6 - Apts - SF - Japantown

On that California trip with my parents in 1972 (see On the Road - Family), the last big, cross country  trip we would ever do as a family, we had spent a few days in San Francisco -- this was the first time I had ever been here (where I now live.) We did some tourist stuff together -- Ghirardelli Square for example -- but we had been traveling together for maybe a week by that time and everybody needed some “me” time. My dad went off to play golf with someone he knew from work and I took off to explore the city on my own. (Not sure what my mother did -- possibly she stayed at the motel and sulked.)

Back then I didn’t know where the hell I was most of the time, but now I have a pretty good idea of where I wandered. First off I traipsed through a part of the Western Addition where it’s a wonder I wasn’t killed. Next I climbed to the park on top of the hill above where I would eventually live in Japantown. Then, like generations of young men before me, I headed for the Barbary Coast area that has been raunchy since the late 1800s. 

This was before my taxi driving days and I was still under 21, which meant that I couldn’t legally go into the famous topless clubs of the day... but my being underage wasn’t obvious to the barkers working the sidewalk crowds who encouraged anyone walking past to come in. I took advantage of this generous invitation to walk in and see a bit of the show, until a bar girl came around to take my drink order. I would then ask for a Coke, since I was under 21, and she would inform me that I had to leave. For me this was perfect. I got to see that there were indeed pretty girls, who looked like they “could” be coeds, taking off their tops and, if I recall correctly, even bottoms. There wasn’t much more to see really -- I don’t think any of these girls knew any ping-pong ball tricks. So I got to see what there was to see and I didn’t have to pay a cent.

This neighborhood is also a traditional entertainment district (The Purple Onion and other Beat era clubs were still open at this point) and I learned that there would be a performance of the local improv group that night, so I bought a ticket. The show was quite good but it got out really late, after Midnight as I recall. This is where things got interesting at the time, and are even more interesting in retrospect.

The improv club was on Broadway and we were staying in a motel on Pacific. Today, I could walk from the club, if it still existed, to the motel in a couple minutes and not even have to climb a hill (there's a handy tunnel). But at the time, all I knew was that if I followed certain cable car tracks I would end up on Pacific just above the motel -- so that’s what I did. This meant that I walked way out of my way, but I didn’t realize that at the time. First I had to walk almost the length of Chinatown, which was all shuttered for the night, to California Street. Then I followed the cable car tracks up California. Near the top of Nob Hill is the only intersection where cable car lines cross. I remember walking through this intersection with the fog blowing fast and cold just above my head. I now live a block away.

Another block up the hill you come to one of the most magical urban spaces in SF -- large hotels, exclusive residential buildings (including the one featured in both Vertigo and Tales of the City), and a cathedral surround a half-square-block park and this grand old brownstone building that was once a mansion and is now a posh club. At some point during my late night climb over this hill in the fog, I think I fell in love with San Francisco.

In May of 1976, before committing to move here, I rode a Greyhound bus to SF from Arizona to see if it was really as nice as I remembered. At that time, Greyhound operated a funky terminal on 7th Street between Market and Mission streets. The platforms were all outside and as soon as you got off the bus you had a wonderful, usually windswept, view of the city all around you. (The current Greyhound terminal is at the Temporary Transbay Terminal and is even nicer.) The terminal also had the one and only good cafeteria I ever ran into connected in any way with Greyhound. The food was both good and cheap. I ate most of my meals there.

The neighborhood around the terminal was (and is)... not good. I found a place to stay in the next block but I had to share a room with an extended family of cockroaches. I didn’t care because I was out exploring the city all the time anyway. And I liked what I saw. On this trip I rode old style Muni trolley buses (Muni is the local, municipal transit system that today includes the cable cars, streetcars, light rail, motor coaches, and electric trolley buses). By the time I moved in July the last of those old buses had been replaced by the newer model.

Old. With since removed Embarcadero Freeway behind.

On July 2nd 1976, I again left the Greyhound terminal on 7th Street with a few bags that contained everything I thought I needed to establish myself in a new place. I spent one more night at the awful hotel around the corner before moving in with my friends from Arizona who had moved out the previous month -- I only learned they were leaving when I attended a going away party for some of them. Four people, two of whom I knew (D___ and S___) had arrived in June and another two I knew T___ and L___ arrived later in the summer. 

Within a couple days of arriving, I had found a room in a classic SF Victorian on a street where Japantown and Pacific Heights mingle (I always referred to the neighborhood as Baja Pacific Heights). On July 4th I rode one of the new trolley buses...

New then, now retired. With recently removed Transbay Terminal at left.

...to the firework display at Marina Green. After a day enjoying the sun in this grassy area by the bay, the fog rolled in just before it was time for the fireworks and all you could see was glowing colors illuminating the fog. I didn’t care because back in Arizona it was probably over 110 and would now start getting humid while I was cold... COLD, and loving it.

Japantown

When I moved to SF I had some money saved up and planned to live cheaply, write, and study (see A Classical Education). With this in mind, I had taken a really small room that shared a washroom (a tiny room between two bedrooms which held a basin, with a nice old marble counter, and a hotplate).  I was on the third floor but I was four floors above the ground as the building (like so many in SF) was on a slope, the only natural light came from two small windows opening onto light wells. There was a shared bath for the floor with a bonus water closet out in what had once probably been the laundry area next to the central, outdoor, stairs. (The main stairs for our floor were inside and connected to the front porch). I didn’t have a phone and my cooking was limited to what I could prepare on the hotplate.

Having Pacific Heights behind me was nice as I frequented one of its parks, Lafayette Square, and some of it’s less expensive shops and cafes on Fillmore. When I did need to use a phone -- to reassure my parents that I hadn’t died yet -- there was one at the top of the hill (in the park I had discovered on my first visit) and another next to a breakfast cafe a block below me in Japantown proper.  I had sushi for the first time at a Cherry Blossom Festival -- still the biggest neighborhood festival. I didn’t care much for sushi then, but love it now. The neighborhood had even more bus lines then than now, so it was a pretty convenient place to live. To the south of Japantown was a dangerous “urban renewal” area that consisted mostly of empty lots and housing projects. I lived in prime hunting territory, from the point of view of the people living in the projects, but managed not to be successfully mugged by out running the one group of kids who tried.

Neighbors

The theater phenomenon of the day was A Chorus Line. I eventually caught it when it hit one of our local theaters. To this day, it is one of the very few musicals I love, but the odd thing for me when I first saw it was that I already knew all the songs -- not the lyrics, but the tunes. My gay neighbor, on the other side of our washroom, had been playing the soundtrack constantly for months but I couldn’t hear the words and didn’t know what it was. I’m sure I would have loved it in any case, but this made it both familiar and new at the same time.

The best room in the back of the building had originally been the kitchen and dining room. (I never knew the people who lived in the front parlors and so never saw those rooms.) When I first moved in a young woman lived there who had the charming habit of opening her door in the nude. Sadly, she was soon gone, replaced by a guy who absolutely lived the disco scene. Yes, this was also the Age of Disco. The gay scene in the Castro was mirrored by the disco scene in Cow Hollow along Union and Fillmore streets. My neighbor grazed the happy hour buffets at a whole string of discos and then went home each night with a different girl. We had nothing in common but he was one of those people who can not be alone or silent and, in a social pinch, would come over and pester me. One night he dragged me out to test the disco waters. I was impressed by the free food, mostly. And, as Glee has reminded us, the music could be quite compelling.

He didn’t stay in the building long but was replaced by a surprisingly similar, though this time gay, guy. Pinchas Katz also could not stand to be alone. I would go over after Midnight to investigate the racket only to find that he was painting his kitchen... this happened multiple times. Though we had almost nothing in common, I would often have to entertain him (or at least be entertained by him) on these at-a-loss evenings. He decided that Pinchas was not going to cut it as a name and re-christened himself Ari Ash -- Ari means lion in Hebrew, I believe. Also by this time, I had moved into the bigger bedroom and now shared a wall with Ari. This room boasted a stunning view over the Western Addition through the stereotypically SF, bay windows. Suddenly being four floors in the air paid off. I also had a cute little gas “stove” for space heating and room for a toaster oven and a desk and even a comfortable chair. I was also running low on funds and getting a little bored. (See SF Sexual Trauma Center).

Around this time an odd thing kept happening: I would be awakened from a sound sleep by the sounds of someone being brutally murdered. I didn’t have a phone, it was impossible to tell where the sounds were coming from, and I was still warm and sleepy while it was cold outside of my bed, so after a few moments of concern and doubt, I just went back to sleep. Usually I wouldn’t even remember these events until the next time it happened. Finally, in one of his bouts of redecorating, Ari moved his bed so that the head was against the wall we shared. The next time I woke up to murder, the rhythmic pounding of the headboard against the wall informed me that Ari was a screamer. In fact he was a screaming bottom. At least now I could go back to sleep with an easy mind knowing that a desperately bored Ari was not going to annoy me into keeping him company -- for a while. 

Extreme Driving

After I was settled into the bigger room in Japantown I visited Arizona for Christmas and then rented a station-wagon to return with a load of stuff I had left at my parent's house. The car was crammed full of stuff and there was no way to secure it if I stopped for the night at a motel, so I decided to just drive straight through. I hit on a simple system of stopping every 2-3 hours for a meal or just a break -- anything to get me out of the car and walking around.

Everything was going fine until I descended the Grapevine into California's Central Valley on I-5. As soon as I hit level ground I ran into a dense Tule (ground) fog. I did the only sensible thing, pulled well off the road and turned my lights out. So I'm standing next to the car in the fog in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next, when I noticed that traffic was roaring past me at normal freeway speed. What the hell, I waited until a long line of trucks and cars roared past and then jumped onto the end of the line. The trick is to stay close enough to the vehicle in front of you to see their tail lights. With night falling, I'm speeding down I-5 (flat and straight) at 60+ and all I can see is a couple tail lights and a few cat's eye reflectors between lanes. As time passes and it becomes completely dark, I notice that vehicles are leaving the line from the front. Eventually the truck I'm following makes it's exit and I suddenly realize I am leading the line.

I had no idea how many vehicles were behind me. All I could do was concentrate on the one or two reflectors ahead as they appeared out of the fog and hope there wasn't a stretch of pavement without reflectors... or anything stopped on the highway. In addition to concentrating on reflectors, I couldn't help also thinking about all the news reports I'd heard about massive pileups in the fog. Now I understood how these things happened. I don't know how long I was leader of the pack, not long I think because it really was a strain. When I had had enough I pulled over at a rest area and my line of vehicles roared passed into the night.

Eventually I made it to I-580 and climbed out of the fog until I hit the Bay Bridge. It was just before dawn now. The sky was getting lighter but the bright gold street lights illuminated the top deck of the bridge. It was so foggy I couldn't see the bay, just the bridge itself which I had all to myself. I couldn't help wondering if I had accidentally slipped into commuter heaven: Five lanes of road without another car in sight and everything bathed in an ethereal golden glow. As soon as I hit the San Francisco anchorage the fog cleared and I could see the towers of downtown on my right lit-up by the magic light of dawn. (See also: The Book Business, At the Movies, Typewriter Repair Days. Next: 7 - Apts - SF - Noe Valley.)