No. 11 to San Francisco

I'm going home to my city by the bay

I wrote a lot in Portland. I sat on 23rd in Cafe Reese and I wrote, and at night I hung out in the south-west and drank Margaritas in a bar with a transman who looked like he should be called Barry. Barry was dating Lavinia, and they groped each other a lot. We'd sit on a table right opposite them and stare, until Barry and Lavinia left to fuck and we had to talk to each other instead. It was no fun without Barry so we'd leave pretty soon after those guys.

Portland went on like this for a week, days borrowed from California, nights ogling Barry, until I woke up one day and my book had come out. We went to Powell's that night and bought it, and sat on the street in the sultry evening heat, my guy reading the book, me just watching the kids walk past. That seemed to be Portland, pretty much. Green and hot and clean and good. If I ever settle anywhere, it will be in a house in north-west Portland Oregon, with a beat up sofa on the porch, a front door I never bother to lock, neighbors called Barry and Lavinia.

I've been terribly alone
And forgotten in Manhattan...

I got on the train the next day, the Coast Starlight it was called. I sat next to an Australian girl called Sarah who had been hospitalized in New York for heat rash, had visited emergency in Portland for a spider bite, had lost her purse in Chicago. Also, her apartment burned down. She was pretty nervous. I took Sarah to the dining car to get her drunk. I figured she needed something other than the pills she kept popping.

There was a girl sitting with a big lady at a table gazing at the landscape, all snow and forests and deer. I knew as soon as I saw her that she'd been terribly alone and forgotten. She had that look about her that just hurt. We sat next to her and Candy, the big lady, in the dining car as the sun was setting near Klamath Falls. We were still in Oregon though we'd been on the train a good four hours. Klamath Falls was the end of Oregon and though I was sad to leave Portland because the city by the bay was not my city, it felt good to move, to keep moving, to turn my back and look forward. She didn't look like she was moving. She looked like she was hurting and didn't know where she was going, like she'd been forgotten and just didn't care. I think we asked her name, but we never got the answer. She twisted a napkin, pushed a wilting salad around an amtrak bowl, and her story came out.

"I split up with my boyfriend just as I moved to Portland and I hate it. I'm just lonely and miserable and the city sucks and we had this ridiculous conversation a few hours ago where he said he didn't want to talk to me until August as 'it hurt him too much'. Everything was perfect between us, everything was fine, and then I moved from San Francisco to Portland and he broke up with me."

"Are you going back to San Francisco?" I asked.

"No, LA. I went to Seattle for the night, and was getting the train back to Portland, but then I set all my stuff up in the sleeper cabin, and hung everything, and unpacked my little night bag, and I didn't want to get off. I love trains. I need to think. So I upgraded when I got to Portland and never got off. I'll get to LA and then fly back to Portland in the evening."

You could feel the older lady bristle then and waves of indignation wafted offa her. She did not dig men, not anymore, not after her life. I call her Candy though her name was not and should not be Candy. She was an old hippy, looked part native Indian, large and grandiose with long black hair frosted gray and a magnificent wise face. She played the ukelele and had been burnt and charred in the past but now liked living alone and had reclaimed herself: this is what she told us.

Our server came by and brought us Merlot and Pepsi and Sierra Mist. If you mix Sierra Mist and Pepsi you get ginger beer, and that's what the sad girl wanted. We watched as she measured it out carefully in a plastic tumbler on a table covered with a linen cloth that rocked and mocked us gently. Behind us the two Mexican kids from Phoenix waved shyly. Eduardo had been telling me about the immigration officials stopping all the Mexicans in Phoenix. His illegal friends never left the house now, scared they might get stopped. He was legal but he never left the house as it was 115 in Phoenix and it sucked. Eduardo looked at me and smiled and looked away as he was with his friends and was 16 and cool, and I was 29 and not cool, unless no one else was around. I looked back at Candy who had rolled up her sleeves and was ready for battle. Candy asked the right questions. She was part of the sisterhood you could tell.

"How long have you been dating this guy? You need to ask yourself, could you ever trust him again?"

I figured poor ole John or whatever his name was hadn't done much to betray trust so far, he'd just dumped the sad girl, but in the sisterhood you can't side with the dude, so I nodded, and anyway, I felt bad for the sad girl and being part of that sad made me side with her.

"We dated for like, two years, and yeah, I've been asking myself that. I've been crying in my cabin like, all afternoon, and I have no idea what I'm doing anymore, I just need to get away. I'm so lonely in Portland, I'm sure it's a great city but I just don't want t get out and meet new people, I want to sit and have coffee with friends and people who know me and I can talk to, and this has been going round my head and...uuuuh."

My love waits there in San Francisco

"I though he was the one."

She stopped, stared out the window and blinked a little, gulped.

"Sorry."

Candy nodded wisely.

"I see your point, but do you really want to turn your back on a new chapter in your life when you could learn so much from it? How long did you live in San Francisco? I lived there for twenty-three years, in the mission."

"Me too! I lived in the mission. I was in San Francisco for four years, and it took me two years to really settle in and I miss it so much..."

"It'll take you two years to settle in anywhere. Portland is a chance for you to make a new start, and what is this bullshit about needing anyone to make you complete? All you need is yourself. The day my husband walked out on our five year marriage, I swear the light changed in my apartment. It got brighter."

Candy was in her element. Candy kicked ass man. Candy was rocking her vag bigtime. I wanted to be like Candy when I was older. The sad girl kicked ass too, because she was honest. She was sitting with three strange women on a train and pouring her goddamn heart out over microwaved game hen and yellow vegetables that could have been carrots but probably weren't. We found out the dude had a history of running away to long distance women: he called it romantic, Candy called it stupid. He had gone on a date soon after breaking up with sad girl: he'd flown from SF to JFK for the second. Fool, muttered Candy and we applauded with our eyes and attacked the zapped fowl. Our server took our main course away and we ordered Creme Brulee cheesecake.

"You're not going back to him are you? You can't. He's an idiot. Get him into therapy."

I imagined Candy strumming along on her ukelele with a bunch of beatniks: it seemed a choice instrument for her. She liked playing people and she genuinely liked the sad girl, as we all did, wearing lonely and forgotten so tenderly even though we might have taken the opportunity for a kick at that open, bleeding heart. I liked them all, these women. I wasn't used to that but I liked them, and I figured it was something to do with the west coast.

When the train stopped I jumped out and stole a cigarette from two girls from Santa Barbara who had never seen green like they'd seen in Oregon and couldn't stop talking about it, and when I jumped back into the train and walked back to my seat, I passed a carriage full of high-school kids in basketball tops and baggy shorts. They were a football team from Sacramento. One launched himself across the aisle with a laptop and I tripped over the cable and splatted on the floor. I felt my finger crunch and knew it was broke. All the kids went OOOOOOOOOH.

"You OK lady? Shit, I'm sorry..."

I was giggling because I do that when things hurt. "I'm OK," I giggled and giggled off down the carriage to apologies, and one brave soul yelled "YOU STILL LOOK AS PRETTY AS YOU DID BEFORE LADY!"

The kids got off in Sacramento and I spent a night nursing my broken finger. Sarah got nervous and offered me pills and a hospital trip, but I had no insurance so I strapped it up with a popsicle stick, asked if I could sue, found out I couldn't, forgot about the damn thing. In the morning we stopped in Martinez and we all piled out to look at Spanish houses and palm trees, rumpled and yawning and clutching coffee, and the conductor yelled so we piled back onto the train. We got to Emeryville and took the bus to Fishermen's Wharf. San Francisco's golden sun wasn't shining for me, but the Japanese guy who drove me to Columbus and Broadway was laughing like a little dog, you know how those dogs laugh? My finger was swollen some, and the sun wasn't shining in San Francisco, but I didn't give too much of a shit, I didn't care, because California felt like you shouldn't. Somewhere I knew Candy and the sad girl felt the same way.





monster finger! took me ages to write this 'cause of the damn thing so apologies for the shit post.... off to explore san fran...