets, I’m inclined to think His vision is still Mad Dog 20/20.

Plate tectonics? File that in the same “Liberal Conspiracy” drawer with evolution and climate change. Spending appreciable time here will make a believer out of anybody. As in, I believe in San Francisco. Hard. All of it. To experience the contradictions of the city, from the bacchanal of Folsom St. Fair (pics) to the glory of Lands End and beyond (pics), is to live life as its meant to be lived.

Maureen Tucker, the drummer for the great Velvet Underground, has an album called “I Spent a Week There the Other Night”. With a little temporal adjustment, that’s how I feel about a week’s worth of San Francisco. Few places deliver like it; fewer keep you longing for more.

One evening I had dinner with a handsome couple at Bossa Nova, a loud and fashionably unkempt Brazilian restaurant in SOMA. After paying the tab we convinced the manager on duty to take us downstairs to the basement, which is currently undergoing a very $$$ remodeling. Once, nearly a century ago, this very space was a Lesbian speakeasy. Whether the memory of its forthcoming incarnation will prove as enduring and mythic remains to be seen.

I’m used to being the only white boy on some streets and trains in D.C., but being the only appreciably sane person on a city block is something rather unusual and disconcerting. As the mentally ill homeless population grows, warehouses and printing presses continue to convert into luxurious condominiums. Subsidized housing for the working class — we know them by their job titles of teacher, fireman, etc. — keeps the carnival from becoming completely unglued.

Best to keep pumping God’s veins with that jungle juice. Until the Big One happens … San Francisco is can’t miss.

Visit the Passport archives.