Infinite Decay into Nothingness by Ajax Green

I moved to SF in '93 to get my life together. I had been spinning my wheels in London England, working in all-night cafe and playing bass in a dream-pop band that I didn't love (we were not as good as the Sundays). I was going nowhere and decided go back to college in the USA. 

My friend Cory lived in SF so I moved there - I had one friend! He found me a room in a giant 4-bedroom, 2-story apartment on McAllister & Baker in the Western Addition ($350). I lived with a graphic designer, a singing waiter, and a lonely girl who could often be heard weeping behind her closed door. We weren't friends, but every Thursday night the four of us would gather in the living room to watch the new, mind-blowing TV show "Seinfeld" and, ironically, "Friends".  

Cory was friends with a band called Granfaloon Bus, who had already put out two great records but after their guitarist/clarinetist was fired (for accidentally kicking an audience member in the face while climbing on the bar at the Blue Lamp) they needed a new guy to make noises in between the verses. I strapped my guitar to my back and rode my bike to the rehearsal studio way out in the Excelsior district and somehow passed the audition - without a clarinet! I was very bad at guitar then, which was a plus - these guys didn't want to hear any notes that had been played before. 

I signed up with a temp agency to make money. In the morning I would ride my bike from the Western Addition to SF State for classes. At lunchtime I would ride my bike over Twin Peaks and zoom down Market Street all the way to the Financial District to do dumb office work in the afternoon. What a thrill to be on the top of the city every day and barrel down the hill as fast as possible into the gleaming metal canyons of downtown! I really wanted to be a bike messenger. They were cool and I thought it must be the perfect career - the city was full of dirty cyclists back then and they were like independent punk cowboys - but I didn't pursue it and instead sat in cubicles and made photocopies of legal briefs and got really good at Minesweeper. 

 A year later my girlfriend joined me from London and we moved to a 1 bedroom on South Van Ness and 24th in a beautiful restored victorian ($700). Across the street was a dilapidated bar called "The Phone Booth" that I was scared of, until one night after school I found some courage and went for a drink. It was an old-man bar, but they were playing bizarre electronic music and I met a few nice gay drunks. They also had a ruddy old pianist who sometimes would play songs, but I never recognized a single tune. He took requests too but he had never heard of any of the songs I suggested - the venn diagram of our musical overlap was completely empty. "How is this even possible?" I wondered. "I know a lot of songs!" 

 At SF State a weird old man who looked like Ernest Hemingway always tried to talk to me after Spanish class. I ignored him for a semester, but then when he showed up in Spanish 2 I relented. Every week we'd have a coffee date at Muddy Water's on Valencia St, where he would regale me with stories from his ribald life. It was just like "Tuesday's With Morrie" except that all his stories and life-lessons were about blow jobs. He often insisted that I must have a wonderful penis, but I never showed it to him. Cruel!  

Granfaloon Bus gigged at a few places - the Nightbreak, the Paradise Lounge, The Hotel Utah, some weird basement; but mostly we played the Make Out Room in the Mission because Marty (the owner) loved our music (and was also the singer's roomate). The G-Bus songwriting was exceptional and I felt so lucky to be in the same band with a lyrical genius - the Bob Dylan of Capp Street! The band was a reaction to loud, predicatable rock and roll, and we tried to do everything the opposite of what had come before. We liked to play songs that got quieter and quieter on an infinite decay into nothingness, and I loved to hear the chatter of the audience in the Make Out Room overwhelm our tiny music until it finally disappeared. 

The Subtle Plague (another SF band) got us a record deal in Germany, and we toured northern Europe a few times. Those first tours were the best days of my life - young, wild, and free, with nothing to do but get weird with my friends on stage every night.  

Four years later I had a kid and my wife wanted to leave the city. "Why?" I argued. "The 3 of us can live in this 1 bedroom apartment FOREVER!" 

I did not win that argument. 

 Ajax Green is a cherished man-about-town in both Oakland and San Francisco. His band Thundebleed, aka Blind Vengeance, has been thrilling fans of 70’s rock for half a century. Follow him here and here, although he’s sworn chiefly off the socials.

Slow Drawls, Bar Crawls & Tech Falls: My SF in the 90s by Cindy Lundin Mesaros

Golden Gate Park, early 1990s Photo by Jennifer Blot

Drafty Edwardian flats in the fog where the wind blew indoors through closed windows that I tried to seal up with plastic wrap and duct tape. Irish bars in the Richmond District with fresh arrivals from overseas crowded on barstools. Late brunches of orange waffles with powdered sugar on Clement Street. Long afternoons spent walking across The City exploring consignment stores. The tart and smooth taste of Tommy’s margaritas in the Outer Richmond. 

Growing up in Santa Cruz County, the big city of San Francisco was my idea of a magical place. A high school classmate took my friend Lisa to dinner on a date, and my best friend, Jen, and I tagged along in the back seat for the journey up Highway 1. We went to Scott’s Seafood, where Lisa got to order anything she wanted, and Jen and I had side salads because it was all we could afford. 

I would move closer to The City a couple of years later, when I attended U.C. Berkeley. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1991 while living in a high-rise apartment in Albany, and took a job in Point Richmond, less than 10 minutes away. When that job ended, I found a new one in SF at a nonprofit (via the Chronicle classifieds) in early 1992 on then-called Army Street in SF. It was my ticket to escape the suburbs. 

It was 1992. My New Jersey transplant boyfriend, Mike (whom I met at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz when his band came through town and who soon after gamely moved to the Bay Area  for me) and I packed up our one bedroom in Albany, loaded our belongings into a rented van and headed into The City. We landed in a flat in the Inner Richmond at 10th and Cabrillo — a neighborhood I knew because Jen lived there. She was Herb Caen’s assistant up until his death, and she personified San Francisco for me. 

It felt like my life started for real the day I moved across the Bay Bridge. We settled into our big two-bedroom flat, with a swinging door to the master bedroom with a fireplace. Mike spent much of his time on the road; I was 24, living mostly alone, and living comfortably on a nonprofit salary in a city that was still affordable.

Jen and I would spend long weekend days walking through Golden Gate Park to brunch on 9th Avenue in the Inner Sunset, then traverse back across The City on foot to wander up Sacramento Street’s  consignment shops. Heading back to Geary Boulevard, we’d meander until we got to Tommy’s Mexican in the Outer Richmond, where we’d find a seat at the tiny bar and relish the scene:  Our friend Julio would give us samples of top-shelf tequilas and regale us with stories while the young staff showed us their newly-carved (by themselves!) tattoos. There were no windows, time crawled, and the tequila hidden inside fresh-squeezed lime juice made us forget our troubles — troubles only a 20-something could feel so deeply.

I made $32,000 a year, which seemed like a fortune at the time. We spent our evenings on Clement Street, having dinner at Giorgio’s Pizza (salad dressing on the side to avoid smearing our lipstick) then hitting the various Irish bars where the singles among us looked for local talent. I couldn't understand the thick accents, but I was a good wingwoman. We made friends with a cover band with a weekly slot at Ireland’s 32, and got to know their regulars. One of them worked at a mattress store on Geary, which we affectionately nicknamed “Ed’s Beds.” We’d join him on his work shifts,  spend foggy afternoons lying on the mattresses for sale, discussing life and love. Or we’d venture downtown to the DNA Lounge to see the M-80s ply their retro catalog to an audience that seemed to be primarily bachelorette parties. In the mornings, we’d have bagels with cream cheese and raspberry jam at the Toy Boat Dessert Cafe served by affable Jesse, the owner, then we’d curl up slightly hungover in our favorite booth by the side door. 

Churchill’s at 6th & Clement was our local. The bartender, Teresa, took an interest in me. One late night post-shift, she asked me to accompany her on a job interview downtown at another bar, and called her cabdriver friend to give us a lift. We flew down Bush Street going way over the speed limit. The driver had one hand on the wheel while his taxi caught air as it flew past the timed lights, all the while facing the backseat and doing lines with Teresa as we headed to this most unorthodox of job interviews.

One night at the Last Day Saloon, also on Clement, we made friends with a Texan named Kenney, who was the drummer for Chris Isaak’s band and who served as the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood. We attended house parties at his flat in the Inner Richmond, including one memorable night post-party giving a ride to a comic of some local fame a few blocks to the Holy City Zoo. I spent the three-block journey uncomfortably fending off his advances. When I complained to Kenney about not being warned about the comedian’s aggressiveness, he said in his slow drawl, “Cindy, us sex symbols have got to learn to take care of ourselves.”

I left our drafty flat in 1994 to move to Chicago for grad school at Northwestern. We had an epic going-away party, and today I have fuzzy memories of a woman slow dancing in our spare bedroom/music room, while her dance partner, our friend Guy, lifted her wig (worn just for the occasion) up and down on her head. A dude who looked like a small angry rooster got locked in the water closet and the door bowed outward as he tried to force his way out. At the end of the night, I attempted to retrieve a friend’s coat from the spare room, but couldn’t dislodge it from underneath my cousin’s Colombian jewelry-designer-friend, who was locked in a passionate embrace with a party guest he had met that night. 

After I graduated from Northwestern, I moved back to the neighborhood. The City was changing. I took a corporate job, where I lasted a year before I jumped ship to a tech startup. I commuted to Mountain View, where we’d package up software on floppy disks to send through the mail. My friend group swelled to include brilliant and awkward engineers, and it turned out that they loved margaritas at Tommy’s, too.

This second stint in San Francisco was more hedonistic. My friends and I were starting to make money. It’s possible we were becoming the assholes who were ruining the City, although it didn't feel that way because we had a history with the place. 

My co-worker Michelle’s boyfriend started a recruiting agency out of his bedroom on Masonic with his roommate Michael, making big bucks placing engineers. Four of us gathered at their apartment one night to travel downtown to a party. When we realized parking would be impossible, we made a quick decision to ride on the back of the guys’ motorcycles. I hiked my skirt up to my waist and flew down Geary on the back of the bike. On the way home, we stopped off at The Stud, dancing until the wee hours, then returned to their place and watched the sun rise, while seeing what would happen if we huffed nitrous out of a can. (Michael later moved to an illegal penthouse unit on the roof of a Financial District building downtown, where we had to wander through deserted offices to get to the entrance … but that’s another story.)

Jen & Cindy, mid 90s, Tiburon

Mike and I got married at Land’s End in 1996 and held our reception at the House of Shields downtown,which used to be a speakeasy with a tunnel to the Palace Hotel during prohibition. In the early days of our marriage, I studied improv at Fort Mason, sharing extreme vulnerability with strangers who became friends. I also took voiceover classes and went on auditions. Mike began playing in a side project band with a major league ballplayer, so we added visiting ballplayers to our crew. One memorable night in San Francisco, I entertained half the starting rotation for the Cleveland Indians at Specs and Vesuvio’s in North Beach. 

The City was awash in new money, some of it lining our pockets. I joined a digital music startup and became part of Audio Alley, which was insufferable on the outside, and the best of all times on the inside. I made many close friends there, all of us realizing our dreams of working in music through the wave of technology sweeping The City. Il Pirata, a bar at the base of Potrero Hill, was the site of many after-work events and shows and where we’d discuss our latest Spinal Tap promotion for Rolling Stone magazine. We were the title sponsor of SXSW one year, hiring the White Stripes to play our party off the back of a truck at a slushy drink place in Austin. 

Stern Grove, turn of the century

We lived high until we didn’t. It all crashed down in 2001, when the party ended. My friend group all got laid off in the same month, with extended periods of unemployment spent playing trivia at the Pig & Whistle on Geary. Those fortunate enough dispersed to “real” jobs, if we could find them. We had to grow up quickly. I helped start a company during the downturn, bought a house in Forest Knolls — an unknown neighborhood west of Twin Peaks tucked beneath the Sutro Tower ⸺ and began raising a family. We eventually fled The City for the East Bay, from whence we came, in search of good public schools. 

Now that phase of my life is done and I look back toward San Francisco, wondering if the City I remembered would still be as welcoming for this next phase of life. I like to think so. 

Cindy Lundin Mesaros is a guitarist and singer in the band, The Ultra Sounds and a super cool woman I bump into at all the best shows! Follow her insta here.

One Way Ticket by Julie Kramer

I was a good girl. Straight A’s at a well-respected college back East. A virgin. No drinking or drugs except the occasional inhale of a joint offered by my older siblings. 

I needed to get the fuck out of Massachusetts and find out who I really was.

The choice was simple: after graduation, I packed my things in a few boxes and shipped them to Oakland. My big sister lived there and would share her home with me for a month, while I looked for work. The next month I had a house-sitting job in Noe Valley, for a lesbian couple my aunt knew.

The job I found was also in Noe Valley: managing one of a chain of bougie food stores called Auntie Pasta. We sold, yes, lots of fresh pasta, cut to order, or ravioli. The concept was, stop in and get all the things you need to make a quick gourmet dinner. I had no management experience whatsoever; they hired me anyway. I was “trained” by a perpetually drunk manager at the Polk Street shop, then dumped into the world of retail food service. 

One of the other managers - the one I hoped would ask me out - soon got fired for taking the day’s profits and blowing it on blow. Another manager, Grant, asked me out and, not knowing how to say ‘no’ back then, I accepted. He did introduce me to the Red Vic movie theater, and yeast on popcorn. He also dumped me when I told him I wasn’t quite ready to sleep with him yet. Because he had goaded me to grow my hair longer, I cut it all off after we broke up and kept it in a short crop for many years.

I fell in love with my neighborhood. Noe, back then, had all sorts of cool shops. Star Magic! Three bookstores! Shoe shops and a cobbler! The little converted garage that had jewelry on paper cards tacked to the walls! Real Foods (filled with young employees who flirted with customers as they browsed the produce)! The Meat Market Cafe, its space a former meat market with hooks still hanging from the ceiling!

And I spent most evenings at the Rat and Raven. I wasn’t much of a drinker, still, and I hated beer. I would order a Sierra Nevada and take two sips, or just have sparkling water and lime if I was really broke. I went to the Rat because I had no friends; I knew nobody in my new town except the folks I worked with. There I met Jonathan Segel, a bartender who became a friend and was also, incidentally, a greatly talented violin player in Camper Van Beethoven. I met a sweet guy named Bob who sold me his cracked black leather jacket for twenty bucks; it was too big but made me feel like a badass. I also learned that meetings guys in bars was not the best way to find a boyfriend. I had a decent amount of bad sex with guys I never saw again before I figured this out.

The CEO of our small food company was a married older guy who had a reputation for partying. He took me out to dinner one night, at a sushi place on Geary, ostensibly to talk shop. Naturally, he drank a bunch of sake and then insisted we go dancing at the Brazilian place on Van Ness. When I refused to dance with him, he sulkily said he’d drive me home. As he weaved down Church Street, he plunged his hand under my shirt and bra. I froze and hugged the door. When we got to my apartment, he asked to come upstairs, and assured me we had a special connection. That connection, however, was severed not long after when he had an underling fire me from my job.

For so many years I was underemployed, broke, and still searching for myself. I wanted sex but was terrified of the AIDs crisis that I saw, heartbreakingly often, in the young frail men in the Castro. I wanted to be a poet, too; I started reading at open mikes, hands shaking the slips of paper that I held. The Chameleon, with Bucky Sinister presiding, became my Monday night haunt. He once read my scrawled name, Julie K, as Juliet, and that became my poetry name. I was fortunate to read with people like Beth Lisick and Michelle Tea and Eli Coppola. The heartache in my personal life gave me lots of fodder.

Through it all, my big sister supported me from Oakland. Until she couldn’t. Her melanoma, which had resulted in surgery years before, had metastasized to her liver. She told me, one day as I visited her at Kaiser, that she’d decided to stop the chemo. She couldn’t bear it anymore. I knew what she was saying. I just couldn’t process it; it was like hearing the sun would stop rising.  I was working another crappy restaurant job when the call came to rush back to Kaiser. She died the next morning.

Who was I without her? 

By then, I had friends. They moved me to a cheap studio shortly after she died. Then I met a wonderful guy who I dated for many years, the first healthy relationship of my dating life. I began to temp, and ended up with a job that paid more, as San Francisco definitely was not for broke poets even then. I spent many nights at Bottom of the Hill, the Blue Lamp, the Hotel Utah and Covered Wagon; music was a deep part of who I was.

I wore vintage dresses and combat boots. I ate pancakes at Kate’s Kitchen. I dreamed of being a drummer, and still do, I waited way too long to address my depression; I made a lot of mistakes. I also got lucky enough to befriend a girl who worked in the salon where I got my short haircuts; she is still my best friend, over 30 years later.

I guess my move to a marina in Richmond was another one-way ticket. I can’t afford to move back to San Francisco, and I like the beauty out here, the quiet that’s mostly broken by waves on the shore or birdcalls. I miss the City but it hasn’t let me go. I don’t expect it ever will.

Julie Kramer is a lovely poet and friend whose cat, Shteve, should have his own social account. I Didn’t Come Here to Fight, a book of poems can be found here.  For pictures of Shteve and the Richmond Harbor, follow her on Instagram @juliekramer66.

Kicked out of “The Happiest Place on Earth”

By Schatzie Frisch 

I just ordered Swollen Appetite from Bookshop.org yesterday and I'm so looking forward to reading it. I heard Sandra read excerpts from her book at the Launch Party in July, and that prompted me to send her the following message the next day:

"Sandra - thanks for sharing bits of your life last night. Ha! I'll be purchasing your memoir... as I grew up here in the nineties as well...  I drank a ton...ouch! I remember (or vaguely remember) driving my tiny Opal Gt on the walking paths in Golden Gate Park...on MDMA. At any rate I appreciate your candor. Helps you, and helps others.”

I have many tales to tell about growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the nineties, but I wrote this piece after going to the Launch Party. It takes place in SoCal my first year in college where I lasted 2 years before coming back to SF.

 Flashback #476 

Kicked out of “The Happiest Place on Earth” - 1980

I took a trip to Disneyland with three of my UCSD Dorm Mateys in 1980. How we smuggled in that rum (Bacardi 151) I am not sure, but I don’t think Security was that rigid in the eighties. But I am sure the Disneyland Security was on “High Alert” and tracking our rum-bunctious antics shortly after we cracked open that bottle. We bought our $9.25 ticket books and then purchased official Disneyland Pirate hats near the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride and had our names stitched onto them in famous Disneyland fashion. Four Pirate wenches with a bottle ‘o rum let loose in “The Happiest Place on Earth”? Batten down the hatches.

 And yes, the Disneyland Security Officers and of course Goofy were on our ‘scent’ from the get go. We left a trail of pungent rum scent wherever we roamed. But even despite our scent, us Pirate wenches would have stood out like a peg-leg.

 Our time in “The Happiest Place on Earth” was about to end shortly after we arrived at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup Party ride in Fantasyland. I remember I gave the ticket-taker my ride ticket in a most unconventional manner. I ripped the E ticket (the most expensive ticket at 85 cents)  out of my ticket book and stuck the tip of the ticket on my rum-drenched tongue. I then stuck my tongue out at the hesitant ticket-taker. He removed the slightly damp rum smelling E ticket off my tongue, and let me run carefree to one of the empty, soon to be light-speed twirling and spinning out-of-control tea cups. I think he knew this was gonna be my “last ride”.

 But before that tea cup started to spin, me Mateys and myself took (another) shot o’rum. There is a manual control in the center of the tea cups and when you turn it, the tea cup spins faster. Us rum-fueled pirate wenches had that tea cup spinning high into the stratosphere! Our Pirate hats flew off our heads as we spun up into the sky! Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and Dumbo flew by. It was a crazy Mad Hatter Tea Party to die for!

 When we came back down to earth we stumbled laughing out of that giant tea cup, a bit woozy, and were planning our next ride adventure, when to our surprise we noticed the subtle Disneyland Security Officers patiently waiting for us near the scowling ticket-taker (who had ratted us out no doubt). Aaaargh! Davy Jone’s locker for you! We were instructed to march single-file (Security-man in front of us, Security-man in back of us. Four Pirate wenches in the middle) through the Park to the Disneyland Jail. Could we have made a run for it? Probably, but for some reason these giggling captive tipsy Pirates chose to comply. We left the empty rum bottle in the tea cup like the good Pirates we were.

 In the Disneyland Jail we were ordered to be quiet and sit on a couch below a giant framed photo of Mickey Mouse donning a blue police uniform complete with badge and police cap. Micky the Policemouse was waving two revolvers in the air. Mickey’s smile said it all, ’Do you feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

 The room was filled with crying kids who had shoplifted stuffed animals, and their irritated parents, and maybe there was a felon or two, or three as well. One by one us Pirate wenches were called into the “Judges” office. I thought I was gonna see Mickey the Policemouse! but it was just some mousey Disney employee. He did have a Mickey mouse cap on with mouse ears. The word “Judge” was embroidered on it. (OK maybe he was not wearing a cap.)

The Judge asked me for my ID. At least I had one! I pulled my ID from my wallet. My ID stated that I was over 21.The photo of the young woman on my ID had dark brown hair like me, but she was Japanese. Her last name was Higashi. I didn’t have my regular ID that day, I guess I had bought the rum? (And you gotta have a fake ID if you are underage to buy rum, even if you are a Pirate)

 Miraculously that Judge took pity on us poor four Pirate lasses and we were escorted out of “The Happiest Place on Earth” single file thru the park again. We had been told by the Judge, “You are not allowed to come back” (That day? This lifetime?) I am still not sure.

 We were silent as the giant iron gate slammed closed behind us, and then we paused for a moment, took a big breath and looked at each other…What? How could it be? Kicked out of “The Happiest Place on Earth”?

 We almost cried… but instead, burst out laughing and started singing “Yo ho, yo ho a Pirate’s life for me”.

Schatzi the Renegade Deli Heiress is a Bay Area artist , musician, and writer whose work is one of a kind — I’m partial to her 20 years of hearts and donut photography!

A Renunciation, A Pivot, A New Beginning

By Stephen Smith

Gods Eye

Approximately a century ago, in 1993, I arrived in San Francisco. As befits such a long-ago occasion, my memories of the time are fuzzy. I know I flew here, spent a few days in a stranger’s house (a friend vouched for me), and promptly found myself a room in the Mission, at Guerrero and 15th.

Unlike our blog hostess, Sandra, by 1993 I had already finished my quest for fame. My appetite for success had waned. I had been teased, sometimes rewarded, and ultimately shooed away from musical renown. I had been fortunate to make a few records on indie labels in the U.S. and Europe. I had toured the U.S. a few times with one band, and been flown to London for a few press shows with another. But, ultimately, I hit a wall. A few major labels (every band’s goal at the time) had expressed interest. One took a breakfast meeting with us, suggesting various promotional angles they would pursue. It seemed like it was in the bag. But when they ghosted us (a term we didn’t have at the time, kids), I had had it. I needed stability. I needed a future. I didn’t want to be subject to the whims of the industry.

Salem 66

So moving to San Francisco was a renunciation, a pivot, a new beginning.

What does a person of moderate intelligence do to start again, with no particular skills and no particular professional interests? Law school, obvi. A classic stop on life’s journey for those with no real idea of what to do with themselves.

I was 26, on a fixed income of about $600 a month. That covered my $330 room, and left me enough to buy plenty of $1.25 rice and bean burritos at La Cumbre. Enough for a beer now and then at Casanova, as well. At the time, Casanova was more of what we considered a “Vietnam Vet bar” than the place it is today. There was a pool table. I was often able to hold it for a few games at a time. My roommate and I would occasionally go to Jack’s Elixir, as well, just a few doors down from our apartment. But that was spoiled a bit when he had to go to the hospital after someone there punched him in the eye, with a fist adorned with a very-three-dimensional pewter ring.

As I’ve said, my memory is fuzzy. I don’t have much in the way of stories from the 90’s, more a series of impressions. Of places like New Dawn, with the huge pile of potatoes you could get for breakfast, saving most for subsequent meals. Of Café Macondo, where a new arrival might sit with coffee, wondering why he was unable to strike up a conversation with any of the maybe-interesting people sitting nearby, but still coming back regularly.

My greatest regret about my 90’s in San Francisco is my failure to really take the City in. I lived in the Mission. I went to school in the Tenderloin. I rarely ventured out to other places in the City. North Beach was unfamiliar. I may never have seen Golden Gate Park. I lived a very circumscribed life. This may have had to do with the rigors of law school, it may have had to do with my relative poverty, but it was largely just my myopia. These days, my wife and I try to take in all of the City. An afternoon in the Sunset. An evening in Dogpatch. We don’t stick to things within a stones throw. As youth is wasted on the young, 90’s San Francisco was largely wasted on me. 

Stephen Smith is an accomplished constitutional law professor and author, as well as the kickass singer/songwriter band leader of The Morning Line. Follow him here.

Whore Baths & 7-Up

Written by Wendy Newman

3AM:

“Come on, baby. Just climb into my bed. I’m lonely. Just lay here with me.”

“Fuck you, you fucking liar,” I said, pushing myself off the floor from beneath a small, round, wooden table in the center of a dingy, one-room Tenderloin SRO. I grabbed my pillow-roll of a leather jacket, my backpack, and my dignity, and was out the door.

That was week three of living on the streets. I was technically employed and had said yes to this guy’s invitation when he opened with, “You look really tired. Want a safe place to sleep?” Isn’t that how it always starts?

It was 1987. I was a 19-year-old punk rock girl who’d left Salt Lake for good. I wanted to move to New York, but I was smart enough to know I was too dumb to make it there. If I ended up homeless in NYC, I’d freeze to death. San Francisco, though? I could sleep on those streets for a minute if I had to, and I did.

I rolled into town with $550, a red, 1972 piece-of-Pinto, a truck filled with treasures, and a reservationist job ($8 an hour) at a boutique hotel chain in Union Square. The Pinto broke down on the Bay Bridge the first week—gear shift gave out; but I somehow coasted off at 5th Street and into the doughnut shop parking lot. A fog-soaked phone book pointed me to a garage with a tow truck, so my baby (and everything I owned) ended up in the Tenderloin.

A lucky break, as it turned out.

San Francisco was home now. Scary, unsafe, and untethered—but I knew one thing: there was nowhere to go but up.

My shift started at 7AM. By 3PM, I was free. I’d walk to the top of Nob Hill and look at where all the boughie people lived, then head back down to Union Square, throw down my backpack, and nap in the grass, praying I just looked like a tourist. When night fell, I’d bounce between Pinecrest and Lori’s Diner on Mason, nursing a 7-Up until they kicked me out. (I really wished I was a coffee drinker.)

After they tossed me, I’d sit up in the alley beside the King George Hotel. Not too close to the street where I’d be noticed (God forbid anyone think I was homeless), and not too far back where things got dicey. I’d sit cross-legged, pretending to draw. I can’t draw. I’d journal. I’d do my best to look like a moody art student, not a girl sleeping rough.

At 6AM, the car repair shop opened. They let me swap clothes from my trunk and reminded me (each time) that my car was ready and they wanted their money. (Spoiler alert: that car and I were never reunited.)

I’d walk across the street to the one-hour drycleaner, get those clothes pressed for $1.50, then carry them carefully to the Westin St. Francis (where I had no business being), and take a whore’s bath in the fancy public women’s room.

Long hair twisted up. Fresh makeup. Pressed clothes. Back to work in the reservations room like nothing ever happened.

Three weeks in, I scraped together enough cash to march my broke ass up to Roommate Referral in the Upper Haight. Remember that place? Tiny storefront, shelves of three-ring binders filled with ads, sorted by price. I grabbed the cheapest one "$210 and up" and called the first listing.

That night, I unlocked a door that was mine. A real door, with chipped paint and a sticky knob and an empty bedroom the size of a walk-in closet. I dropped my backpack and jacket on the floor, and exhaled like I hadn’t in a month.

Within a year or so, I had the life I’d imagined: a place of my own in the Lower Haight, a circle of friends, and an adorable, irreverent guy who would become my husband. He had a giant record collection and a thing for late-night burritos. The bars were ours: Toronado, the Albion, Nightbreak were all the places that made the city feel like it was ours, too.

For the modern-day punk rock kids fleeing their towns to save their lives, it’s not that simple anymore. There's no grass in Union Square to fake-snooze on. No chance anyone could stash a car full of belongings at a shop on Turk without getting everything repossessed. No $1.50 pressed-shirt miracles. Try taking a whore’s bath at the Westin St. Francis today—good luck, friend. And Roommate Referral? Long gone. I had it rough, but it was an easier time.

I’ve left San Francisco a handful of times. But I always come back. The re-entry’s always brutal, financially, but always worth it. When I leave, I don’t just leave my heart here. I leave my self here.

These days? I sip good coffee, smile at the memory of getting married at the Westin St. Francis, sell fancy SF homes, and live at the top of Nob Hill.

Nineteen-year-old me? She never dreamed this big.

Wendy Newman is the author of 121 First Dates, a Workshop Leader, and a realtor in San Francisco and Nevada County. Follow her Insta @wendynewmanrealtor

Who Did We Think We Were?

A buck with fuzzy antlers crossed the path where Marissa and I were walking in the Mountainview Cemetery. We paused for the elegant beast to pass, unthreatened by the two middle-aged ladies’ presence. I said hello in my sweet-talking kitty-cat voice, then Marissa and I continued our discussion. I needed help promoting my memoir, Swollen Appetite, to new readers. 

I worried that I had only a few smoldering embers of energy left for pushing the book. Something had to be done before the fire grew cold. Marissa mentioned before I started moaning and groaning that she had dropped her son off at SFO that morning, and for the first time, had not gone to the gate with him. He was ready to go without her, so off he went into the wild blue yonder, and to the next gate where his Dad would be waiting. I said, maybe my book is like Dean, on its own now, ready to go where it needs to go. But no more than my pal is ready to relinquish her son to the big old world, am I ready to stop trying to get Swollen Appetite in front of new readers.

The problem is not exhausting my friends while trying to reach a broader audience. Every relationship I’m in is a throuple: me, my anxiety, and the other. I know I’m a rich dish. But lucky for me, I have patient friends, and Marissa had some good ideas! She noted that as she read Swollen Appetite, she was transported back to her own experience of living in San Francisco in the 1990s. It was more than nostalgic, it was evocative. She marveled at who she was then. I’ve heard this from others as well. That sweetness, that connection keeps flowing back to me from readers. 

The exciting idea Marissa came up with is to create a collective blog post like the one I had curated a few years ago on my website called Immigrant Song. I could ask readers of the memoir to submit their own stories and pictures about what memories or thoughts Swollen Appetite pried loose inside them. It could be about their time in San Francisco in the 1990s, or any other place they had been when they were on the cusp of becoming who they eventually became. Writing prompts could be anything from overwrought ambition, comedy, poetry, or music scenes to strange dates, or discovering new friends, jobs, or talents, and especially, unleashing unknown power.

Swollen Appetite can be the catalyst, which is what this writer has wanted all along. Brian came up with a name for the blog that nails the attitude of youth: Who Did We Think We Were? There’s a silky scar as long as time separating us from another version of ourselves. Stitches of seconds, minutes, and years knit a thicker skin over the past. We’ve survived youth. Not everyone does. We had dreams, relationships, ambition, and oh so many feelings: disdain, doubts, jealousy, joy, contention, and longing. Who did we think we were?

Please submit your personal stories of 500-850 words max, along with at least two pictures, to sandraaustinmello@gmail.com. And please tell your friends who haven’t read the book that it’s available in paperback and Audible. Can’t wait to read your contributions to our collective!

Next up: 1990s Karaoke Party at the Mel-o-dee Lounge September 20th -  stay tuned!