The First Three Years Are the Hardest

For the last three years I've been involved in the most intense and complicated relationship of my life. My partner is demanding, fragile, inconsistent, often inscrutable, and utterly contrary. But it's all been worth it, because of the passion and joy I feel whenever we're truly in synch, because of how the relationship forces me to grow and change...and because I'm finally beginning to see how beautifully we're coming together. And in the end I believe we'll have created something truly special.
       We're over the hardest part: the rough draft. Now we're in the revisions phase, with the help of a great couples counselor (although his job title is "editor"). Next comes copyediting, and then, next fall, my beloved and I will finally come out together...from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I never knew a relationship with a book could be this damned hard, but I know that when I get to hold it and gaze at it and kiss it at last, all the tears and yelling will have been worth it. 
       Today I'm celebrating our third anniversary. Oh, we've known each other much longer than that. But three years ago today was when we finally stopped flirting and got serious. It was on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 10th, 2013, that I had the breakthrough that turned a long-frustrating ramble through a wilderness of conflicting ideas into the pursuit of a coherent notion that quickly became the book I'm now revising, Nation of Faith and Flesh. That's when an idea sprang into my head for a sequence that showed me the tone and point of view I should use and effectively opened the door to the whole process of discovering what I should be writing. 
       Here's Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, noisy, too hip for its own good, but spacious and stimulating, where I was working that day:

       Here's the view I had from my counter in the front window, with the earnestly pondering young folks of Valencia Street and the afternoon sunlight that inspired me:

Here's the very spot on the counter where that breakthrough happened:

       And here's the beginning of what I wrote:

       Those words don't appear in the book. In fact, that character doesn't even appear in the book. I gradually moved the time frame of the book earlier, so it ends right before this passage would have appeared. But following this thread started me on the road that will result, in just about a year, in the publication of this book. Allow me to raise a $4.00 glass of cold-brew coffee in a toast.

Living Silents

One of the highlights of my year, every year, is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Every year, my friend Joe Filice flies up from San Diego and we make a four-day orgy of it. It's also about the hardest of the things I love to describe adequately to other people. That the movies are hypnotically beautiful some people will believe, and more of them can understand that the live musical accompaniment is exciting and that the Castro Theatre is a spectacular showcase. What's difficult to convey, though, is that the showcase never feels like a museum. What we're celebrating never feels like a lost art form.
       For one thing, there's a quality of discovery for the vast majority of people in the audience, just because these movies are so rarely screened. I'd seen only two of the sixteen features at this year's festival, and several I'd never heard of. For another, the musicians are brilliant and innovative, entering living collaborations with the images on the screen that give new life even to movies I've seen before. But beyond that, there are new movies. One of the most exciting aspects of following the business of silent-film restoration is the fact that they keep finding films not seen in decades, films long thought lost. 
       Ever since I was a kid I've known of a Laurel and Hardy short called The Battle of the Century, famous for its monumental pie-fight sequence but surviving only in pieces. It was possible to see clips of it, but not the whole thing. But the pieces have been found in recent years, restored and assembled, and at this year's festival I got to sit there and watch that almost mythical movie whole for the first time.
       Another film shown this year, Behind the Door, had been known only in very incomplete form for several decades, and another, Mothers of Men, hadn't been shown anywhere in over ninety years. During "Tales from the Archives," the festival's annual presentation on what's up in the world of film restoration, came news of another great project in the world: a new edit of Abel Gance's monumental Napoleon, already restored to great fanfare a few years ago, that promises to bring it back, for the first time since its premier in 1927, to the director's original conception. I already spent a few years waiting for Kevin Brownlow's restoration of Napoleon, which finally arrived and more than pleased me in 2012. Now I get to wait a few more years for this one...and along the way, I know there will be more new discoveries from that extraordinary period of cinematic creativity, miraculously brought back to us from the past.

Say Hey

This afternoon I was building some Ikea furniture in my living room and heard the sound of a marching band coming from outside. Not something one normally hears in this part (or any part) of San Francisco. My wife realized it was probably coming from AT&T Park, Giants' stadium, which we live near.
       We went and stood on the balcony, and out of the percussive marching band racket we heard the horn section starting on the Birthday Song. Then a huge chorus of voices rose, muddy at first but then clearly resolving into “Happy birthday, dear Willie.”
       Willie Mays had turned 85.
       I wanted to put my hand over my heart or something. It was a great moment in a great town.

My Pal Splendid Man

It was 1982 and we had just sold our first book. After years of separately writing serious novels that no one wanted anything to do with, we had decided to try writing something together just for fun, and we surprised ourselves by conceiving, writing, and actually selling a humor book, The Beaver Papers. It would be over a year before the book actually hit the bookstores, and during that time, fired with enthusiasm to work together, we dreamed up one humor idea after another. Some of those ideas later saw print in the National Lampoon, one of them eventually became the comic book The Trouble with Girls, but the one we loved best and did the most work on is the one that has just now, finally, arrived in print.
  We both lived in San Francisco, but not in the artistically edgy North Beach or Mission District that you read about in literary histories. We lived in the Richmond District, the foggy north-west corner of the city, a neighborhood of small apartment buildings with an almost suburban quality compared to the city that lay a bus ride away. We did most of the work at Will’s place, a second-floor apartment at the corner of 42nd Avenue and Balboa Street, and so it came to serve as the actual setting for much of the book. The second-hand furniture, the less-than-stellar housekeeping, and the general air of shabbiness all left their imprint on the stories.
      We didn’t have much money then, and in our memories we seem to have subsisted almost entirely on rice and chili—the rice we cooked at home, the chili we bought at a take-out Mexican joint down the street. When we felt like splurging we’d drive down to Mr. Hot Dog’s Cowboy BBQ, a Korean-owned diner on Geary Boulevard where a man could get full for less than four dollars. Our external lives weren’t much, but our internal lives were rich—if a bit peculiar. Besides surfeiting ourselves on William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary heavyweights, we also indulged in a shared obsession with the comic books of the 1960s. In our novels we tried to emulate the former, but we could never shake the temptation to do something creative with the latter.

      And so were born the stories that would become My Pal Splendid Man. It started with a quickly scribbled scene in which a superhero drops in on his young writer friend Will Jones—not as a prelude to exotic adventures but to talk about life, books, and highballs. That scene grew into a story, and suddenly we were seized. For a few months our favorite thing to do was to get together, eat our chili, and spin out a new Splendid Man story. We did wind up sending our heroes off on exotic adventures, but they were adventures of the sort that grew out of the peculiar chemistry of their friendship.
  Finally The Beaver Papers came out and made a modest splash. It earned us an invitation to write for the National Lampoon and the acceptance of our second book, a serious indulgence in our obsession called The Comic Book Heroes. By then we had begun to conceive My Pal Splendid Man as a book, but as life swept us along, we never found the time to finish it. After a while it became one of those projects in our drawers, remembered with great fondness but never returned to.
  Thirty years later we opened that drawer. We read the stories again, first with nostalgia but then with the joy of rediscovery. Not only were they still alive to us but they reignited the fire that had filled us decades before. We found ourselves writing five new Splendid Man stories to round out the narrative and weaving new threads through all the episodes to hold them together as a book.
  We were momentarily tempted to update the book’s milieu, but then we thought better of it. Not only was Will’s life built around the realities of being a would-be writer in the pre-internet age, not only were there some story elements that could really only work in the social context of the early ‘80s, but the essence of Splendid Man himself was clearly inspired by things we were observing in comics at the time. The wholesome superheroes of the “Silver Age” were then being supplanted by a newer, darker sort of superhero; the tension of that moment was much of what went into defining our hero’s character. So, despite the great temptation to fill Splendid Man and Will’s world with iPads, hybrid cars, and kale, we’ve set the stories in the time they were originally conceived.
       Fly with us, then, back through the time barrier to 1982. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. A dark grittiness is creeping into popular culture. The poor can still afford rent in parts of San Francisco. A writer needs Wite-Out to correct a mistake. Will Jones strikes up a beautiful friendship with a fellow known as Splendid Man. And up and away we go.

(The preceding is excerpted from the introduction to My Pal Splendid Man, on sale now from Atomic Drop Press!)

Goodbye, Candlestick

I'm writing this as the 49ers take the field to play what will most likely be their last game ever at Candlestick Park, where they've played football since 1971, where the Giants played baseball from 1960 through 1999. And I'm starting to miss it.
       Well, I'm not really missing it. It's a horrible stadium. Grim, bleak, ugly. Hard to get to. No matter where you sit, you're too far from the field. Cold, wet, and windy all summer long. The wind used to screw up baseball games and the boggy field mucked up football games. Not enough restrooms, terrible food. The Giants almost moved to Florida just to get away from the place, and it took a new stadium to keep them in town. The 49ers have been pushing for a new stadium for twenty years, and now they're finally getting one—but not in San Francisco.
       And it's not like the 49ers playing 50 miles further away makes any difference to me. I haven't gone to Candlestick in fifteen years and I haven't felt much desire to. Frankly, I'm more likely to want to spend the time and money to check out the team's spiffy new home in Santa Clara than I ever would have been to go back to Candlestick. 
       I do have some memories around the place. In the first half of the '80s, when I was fairly new in S.F., working part time, with some baseball-crazy friends, I became a passionate Giants fan and spent a lot of chilly days and frigid nights in the bleachers. It was a pretty forgettable team I was following—Jeff Leonard, Chili Davis, Bill Laskey—but the ritual was fun. My time got shorter after that, but I still managed to get to several Giants games over the next few years, when they were actually good. I was there for an All-Star Game and one playoff; I still remember Joe Price pitching great innings of long relief and Jose Uribe putting the Giants ahead with a clutch single down the line.

       Football games were a bigger deal. I took my brother a few times, my father once, with a sense of doing something meaningful, a sort of offering to the family cult of 49ers fandom. They all had happy endings except one, one that that was by far, to my mind, the unhappiest 49er game of all: their 15-13 loss to New York in the NFC Championship after the 1990 season, when they fumbled away a trip to their third Super Bowl in a row and Joe Montana broke his hand. Miserable as it was, I still take a certain pride in having been there that day. (If nothing else, it was a chance to watch 68,000 people vacate a building so quickly it was as if a gale had blown us all away.)
       And, of course, there are the memories of the things that happened there, that I watched on TV but will always associate with the place. I remember how alive I felt, how electric everything seemed to be, after that Dallas game in January, 1982. I remember the glow I felt for days, even though my real life was pretty crappy at the time, after they beat the Bears to reach their second Super Bowl. I remember the pizza-and-TV parties Jennie and I would throw for every playoff game, baseball and football both. I remember my friend Joe coming up from San Diego to watch Will Clark put the Giants in the World Series with an eighth-inning single up the middle. And even though the teams will continue to play inside my television set the way they always have, knowing that the place is different—that I'll never again see those shots of the Goodyear blimp over San Francisco Bay on an autumn afternoon—is a loss of some kind.
      None of that is what I'm really missing, though. As I've been writing this, I've realized that I'm mourning something that isn't the place and it isn't even the memories. What I'm missing is just how much it all used to matter to me. 

       I started to pull away from baseball sometime in the early '90s. I had a baby son, I had a lot of interesting work to do (and a lot of deadlines), and it just became impossible to follow a team for 162 games a year. I got in the habit of tuning in for pennant races and playoffs but not really engaging with the rest of the year, and inevitably the passion faded. I still follow the 49ers, but they stay in a much smaller compartment in my heart. After Nicky was old enough to go out and do things, I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoons with my family, and so I start watching football games on my VCR. Gradually I started fast-forwarding through more and more plays. Then the players I'd been so in love with started moving on, and I just didn't connect as well with the new ones. I still watch most 49er games, but fast-forwarding; I still arrange either to host or visit friends for playoffs, but I spend more time sitting and talking and eating, and less time standing and pacing and staring and screaming and jumping and dropping to my knees.
      Which is healthy, really. After the last Super Bowl I felt downhearted for about fifteen minutes, and I thought ruefully about that final, dreadful set of downs at the goal line maybe a dozen times during the next few days. In decades past, I would be depressed about a playoff loss for weeks. I would wake up thinking about that Roger Craig fumble or go to bed writhing over that ball Candy Maldonado lost in the lights. All over games that didn't really affect anything, played by a bunch of guys who didn't know I existed. 
       Of course, that coin had another side. There was an ecstasy, a feeling of everything being right with the world, that that same bunch of guys could give me with a victory, and it could last for days, for weeks. I enjoy watching Colin Kaepernick and Vernon Davis and Justin Smith, and sometimes they even make me vocalize suddenly and loudly, but I don't feel that exquisite, world-transforming joy I used to. No matter what happens in the end zone at Candlestick Park, I remain solidly, happily, healthily in my real life.
       I would never want the whole emotional package of sports mania back again, with all the lost time, the vast brain space given to statistics, the pointless funks. But I do miss that ecstasy, a little bit. And even that strangely sweet agony that made the ecstasy possible. I miss the feeling I used to be able to get driving past Candlestick on Highway 101, even on a Tuesday in February, long past the Super Bowl and well before Opening Day, when the stadium just sat there slumbering, ugly as hell—a feeling almost as if I were passing some boyhood home, all longing and joy and almost painfully rich memory. I'll miss that, at least a little, when I drive past the place next time and know that its life as a stadium is over. And I'll miss it when I drive by, sometime in the next year or two, and realize that it's gone.
       For now, though, it's still here, and Frank Gore just ground out ten yards on the spongy turf, and I'm going to watch it.
    


       

Village, Pueblo, Dorf

I was sitting and reading at Martha & Bros, a just-under-the-radar San Francisco institution, a handful of coffee shops (exactly five), entirely as family owned as the name suggests. Martha is from Central America—Nicaragua, I think—and she staffs her shops mainly with a seemingly endless supply of nieces, friends of nieces, and cousins of friends of nieces from the old country. The walls are painted with murals of hillside plantations with macaws in the trees, the back-counter gossip is in Spanish. Sometimes the music is Latin too, although just as often it's unobtrusive coffee-joint music, "smooth jazz" or soul/pop or grown-up rock.

      Today it was a variant of the last, Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz and people like them whose names I don't know. It's a common sound in S.F. cafes, one I tune out easily. The only note that nearly caught my attention was an announcer's voice—this wasn't the usual Pandora but apparently a radio station, probably KFOG, which every white person in the Bay Area between 30 and 60 seems to listen to while driving to work. It's harder for me to tune out speech than music, especially caffeined-up rock-FM speech, so it kept forcing its way through my book and into my consciousness. But even as it forced itself, I never fully understood what was being said. Gradually, in fact, that's what brought me to full awareness: the refusal of the words ever to coalescence into any sort of sense. 
       Which is when I paused and listened and realized there were some words I knew, just not words I'd been looking for. Jetzt. Ihre. Neue. Fünf. The radio was speaking German. And as I listened longer, I discovered that about every third song, although its sound was never incongruous with the rest, was in German too.
       The explanation wasn't difficult to imagine. An employee chooses a station off some selection of streaming music options (iTunes used to offer this, someone must still) and either doesn't bother to read too closely or doesn't know enough non-Spanish to pick out the nuances of Rock Radio Hitwelle. Even so, it struck me as a little bit miraculous.
       This is globalization, certainly, but not how we would think of it if we heard an American station in Managua, or even in Berlin, where guilty worries about cultural colonialism would start creeping up. Yes, it was American music, but looped back to us and varied subtly by another nation—not a downtrodden nation by any means, but not one with any imperial authority in the arts or popular culture. After all, Germany failed in its last effort to impose its culture on the rest of us, to have us listening to Wagner and watching movies about bright-eyed young goatherds in the Alps. Failed quite badly, actually. Its musical intrusion into a Nicaraguan-American coffee shop was not only not fraught with significance but was quite wonderfully, randomly insignificant.
       The online version of that German station no doubt exists mainly for Landsmänner sent far from home and missing not only their home-cooked culture but their familiar, everyday reworking of American culture: the tired department manager at the Volkswagen plant in Puebla, the sweaty staff at the Deutsches Generalkonsulat in Lagos. But because the internet is the internet, it leaks out. It finds the wormhole through space and appears, uncomprehended, barely noticed, but welcome and amusing and vouching momentarily for the bigness and strangeness of things, in California, in Nicaragua, in anywhere.


      

Not of a Feather

This ran a while back, in a slightly different form, in 7x7 magazine. I was reminded of it when a friend asked me, in a recent conversation on the Writers Grotto's participation in the upcoming Litquake, how I would describe the cultural identity of San Francisco. I still can't describe it, for the reasons explained below.

Outside the Peet’s Coffee in Potrero Center, there’s a flock of birds who perch on the chairbacks near people sitting and drinking their coffee. It’s easy to take them for blackbirds looking for food, but they’re not. Blackbirds are like New Yorkers, restless, quick, aggressively biting at opportunities. These slower and more patient creatures are cowbirds, who might grab a crumb if it lands near them but are generally content just to sit near people, as if enjoying our company; which they are, in a way. Cowbirds evolved to survive on the insects startled out of the grass by herds of bison and cattle, equipping them with an instinct to hang around groups of large, sedentary mammals. Somehow this flock found its way to a place where there are no cattle, and so they seek out the company of the only large, sedentary mammals they can find: San Franciscans drinking coffee.

      There’s something, as we like to say, “very San Francisco” about that odd, serene scene. It reminds me of one of our best traits, our ability to coexist quietly, perching in our separate realities in a sort of loose mutualism, even a benign indifference. I experience fewer tensions here around cultural or individual contrasts—fewer tensions about anything, really, except parking—than in any other city.

      But I experience something else, too, as I move through the city: some lack of collective identity, a mystery about what it means to be a “San Franciscan.” From neighborhood to neighborhood I feel like I’m moving through herds and flocks of very different creatures, coexisting contentedly but in separate realities. When I drive from Noe Valley to a Hong Kong dessert place in the Sunset, it’s hard to say how I and the guy behind the counter are both San Franciscans except in the literal fact of our residence. This is not about being a native or an immigrant either. Raised in the Santa Clara Valley, I feel very Californian—genial but cautious, with a certain mellow, all-weather slowness. But by that very fact I feel like a perpetual visitor in this foggy island that feels as far from California as anywhere else.

      I could say similar things about any diverse city, of course. But even in New York, as heterogeneous as a place gets, there’s a sense of what it means to be a New Yorker—someone who, whether his ancestral tongue is Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, or Southern Black, has been molded by the city to a certain attitude and speed, a particular way of pronouncing “R.” Here, we don’t even agree on how to pronounce our street names. On my way to Candlestick Park, I drive past Kay-sah-dah Street, but the people ignoring my car live on Kyoo-say-duh Street, although we all clearly see the sign reading "Quesada." (And don’t even get me started on the East Coast expats who still talk about Jew-nipero Serra Boulevard.)

      There are native San Franciscans. My former doctor was one, proud to be sending his son to Lowell, his own high school. His San Francisco, though, is a city of tract homes on quiet streets inhabited by low-profile Asian professionals, a city I’ve barely come to know in three decades here. There are even old-soil, multigenerational San Franciscans. But most of them live in San Bruno. Drive down Mission through Daly City until it becomes the El Camino and you'll eventually pass the San Francisco Police Officers Credit Union building, a breadcrumb on the trail to where the people who wear the name of our city on their uniforms have been driven by housing prices. The people whose ancestors lived in a town called Frisco are mostly an invisible substrate; and when they do call attention to themselves, it’s likely to be some unfortunate demonstration of how the city has left them behind, like trying to save Army Street from the unstoppable waves of American change.

      Recently, a friend of mine took off on a rant about the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, those invaders from San Ramon and Novato whom she only grudgingly tolerates in her San Francisco. She is the very image of one version of San Francisco, riding her bike in her canvas high tops and Peruvian knit cap. Except that she just moved here from Pennsylvania five years ago, while I’m sure many of her despised B&Ters grew up within 20 miles of here.

      What most of us consider “San Franciscan” is constantly being rewritten, usually by newcomers. Again, I could say so is New York, but there, a continuing culture of publishing and galleries that molds new influences into an umistakably Manhattanesque shape. The New York literary community is full of out-of-town immigrants, but most seem directed by a sense of being New York Writers, with the ghosts of Max Perkins and William Shawn also lurking in the corners. In the SF Writers Grotto, where I feel like something of an oddball for being from the Bay Area, I can’t say what distinguishes us as SF Writers, except maybe a relative lack of vanity and competitiveness. Which is often how we define SF, not by what it is but by what we’re not; specifically, not New York or LA.

      Maybe that indefinability is one of our great virtues. This city is less an entity than a stage, a benign and beautiful setting in which we all have the freedom to create our own, separate San Franciscos. Like the Peets patrons and the cowbirds, we exist side by side but in different realities. The woman with the latte may never understand that the bird perching on the next chair is really there for her, not her scone, and the bird may never catch on that the woman just isn't going to stir up that long-desired cloud of gnats. But the sun is out, and the breeze is soft, and who needs to worry?

      In that quiet coexistence there is deep comfort. We all perch together in the diluted sunlight of a San Francisco morning, lost in our own contemplations, nomads at rest, waiting together for the universe to serve up its largesse. These can be the city’s sweetest moments, these tentative encounters between two locals both feeling like eternal visitors, no one having any proprietary claims or any particular roles, pausing for a moment in our separate migrations.