Arrival In My Home Port

(1731 words)

‘It matters little how much is destroyed, if only a germ of the miraculous be preserved and nurtured.’     -Henry Miller

My city is seven miles by seven miles, maybe a little more or less on either side but essentially is a round-edged square. San Francisco is the kind of place you come to or leave. All of my life’s memories of that beautiful place are captured in movements with only one big and important memory-box showing me sitting still and that was the day I started sailing.

I sat on a rock beneath a small port entry light at the Marina Green and saw for the first time slanted sails driving spear blade hulls through foam above the grey green bay waters. I was hooked on something I lived with but never saw. I was grateful to the forces of my surroundings for the first time since I was a kid and touched a buffalo hoof in the middle of the Golden Gate Park. 

San Francisco blended my heartbeats in jazz and congas and parks and laughing schools and hurt knuckles pounding my colour into black and white kids’ faces. I grew up moving to the Haight-Ashbury and matured looking back at the ‘Mo District and appreciating the smells of my parks. There was dew on grass. There were bent eucalyptus twigs, tree ferns, ponds, small creeks, ridge-lines and dells. My first kiss and sex. The French witch with no underpants. My dog, Rover, shaking mud to a fine white fur.

The plane landed and I bumped to attention. I had to remember my overhead luggage and overcoat. I had to go through immigration. I had to get a ticket for the bus into the City. I had to take a piss and wash my face and brush my teeth. I had to get something to eat so I could sober up.

I woke up as the bus moved over the hill and sat up to see my favourite site… my City emerging from the soft crest of this hill. The city hall luminous and the seven hills undulating in mid-day light. Pastel boxes of whitenesses rolling up and down and spreading to the lower bay. 

‘Image Is Everything’ said the rectangular billboard where there were no billboards before. Two tennis shoes stuck in my face. I blinked strongly and the billboard was blotting out the city hall, disrupting the pastels and contours. Where was I?

At the bus station people seemed to be moving faster than my memory recalled. I was only gone four days but I had to look at the street signs to reassure myself that this was San Francisco. I had returned to the City many times from slow paced places and went right into gear, but something had changed… The last thing I concluded is what we all fear concluding: I had changed. Now, that is scary. I tried to tell myself that it was the booze and fighting and surprise family things. A lot had happened and I was not coping well, is all.

I walked the wrong way to catch my bus, but decided to take a walk to the marina as an award to fate. I went into a liquor store and bought a half-pint of the word rum on a bottle and continued my walk. I mounted the hill above the tunnel and looked out at Chinatown. I stopped and sat on the cement rail above the tunnel and sipped from the bottle. It burned my throat and made me take a slug this time. I wanted to get drunk, I thought out loud. I was in my City and I wanted to be a San Franciscan. I wanted to get good and drunk.

The breeze caught me up on that rail and I remembered my Lizard King sitting at her berth and wanted to be there right now. Capping the bottle I put it in my overcoat pocket and put the overcoat on, shouldered my bag and skipped down the steps into Chinatown.

Chinatown makes me who I am every time I smell and walk its streets and alleys. My youth was spent courting those pretty little ladies who found me exotic, I was smiling now. Looking around at laundry hanging in droops from secret windows on blocks of buildings that I always guessed contained half of China’s population I breathed like I was back in town. I took another pull while walking and spilled a bit on my overcoat but did not care. I was at home.

I was sweating now since I was not being touched by a breath of air passing from one familiar street to an alley shortcut to a street. I pulled off the overcoat and hung it through my bag strap, careful for the bottle’s easy access. Into North Beach and sunlight. I thought I should celebrate something. I was home? Na, I always celebrated that one. I was representing a nation, delivering its heritage? Yes… yes, that would do. 

I stopped passage and turned at Washington Square, looking at the statue of Benjamin Franklin at its centre and crossed the street to enter Grant Avenue and some good bars.

Years before it was the Anxious Asp. A cigar smoking lesbian midget ran the place. I was sixteen looking like I was twenty-five. I met two good friends there. One is dead now and one is a house-husband. Both were bad muthas, then. What was I now? The Asp is gone. A blood I had met in Mexico had bought it and moved it to the Haight during those latter stages of the hippy landings but it had failed. I did not like that guy anyway.

Mike’s Pool Hall was gone also. It went when topless came in… almost to the day. Mike’s was wonderful and introduced me to the hierarchy of San Francisco’s underworld. Genovese to Sicilian to Bloods, all funded by Chinese. The heroin, pot and coke were routed through the toilet at Mike’s and deals were made at the pool tables for more than samples. Mike’s smelled like a German Beer Hall and had crushed peanut shells soaking up anything on the one foot up levels of its two floors. 

Now, I was at Specks in his own tiny alley. Across from Vesuvio’s and City Lights Bookstore. The bouquet was memory. I poured the last of my rum into the last contents of my beer mug and ate my traditional cheese from the big slicer on the bar. The bartender saw me but knew me since I was a kid. I was home.

I was already drunk. I knew I was drunk and when I knew I was drunk I must be really drunk, I thought, looking out at the city lit with haze and little spectacles of wonder. I was looking and looking around to see everything. The world might go in a second and I have to inhale all through all these digits and nostril hairs and tongues and ear throbs. Music somewhere down the hill but I didn’t need that tourist shit. Well, there might be a babe down there looking for a little Khalil Gibran and I was packing it in my overcoat, wasn’t I? Bloods are supposed to say ain’t I, not wasn’t I? Damn.

  Looking up at wispy clouds, getting a grasp on things, moving legs with feet on wet concrete with lines separating pads, don’t walk on a line, break a back or how does that go?…step on a crack. Shook my head three times and looked up at Chinese lanterns and bright red and yellow lights advertising something that I didn’t have no time to study. Moving and moving, clearing the head. 

Down to the beach of crisp memories of sand on cheek. I woke up and looked around at the expanse of artificial lights on mounds and shadows of grains and a maritime museum curving amphitheatre with stairs that were steps and/or seats.

Sea black with phosphorescent lapping timed slowly but consistent in artificial light. Where I need to be where? Got up and dusted off sand. Who would want me now with this look of drunken sandiness? Moved on toward the other beach, the North Beach, the park named for the wrong person on the statue, maybe some smoke and cold wetness. Maybe a church floodlit with hashish glows and crispnesses of grass blades and cut smells with some poet talkin’ shit about shit on somebody’s shoulder and progressive jazz ringing in his other ear.

I still had some rum in my pocket, damn, where have I been? Thought I finished that? Up on the steps a woman under my arm looking out at the wetness below. It was raining. 

This town is crazy, god how can I live anywhere else? They all slow the heart, everywhere. Here, there is something that looks up and out. Well, San Sebastian, but fuck, how?

I lost patterns in the stars and cried out to the buildings around us to let fly.

Am I dead now? I looked at her breathing smiles and wonder if she was alive and if she had dragged me back to life. Did she? Yeah, maybe. Walking and listening to a voice wondering.

In through a door that was a bar without a real name. On into sawdust and musk and tweed jackets with leather patch elbows pointing out from long oak. The barmaid knew me? I had a beer in hand in a mug that had no taste. I looked around the whirl of fine tune on tune. I looked in and saw flashes of saxophone and blare of trumpet and rasp of snare moving toward a guitar that pointed at the thunder of bass. All soft black in light. 

White guy telling his girl with white garland on white formal dress what these people are really meaning, how we white people don’t know what meaning means but we will define it and then we will market it and have jazz clubs that have tablecloths that she will really appreciate. She nodded to her hero.

The band-leader spoke smoothly, ‘Okay folks, it’s one-thirty and we’re shuttin’ down.’ The spots went out and the room was dark. I sat on the floor.