Goodbye to California Street

I am standing here at the windows, looking out at the oven-fresh brownie texture of the Bank of America tower, lit up with the warmth of a Pacific sunset, and beneath it the calm marbling of the Ritz Carlton, née the Metropolitan Life Insurance building. One can wrap their toe around the uneven wooden flooring in portions of my flat; it is one of the last real, quiet San Francisco residences, where a legitimate person, uninterested in money, may look at the towers of those who are. 

It is not a good time to pleasantly leave an American city, yet here we are, two friends saying farewell after a summer camp concluded halfway through by someone having gotten a deadly cough. The office which brought me here is now remote. The lease is up. The warmth which now seasons the leaves of the bay laurel outside the window bely the coldness of the sidewalks, the dead stillness of California Street without the rattle-whir of never-ending cable, the ding-ding and upward grind of cable cars. The San Francisco cable cars are in constant conversation with the city around them, but today…. today, they are still asleep in the Mason and Washington garage, the unending steel cord visibly paused between the guards in the pavement.

And yet the city is still alive, quietly so. Some call it empty and post videos of themselves wandering about the streets disturbing this unusual peace, as rare as an eclipse. There is a pressing, social (media) need to make noise since silence is disagreeable to modern tastes.  I think it is a painful reminder to our self-absorbed age that a city does not need its citizens, per se. It is bigger than them, defined not by those immediately in it but by the indelible personalities given to it by the past citizenry, like layers in sandstone upon which we are mere crumbs. There is more Herb Caen here than Mark Zuckerburg; and if you do not know who that is, their degrees of celebrity are simply the difference between making a home and making a fortune.

There are the things you throw away while living somewhere: empty whiskey bottles, coffee tins, cardboard boxes, magazines, letters from former intimates. Their jettison into the rubbish (and recycling) bins  is necessary for a continued presence. But every time one moves, there is an opportunity to remove things from your life forever or canonize them. Anything that survives one move will survive all the rest.

The leather chair goes: bought at an indecent time for an indecent price. The faded coffee mugs stay: too many sips stamped upon their rims. The television is exiled, can be replaced if the madness of owning one ever returns. The old books stay, always stay. 

The smell of walnuts and cranberries, frying in butter (and bread toasting to the side) exhale alongside this view, a prelude to a poor man's rich man's salad. Hal McKusick's "Ain't Nothin' But a Memory" plays. But it isn't a memory, not yet. 

San Francisco is a city made by globalism, undone by globalism, nursed along by globalism. Before moving here, I once felt wrongly that this was the sum total of Baghdad-by-the-Bay, a venture capitalist's playground filled with an unceasing stream of toddlers from the better-connected private liberal arts schools. Today, in the quiet calm of a frightening plague working its slow destruction, there is a hopeful truth; San Francisco is not that. She is more, vastly more, encyclopædiæ and burlesques and newspapers and albums more. 

She is bigger than the Pacific Ocean which dominates her western edge. You can believe in the ocean during the daytime; when the sun still smolders on the horizon, you feel the California surf. But no one really discusses it. The defunct Sutro Baths and the Cliffhouse are more in the collective  consciousness than the beach (one goes to Carmel-by-the-Sea for that). For afterwards, once the sun sets, you are a city apart. There is no sea, no Central Valley; only the hills, and City, and the bridges, and jazz.

Somehow, many nights become few. The lease says so. The evening says otherwise. This evening will last forever, or at least as long as I stay awake. A new Dave Brucbeck song plays on the radio, one I’ve not heard in twelve years of studiously listening to the man. Last summer I'd begin each morning listening to Jazz at the College of the Pacific or Bossa Nova USA on the television screen while another luscious day rose from the west on the evergreens of Twin Peaks, or the tripod Sutro Tower strode out of the vanishing fog. The television stand, which started off against the wall a year ago, then spent a good while in the middle of the room as a coffee table, is back against the wall again during the rituals of moving. It is an earthquake-proof affair made of oak beams and maple planks from the family farms and railroad spikes from Cleveland, and I observe a knick its oak legs carved in the hardwood floor’s varnish; hopefully the landlord will not (I am certain he, alongside most of humanity, does not read this column).

There is little about San Francisco that has not already been said by writers with more skillful hands than I possess. It gave Twain supper, London drink, Kerouac hallucinogens. It gave me, oddly enough, what it is giving everyone right now on the empty streets and empty-as-churches cafés: serenity, a hard start. San Francisco is where America sends her writers in the winters of their discontent, to learn that summertime comes again. There is a warmth to its cold breezes and a sober coolness to its summer days that says patience, patience. Look once more. Write.

There is an herbaceous magic in its gardens, in its open cafés, its tree-laden streets and even in its slums where laurel trees grow alongside potheads, filth and tent encampments. The Bay Area soil is rich, and anything will grow here, good seed or bad; but it will grow. The soil is so wholesome that lavender and rosemary spring up in the wild, alongside stucco walls and Victorian bay windows that are cut down, one by one, for bland, broad windows which admit glorious views of Victorian bay windows.

I came to San Francisco in a hard time, blindly following that magnet that draws everyone here though they invent narratives after the fact to explain why they first crossed the Bay Bridge, or slid underneath it in the soporific, screeching fury of a BART train (the old-style BART trains, designed to be cramped when crowded, are comfortable when empty and reliably loud). The history of the year is, like in any good museum, bound up in mementos and relics.

Here are the renter's insurance papers, the result of a hurried phone conversation from the Palace Hotel the day I moved in. They may go in the rubbish pile, having successfully protected me from nothing (insurance is a bribe for the universe to leave you alone). Here is my first cable car ticket, for which I paid $7.00 like a rube. Then my first Clipper card, used entirely for cable car riding. I was told — by what I do not know — to ride the cable cars with religious zeal late into the evenings, and this quiet ritual sustained me during some difficult hours. It led to a fascination with their rhythms and the Dutch-angle beauty of a city built so well upon hillsides, which led to a certain essay about spending twelve hours riding on the damn things.

Here is a Giants game ticket, an ill-fated match against the New York Mets on a halcyon summer day with friends. In cleaning the kitchen I will probably find one of the parmesan packets from the pizza party I gave at the apartment beforehand. Here is an abundance of University of Richmond paraphernalia, giveaways from alumni events and the fifth-year reunion. And here, a press pass from a Palm Springs tourist board fête (the date-pulp-and-rum mai tais were, contrary to the usual effect of rum, most memorable). These events seem especially distant as they belong to an age where it was allowable, ethically and socially, to see other human beings; but moreover they are an enduring testament to the city's generosity to a rural interloper who had railed against her for so long until he arrived at her doorstep, downhearted and empty-handed. From the kitchen's open window, that breeze, ripe with greenery, wafts over other papers that call for my attention. 

Here is a receipt from a Central Valley Olive Garden, a souvenir of my first sojourn to a town called Modesto, a place that I returned to often and, as it turned out, am moving to. High heat of endless summer! But that was October, a half-year ago. San Francisco's seasons this last year were sunkissed day and foggy nights, and there were not so much months as there were many days. It was always summer of some sort.

Here are cleated shoes and a softball mitt from the season and a half I played with a team whose names were a bit too rowdy to be printed here. There are few better uses of Sundays than a good beer league, assuming you are not an ardent Baptist, and I suspect I will use them again. They go into a Trader Joe's paper bag to be stored until a time comes for ball games and light beer as hydration. 

Tonight, it was cool; maybe it was the human bustle which warmed the city, at least in part. Fog and rain are rolling in from the west, from over the hills; the many hotels which rise from Union Square are unhabitually dark except for a single room here or there: no tourists or businessmen now. The Four Seasons has illuminated a few floors in the shape of a heart, a laurel being passed around the city by the hotels who have all but closed up shop; the Westin had it last week. The Mark Hopkins is vacant, no glamorous cars parked the entrance where Robert Duvall once parked in Bullitt, no snappily-dressed doormen. But the flag is still billowing in the breeze, high above the Top of the Mark. Grace Cathedral has not forgotten how to toll the hours, nor has St. Mary's down the hill.

San Francisco is empty tonight, much as my apartment is becoming. But it will be here, all of it, when it is time to return to life. As it was for me a year ago.