Trout Fishing
◊ I was at Pier 39 in San Francisco for Mother's Day. I spent two hours trapped belowdecks on my parents' musty-smelling secondhand yacht, trying to get my mom to just shut the hell up. It was an exercise in futility, as usual, so I excused myself and went for a walk.
The pier, Fisherman's Wharf and both sides of the Embarcadero were clogged, thick and sluggish, with tourists: beautiful, overdressed European tourists, befuddled Japanese tourists and slow, dumb American tourists. These last were dressed head to toe in practical, butt-ugly, mass-produced cotton clothes, were built like trucks and clogged the sidewalks as they held each other's hands for safety and gawked at the street performers like they'd never seen people playing bongos before.
I shouldered through and past them, grinding my teeth with irritation, holding my cigarette over my head because the dumb fuckers were too distracted by the sights to dodge the glowing-hot tip on their own. I struck out toward Columbus, away from the wharf, up toward the hills where the Europeans would be hobbled by their classy, impractical shoes, and the Americans by their own laziness.
Most people ignored me, except when they'd follow my lead as I waded into traffic to cross busy streets. One guy wearing a black trilby hat purred "Hola, panda" in a silky voice when he saw the bear on my shirt, and I smiled and kept going.
It's funny how places never belong to you if you go there with someone else. Those places, no matter how much you like them or how often you go to them alone, always belong to the people who came with you. They exude a kind of psychic perfume that yanks you out of now and down to somewhen else, with someone else, entirely without your consent. Sometimes, if you've been especially unlucky, the mental reek is skunk spray instead of cologne.
I was lucky; my own dank demons were seven or eight years back and in a different part of town. Newer, sweeter personal landmarks seemed to crop up every few minutes between the wharf and North Beach: the Mus�e Mechanique, Cobb's Comedy Club, Chinatown, the Stinking Rose, City Lights Bookstore. They made me concurrently smile and wince, but I smiled much bigger than I flinched.
In the window out front of City Lights was a copy of the poster Dean and I used for a flyer promoting his book. When I stepped inside, books by Armistead Maupin, William Burroughs, Dave Eggers and Lynda Barry whispered about the million more memories hiding in their pages. I dragged a Richard Brautigan collection around the store with me for a while until I reluctantly put it back on the shelf. The idea of reading In Watermelon Sugar as anything other than a slim, battered paperback with that bright blue cover just felt wrong.
The whole day felt wrong. I was trying to reclaim something that had never been taken away from me, to put my own stamp on a city that had been there hundereds of years before I came along.
So I gave up. I bought a book on Tijuana Bibles, got a hummus sandwich and bought a big fucking bottle of Newcastle from a cashier who closely studied my ID and said I looked about 18 and called me "honey" when he gave me change. I dumped the change into the cup of a guy holding a sign that said "NEED $ FOR ALCOHOL RESEARCH," gave him a cigarette and lit one of my own off the lighter he cupped in his grimy hands, and went the fuck home.