Call it “Frisco” and they will excommunicate you. You may not mind being excluded from the coolness that is San Francisco but if you want to be nice do as Northern Californians do and call it simply “The City.” Anything else is excessively familiar and Frisco is a small town in Texas that would I dare say dislike being associated with the Gomorrah of the West Coast as much as any stout Texan might. And yet as messed up as this town is in many respects it is lovely.
Of the three years I spent driving 18 wheelers and earning my Teamster pension I spent one year driving around San Francisco delivering and picking up all manner of goods from all sorts of small businesses that one doesn’t really think of when one imagines San Francisco. I learned to count to ten in Mandarin when the printers asked me how many pallets of ink I had. I learned to say good morning in Japanese and Mandarin such were the range of clients of J and J truck line. Ohio Gozyo Mass I learned phonetically with a snappy little bow and then we all laughed and broke into whatever English they had.
Layne went to law school in The City (not Frisco) and we spent our morning looking for her favorite pupusa shop. When she was a student El Salvador wasn’t on the map and food from that tiny Central American country was hardly fashionable. She liked anything Latin American and pupusas which are thick tortillas filled with molten cheese are filling and were cheap and she had a leg up on the San Francisco hipsters of the day.
I had a cheese and a bean in the traditional manner but Layne went rogue and added meat to hers. If you look up pupusas on Google maps in San Francisco you’ll find a dozen options in the city tha5 cooks every kind of cuisine. We took our Salvadoran national dish, in a pizza box no less (!) across town…
…and fought the traffic which wasn’t nearly as bad as you might think,
…to Marina Green across from Alcatraz Island to enjoy the sun breaking out, the breeze cooling everything off and the views, unparalleled except perhaps by Sydney, a city I have never seen but in photographs. We were parked on the waterfront with the bay spread before us from the Golden Gate all the way past Alcatraz.
I like Sam Francisco a great deal even though it suffers from the usual host of homeless problems that seem to have become endemic across the cities of the Golden State. The wealth here is extraordinary and the fact that the great technological entrepreneurs think that human suffering is not their problem is hardly surprising considering the evolution of human history. We are told no one has to be poor if they have the strength of character and will to work to avoid ending up like this:
I may be wrong but I don’t think the lunatics of the street are employable and without hospitals and help we are making sure they never will be. There are those who make a profession of being on the streets, the people whose trade I call being a bum, and I’m not sure I can exclude myself from that category owing to my own houselessness, and we put up with the irritations of street life to enjoy the freedom it brings. But to be a lunatic, filthy and forgotten in the midst of this sea of wealth speaks more to the character of those who step over them them than the failings, if any of the stepped over.
Fentanyl is the new object of blame for many of the ills of society. We’ve worked through marijuana and Percocet with attendant sacrificial victims and now the threat is fentanyl. Judging by the streets they could have targeted the dealers a lot sooner but the recent ouster of a district attorney not devoted to the pursuit of whatever ails the wealthy classes has brought about a delayed reaction. As much as I like The City it is a ghastly place to visit these days. On top of all that Covid is keeping us out of museums and displays of art we would normally spend time to see. It is therefore time to move rapidly on from Bagdad by the Bay.
I preferred the understated gladioli in the window of the house next door to the mural but I think we weren’t supposed to notice them sitting there elegantly attuned to the color of their own exterior walls.
There isn’t much of anything touristy about our tour of The City, a sentimental journey with memories of our own and thus idiosyncratic to a degree. We are both hoping that when we return from South America, hopefully in good health, we shall be able to see the city we have enjoyed in the past. As much as Americans wish Covid were over it isn’t, and wishing won’t make it so. For now we skim the surface of the attractions we would like to enjoy indoors among our fellow curiosity seekers.
