Travel Diaries #33 - One Night in San Francisco
Because the only time to truly see a city is by night
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1.
I don’t remember the drive into San Francisco. Shortly after we’d left the campsite in southern Oregon, Zach had turned to me from the passenger seat of the car and cracked a can. We lost our convoy after the first turn in the road, and wouldn’t see them again until we arrived that evening.
We drove down a motorway for six hours cutting through the middle of California, avoiding the Pacific Coast Highway as we didn’t want to get lost. I bought some Four Loko in a petrol station around noon, and passed out in the back seat for much of the drive, uninterested in the motorway, vicariously dreaming of the glorious scenes that our friends were enjoying on the legendary coastal road.
I wake up as we’re crossing the famous bridge into San Francisco, so at least I can say I saw it, in that way that people like to be able to talk about having done something more than they like doing the thing itself, though in my still-steaming daze I don’t take much heed of it as I’m fumbling in the back seat for my missing phone, which I never found.
Our group reconnects at the hostel somewhere in Chinatown, every car having lost each other en route, us all getting here at different times and with varying states of energy and enthusiasm. Some do as people in hostels do and hang about playing cards; some get food, some call it a night. Myself and Zach are pushing through on one of those third winds that possesses you with a bewildering equilibrium to go out into a new city in whatever shape you find yourself in, the much-sought-but-rarely-attained state of divine bodily inspiration that only life’s true rockstars and romantics are able to summon and live through.
Zach served five years in the Australian military. He’s tall with built shoulders, blonde hair and a deep rumbling voice that says things like ‘strewth’ without affectation, one which you could imagine casually discussing killing wild animals, though he’s incredibly friendly and easy-going – he’s what the Australians themselves would call a ‘good cunt’. We shared mutual friends from our winter in the mountains, and had connected fairly quickly over the last couple of days’ driving down the west coast.
It’s 9 at night but feels like 3 in the morning, the night already holding in itself an elixir of timelessness and eternal youth, alcohol being the potion which diminishes one’s own spirit so you can join in holy communion with others, for now all we desired was to become one with the city and whatever it may offer us so graciously, so selflessly, to go out and whirl around streetlights from one arm with our caps in our hand.
Zach has clearly done his research for the trip; he informs me that in America you get free entry into strip clubs with a military ID, and he presumes his Australian one will work – we might as well milk the system for all it’s worth, and won’t say no to a free lunch. We jump in a taxi and head to the club. Zach’s ID works; I pay my $5. Into a typical nightclub, all dark and red ambient lighting, pumping music, punters milling about, dancing, shouting through the noise, the unmistakeable hum of want wafting through the dry ice. Topless girls gyrate and flash and flicker on stage. They say a sociologist is someone who goes to a strip club to look at the customers rather than the girls: one guy catches my attention standing lone and proud and leaning gently into the stage with the furtiveness of someone hailing down a taxi on Camden Street at closing time. No older than us, he clasps in his hands a stack of ones as thick as a bible, furiously peeling them off and throwing them at the object of his focus, of his desires, though there’s an almost innocent detachment where he looks like his main desire is to discard all his money by whatever means necessary. The girl squats down to collect her wages as he indiscriminately rips more bills out of his wad and makes to stuff them into her g-string, though he’s got so many he can’t even fit them all in there – he doesn’t even care, like a barber discarding trimmings on the shop floor, it can all be swept up later, he’s just lashing notes all over her, he’s just throwing them at the slot machine, tossing them to the stage where they make their way like sad little paper planes on a final lustful jihad, with the intent of a shrewd businessman carefully allocating money to his various investments, possessed with the fervour of the situation though with an ultimately unthreatening air – he’s just really, really into it.
The money must go somewhere.
We grab drinks, do a lap, and leave.
Freed from the murk of the American dream and back in the embrace of darkness we find ourselves stood on a dingy street bathed in that post-apocalyptic noir-ish blue you see in movies about gangsters who hang about in alleyways, weighing up our options of what to do next, where in the city do we want to take us and swallow us whole. We want another drink.
A voice calls out and offers us one.
He's standing in a doorway with a case of Budweisers between his legs, chatting to passersby and the bouncers from the club. A friendly American lad with bushy hair, he offers us a beer and asks us to join him, we introduce ourselves and accept the invitation. They’re telling us we’ve to get away from the door of the strip club, please, you can’t drink here, so Zach suggests we head back to the hostel, asking our new friend and supplier of beers if he’d like to join us. He seems like a decent guy, he’s giving us free beer and at this hour it doesn’t look like we can get more anywhere else, it’s past closing time on a Tuesday night.
In the moment of decision comes awareness. San Francisco is known for its population of vagrants, homeless people, bums, hobos, crackheads and various others possessed by eternal wanderlust and madness, and it becomes apparent that many of them are congregating around this darkened corner of urban America.
We notice we’re surrounded by what seems to be a growing horde of clinically insane zombies, lots of groaning and moaning and scraggly beards and dead eyes and sinister stares and shuffling.
A growing chorus spontaneously arises amongst the dispossessed, the gulf between the haves and have nots in the lands of the free allows previously unimaginable circles of hell to be inhabited.
“CHANGE… CHANGE… CHANGE…”
They chant, solitary assembling converging into a unified demand. They all want change. They want beers. The shuffling seems to halt into a slowing tide of elevated consciousness, an awareness that there are others in their midst, and they might provide something to feast on. Who knows if they even know each other, or anyone.
We figure it’s best to be getting on our way.
We hail down a taxi and the eerie feeling ramps up a notch, things have all of a sudden become sinister.
“BEER”
“CHANGE”
“BEER”
“A QUARTER”
The requests come thick and fast. They want it all, everything we have. They might even want Zach’s military ID soon. Their numbers start to take on the manner of an army, a co-ordinated attack. They’re going to start grabbing stuff soon, though there’s a strange, ghost-like spirit to their movements and their engagement, like they’re not quite able to cross over to our world, or to speak in anything other than single words and urgently-yelped monosyllabic demands.
An urgency develops, we jump into the taxi in what feels like the nick of time as we’re surrounded by more and more of these guys, this unplanned union of tramps who begin to clamber at the taxi as we haul ourselves in and give the driver our address. It’s bizarre, unsettling but morbidly amusing, baffling. There is literally a guy crawling onto the bonnet of the taxi and draping himself over the windscreen as we pull off – it’s like Dawn of the Dead out there – desperate for something, anything: a beer, some change, a lift to somewhere that isn’t exactly where he is right now. I look behind and the congregation has multiplied again, blink and their numbers have doubled again, they’re staring at us but don’t give chase, their conditioning probably wouldn’t allow it anyway.
The hostel is not far, we catch our breaths on the drive and reflect on this most bizarre of developments, the night has taken another turn.
And yet it is still young.
2.
Zach’s jeep is parked right outside the front door of the hostel, filled with our luggage and the festival gear we’ve bought in Walmart. We pull out the camping chairs and crack open more beers at the side of the road. Our new friend’s name is Mike. He’s a typical American fellow, all bright-eyed and friendly enthusiasm, wearing a sports coat, jeans and runners. He’s just hanging out and looking for some friends to party with ‘cos the bars were closed. Recently broken up with his girlfriend, which he’s pretty down about, he’s had to move out of the apartment they were sharing; for now he’s staying with friends. As well as the case of beers he’s also carrying a plastic bag with “some stuff in it”, not having caved into the local manbag craze that was around in those days. He’s good company, in that likeable and eager way that so many Americans are.
We drink more beers, Zach throws some music on from the car stereo. Mike asks why we’re in San Francisco, and we tell him about our adventure so far: our gang of friends were celebrating the end of winter by driving down the west coast of America; we’d already come from B.C. and through Washington, Oregon and California, we’re free as birds but on a journey, our destination: Coachella, baby. Our friends might sleep but Zach and I are in San Francisco for one night only.
The drinking and camaraderie is interrupted by the form of someone appearing from the night, one who possesses the same demeanour and vocabulary as the locals who’d accosted our taxi some time before.
“I NEED… A DOLLAR.”
Even now just typing those words brings back the dead-eyed stare of the guy intruding on our little mini-festival at the side of the street in San Francisco. I hadn’t heard those words in years, the memory long faded from the drunken mists they appeared from, the superfluous details of this story evaporating into the ether until only the mythological truths of the tale remained. Though maybe that sentence is the story.
“I NEED… A DOLLAR”
The figure’s voice morphing as he continued his sentence, repeated over and over. Strong, collected, firm, brave even at first, faltering after the ellipsis as the statement reached its climax, the word DOLLAR carried on a wave of ever so slight vibrato that conjures desperation towards the appeal’s conclusion, as if it’s conveying news of a rapture, as if he’s about to break into a cascade of reasons, justifications, explanations as to why he needs the dollar, his back story, his life’s story, his circumstances, who he is, or was or had been and why he’s on the streets, now in front of us, not just in front but in between all three of us, as if he’s leaned over one of our party’s shoulder at first, then look again he’s in the middle, then he’s over the other shoulder, like a sprite or a fairy or a devil flitting about from scene to scene but coming to rest in between us. He’s towering over us, then he’s on his knees prostrate in front of us, his hands are humbly by his sides, then they’re outstretched and cupped like Oliver Twist asking for more, from life and from us, he is dishevelled, he is unkempt, he is rough, he is destitute, he is without a home or perhaps even an identity, he is desperate, unlike his peers in the darkened streets by the club he doesn’t want the ambiguous demand of ‘CHANGE’ which could imply the minimal pieces of local currency or a desperate need for a more wholesale change in their circumstances, all he needs is a small piece of money to continue his life of asking for further money, he offers no explanation as to why he needs a dollar – in fact, it soon becomes apparent that he cannot offer one, he can’t ask for ‘CHANGE’ because he doesn’t know what change might entail, or even that life could change.
All he can say is:
“I NEED… A DOLLAR”
It's all he’s able to say. A resident of the streets for so long his wits have been rendered and blended and are now senseless, he’s been smoking crack or meth or something until this is all he can say, until eventually he can say something else, in the same manner and carrying all the weight of his own life and the failings of civilisation as his first and until now only snippet of speech:
“MY NAME… IS DAVE”
He has a name and it is Dave. This opens up a whole further world, a backstory, a life story, a history, just a few words open worlds within worlds. We don’t have any dollars, they probably got assumed into that all-American hero’s biblical stack of ones at the strip club, to be offered in ecstatic holy communion to the gods of the American Dream, and the rest paid for our taxi fare home.
Zach offers him a beer and a seat in one of our chairs.
Except he can’t sit, he’s been on the streets and abandoned from society for so long that he doesn’t know how to sit in a chair. He needs a dollar, and though he can’t tell us in words and language what for, we figure out what he might need it for. Zach –good cunt that he is – suggests we take Dave somewhere to buy him a coffee and something to eat. Packing the camping chairs back into the car we set out on a mission, our night now invigorated with a purpose, myself, Zach, Mike and Dave, the four of us now like the Animals of Farthing Wood journeying through San Francisco at 3am to find a cafe or a late-night food shop. We walk a few blocks in that wandering way that drunk people in groups rove city streets at night, all deliberate meandering but aimless volition, shifting in and out of twos, then three and one up ahead, then all four abreast, stopping for a straggler who needs to piss on a lamppost or behind a dumpster, not in any hurry, the night is still young.
Dave periodically reminds us that he still needs a dollar, and that his name is still Dave.
The welcoming lights of abundant consumerism spotted ahead like a distant lighthouse: a Dunkin Donuts that’s still open just a couple of blocks away. A typically-sized downtown building, about yay wide, its front wall entirely made up of a large window facing onto the street. Along the window there’s a counter for customers to sit and face the world; in the background a standard fast food counter with illuminated menu displaying all the wares that are fit to sling at a low-low price. At the window looking out sits a solitary figure, a jet-black character pulling light from the nativity of convenience around him.
A middle-aged Asian guy waits in service behind the counter. Perfect Dunkin Donuts, coffee, donuts, snacks, reliable franchise store and symbol of the American Dream, open all night for our indulgence. We order donuts and a coffee for Dave. The single figure at the counter facing the window: black-skinned, dressed in black, with a doo-rag on his head, a long leather trench coat, wraparound sunglasses, black leather gloves, an unexpected purple frilly shirt. He’s dressed to kill, like a cabaret Morpheus. There’s some tabasco sauce on the counter. We are shitfaced. Someone dares me to put tabasco in the guy’s coffee while he’s gone to the toilet. A prank, a joke, a jape, the hilarious trick of a drunken tourist who doesn’t possess the imagination to enjoy the wonders of life and humanity without pulling desperate and mildly malicious pranks to show off to his friends.
I can’t even remember if he was there or not. He might have been right there, watching me, staring straight through my drunken invisibility cloak. The owner goes crazy from behind the counter. He’s livid. He’s seen me – he’s seen me putting tabasco in the guy’s coffee. Maybe the guy has seen me too. In the moment of decision comes awareness, the lights go up and sobriety awakens me, just a little. I feel bad, I feel foolish, I want to make amends and I know I’ve done something stupid. I sheepishly stroll over and slip a fiver on the counter so the guy can get another coffee. He can get two coffees. He can even get a donut at these prices! I apologise profusely, pathetically. He turns slowly, intentionally, a disembodied head behind wraparound sunglasses. Expressionless, he speaks straight into the depths of my sozzled soul:
“JUST. GO.”
Nobody in this town seems to speak in full sentences.
He probably wants to kill me, and looks like someone who carries a gun, or at least knows people who carry guns. We are in America after all. San Francisco, all sunny bridges and carefree gay abandon by day, has turned dark over the course of the night. Homeless people, zombies, vagrants, thieves, crackheads, night of the living dead, strippers, Dave. And now I’ve crossed the line to where demons reside, and they have their sights set on me.
The guy behind the counter is going mental and roars us out of the shop.
“GET OUT!”
The four of us drunkenly shuffle out of the shop, apologising, no doubt bumping into each other, having absorbed the mannerisms and co-ordination of our host city’s night-dwellers. I’m mortified, giggly, apologetic but ultimately free of major worry. Zach is like ‘whatever’. Mike is oblivious, like this happens all the time in America. Dave is still Dave. Morpheus is stoic, staring intently out the window.
We have our coffee, Dave has his coffee, we have fed and watered our new friend and we feel good. We’ve given him more than a dollar, we’ve shown him some sort of compassion that goes beyond the American dream of dollars, and the strippers for whom they’re printed to inevitably fund. He thanks us so much. He is grateful. I think he’s still asking us for a dollar, or telling us he needs one anyway. We’re standing outside and we start moseying up the street, again in that meandering way drunk people do when they’re wondering what to do next, not meaning to go anywhere but drifting away from the last public house like a striker losing his man, ending up thirty yards up the street without having walked a step. Myself, Zach and Mike, our job done, we consider our options. Anywhere else to go? We laugh at my stupid frat-boy sense of humour, my reckless but ultimately harmless act of drunken trickery, my pig ignorance. Until our laughter is interrupted by the loudest of crashes, the sound of a car crash, a train wreck, a bombshell, a totalising and absolute game-changer.
The sound of glass shattering into a million pieces.
OH FUCK.
We turn to see the window of the Dunkin Donuts smashed completely to pieces, shards of glass hanging from what remains of the window, a metal trash can bouncing around on the ground. We realise that Dave is after picking up a bin and has thrown it through the window of the shop we were just kicked out of. And he’s delighted with himself – he’s standing there, proud, defiant, purposeful, like his life has meaning again, for the first time in the longest of times, or maybe for the first time ever.
Oh shit.
“Dave?!”
We don’t think – we run. Instincts kick in. In an instant we’re gone, we’re running up the streets, back the way we came, as fast as we can, like a bunch of high school gangsters caught skipping school and egging cars, legging it from the scene of a crime that most of us didn’t commit but we’ll all hang for.
Truth be told, it’s exhilarating.
Our night has more purpose now than ever – all of us – no longer beholden to the slobbering aimless shuffle of the group and the city we all have somewhere to be: as far away from here as possible. What in the name of God has just happened. This is mental. We run. We keep running. My face is a picture of panic that helplessly bursts into a giddy smile, a laugh, a cackle. This is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. Why did it happen? What the fuck. What was Dave at? Dave is running with us? Jesus. We keep running the few blocks until we get back to the hostel, our bodies’ spatial memory taking us unthinkingly along the path of least mental resistance. We figure it’s far enough. And technically the three of us didn’t do anything. I only spiked the guy’s coffee with hot sauce, I even paid him back! Twofold! It was Dave, Dave did it! His name is Dave!
Dave is still with us. We turn to him in disbelief:
“What the fuck did you do that for Dave?!”
He has finally found some more words, rediscovered his gift of communication coaxed out by our acts of friendship and the sharing of our humanity, and by his newfound purpose of vandalising late-night coffee franchises.
“He was disrespecting you”
“What?! Who??”
“The guy in the shop.
He was disrespecting you...
My friends.”
He did it for us.
We had responded to his monosyllabic pleas with connection.
Invited him into our group.
Bought him a coffee and a donut.
Shown him kindness.
We were his friends.
“And he was disrespecting you.”
Dave has finally found his voice.
Jesus Christ Dave.
“You need to get the fuck out of here!”
And so we sent Dave on his way, his new and perhaps only friends, the only people who’d been kind to him in a week, a year, a lifetime maybe. This poor guy, a helpless crackhead from what we could only guess, rendered almost mute and maybe psychotic by a life and harsh existence on the streets of this great American city, for god knows how long, abandoned by society, his family – not even as much as a single dollar to his name to fulfil his needs –and we had to send him away, like Tony Soprano taking one of his own out on a boat to shoot him in the back of the head, sent out of town on the back of a horse to fend for himself with a lone dollar. An act of bravery, loyalty, compassion, a show of in-it-together brotherhood by Dave, putting a metal bin through the window of a no-nonsense Asian businessman’s donut shop, who’s only trying to get by himself, he needs a dollar the same as Dave, the same as everyone. Poor Dave, his confusion as to how express his gratitude, the rules of the street not mingling well with the rules of society, acts of wanton and deliberate vandalism sadly not appreciated in our circles, us foreigners, an American, an Aussie and an Irishman who walked into a coffee shop at 3am;
the barman said “Get out”.
Dave shuffles off up the street, his body no doubt consumed by the vapours of the night, never to be seen by us again, perhaps not by anyone at all.
We figure there’s no way the Dunkin’ Donuts guy has followed us or could find us at this stage. He has to have have given up. This city is fucked, truth be told, a bucket through a shop window isn’t even on the police’s list of priorities given what we’ve already seen tonight, and in any case, it wasn’t us, it was Dave.
We take the chairs out of the car again, plant them on the footpath, and crack open another three beers.
For the night is still young.
3.
I wake the next morning and go down to Zach’s jeep to find Mike asleep in the front seat. Everyone in our group is going mad cos we let some randomer sleep in the car with all our stuff. I’m getting the brunt of it even though I didn’t even know he was there. It turns out Zach had told him to sleep there – it was Zach’s car and all. Zach had stayed up drinking with him after I’d stumbled to bed, after we’d watched the sun come up over the distant Oakland Bridge at the end of one of those long American downtown streets, a stunning sight, the night finally having reached its inevitable age of maturation. A welcome return to the sunny optimism of daytime, an escape from the twilight hell of San Fran by night, which had started with a glint of boyish mischief but was corrupted as layer after layer of the fabric of society had been peeled off and examined – the capitalist sex trade, the absence of a social welfare system, the complete breakdown of law and order – all under the skyscrapers where the real world was manufactured between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday to Friday.
Zach vouched for Mike, so did I. Everyone was giving us dog’s abuse for letting a homeless guy sleep in the car, he could have stolen everything, robbed the car, disappeared, our holidays and probably our short-term lives ruined on several levels.
“Ah he’s not homeless.
He just needed somewhere to stay.
He’s fine…”
We pack up and drive over to meet our friends at another hostel across town. Mike comes along for the ride. Zach and I consider him a friend at this stage. He’s a good lad. Good craic. Enthusiastic. Eager, in that likeable way that so many Americans are. He’s still clutching the plastic bag, which in the light of day seems to contain basic domestic items: a toothbrush, a towel, a small change of clothes. He just broke up with his girlfriend. He moved out. He’s staying with friends. He’s coy about where they are, where he’s staying. I notice the scabs on his knuckles. In the optimistic light of day, a glow of darkness surrounds him. His dirty hands. The pain in his voice.
We walk around San Francisco. Some of the group go to Pier 39 but I haven’t the wherewithal or the organisation to go with them. I see very little of San Francisco in the light of day. We only have an hour anyway before we have to get on the road. I walk a few blocks, up and down, we go to a shopping mall for a minute. I only care about smoking a few cigarettes before we get in the car. We get back to the guys’ hostel. It’s time to leave.
Mike is telling us he’s going to come to Coachella with us. He even talks about coming back to Canada with us after, or going to Australia with Zach. Things are getting a bit more frantic. Is he really homeless? Does it matter? The gang are having none of it. Zach tells him we’re flying to LA, rather than that we’re driving straight down to Palm Springs. Zach and I’s desire for connection is retreating, as it tends to the morning after the night before.
“How much are tickets?”, he asks,
“I’m totally going to meet you guys there.”
It’s time for us to leave. I don’t particularly want him tagging along either, neither does Zach. The rugged hedonism and easy connection of a city by night don’t translate into the sunnier light of day; they are two different worlds, and most of us are two different people inhabiting them, though the tragedy becoming apparent is that – as with Dave and all the others we’ve encountered – it seems that Mike’s two worlds don’t separate so easily.
How desperate for company must Mike be to still be tagging along, well into the next day, with his little plastic bag, a bindle without even a stick, loitering around in a group of travelling friends amidst the audible and not-so-secret hum of mistrust, disapproval, the anger, the outright voiced contempt. Talking over and around him, trying to pack, organise, looking things up, printing directions,
“He’s not facking coming with us”
they’re all saying, all vexed southern hemisphere twangs and drawls, he’s still there, dragging out the last few minutes of our presence, outstaying his welcome but desperate to hold onto our fleeting itinerant friendship, his offering of beers coming good and achieving his original stated goal – to make some friends.
“I’m flying to LA”
“How much are Coachella tickets?”
“I’ll see you guys there”
“Where are you camping?”
the questions and the claims and the plans getting ever more desperate, as slowly every last drop of air of humanity he’s been shown evaporates around him.
We’re leaving.
“Git in the facking car Gav”
come the last calls at departures,
“or we’re leaving you as well.”
I get in the car. We’re leaving. Tears in his eyes. I look at him again. His clothes now so obviously stained and grubby. Bags under his eyes growing ever larger as the morning lights up. It’s midday now and the darkness of the night surrounds him like an anti-halo framing his sad human body. His plastic bag with a towel in it. The scabs on his knuckles. I wonder how long ago he broke up with his girlfriend. How long he’s been ‘staying with friends’. Nowhere to go. No-one left now. He is burning in the sun on the heat and optimism and carefree gay abandon of San Francisco by day, as he grasps at the threads to humanity hopping into the car, and now it’s pulling off. The window’s still down as we pull out onto the main street, the last words I hear from Mike:
“You guys are the nicest guys I ever met!”.
And now we’re gone.
Next stop:
COACHELLA, BABY.
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This was great, loved reading and rolling along with the story, which takes a sharp turn (that shattered window), and then this line, filled with knowing: "The rugged hedonism and easy connection of a city by night don’t translate into the sunnier light of day; they are two different worlds, and most of us are two different people inhabiting them".