…in a city famous for its hills, that’s more demanding and entertaining than it sounds.
Author: Jinx
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I love this time of year. The light doesn’t have that bright glare of summer but seems to rest on everything softly, so the shapes of buildings, shadows, trees, are all a little more sharply defined. Michael calls it earthquake weather. He hates that the days have become shorter. I like it. Autumn always cheers me up.
On Tuesday night I saw my first film at the Metreon, a megaplex that is part o the Yerba Buena complex, which means it is huge, glossy, composed of squarish chunks of brick and window. I felt my way up to the theater through a maze of mall promenades and escalators. It was a New Yorker event, a series of political films put on by the magazine. The theater was nice, the screen large, the seats comfortable. THX sound is such an integral part of the theater experience that we were given the usual ear-blasting THX intro (some wag in the audience kept yelling “louder!”) even though The Contender is a fictional riff on the Lewinsky scandal and consists mainly of headshots and dialogue.
I remember being annoyed by THE CONTENDER. It struck me as one of those context-ignoring Hollywood dramas so naive about politics that it treated Democratic/Republican scandals and tactics as interchangeable.
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I had a hell of a fight with Capone this evening. We had KFC for dinner, and he grabbed a breast from the garbage and emerged from the kitchen growling and snarling and daring anyone to take it away. I chased him into my office, shutting the door to trap him there and swatted at him with the broom until he dropped the breast. He still hasn’t forgiven me for it.
Fried chicken for dinner. I miss my youthful metabolism.
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by scrolling social feeds.
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Our driver, Mona, took us to a party some distance away. Mona was a slender black woman who undermined her prettiness by cramming her round self into the square hole of Marin fashion. Her dark reddish hair was straightened so it pointed stiffly down at her shoulders, and her eyebrows were plucked into arched pencil lines.
The moon was out, and it was a lovely night, with pale clouds drifting over the hills. The party was at a reastaurant beside a lake, mirror still and ringed with big white houses. We had to give our tickets at the door where someone had stationed a large manniken like the ones we saw that the Jewish Film Festival Shabbat. This one was meant to look, I guess, like the quintessential Mill Valley Film Festival patron, a white, slender, chicly dressed woman with long blond hair and collagened lips that stuck out of her gauze face.
There were crowds of artsy but well-dressed people, a small wind band playing film-related tunes like Alfred Hitchcock’s theme (I believe it’s called “Funeral of the Marionnette”) and Laurel and Hardy’s “Dance of the Cuckoos.” A long buffet stretched out in a back room overlooking the water, offering chicken, tomato salad, lamb, and other dishes. I loaded a small plate and met Michael at the bar where he’d found seats for Mona and me and handed us each a glass of white wine before setting off to load his own plate. The food was delicious, the conversation with Mona awkward since we had little in common. I was relieved when her friend, a pretty woman with short blond hair, showed up. They squealed and kissed and fell into deep conversation after explaining to me they had met just two days before and the manicurist while Mona was waiting for her nails to dry. I sat happily silent, enjoying my wine and the view of the lake past the rows of bottles, getting pleasantly drunk while Mona and her friend talked and Michael schmoozed.
After a while I got bored, or perhaps a bit more sober. I saw nobody I wanted to talk to in the dimly lit crush of people, so I went in search of Michael, who’d said he was off to find dessert. Once I located him at the pastry table, I munched on a lemon meringue tart and a fudge square, neither of which I really wanted, and talked politics with a girl named Becky who worked for the festival. It ended only after the restaurant management dimmed the lights, called out that they were closing and finally, in evident desperation, came over and flatly told those of us who remained that it was time to get out.
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This afternoon we met a prospective employee. First there had been occasional hints, phone conversations where Charlie said “You’re two hours away? Well, you’re getting here.” Then I learned that someone named Gaye was coming to be interviewed. Then there was an unfamiliar voice coming from the front rooms and when I went there on some pretext, she was there, shoulder length blond hair, a pretty face, a cookie jar figure.
Charlie wasted no time in putting her to work, possibly because Faren wasn’t feeling well, first complaining about being headachy and woozy and lying down in Charlie’s room, finally going home at about 3:30. Charlie’s mood didn’t help, drifting into that combination of crabbiness and martyrdom typical at this point in every issue.
By the end of the day I was running out pages while Charlie and Gaye went through what they already had and tried to put them in order. Charlie kept coming back to berate me about the pages he couldn’t find, which made me shrug. Once I run them out I hand them to either him or to Faren. What happens after that is not my problem.
At 6:45 Tim, who had the car today, came to pick me up. I was still running out pages. Gaye came back to be shown how to do it once I left. She struck me as shy, but determined to show she knew her way around and could handle herself. I commented that she didn’t need to stay so late and she said, “Where do you think I’d be going? I’m staying here tonight.” She’d driven here all the way from Chicago! She told me she had some experience editing magazines, was mainly interested in writing poetry and had a couple of collections published.
“Have you warned her?” Tim asked me.
“Warned me about what?” she asked a bit sharply.
“Oh, it’s just that it’s a high pressure job,” I said. “People only stay here…”
“…about two years. My father commented on that when he read the anniversary issue. ‘They only stay two years.’ But I said, ‘Look Dad, they stay two years, learn a lot, then go on to better things.’”
Not a bad plan.
In the diary I note that, as we drove home, Tim asked me if I were worried about Charlie making a pass at Gaye while she stayed the night. I thought it unlikely, and still do. I’ve heard stories about Charlie when he was younger, but never once in my years at LOCUS did I see him make a pass at the women who worked for him. He already had a hard enough time getting employees. And it was a big house.
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Daily writing promptWhich food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?
…homemade Yorkshire pudding. My grandmother was born in Portsmouth England and I assume her mother taught her how to make it. At Sunday meals in my grandparents’ house on Bayou Desierd, her Yorkshire pudding would be carried out to the table, soft, bulging and trembling in its dish, followed by a platter bloody with rare, tender strips of roast beef. Long before Pink Floyd’s The Wall. my grandmother would say archly to the children at the table, “You’ve got to eat your pudding first! Then you can have your meat.”
Which was no chore. Her pudding was delectable and deadly. Along with steak, gumbo, bourbon and fried catfish, it likely contributed to my grandfather’s heart problems.
It also set me up for bitter disappointment when I traveled to England in my twenties, ordered Yorkshire Pudding, and was brought a chewy, muffin-shaped side dish plainly taken out of a freezer package.
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I was terribly hungry and would have to get something to tide me over. Across the street I noticed a place that advertised Philly cheesesteak sandwiches and decided that would be the quickest place to get a meal before the event.
It was small, bare, undecorated with pale walls and a few vinyl tables. A TV set hung over the room, the sound turned down as an anchorman moved his mouth. I ordered a Philly cheesesteak sandwich and sat down to wait, regretting I’d brought nothing to read. All I could find was a mustard-stained SF Weekly stashed behind the table, and I gingerly spread this out and glanced over it.
And waited. And waited. And waited. I could see three men behind the counter moving about, doing things I couldn’t make out over stoves and sinks. In another tiny adjoining room, I noticed a family, a couple with three children, plainly waiting for a meal. Occasionally one of the men behind the counter would place a plate of something to one side, and I would endure torments wondering if it were mine.
Time ticked past. I glanced over my shoulder at the movie house where people milled about the sidewalk talking in groups. It might be awkward if arrived late, given that Michael was hosting the onstage interview. Finally I saw one of the counter men pick up a paper plate and saunter towards my table. He set the plate down before me. Chicken breast on a roll. I called him back and he took it away to carry it to the family in the other room.
At last, it came, one of the most succulent, delicious Philly cheesesteak sandwiches I’d ever eaten . Was this because I was ravenous, or because they had been spending all that time industriously, meticulously, thoughtfully constructing the best Philly cheesesteak sandwich ever?
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Last night, after going out to check that the garbage cans were set out, I stopped in the first floor hallway and spoke with one of the girls downstairs, the dark-haired one, who was dressed in white long underwear for the cold night. She has pinned a large, brightly colored world map on the wall of the corridor. Resting on the opposite wall is a mattress. She said she likes to lean against it while she contemplates the map.
The “dark-haired girl”, Maggie, was one of two artists who lived in the unit below us, in a typically SOMA space she and her roommate had made their own as only artists can. It was well organized, brightened with their work. I believe the space had originally been a small grocery. You could still see the ridges left by a large walk-in freezer on the contrete floor. The streetside wall was a garage door . I think the real appeal of the apartment for them was the paved back garden with a covered shed they could use as a studio. Maggie created a darkroom there constructed of various doors she’d salvaged at construction sites in the city.
I remember the corridor where we talked as narrow, industrial gray, garishly lit. I can’t actually summon up the memory of that conversation, but I can see Maggie with her short brown hair, jolie-laide, slightly heavy faced and insouciant in her long underware. The map was a hint of things to come. Maggie was and still is a talented artist who now lives in Switzerland.
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He was German citizen, a mid-level civil servant, and man of conscience who recorded his opposition to the Nazi regime in a secret diary he began in 1939. As a lonely voice of German opposition who could only record it in secret, he was uncompromising in his views on German responsibility.
He wrote in 1945, “If now, after the collapse, should any of these lackeys of Adolf Hitler have the insolence to claim they were merely harmless onlookers, let them feel the scourge of avenging mankind.”
Pam Troy 