|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
January 15, 2008The thrill is gone.No longer in love with you,SAN FRANCISCO.So sorry. “Maybe I’ll be overjoyed to get back to SF,” I speculated last time, leaving for parts east. But nah. Not like the time my friend and I were on the plane coming back from Ireland and they were showing “Mrs. Doubtfire,” when I exclaimed, grabbing and shaking her arm, “Look, he’s getting on the 22 bus! Yay! We’re going to San Francisco!” Or when I first got my job at Pier 1-1/2 and I would hyperventilate walking through Justin Herman Plaza and arriving at work on the Embarcadero, Coit Tower looking down on me, the Ferry Building behind me, the Bay right outside my office window. It was so utterly San Franciscan! I felt like goddamn Mary Richards. But on US Airways Flight 657 out of Philadelphia, Seat 17F Window, which a long-legged businessman traded for my 16D Aisle, I’m not just heading home, being the one I created in a flat on Page St.—I’m also returning to not knowing what home I’ll end up in. The blush of love for San Francisco has faded. The determination to find a way to stay here no matter what, has died. San Francisco is not welcoming me home. Its golden sun is not shining for me. I find I don’t really care. I AM BEING SQUEEZED OUT.I barely squeezed into home ownership here—due to my own resourcefulness, certainly not because anyone was paying me what anyone needs to live in San Francisco—and made it last a miraculous four years. My housing cost since I bought into this TIC, because of dues and interest increases, is $600 a month more than it started out at. That’s a whopping 7,200 smackers a year. And I’ve been smacked all right, upside the haid. So the standard of living I established for myself after years of real estate investments and dues paid in the workforce, is now out of my reach. It is and it isn’t San Francisco’s fault. It’s also my choice. Assuming I were willing to return to full-time work, at my level as a “viable commodity,” as my friend Jon put it, working full-time wouldn’t cut it. Short of a lightning-fast acceptance of and advance for my book (I’m running out of time and money), the one and only way I can live as I want to, as a writer, by myself, in this city, working part-time for walking around money, is to sell my home. That’s pathetic. I will be richly rewarded, but to stay here, I’ll be using my resources at twice or thrice the rate of other cities. I’m OK with selling the flat because I’m a spoiled American brat anyway. I am part princess (Russian), part peasant (Polish), and the princess has held court long enough. I don’t need all the trappings I’ve surrounded myself with. And I am still far more relieved to have banned full-time work from my life than I am anxious about losing my home. I have too much. By the standard measure of budgeting housing at one quarter of one’s income, I, as an office manager salaried at $42,000/year, should have had a yearly housing budget of $10,500, requiring an apartment at $875.00 a month. That’s before taxes. If calculated using my take-home pay, I’d need a $675.00/month place. There is not one single listing out of dozens below $1000 on the front page of Craig’s List today. I’ve been living beyond my means, but even if I cut my life in half, San Francisco will not be meeting me half-way. Craig’s List is hardly a red carpet of welcome to come live in this city. Here! See before you dozens of attractively priced apartments of your dreams! in the coolest possible neighborhoods! and no one else wants them! No competition from people who have jobs, because the supply is sufficient to house all comers! Step right up. ONE AD HAD THE NERVEto claim, “Fresh paint and new carpet make this pet-friendly flat a warm, clean and an economical alternative to living in your car.” Thanks for the compassion! “May you use the diamond cutter of mercy,” as Kerouac put it. It’s all over the front page today. Long-time residents, mostly black, are being priced out of what used to be called the ghetto, the now-gentrifying Bayview. “…as he struggles to pay the mortgage on the family home he inherited, [resident Herman] Autry fears he’ll be the next to go. ‘I’d like to die here and pass my house down to my daughter, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it,’ he said. “I’m afraid the change will end up eliminating me.” That’s pathetic. Why is the City not taking care of its own? “Most of the artists I know left the city 25 years ago,” a Berkeley printmaker told me, “for the reasons you’re discussing. The one art community that has grown is the students at the four expanding art schools in SF and those students live stacked on top of each other or live across the bay and commute.” WELL, THAT IS EVER THE CHALLENGEof being an artist. If you decide to live a certain way, you can’t buckle, or it’s business as usual. I refuse to go back to work. I don’t know how other artists do it; there must be a million stories in the naked city, but my solution is to trade my flat for my freedom. I know full well how lucky I am to have this option. But I regret that I spent so many years working full-time and pouring money and effort into buying buildings. Looking back, I’d have served myself better living in a squalid garret and following my star. Wasn’t ready, yada yada, “the fullness of time,” and all that. But the star shines ever brighter, and it’s easier to follow now. I’m on my path; I will plow my own furrow. SHALL THE TWAIN NEVER MEET?Why, a reader chided me, do people talk about New York like “every other city is just another borough?” Guilty as charged. I had named New York “The City”—but I was only mocking San Francisco for referring to itself in newspapers as “The City” and not “the city,” as if there are no other great cities. I’m sure it’s just a journalistic style standard, to differentiate it from other Bay Area cities, but that’s what bugs me about it. It sounds full of itself. I’m not feeling very San FranSASSY! right now. San Francisco has a pulse all its own, but I love the New York vibe as well and it’s truly exhilarating. You can “feel the creative juices oozing from the pavement,” a blogger named Kelvis wrote; unfortunately they’re not the only juices oozing from the pavement. “EAST’LL MEET WEST ANYWAY,”says Kerouac. “Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally.” This was to be his Rucksack Revolution, Zen Lunatics coming down from the mountains to spread the Dharma. After 26 years in Philadelphia and 26 in the West, I overestimated myself thinking I’m effortlessly bicoastal. Thought I could swing back and forth between one and the other like a cross-country monkey switching hands state by state. Though I’d almost had myself convinced, I will not at this time be moving to New York. One strike and it’s out. The weather. “The weather” is so all-encompassing an aspect of how you live your life and what you do in it, I can’t ignore it, nor do I wish to “adapt” to it. The 17° arctic blast that hit me the few days I spent there reminded me why I left the east coast in the first place. “THE IDEA OF BROOKLYN.”I had written over a noontime breakfast of spinach feta omelet at the New College Diner at 4th and Union. “I like it. I like the idea of living here”—but the reality of inhospitable winters and intolerable summers is not something I want to return to. There’s the indoor/outdoor balance issue of not freezing outdoors, not roasting indoors. You can’t wash your hair, walk out the door and have it dry on the way to the bus stop. You can have it freeze solid. Of San Francisco weather I ask only, how late will I be out? Do I need a jacket? OK, genius, breaking news. People want to live in California for the weather. So there is tremendous demand, but the supply is only for the rich and the publicly-housed poor, nothing in-between. I resent it. I want to punish SF by leaving it. And there are plenty more appealing Park Slope apartments on Craig’s List than here in “The City.” Suddenly I’m dissatisfied with this “tremendously sophisticated little city,” Jack called it. Don’t quite know what to do with myself. Nevertheless I am serenely content to be myself, because seated next to me is a Williams Sonoma/Pottery Barn exec or middle manager who for the past hour has been paging through a three-ring binder of chart after chart of figures, columns and columns of numbers, meaning God knows what to him or anyone else, and I want to screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam in exasperated boredom for him and all the corporate white collars of the world to whom that crap means money. Column after column, page after page of money—sales figures, costs, profits, projections, percentages, breakdowns ad nauseum, while I engross myself in Kerouac’s vivid account of the High Sierra Matterhorn climb in The Dharma Bums. “’twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unjaundiced eyes, friends.” THE GENTLEMAN IS IMPECCABLE.Perfectly pressed crease in perfectly white shirt with perfectly starched collar, cuffs and breast pocket. His suit jacket is laid with the utmost care over his thighs and will remain there throughout the flight. After his eyes, I always look at a man’s arms and hands first, and he has gigantic man hands—house-building, breast-caressing hands, manly veined hairy hands. He is bald, and takes great care of himself with the best toiletries, like the psycho in “American Psycho.” He is drinking a modest glass of un-iced water (I choose cranapple juice on the rocks) and watching “Rush Hour 3,” with a surprise pathetic appearance by Roman Polanski, without headphones, the book of charts placed neatly on his tray table. If you could open airplane windows, I would make a quick grab of the binder and throw it into the clouds, handing him Dharma Bums with a smile. Change your life change your life get rid of your wife. A wife who enjoys her giant Pottery Barn/Williams Sonoma discount. WHAT A JUDGMENTAL BEE-YATCH I AM.But that is one of the ways one occupies onself on a cross-country flight—speculating about the other passengers. Maybe his wife is an astrophysicist, what do I know? A gentle reminder of acid reflux agitates my chest, left over from the Norovirus I picked up in New York, then passes. “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” says a flight attendant to every aisle seat she passes with the beverage cart. I’m curious about the Man, the one who belongs to the “real” world of commerce that would never admit me into its Club. There’s a piece of lint on his sleeve he is unaware of or it wouldn’t be there. I feel made of lint sitting next to him, his exquisitely manicured hands clasped together like he’s in Sunday school. He looks a little like either Ray or Bob of Bob and Ray—Bob I think because I recall his son Chris Elliott played a weird character on Letterman called The Guy Under the Stairs, who would occasionally surface to say things like, “One of these days, Dave, you and I are going to go ‘round and ‘round.” I use that myself when I want to sound theatrically threatening. I WANT TO PLY MR. MAN,as if he were a sociological specimen I’ve encountered in the field, with questions about how his “kind” lives. What mating ritual did you employ to capture your wife? Is she the only one allowed to rub your shiny bald head? Is that part of the mating ritual? Is she an astrophysicist? Do you stay in shape playing racquetball at lunch? What do those columns of figures mean to you—do they “speak” to you or is it just a job? Or what thrills you? Does an orgasm await you at your destination? Are you from Philly or San Francisco? Or neither, just a traveling MBA? One time a tour bus was coming down Steiner St., as was I, and I waved at it and yelled, “Hi! I’m a San Franciscan!” But I don’t feel like one anymore. Feel like a boat lightly tied to a pier, just drifting until a course has been plotted. Kerouac refers to the “nowhere industrial formations of an America that is still magic America.” But is San Francisco a San Francisco that is still magic San Francisco? Ay, there’s the rub. Chicken John said of a show rehearsing at his place, “it feels like old San Francisco in here.” Is it now old, dead and gone San Francisco? Is it now a gated community for the rich, corporate sector? One of these days, City by the Bay, you and I are going to go ’round and ’round. IT TURNS OUTMr. Perfect is a knuckle-cracker. Not one crisp crack, either—the knuckle-by-knuckle type. Does it set his wife’s teeth on edge? And now he’s wiping his table tray, top to bottom, side to side, with his cocktail napkin. At six feet plus, aside from these actions, he has managed to sit very nearly still in the accursed middle seat, and he’s not sitting zazen. “Kerouac living his dream as a Zen Lunatic and rucksack wanderer on the fabled golden shores of West Coast America,” is how Ann Charters describes Bums on the cover of my Penguin paperback. What would the Man think of these words if he read them on my tray table? Who’s to say he hasn’t read Kerouac, even wandered with his own pack upon his back? Maybe he hitchhiked through Europe before grad school. Instead he is reading what looks out of the corner of my eye to be some sort of motivational flyer, the only words of which I can peripherally catch are under the heading: EXECUTE1. Know your business. 2. Know where you want to go. Excuse me, sir, but your brain is being washed; the suds are coming out of your ears. I do feel like passing the Dharma on to this guy whom I am patronizing on paper solely because of his professional groomed white corporate appearance. Because he represents that world that Dharma Bums rebel against, “refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets…fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume…” “’scuze us, ‘scuze us, ‘scuze us, ‘scruze us,” comes another cart. You know, The Real World, what Jack called “faceless wonderless crapulous civilization”—the one I shrink from at every opportunity. “It’s nothing but bullshit!” yells Ray Smith to his family in Bums. No one ever listened, he complains, “they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn’t know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn’t understand the significance of this very important, very real world.”“There was a lot of teaching for me to do in my lifetime,” he reflects after his friend jumps off a roof, and he’s curious why he couldn’t save her with his Buddhist ideas expounded upon earlier that night, as if it’s all about him, not her. The ego! As much as I love Jack Kerouac, I sometimes dislike, even despise him. “FUCK KEROUAC!”yelled Ariel Gore, author of How to Become a Famous Author Before You’re Dead, to wild cheers of appreciation, at her reading at The Make-Out Room the other night. Yeah, what did he know? If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Nevertheless my trip back east revolved around the NY Public Library’s amazing exhibition “Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road.” This was my fourth On The Road scroll pilgrimage, and if Jack’s ghost was not wandering that gallery, he will never be called forth. Aside from the awesome collection of personal papers, famous breast pocket notebooks, journals, paintings and other priceless items from the Kerouac Archive at the NYPL’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, there were many items that had belonged to Jack: crutches he used after a Columbia U football injury, a worn pair of ankle-high boots he no doubt wandered down many a road in, his railroading signal lantern, his Writer’s Guild card, his pocket watch, corn cob pipe, Zig Zag papers, passport photo, a “Souvenir of Florida” painted silver cigarette lighter that would have snapped shut just as I envisioned in my poem “The Picture,” and even a pack of peppermint Beechnut gum with a stick and a half left in it. But best of all was the sheer encompassing volume of materials, demonstrating that the man was always writing, in-between drinking ruby port in alleys, spouting Buddababble and screwing Mexican whores. He loved it. It was his life. LOVE OF WRITINGThat’s what it’s all about. A woman doesn’t need the money and room of her own Virginia Woolf famously prescribed, contends Gore. She needs a blank page and a pen, and a little bit of time. And the commitment (bordering on obession) to write. (And some humility.) “I wish I had time to make my own Christmas cards,” I told a friend while still employed full-time. “You have time to write your column, though.” Touché—we make time for the things we really want to do. Whatever time we have, that’s what we use if for. You set your own priorities by how you spend your time. If you have time to watch a TV show, or go to a club, or accept an invitation from a friend, it’s a choice you’re making. You could be writing. Tonight I cancelled my plan to join Chicken John on his Monday night movie-fest in the Applause Bus, to work on this column. You have to be your own motivation. I say, if you want to be a writer but can’t get yourself to write, and time passes as the world turns—drop it. Find yourself something you can and will devote yourself to. No one will ever know what they missed. Nor will you–only the feeling that you did, miss something. If you want to write, you do write, and will write. Got a copy of Gore’s book at Booksmith. I told the cashier the book I actually need is How to Become a Famous Author Before You’re Forced to Sell Your Flat. “Going back to work is not an option,” I added. THE GREATEST MOMENT OF PEACE IN MY LIFEcame somewhere in Colorado on the California Zephyr in December ‘06 after I quit my job, lying on my berth propped up on one elbow and typing with the other hand, breathing calmly and relishing the chug chug of the train against the night silence, thinking, “This is all there is, now, Alexandra, from now on.” A fellow I saw profiled, John Pollack, quit his job speechwriting on Capitol Hill to pursue his dream of making a boat entirely out of corks, wine corks—165,321 of them, and sailed it down the Duoro River in Portugal, land of cork. Had the realization of this dream made him happy, was the question. He said that happiness comes in moments—moments like reclining on a train knowing you will never have to compromise yourself again. They say you can’t buy it. But in my case, both a dream and money did buy me happiness, the general overarching kind that drips over your whole life despite daily mood fluctuations—money bought me the freedom from working for others. And soon it will buy me horizonless time. Jack: “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.” As writer Stefan Beck remarks in The Wall Street Journal on Mark Twain’s Roughing It, “Twain ‘finds himself’ the old-fashioned way, by finding everything else under the sun. The outcome, for which every American should be grateful, is that after this he never dreams of going back to honest work—though I shouldn’t slander him by suggesting he was ever really there to begin with.”I’m with you there, Stefan. I will not slander myself by dreaming I will ever go back to honest work. All I ask of myself is to be honest on this page. That thrill, at least, is not gone.
The author wishes Jack could see this. ------------------------------------------------------------ Things
My new year’s hope for you—don’t electrocute yourself on the Master Switch. Ground yourself on a path and plow your own furrow. copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
