San Francisco
I go out for coffee with Melissa down a dead road in the past
I am walking back to the Inner Sunset, from Cole Valley, with Melissa. She’s my neighbor and my housekeeper. Melissa’s boyfriend is a bodyworker, and the landlord was keeping a camera trained on their doorway to try and prove James was operating a business out of his apartment. He wanted to sell the building, and it would be worth a lot more without any tenants. Now, James does maintenance on the apartment, and looks after it when I’m gone. Mi casa su casa.
Sometimes he pisses me off. I can’t say why, but the image which comes to mind is a line from, “Lipstick on Your Collar,” the British production of one of Dennis Potter’s most engaging series. If you haven’t seen it it’s worth paying for, as is Potter’s other genius television series, “The Singing Detective.” Anyway, in a fantasy set in the Alps, Francis returns to the little house after having sold the sheep for nine hundred and ninety thousand dollars. He’s very proud of himself. Sylvia, says, “Ahh … What a pity it wasn’t a million.” Where there’s an apple, there’s a worm.
I’m aware that what bothers me out of proportion to its objective importance is how I detect my shadow, and move it into the realm of the known and acknowledged. Melissa, knowing that James and I might clash, has taken over the social interface, which is as it should be. She was doing housekeeping for good friends and I hired her to do my place, discovering that she lived a couple of buildings west of me. James is an acquired taste. Of course I’m giving him a hard time. I can’t resist.
Melissa calls me to go out for a walk and coffee when I get to the city. We used to walk to Cole Valley to have coffee at Peet’s, but they have closed the location. We went to a new place yesterday, the “Wooden House,” at Carl and Cole, where the N. Judah streetcar stops. It’s a lively intersection. I have a history with the location from when it was a laundromat, and my pot dealer lived on the top floor of the building with a red-haired woman and a bunch of parrots. There was an African Grey named Arthur, who talked all the time. There was one bright blue and one bright red Macaw, and the red one, Rainbow, was a bushwhacking ankle biter. Bradley died of cancer, it seems like a long time ago, now, so he died relatively young. I had stopped hanging out there when crack and meth showed up. “Elvis has left the building.”
Going for coffee in that building made me think about the title of a William Burroughs novel, “The Place of Dead Roads.” Burroughs said there are familiar roads you travel, a familiar path to a familiar door, and then, one day, you don’t go there anymore. It becomes a dead road. This was such a place. It moved to dream time, where there’s no need for a road, as everything’s in the same place, fragments reflecting lived moments like facets of a broken mirror. Dream time is a timeless place.
Now that Melissa has started walking me across the hill, past UCSF, and into Cole Valley, I’m building another road that runs close to the old road, like bypassing a small town with the new highway, but always seeing it out there, where the road used to end, and the fun would begin. One day we were throwing big sharpened nails at the wall, which was beside tall, paned windows. We alternated throwing and sticking them in the wall, until Brad threw one right through a window pane. It shattered the pane and hit on the sidewalk below. I still see his face frozen in a moment of shocked paralysis, then, cautiously looking down to see if it had hit anybody in the head.
It’s a nice walk from the Inner Sunset to Cole Valley. Some uphill and some downhill, always on the shady side of the street. Melissa likes the shady side of the street. Who is she? Nobody knows. She was born in Bakersfield and she was a punk, in the sense of fashion, not of somebody doing hard time. Sometimes hair is redder than you expect. We always seem to have a nice walk and coffee, because she is a woman, and has relational energy. She knows how to keep things running smoothly through the application of wiles to vulnerability when both wiles and vulnerability are in their most positive perspective. But, beneath it all, there is the secret cause of why we get along: she laughs at my jokes.
A text comes is coming in from Jasmine.
(to be continued)