Down the street from DS is the sad, ugly, single-storied brick complex where I worked more than a year ago, Asian American Recovery Services, a live-in rehab center for substance abusers. Perhaps the fact that I first came to this neighborhood to work at that way station for lost souls has poisoned my view of it. Perhaps under other cirumstances I would find it a welcome change from the slick, smug wealth of Cow Hollow. But I feel no energy there, no sense of it as a working class neighborhood where people have cheerfully settled in to make the place their own for a lifetime or two. Instead, I get a sense of doom. Any middle-class person still living in San Francisco, any teacher, nurse, mechanic, artist, even on that section of Hayes, has to know that their days in The City are numbered.

DS does actually have a sign, and an attractive little foyer that displays various tiles, marble, and woodwork, and hides the working office from passersby who might pause to look through the large front window. Its owner, Giacamo, is a bullet shaped, very densely built gay man with wire-rimmed glasses, a moustache, and a potato face. The first week, I’ve set up a filing system for him, and tomorrow I’ll begin trying to set up some spreadsheets and form documents. Giacamo is touchingly delighted with every effort of mine to impose order in his office, and that’s gratifying but puts me a bit on guard. People very easily delighted can, in some cases, also be very easily disappointed.

One thing I like about working at that end of Hayes is the bus ride, which is long and lurching but interesting. The neighborhood itself is bleak, but to reach it the bus moves through shady, peaceful looking areas where, at the end of the day, I glimpse weary black working folk walking up the steps of handsome old houses that Yuppies are bound to buy up in a few years. We pass Alamo Park, with dogs frolicking across the grass, tourists taking pictures of that famous row of painted houses that stand with their backs to the city. We go through the newly chic part of Hayes Valley, with its boutiques and coffee shops and I usually try, in vain, to locate the storefront where I used to go to get my hair cut and dyed. There is a corner store which I always notice called the Me Me Shop. Its windows are cluttered with blue glass and brass and someday I’ll go in and see what, exactly, it is they are selling there.

Part of Hayes Valley was “newly chic” because an overpass that cut through it had been taken down in the wake of the ’89 quake, which saw the demise of the elevated Embarcadero freeway and other such blights. Before then, the shadow of that overpass cast a pall and kept the neighborhood dark, the rents low. I used to go to Hayes Valley to have my hair cut and peroxided. I’d endure it looking through the storefront windows at the soul-food restaurant across the street and thinking about giving the food there a try. I never did, much to my regret.