The Thirty-Fifth Post

San Francisco is a really fucking special place. If you’ve been, you’ll know what I mean. And if you haven’t, flights are cheap these days.

Driving up the 101, past Candlestick Park, coming up on the fog as it rolled in towards me, so did the memories. Rites of passage. My coming of age. Innocence. Innocence lost. A young man learning things about girls he was never taught in Catholic school.

You could say it was like seeing a lover from long ago. Walking down her streets from my hotel in Pacific Heights, down Fillmore, having a Mekong Mocha (not for the faint of heart) from the Bittersweet Cafe, past the French bistros, and then later along Post, towards Union Square. I was two streets West of the Marriott, waiting to cross at a light, when I heard a voice go, “Ay!”

I turned. He was an old coyote, in a beanie hat, holding a paper cup. I figured he wanted some change.

“Ay, for real. For real, dawg,” he said, motioning me over. I shrugged and approached him. He looked at me through drugstore glasses.

“Yo man I got a question for you,” he said. “You look like you got some answers.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “What is it?”

“Yo what do you do, man, when the world is comin’ down on you hard, and everything feel like shit, and your old woman treat you like a fool, man, what do you do?” he asked, through gold teeth with pain on his face. His cup was empty but he wasn’t asking for money.

“I smoke weed, dawg,” I replied. He looked up at me, confused. I figured I’d done enough damage, and turned around to cross the street.

“Ay! Ay!” he yelled. I turned around from where I’d gotten. Nodded my head, what?

“What does it do for you, the weed?” he asked.

“It makes me feel better,” I replied. I turned and started walking.

“Ay!” he yelled again. I turned my head. He was pointing at me, grinning, then laughing, and started to slap his thigh.

“What?”

“Dude you made my day. Thanks, man.”

I smile. I walk away.

The first thing I do, is walk into Niketown and pick out a pair of black Shox on sale. The sole on my right canvas slip-on split on a downhill walk, and I wanted better shit for my feet. I grabbed a pair of socks from the rack and tore them open. “Do you mind? I’m going to wear these out,” I say to the sales assistant. I put the old shoes in the new box and give them to the person working the checkout. To be recycled into childrens’ playgrounds, she says.

Then, I walk into a H&M and pick up a light-coloured blazer. I’d forgotten how cold Summers in San Francisco get, and on this day it was 55 degrees and the clothes I packed were mostly linen affairs and the warmest shirt I had was a henley. Minutes later, I emerged adequately clothed, shoed, and started to walk again.

The rest of the day was a montage. A man on the sidewalk showing a rat and a cat and a dog, hanging out together quite amicably. I give him three dollars and he lets me video them on my phone. A pretty girl from Hong Kong strikes up a conversation with me as we cross the street. We smile and wish each other a nice day as we then cross different streets. I watch her go and imagine the time I would’ve just put my hand on her arm, just below the elbow, maybe just above, and stopped her from crossing her street to ask her what she was doing later, maybe tonight. I toy with the idea, and finally pass. And, anyway, the moment had come and gone. I eat at a Hunan restaurant I ate at the night before. The lady who owns the place recognizes me and treats me extremely well. We make small talk. Later that night, in Union Square, outside a Forever 21, a small, older gentleman who’d seen better days approaches me and asks if I’d like to buy a copy of The Street Sheet, a small newsletter published for transients to sell. They’re $1 a copy. I give him $5. He thanks me and then I ask him if he knows where I can buy some dink. He nods quickly and says, “Follow me”.

We walk around the block as he looks for his man. We go to a Carl’s Jr where my new friend, Rick, Rick the Poetry Man says his connection is almost always at. Rick looks at me for a second and asks in a small voice, kind of like he wished he’d known to ask right away, if I was the po-lice. I laughed, and asked him if I smelled like the po-lice. You know, like bacon. He laughs. “You said bacon, man,” he says. He tells me he’s been writing poetry on the streets of San Francisco for 20 years.

“Do you like Bukowski?” I ask him.

“I only take my inspiration from the man above,” he replied.

We walked around a little more till he gives up, complaining the Bart police have fucked things up tonight. Asks if I can give him another five for trying. So I give him the five and as we part ways he tells me if I come by again and want to buy weed, anyone on the street will sell it to me if I just say Rick the Poetry Man said it was cool.

Later, standing under the awning of a pizza-by-the-slice place on the sidewalk, two girls dressed for a bachelorette party walking by point to me and say, “You’re sexy!” and then to each other, “okay that’s three, let’s go,” and take off in search of number four. Minutes later, I flag a cab back to my hotel, and feeling connected to everything and everyone, started thinking I really wanted to live here again.

Our agent hated our script. He didn’t use the word hate, but diplomatically told us he had “some major problems”, and The Maestro and I sat and listened with our jaws clenched and stomachs turning as he explained that in his opinion we’d gotten some fundamentally poor development from our manager, Angela Birnbaum, and our hearts sank as we listened to him essentially tell us that everything we should have done for the script were the things we’d wanted to do, till Birnbaum convinced us nobody would buy the script unless we made some commercial decisions. He blames Birnbaum. I blame myself. Us. We wanted to be amenable. We wanted to do whatever it took to get the script in shape for a spec sale and in so doing embarked on a year’s work of rewrites (mentioned often enough on this blog) that will now go sailing out the window. We deserve it for behaving like amateurs.