San Francisco is Babylon

Trip Guide: GANESH

I pretended to read Jack Kerouac on the bus from Sacramento to San Francisco, but I was too anxious or excited to really properly read a book, and I've always found Kerouac to be a bore, if you want to know the truth. I sat in anticipation, half wondering and half dreading what would happen in the week to follow with Salvatore and his flat mates, whom I had already begun to suspect hated him. And they did. The following week was a maddening regiment of watching Sal drink himself into oblivion, scream at his flatmates, beg his super to not evict the both of us then and there for his insolent stupidity. I had always loved Salvatore as a brother, but after his woman and child were out of the picture he too crawled into a bottle of Southern Comfort. Or Ancient Age, as the case may be. I cannot pretend to be better than Salvatore because I am willing to spend a few dollars more for brand names. The only real difference between us is that Sal is a mean drunk.

I speak from the heart too often to be able to deal with hot tempered, drunken Italians. Salvatore is and has always been quite the gentleman, and the type of person to really give you the shirt off his back once you are in good with him, as I was at the time. And in many ways I still regret the following week which was comically awkward and full of many social faux paus on both of our ends. It is what it is- and this has become my chosen mantra, much like the Serenity Prayer for recovering alcoholics. "It is what it is", man. And sometimes it just fucking IS.

We chatted via text message on the whole trip over. About everything, and nothing. I seem to recall having a conversation with him about Hebrew mysticism, which is a somewhat unorthodox passion of mine. What can I say- I like numbers. Salvatore's child was a Yid, his baby's mother is Jewish. So far, so good. It was an attempt to bridge a gap that had occurred between us around the time of his split with the girl. The last time I had spoken to Sal he was in a bit of a pickle with his lady friend, the mother of his child. I remember him telling me that he thought I was full of shit, which was and arguably still is the case. Sal has a very low tolerance for academic types, as I sometimes am. Quite the artist, quite the passionate human being, but wax philosophical with Sal and he's liable to break a bottle over your head out of personal insecurity. Particularly if he was drinking whiskey, which he usually was.

I first met him at a reform school that our parents had sent us to when we were young teenagers, not quite the age of 16. The place was a walking nightmare, full of kleptomaniacs, cousin rapers, horse rapers, aspies and derelicts. It was always a wonder to us that we were fucked up enough to fit the bill, and as I recall Salvatore was one of the few kids there who was not doped up on all the meds they stuck up our asses every night before bedtime. We quickly became friends, although even at the time his inferiority complex and hot temper made it difficult to tip toe around his feelings.

We played music to escape our problems. I still do. He still does. I guess that was the main reason we got along so well. I trained him, which is to say I knew and still know my way around most instruments and the theory behind them to be able to make them sing. I had a background in theory and composition, even at that age. To use Salvatore's words, I "played at being a composer" with him. We spent long hours memorizing songs we had written together, or perhaps more accurately, songs on which I had dictated basslines for him to play. He told me the first night I arrived in San Francisco that I was the person who was singly responsible for his obsession with becoming a better instrumentalist. I told him that I was sorry, for what it was worth.

When I finally pulled into the bus station on Folsom, I was exhausted. Sal was waiting inside the terminal when I opened the door and called for him to come out.

"I was waiting forever man. I was starting to think something was wrong." He smiled a toothy, overly enthusiastic grin. His long, greasy black hair was pulled back into a tightly knotted pony tail. He had bathed for the occasion, which is admittedly rare for Salvatore, but his hair and forehead were already starting to acquire that shimmering layer of perspiration and the shine it normally had after a few days of ignoring his hygiene. He reached his arms around me to embrace me warmly, and thrust a joint into my hand. "Let's get high!"

We walked a few blocks with all of my shit- which was a bit much even for two people to walk the whole 11 blocks to his flat. We opted instead to take a bus, and got stoned on the way to the bus stop.  We rode the Muni bus to a liquor store very close to the apartment, and I bought a six pack of some decent Belgian ale and Sal bought his usual liter of whiskey, in addition to the bottle he already had back at the apartment.

When we arrived back at his flat, the evening quickly degenerated into sloppy drunk impromptu jams of Eric Burdon songs and madness. Somewhere in the evening, things took a sharp left turn quickly when I said that I thought New York was a cesspool. I tried to explain that was the reason I liked it so much, but Sal was already on the defensive, staggering around drunkenly like a pugilist and flailing his hands in the air, screaming at me.

"What the fuck does someone from the bumblefuck midwest know about anything, anyway? You think you're real fucking cute, don't you. How long have you traveled now? I've been all over the fucking country man. Most people in New York are good Italian families in the Bronx."

"I'm not talking about them, man. I'm talking about Manhattan. And this isn't to say I don't enjoy New York City. I'm just saying- take a look at it. It's slick marketing executives, dope men and prostitutes. That fucking place is like Rome before it burned."

Somehow we back peddled our way out of the argument when his flatmates began beating on the wall again. Earlier that evening, Sal had made me pretty uncomfortable by screaming at them, calling the British man and his wife "Ichabod Crane" and "the OGRE", respectively. They'd really only asked him to turn down the stereo, which was at that point blaring The Animals. It seemed a reasonable enough request, but I could feel the hostility between both parties and things were starting to get ugly.

I had tried explaining to Sal that I had just gotten out of the worst domestic partnership I had ever been in, that every evening was a new conflict or struggle over some seemingly unimportant mundane detail, and that I was only craving a bit of sanity and stability. Knowing Sal as I did, I probably should've just kept my mouth shut and let him get evicted. He personalized it, of course, and that was the first bit of nastiness of the evening. Things just got worse.

Early in the morning, around 8 AM we were both still awake and completely trashed. Sal had slipped into playing old Tom Waits LPs at some point during the evening, listening to "Tom Traubert's Blues" and weeping about his lost woman and the daughter he was no longer able to see- undoubtedly due to his heavy drinking and uncontrollable outbursts of anger. I had embraced him long and hard and told him it wasn't his fault. If I look at that statement honestly, it was probably more in relation to my implicit resentment of the female gender at that point in time than it was any sort of objective measure of his innocence. We both knew he was a fuckup, but he was my friend.

We left in the morning around 8, went walking through the Mission. After taking a piss in the middle of the street in front of about a dozen passersby, Sal treated us to some fast food with his EBT card. As we stood there, three sheets to the wind, one of a million grifters begged me for 5 minutes continuously for spare cash which I did not have. Rather than answer him directly, I turned around and drunkenly barked gibberish at him until he left.

After that, we left and Sal staggered around town chasing after cop cars like a chimpanzee and making garbled monkey noises. Every so often, a pedestrian would make the mistake of walking near us or across the street from us, and Sal would put his dukes up into the air like the Notre Dame fighting Irish mascot and scream "HEY! HEY! WHADDAYOOOOOOUUUU THINK YOU'RE DOOOOOINNNNN?!!" He staggered through the streets, walking in front of traffic and flexing his muscles like Hulk Hogan, screaming things like "OHHHHHH YEEEAH, BRRROTTTTHHHHERRRRRRRR! YOU DON'T WANT TO ANGER THE HULLLKKKSTTTERRRR!"

It was good fun, until we decided to go back to the Burger King in the Mission because he wanted to pick something else up. I waited outside. After a few minutes he ran out of the front door, flailing his arms in the air mumbling incoherently about how he had tried to order something but he scared them and they told him to leave. After this, he had thrown his fists down onto the counter and screamed at the workers who began to scream back at him in a foreign language that was presumably Spanish. Things were getting nasty. As we walked away, he took his fist and slammed it abruptly into the solid doubly thick glass wall of the Burger King. Yelping like a wounded animal, he staggered off. "MOTHERFUCKERS! COCK-SUCKERS!" he howled.

After we had slept most of the day, we finally woke up, not just a little worse for the wear. Sal was in a piss poor mood, as was expected. He had fucked up his hand pretty bad. That afternoon, his super talked to him and told him there was a good chance he was going to get evicted if he received anymore complaints. The atmosphere was tense.

We walked around for a bit, went to the Goodwill so I could pick up a towel which I forgot at the Mexican diner we went to afterwards, and spent a bit of time oogling women in Dolorous park. It was a beautiful day, and people were congregating, smoking herb and drinking in the park as is typical on a Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. Sal was already half drunk, having bought about three tall boys since we woke up.

Later on, I decided to go out with a friend I was planning on relocating to LA with. Sharon was a writer, a noise musician and an all around flakey person. I had a lot of respect for her, and still do to an extent, although I can certainly understand why many others I knew personally refused to make any solid long term plans with her.

We went to a bar called Zeitgeist that evening, all three of us. Sal quickly got a little sand in his vagina because he was convinced we would ignore him all evening and exclude him from conversation. He split, taking the keys for the apartment with him. Sharon and I sat and drank and talked, and I bought her dinner at a little diner a few blocks away. After we had finished eating, I walked her home and went back to the apartment. I called Sal to let me in, only to find that he had fallen asleep.

I walked around through the Mission all night, freezing my ass off and wondering if Sal had intentionally locked me out due to some unforeseen instance of personal spite. It was still early, and I knew him to mostly fall asleep later in the evening. So I continued to walk around, and freeze. I was nearly out of cigarettes. I silently cursed my luck. I thought of the warmth of Katherine's bed, her dog Gyp curled up around my feet.

I called her.

"I'm in a bit of a position."

"Mmm."

She was half asleep.

"I got locked out of the apartment. Sal is pretty unstable, and I'm not really sure things are going so well. If you could send me a little money to get a cheap hotel room or help me find a place I could sleep for free for the night, it would save me from the cold. I have no smokes. I am broke. I'm freezing...."

We talked for a bit and she fell asleep on the phone with me before we could find a solution to my freezing to death. Mark Twain once said the coldest winter he had ever known was a summer spent in San Francisco, and it wasn't even summer yet. I cursed my luck, again. For all the good that it did me. I remembered laying with Katherine days before I left, holding her. I was staring into the locket necklace around her neck, transfixed. It was a replication of the elephant god Ganesh, remover of obstacles. It seemed like a strange sort of harbinger of the future at the time.

But who or what was the obstacle being removed? Was Katherine the obstacle I was meant to overcome? Was the universe finding a way to tear us from each other before anymore damage could be done? Was I only in the way of her getting what she really wanted? She always told me what I wanted to hear. She never cared to change, which meant I couldn't have ever been much more than an inconvenient burden to her. Hollow, empty pleasantries and bodily fluids were exchanged, but did I ever even know her? Could she ever even see me for who I really was? If we were nothing more than hurdles to jump over for each other before either of us could be free, why did I miss her still? Why had the universe seen it fit to bring us together in the first place?

I roamed up and down the streets all night, until I finally found a seedy old motel called the Krishna Hotel where a rape and a murder had taken place recently. I tried the knob for the door which was barred with iron bars and was surprised to find it unlocked. I staggered up the steps and passed out in the hallway, relieved to find a bit of warmth there on the hardwood floors.

I must've not been sleeping long when Sal called my cell phone and apologized most sincerely. He had fallen asleep and forgotten to let me in. I forgave him, for what it was worth, but I was still not very happy with the situation. I had a whole week left to put up with this shit?

I met him outside the apartment on Folsom. I went inside and quickly fell asleep.

The next day, there was a huge rave and street festival on Howard  that took up several blocks. It was fantastic. Everywhere I looked, beautiful half naked women in long fishnet leggings dry fucking people to loud electronic music. Men dressed in furry plushy wolf outfits, wearing campaign buttons that read "Nixon '72" and drugged out freaks barfing into the streets. Flaming queers in Freddy Mercury outfits dancing wildly on high rise beams and DJs lined every block, and the people were packed in together like a gigantic living Bosch painting.

Two natives came to us asking if we had a pipe. I responded in the negative, but told them I had papers. We rolled a spliff and smoked together. Sal told them that I too was a DJ, and that I put all of these other hacks to shame. I laughed. He was full of shit- I had just picked up a set of Numarks about a week before and had been fucking around with them at the apartment, so I was really still a beginner. I blushed.

Several days passed, and I had an awful fight with Katherine on the telephone. She was accusing me of all sorts of things, and every time I actually tried to explain myself she cut me off and screamed that she didn't care. Finally, the conversation ended in her calling me a pathetic junkie. I relapsed that night.

I couldn't sleep, I had realized things would never be the same between us again. I was drunk, and restless. Tossing and turning. I left and walked up and down Van Ness until I found a dope spot, and copped what I later found out to be a bag of black tar, which I had never had before.

I shot the whole bag without cooking it, which apparently is a very bad idea with anything that isn't brown or white powder. Slowly but surely, over the next few miserable days I spent wishing things could be different with Katherine and tip toeing around Sal's anger problem, an abscess developed on the inner crook of the elbow portion of my left arm.

By the time I finally decided to leave early for L.A. on a bus, it was hurting like a bastard and I was getting worried. Sal was intolerable that day, asking me to leave for a while even though I was in a generally agreeable mood, and had been for most of the ill-fated visit we spent together. I had no money, and nowhere to go. It was cold. I asked him for some of the money, about a dollar or two that I had given him for food the night before back so I could get a cup of coffee somewhere warm. He responded by becoming indignant and telling me off. I told him that he was the worst host I had ever had the displeasure of staying with, and to go fuck himself. I packed my shit, and took a bus in to L.A. that night.

I took a handful of anxiety pills and slept. Somewhere in the middle of the night, a gangbanger girl, probably from L.A., sat on the seat next to me and smushed me up against the wall. She slept that night with her head on my shoulder. We didn't speak a word to each other. I arrived that morning in L.A., and Amy picked me up to take me to her mom's place in Oceanside. I slept the best sleep of my life.

I realized, as I sat at Amy's desk and wrote the account of my trip to San Francisco last night, that it remains one of my favorite cities despite the rotten luck I encountered during the majority of my time spent there with Sal.

Which is interesting, because as I make the trip to Portland with Amy and our two ride shares today, we've just decided to spend a night in San Fran. Emily's boyfriend plays in a Blue Grass band in the Haight, and Pete is planning to crash with us at Amy's friend Joeseph's house.

I like San Francisco a whole lot, even though I'd be the first to admit to you that it is a modern day Babylon, full of junkies and pimps and whores and psychotic homeless panhandlers who'd probably just as soon shank you to death and play around in your blood than they would bumrush you to beg for money. And begging is the wrong word for what they do, because they often will not take no for an answer. Everyone has an angle.

And that is just in the Mission, so we will ignore for the moment the burnt out old hippies with names like "Free" and "Buffalo" and "Moon Beam" who have DEFINITIVELY outlived their use, or all the runaways or modern day pseudo-hippies who somehow didn't get the memo that it is no longer 1969 and that the Haight isn't about peace or love so much as it is about cons and marks, a mutually parasitic relationship. Not to mention the hopelessly disheveled junkies in the Tenderloin, or the Mexican block boys representing La Mara who will walk you from point A to point B to cop, exacting only a modest price in return. I've heard they sometimes buzz open peoples' faces right there on the streets of Mexico with chainsaws, but they have always thanked me for my patronage and bestowed the most earnest and heartfelt blessings upon myself and my family. It's all a matter of how you want to look at it, is all I could ever say.....

Yes, San Francisco is Babylon and filth and decay, like something out of Bill Burroughs' blackest subconscious vision: A vast, teeming human marketplace trafficking in any contraband you can imagine, full of thieves and pushers and overflowing with debauchery. But I thrive in these situations. Which says something about my general character and demeanor, although I can't quite put my finger on it. Fuck it. It is what it is.

A homemade banner attached to an overpass on the way through L.A. reads "E-POCALYPSE NOW". I have seen it two to three times on my numerous trips back and forth, back and forth, between Oceanside and L.A. on the handful of trips between these two places that I have taken since I first left San Fran. And that is an altogether different set of stories for another day.

"E-POCALYPSE NOW"- probably a clever bit of viral marketing or promotion, but extremely relevant, none the less. If god destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with an Avenging Angel, and Travis Bickle waited for the real rain to wash the filth off the streets of New York, Bill Hicks petitioned the powers of nature to give the earth the enema it so badly needs for its own survival by flushing the turd that is L.A. into the ocean.

Fair enough, but I hope that I am not still in Southern California when Gaia finally pushes the plunger down to flush it all away.

And what of the notion that the infrastructures and electronic networks we have built for ourselves will be our own downfall, like Mary Shelly's "FRANKENSTEIN"?

Certainly, we have become dependent upon the internet. How would communication, commerce or society hold up without it? I have traveled through America this year exclusively through the use of the internet in planning my places to crash with friends miles away from one another.

And all it would take would be a few strategically placed pulse bombs... But ah, nevermind that.

Nevermind that grim realization that the end is always nearer than we may suspect, and that the shit will someday truly hit the fan when Frankenstein's monster turns on him. Yes, nevermind that. Onwards... to Babylon.