They hang in one noose
Bodies upright,
Heads upside down, close
As if comforting each other.
About to be transmuted
With heat and wine.
Author: Jinx
-
— as in being put under general anesthetic and cut open — was when I had my wisdom teeth removed as a teenager. It was done in the local hospital instead of the dentist’s office, and since this was a small town, the anesthesiologist was a family friend. I remember, just before he put me under, thinking how odd it was to see Dr. Mino in whites and a mask instead of a polo shirt and slacks, bantering with the nurses instead of sipping a martini on our patio.
-
I picked up some cheese at 2001 on my way home. St. Andre and, with the help of a fey, elaborately bored clerk, some wonderful goat cheese, (“Is it as good as Humboldt Fog?” “Nothing is as good as Humboldt Fog.”) a hard, nutty-tasting cheddar, Spanish anchovies, some bread and crackers. Then I walked cross the street to the Jug Shop and got an expensive Italian wine. Went home with my arms full. We had a nice, quiet evening. The cheese and wine were deliicious and I read two books.
This was a continuation of my birthday celebration, which stretched over the weekend. 2001, the high end cheese shop on Polk was named after its address — 2001 Polk. I remember it as a white, sterile looking space consisting almost entirely of refrigerators stocked with high-end cheeses. The guy behind the counter watched me as I browsed. I watched him back. If I reached for something he didn’t like, he’d shake his head, and I’d go on to the next cheese. He never steered me wrong. 2001 Polk is still an excellent cheese shop, but it now sells wine and lots of other good things along with cheese. It’s owned by Ray Bair now and called Cheese Plus.
The Jug Shop, a 60-year-old business, is gone, renovated away to another location, which had much less foot traffic. It closed last month.Reading two books involved, still involves, alternating between chapters. Typically it’s something light and something heavy. Like combining cheese and wine.
-
Today, Bill Contento installed Pagemaker 3 and showed me how to use it. The colors are different, and the logo. For much of the day I stayed in the back office with Bill and Faren, getting the hang of Pagemaker’s new autoflow feature, so it occaionally got a bit crowded. Charlie, who was in a good mood now that another issue is under his belt, kept coming back to see how things were going, then darting away because he couldn’t stand watching it any more.
Late in the afternoon I drove Charlie down to Berkeley to leave some galleys and a book cover at The Other Change of Hobbit. Lisa Goldstein was there. Then we went to Andronico’s where we both did a little shopping. By the time we got back to Locus it was time to go home.
Charlie was blind in one eye, which screwed up his depth perception, so our duties included chauffering. Sometimes that meant visiting the local bookstores — The Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival in Berkeley, Fantasy Etc. in San Francisco… The Other Change of Hobbit has, alas, gone the way of many bookstores and no longer has a corporeal form. At that time it was in a little shopping complex on Shattuck, always brightly lit, never cluttered or shadowy, but well-stocked with the latest and best in fantasy and science fiction. It was, as all important bookstores should be, a social center where part of the visit was pausing to gossip with the owners, Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, or the writers who freqented it. Lisa Goldstein, the author of THE RED MAGICIAN, was at that time a small, blackhaired, pretty woman of about my own age, and everything I aspired to be in a writer. She still is. Wish I could remember what we talked about.
Andronico’s back then was the ne plus ultra of high end supermarkets — soft lighting, with soothing music, wide aisles, and an amazing selection of produce, etc. It has since been swallowed up by Safeway.
-
Blazingly hot day. Even the shade wasn’t cold, just cool. When I went out for a morning walk I saw pigeons sitting in the fountain in front of the Old Mint, trying to cool off. I walked down to Waldenbooks on Geary to see if they had any good diaries, but nothing I saw appealed to me. Instead, I bought a copy of Satan Wants You. On my way back I passed that guy who does opera on the street. He was singing “La Donna Mobile.” I put a dollar in his hat.
Blazingly hot days are rare in San Francisco, especially in June (Our summer is usually just a few days in October.)
I was reaching the end of this volume, a lined blank book with a pale green cover and a picture of cats on the front. Back then, there were enough bookstores, chains and indies, in downtown San Francisco for my walks to consist of going from one to the other. Waldenbooks was, along with B. Dalton’s, one of the two main big chains of the 1980s.
SATAN WANTS YOU by Arthur Lyons is not as bloodcurdling as it sounds, was actually a badly needed skeptical reaction to the Satanic Panic, which was in full swing at the time. We were constantly opening the paper to read breathless, utterly credulous news accounts of Satanic cults infiltrating preschools. Lyons was a breath of fresh air. Sample passage: “With a little effort, I managed to track down the twin bloodthirsty cults and found them to be the fictitious creation of a Minneapolis accountant.”
The singer I mention was someone San Franciscans frequently referred to back then as “That Opera Guy,” a large, fair-haired, rather chubby man in his late twenties or early thirties who sang opera on downtown streets. I believe he was trying to raise money to get into a prestigious performing arts college. Fine voice.
-
…writing. Occasionally, I pause to dabble in hypochondria. (What’s that red spot on my cheek?) Apple, arugula and goat cheese sandwich for lunch. Daily walk during which I visit my favorite cheese shop and try a sample. Look in the window of my favorite donut shop and promise myself a donut in a week or two (boston creme) . Look in the window of my favorite cookie shop and and promise myself a cookie (The Harvey Milk looks good) Look in the window of my favorite cannoli shop and promise myself a cannoli (Like them plain). Wander home. Play Sims 4. Fix a healthy dinner while listening to news. Eat dinner with husband . Promise husband I’ll make an UNhealthy dinner next time. Read a novel or The New Yorker. Go to bed and make a point of thinking, not about what I heard on the news, but my sims. (Will the evil Felix Horn evict his obnoxious stepsister and her family from the estate now that his father has passed away?) Sleep soundly.
Wake up. Coffee in the morning…
-
My birthday was this week. I am now forty-two.
The rain started on Wednesday as a pleasant silvery day with a driving mist. On Thursday, it came down in earnest. In the com room we could hear it beating on the plastic roof over the porch. Kay commented that when we move to the new locaion on Lombard, he will miss that sound.
Friday, it was still blustery. All that day people trickled in to wish me happy birthday. Employees always get a card and a bottle of wine (white.) Portia delivered this. Kay brought in my favorite breakfast, a sparkling apple juice and a croissant. Lou brought in some flowers for me, long stemmed and eccentric (much like her) with tumbled wheatlike yellow and purple blossoms. I treated myself to a special lunch at Betel Nut, a chic, dark little place, where I had a hideous but delicious anchovy salad — dried minnows with their heads and eyes intact, tossed with toasted peanuts and green things I could not identify. Then I went to my usual lunchtime haunt, Solar Light Books, where I bought a ridiculous volume on fairies and a paperback about the wreck of the Medusa.
Another lost bookstore. Solar Light Books was one of those Union Street shops in a building once residential, now retail, the bookstore reachable by a wooden angled outside staircase. I recall a nice young female owner, and a cat. I’d like to find that book on the Medusa and reread it, but I fear it’s not so much lost as submerged in the ocean of books crammed onto shelves and boxes in this apartment.
-
“Why is the day lasting forever?” Shelly asked. Because, of course, suddenly we are left with nothing to do but those chores that getting the magazine out gives us an excuse to ignore.
I spent a lot of time today answering mail and working on the phone list. The latter is always kind of interesting because the phone list is a measure of how people have risen and fallen in Charlie’s estimation. One person who’s been on it for years is now removed for being rude to Shelly at the last ABA. Others have been demoted from authors (indicated with an “A”) to fen (indicatd with an F.) Yet others have been promoted from Effs to Ays. I managed to get the final list run out at 6:00. When I left everyone had departed, including Charlie, who’d gone for a walk.
This was, of course, the era before email. Answering mail involved postage, etc. and was a pain in the ass.
Charlie may have gone off for a walk to cool down after the emotional upheaval of editing his phone list, which involved him revisiting old offenses.
Another measure of Charlie’s estimation was how flattering or unflattering were the photos of authors and fen included in the magazine.
-
Daily writing promptAre there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
…we are legally required to compost. This does not mean, of course, that everybody does it. (I have yet to hear about anyone being arrested for Failing to Compost.) It does mean we all get a free, portable compost container that we can, if we choose, empty nightly into the compost bin downstairs. We choose.
We also don’t have a car. Since we live downtown and the public transit here is good, we don’t need one.
-
I’d hoped it would be sunnier this far inland, but the sky was stuill gray, the air still cool, and my bathing suit stayed in my bag. The pool didn’t look very inviting anyway. It was murky, and there was some sort of bot crawling around on th bottom, an automatic pool cleaner I guess. Instead I watched a ping-pong game with two agents slamming the ball at each other. I heard someone beside me gasp and looked up to see a rat running along the top of the backyard fence.
But the food that Portia had prepared the day before was very good — barbecued chicken breasts, salads, pork loins… I ate at a table with the company’s star broker (Blond, part-time actor, desk shaggy with stacked papers and files) At one point Rose invited me to walk around with her and look at the house. We went down to the wine cellar, which was as brightly lit and new and dustless as the rest of the house.
Kay and Lou and others from admin played poker at one of the tables by the pool. One of the male agents, a jowly man in his sixties, ventured into the pool, mainly walking around in the water up to his chest, but occasionally plunging foward to swim in strong, overhand strokes.
The sun lowered. The musicians began packing their instruments. Janey (dark-haired peppery agent who had waged an unrelenting war against Yovanna) offered me and Lara a ride back into the city. We waited in the front living room for her to bring her car around, listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland on the CD, and I contemplated the framed WWII era advertisements on the wall. Weirdly, what looked like a large building cornice in the shape of an eagle, large enough to qualify as another piece of furniture, rested on the floor beside the sofa.
A rat running along the top of a fence is not an unusual sight in California suburbs. It’s why Hanta virus is a real concern in this state — most recently in the headlines again after the terrible deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife in Southern Cal.
Pam Troy 