Even the Trolleys are Transplants

Everyone had told her that San Francisco was one of the greatest cities in the world: The temperature was always perfect—not too hot, not too cold; it was a haven for the LGBTQ+ community; it was full of big tech and big dreams. So she moved across the country, sight unseen, to this land of moderate weather and equality and prosperity, because her boyfriend had gotten a job at Google with a six-figure salary, and you couldn’t refuse a job at Google when you were from nowhere.

She should have Googled more about how everyone hated the Google (and Apple, and Facebook, and other tech company) buses before going to the land of Bitcoin. She had to Google “what the fuck is Bitcoin.” She had to Google “how do you use a city bus.” She had to Google “what are the best non-tech jobs in the Bay Area.” She had to Google “how do you get rid of rat mites.” She had to Google “what to do in an earthquake.” She had to Google “how do you deal with depression.”

“How’s San Fran?” her friends who stayed in nowhere texted her.

“Nobody in San Francisco calls it ‘San Fran,’” she replied. That was something the Googlers had told her in person, and she’d confirmed with a google. Google wasn’t even in San Francisco. It was in Mountain View. But all the Googlers lived in the city and commuted there via wifi-enabled company charter buses.

One day, two months after the move, with still no job lined up, she stared out the window of her boyfriend’s studio apartment on Castro Street in posh Noe Valley. One of the later morning charter buses from Apple was stuck on the steep hill. It had bottomed out where the extreme incline flattened at the cross street, Elizabeth. A whole scene was unfolding right before her: The techies, stranded. The public bus using the same route, unable to pass. The passengers on the public bus, angry at the privileged tech workers, spewing vitriol as they hoofed it up Castro. She sided with the people riding the public bus.

The power of Castro Street was immense, and it often left her in awe: It was so steep, and at the top, she loved looking out over The Castro neighborhood, with all its rainbow flags, and at downtown, with its towering buildings, the ugly eyesore of Salesforce Tower with its capitalistic projector on the top floors displaying everything from basketball games to the Eye of Sauron. She lived toward the bottom of the hill, and walking up it was a workout. But she still preferred that to getting on the bus. She was still figuring out how the buses worked. And the last time she’d gotten on the bus, a homeless person kept banging on the windows, scaring the other passengers. When the driver told him to knock it off, the man threatened to light the bus on fire. She got off even though it hadn’t made it to her stop.

“I’ve got two interviews this week,” she told her boyfriend that night over a pizza he’d ordered for dinner. They were sitting on their futon — her one contribution to this fully furnished apartment — watching the latest episode of My Hero Academia. Her boyfriend paused the anime.

“That’s awesome, babe,” he replied.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe then I can actually pay for part of the rent. Not half, though. I won’t make anywhere near what you make.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“But this place is two thousand dollars a month! It has rats, and it’s two thousand a month!” She didn’t want to have this conversation again, and yet she couldn’t grasp that their rent for a place with no bedrooms and a Murphy bed cost more than her parent’s three-bedroom house in nowhere.

“The landlord is working on the rats,” he assured her. “The exterminator got rid of the mites. It’s okay now.”

She hugged a futon pillow and nodded.

“Can we get back to the show now?”

“Yeah,” she said, and took a bite of her slice of pizza. This extra large barbeque chicken pizza cost $40. In nowhere, it cost $20.

Getting to her first interview in The Presidio, the very northern part of the city that was once a military base, took nearly an hour — much of it spent looking at Google Maps, trying to make sure she was on the right bus, headed in the right direction. Getting to this remote office required riding three different bus lines. When she got to the building, she hid in the bathroom working up the courage to go into the office. In the office, she was interviewed by a blond-haired man wearing a black t-shirt and chains and piercings. She wore a grey suit and a purplish-blue blouse.

“You met our acquisitions guy in New York, right? That’s how you heard about this position? A lot of the people here, they’re ex-New York people,” the gothic man said.

“Yes, I took a course on publishing and heard him talk about this startup. It sounded really cool. I love the idea of a digital archive of old magazines,” she said. What she meant was, this was one of only a handful of publishing companies she’d learned about in San Francisco, and she didn’t know what else she was qualified for.

“You get to read a lot of great pieces this way. I’ve learned a lot. It’s really cool. So, do you know XML?”

She did not know XML.

“Well, that’s okay. It’s pretty easy. You can pick it up quick. We’ve got pretty good documentation in Google Docs. Let me show you around the office,” he said.

There was a pool table. There was a PlayStation with VR capabilities. There was a kitchen area full of snacks. There were no cubicles. Everyone was wearing t-shirts and hoodies and jeans and sneakers. Many had brightly dyed hair or streaks of hair. Everyone had a Mac.

She’d interned for a startup before, in nowhere. She’d gotten a glimpse of this life through that. And yet: She was wearing a grey suit with a purplish-blue blouse. She’d never used hair dye before. She had a Windows laptop. Her favorite PlayStation games were from the PS2.

“Do y’all have Beat Saber?” she asked. “This is the most critical question. I’ve been wanting to try that game.”

“Absolutely. Do you want to play right now? If you can beat me, you automatically have the job!” her interviewer joked. As they put on the equipment, he added, “Fair warning, I’m in a band, so I’m pretty musically inclined.”

She did not beat him at Beat Saber, but was assured she’d impressed the team anyway. They’d get back to her on whether she was hired. This editor position would pay $12 an hour.

The next day, she had an interview at a traditional publishing house headquartered downtown, just off of Market Street. From Noe Valley, she hopped on the bus at the stop just outside her apartment, and got off after going up and then down the Castro Street hill. In an attempt to get to know the city better, she decided to take the F streetcar line above ground, even though the trolleys were much slower. Then she could see all the stores she might want to shop at, the restaurants she could dine at, the people she could meet. 

When she got on the trolley, she noted it was one of the restored cars from Italy. It took her past a bookstore, a bar that doubled as an arcade, a Super Duper Burgers, a Peet’s Coffee. She didn’t eat beef or drink coffee, but she had picked up enough from the Googlers and Google to know that she was supposed to care about these establishments, that they were quintessential to San Francisco.

The office was in one of the rougher patches of the South of Market area — was that human poop she spotted on the sidewalk along the way? — but she got there early, with 10 minutes to spare. She spent that time alternatively scrolling Twitter and taking peeks around the office. It wasn’t like the startup one. This one was cluttered with papers. There were no games. There was a coffee machine and not much else. This was a space where things got done, and she felt a little more at home here.

“So, why are you interested in this position?” the interviewer asked. She was a sharp Asian lady wearing a bright blue dress.

“My boyfriend bought me some of your books as a present once. I really liked this educational slant on geeky things. I think you’re doing a lot of good for the world. Your books really helped me understand more difficult mathematical concepts.”

“That’s amazing. That’s exactly what we’re hoping for. I’m glad our books were helpful. Now, let’s see if you can help us. Here are some sample pages that need editing. Note any edits right on the pages. You’ll have a half hour.”

Twenty-five minutes in, with two pages left and a deep fear that she was missing all the spliced commas and incorrect equation answers, she knew she wasn’t going to get this job that paid $28,000 a year. The competition in publishing, in the Bay Area, had beat her.

She left the office and let a deep sigh escape her as she stood waiting for the light with tons of other people — tech bros, queers, vegans, hipsters, wannabe DJs. She watched a Tesla almost hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian kicked the Tesla as it passed. The light changed. She entered the crosswalk.

In the middle of the crosswalk, a man in a business suit turned around and spit on an old homeless woman who’d be asking him for money or food. His head turn, the spit, it was all so full of vitriol. The lady recoiled. Other pedestrians threatened to call the cops on the man. He walked away.

She wanted to hurt this man for his dehumanizing actions. She wanted him to pay for his insult with a black eye, a police report. But she didn’t punch him, didn’t kick him, didn’t do anything at all except seeth the whole subway ride home. Then she played too many hours of Final Fantasy XII until her boyfriend came home and she could tell him all about the sights and the smells, her awful interview, this awful stranger on the street.

There were no new jobs to apply to the next day, or the day after that. She thought that maybe she should learn to code. She kept playing Final Fantasy XII until she couldn’t take it anymore. 

A walk around the neighborhood. That sounded nice. Not 24th street, though. She couldn’t bear to pass all those quaint Noe Valley shops she shouldn’t go into since she didn’t have any money. Not the bakery. Not the bookstore. None of the ice cream places. No. The temptations were so great here. She didn’t want to go to The Castro, either, and see the rainbow sidewalks and the sex toys and the nail salon called “Hand Job.” No. What she wanted was to enjoy Karl the Fog rolling in in the afternoon over Twin Peaks.

On the walk, she googled why the fog was named Karl. She googled who is behind the @KarltheFog Twitter account. She looks at the best tweets from the account (“Sorry for the sudden tears but I had a breakthrough in therapy where I realized I spend more time making others happy instead of making myself happy and I need to focus more on me first”).

The walk up toward Twin Peaks and the radio tower on top of it was even steeper than Castro Street. She wondered how all the cars parked along the road didn’t slide down, didn’t roll over on their sides back into the valley. It was these things that left her in awe of the city, these literal heights, these spectacular views. She missed the weather in nowhere — the leaves changing, the snow falling, the thunderstorms — but the hills and the fog made up for it here. She could see Karl spilling over the peaks now. 

She made it to the top of Elizabeth Street, where Market Street turned into Portola Drive, where the neighborhoods of Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, and Twin Peaks combined. She stood in the middle of the pedestrian bridge that crossed Market and turned to look back the way she’d come, turned to see downtown in the distance and the sprawl of the million dollar houses, the big-time small businesses, all beside it. She was the only one on the bridge, the cars passing by below her. This was one of her favorite views, this space between the high of Twin Peaks and the low of Noe, the middle place few people bothered to go or knew to want.

It didn’t take too long for the fog to finally descend around her, blanketing her in grey. The cars below looked like smoke bellowed around them. She could hardly see to the end of the pedestrian bridge. Downtown was no longer visible to her. There was no longer a peak to look up to or a hill to look down from. There was only this bridge, suspended above the sliver of road she could still see, and the cars on the road that were more cautious now.

The girl from nowhere breathed in the chill and let herself fade into the fog.