Everyone loaded their own plates from the spread on the kitchen table. There was saffron rice, black beans, yucca cooked with garlic, and wonderful fiery, transparent sauce, and a powdered combination of banana and pappers to sprinke over it all. I settled on a couch in a sort of parlor near the front door, the only area with at least a couple of free seats. It was a darkly-painted little room with a beautiful sofa in purple crushed velvet, tucked into one of the window alcoves. A huge surfboard leaned against the wall in one corner. At one point, I got up and located my purse. I feared it blending so completely in with the brown walls and drk wooden furniture that I’d have a hard time finding it when we were ready to leave. It was night now, and in the window nearby I could see only a large bush, covered with white bell-like flowers, rocking gently in the wind.
Category: 21st Century
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One of the guests talked about the visit she paid to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It had not been connected to any work. She’d just thought it would be a fascinating place to visit. However, the fact that she worked in the American media had made her instantly suspect, and she’d encountered a good bit of questioning from the Soviets while she tried to arrange the trip. On her flight into the country, she’d spoken with an Englishman who told her about the “Bird Market,” an open-air market in the Russian countryside. She decided she had to see it. Her Soviet guides objected, either for political reasons or because they didn’t like the idea of a single woman who spoke barely any Russian wandering so far afield, but she had decided to go to the Bird Market, so she did. She told us about the Russian women wrapped up in their babushkas, the men in their hats and hip boots, the maggots sold as bird food, which came rolled up in newspaper cones. Since she spoke no Russian and nobody spoke any English, she’d communicated with them and they with her by drawing pictures.
In Leningrad, she’d gone to the opera, which got out so late there were no taxis in sight. Her attempts to find out about buses went nowhere because nobody could understand what she was saying. It was dark, and it was late, and it was a long way to her hotel. Suddenly, two young men, neither of them much older than thirty, appeared and answered in the affirmative when she asked if they spoke English. They were intrigued once they knew she was an American. First, they wanted to know if she could change rubles for dollars. Then they wanted to know if she had any blue jeans. Then they asked her if she had any paperback books. She said, well, yes, she had one at the hotel, but she doubted if it was by anyone they’d ever heard of. It was an American author named Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut! They were enraptured. It turned out that the only way they were exposed to American literature in their schools was through paragraph-long synopses of American novels, and it happened that Kurt Vonnegut was one of the authors they’d encountered this way. An agreement was reached. They would give her a ride to her hotel, dropping her off two blocks away, since Russians were not allowed near hotels used by foreigners. The following day, they would leave their car parked at a certain place and time with a window rolled partly down. She would walk past an slide the Vonnegut book through the window for them.
She did it, but she was genuinely afraid, she told me. Any Russians who saw her might suspect her of concealing microfilm or something in the book.
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Jean said Cuba was terribly, horribly poor, largely because of the American blockade. There were no antibiotics to be had, almost no drugs, and no medical instruments. Physicians boil hypodermics to reuse them, and there is a terrible sort of triage in place where AIDS victims are refused AZT on the grounds that they have brought the illness upon themselves. Criticizing Fidel can get you sent to prison. “I thought if I had to look at one more picture of Che, I was going to puke.”
But she was impressed with how kind the people were, and how their lives in Cuba, and the kind of society it is, fostered a sense of teamwork, of responsibility for each other.
At one point in her visit, she wanted to film what is known as “The Ice Cream Park,” the brainchild of a revolutionary who apparently considered access to ice-cream an inalienable right of the people. Getting into the ice-cream park required patience. There were long lines of people waiting for a chance to enter, and Cuban guards would only wave in a few once other guests left. When her turn came, a young guard, about eighteen, questioned her sharply about her video camera and told her she could not take it in. The other, older guards, scolded him. “Leave her alone. Can’t you see she’s just a tourist?” He backed off, genuinely abashed and she went in feeling a little ashamed, because the young soldier had been correct — she was no mere tourist, but a filmmaker.
In the park at one point, a fellow approached her as she spoke to an ice-cream vendor and pointed out that the camera she was carrying was the kind of thing used by professionals. Jean rolled her eyes in imitation of a girl delighted with the attention. “I said, ‘Gol, guys! I really got a bargain didn’t I? Really? It’s what filmmakers use? Kewel!‘”
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In the kitchen I had a long, interesting conversation with Jean, one of Michael’s co-workers. She’s a jolly woman in her thirties, with shoulder-length dark hair, no makeup. She’d just gotten back from a trip to Cuba, and talked about a documentary she’d considered doing on a relative who was “not a red-diaper, but a crimson-diaper baby.”
The relative’s parents had not been actual party members, but only because her father was the bureau chief at Tass in the American city where they lived, and needed to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. The parents, Jean said, combined their Communist views with an especiallky virulent form of New England puritainism, and as a result her relative had a constrained, paranoid, and isolated childhood. Her memories of the Red Scare were especially terrible, of government agents following her and her parents, of tapped phones and other forms of harassment. By the time she was twenty, she found herself virtually unemployable in the U.S., so she’d gone to Czechslovakia to live, then ended up in Cuba, where she remains. Now an older woman she is, Jean said, like most American expatriates in Cuba — intense, neurotic, and dogmatic.
Her life was tragic in ways Jean said she’d rather not discuss, and Jean decided not to do the documentary. It might have upset her relative and the story might distract viewers from what Jean wanted the documentary to be about — life in Cuba. Her relative, she said, seems to be one of those people who lives someplace, not because she loves the culture or langauge (her Spanish is still terrible) but because it appeals to her politically. Jean mentioned another interesting ex-patriate, an ex-CIA agent who had a crisis of conscience and defected. He’s now a travel agent in Havana.
At that time, it was still illegal for Americans to visit Cuba.
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Monday night we went to a party in Bernal Heights. A friend drove us, parking the car on a sloped little street near a seedy grocery store. The hill we were on offered a panoramic view of a tangle of highways and roads about as pleasant to survey as basement pipework.
Bernal Heights retains the appearance of being low rent, but I suspect proeprty values there are just as outrageous as anywhere else in San Francisco. The house we were visiting was one of those hillside places that seems almost built into the surrounding slopes and foliage. Just walking up the steps to the door, I saw a beautiful mossy brick path leading into a shady green garden.
The house itself was the kind of place I dreamed about having when I was a teenager. Cozy, dark, idosyncratic, with roughly-hewn walls and beams, exotic carvings and dcecorations, and worn looking furniture. The hostess was slender, blonde, very serious, the host a squarjawed, dark man with a ponytail. He was overseing the cooking in the kitchen space, which had jars adn jars of wonderful looking spices. She saw to the guests in a vaguely, anxious, uncheerful manner that left me feeling as though I’d been briefly examined and found wanting. There were already about nine people there, most of them about a decade younger than me and almost all with the enviable ease and charm of people who are doing exactly what they want with their lives. Michael and I each picked up a glass of red wine and walked out onto the narrow, planklike back porch. It was high up, but offered little view other than trees and rooftops, so we went back in.
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I’m back at H&C. Started last Wednesday and found Lara just about to pop, so swollen in her strained t-shirt I could see her inside-out belly-button pushing against the fabric.
Poor Dierdre is gone, replaced by Kay, a blond, stocky fellow in his twenties whose half-grown beard and barely concealed chest-hair remind me of a coconut. Apparently he had, until recently, a full beard and dreadlocks going halfway down his back. Al that remains of that is the impression of hairiness and a fondness for jewelry, especially a silver-colored bracelet on one wrist. I like him. He’s smart and literate. The prospect of sharing an office with a man seems to have unhinged Yolanda, who flirts so outrageously with him I’m reminded of a cat I once had who would pick fights with other cats by yowling and twisting its body until it was practically standing on its head.
That may be part of why there’s a rising tension between the comroom and the office manager, Portia, who sweeps past it occasionally with her lips compressed, her eyes on the open door with the look of someone on the watch for misbehavior. It’s possible Lara and Yolanda have a little too much in common, both being young and fond of men, fashion magazines, and gossip.
Lara’s last day before she left for maternity leave had a last-day-of-school feel to it. She left cheering and practically skipping out the door.
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The fact that nobody called the next morning was somewhat reassuring. I spent Sunday close to home, jumping every time the phone rang. That night, I spoke to Mother again, who told me Dad had improved tremendously, though he was still weak. On Monday, he would be out of ICU. Monday morning I noticed our Abyssinian was running to and from his litterbox every five minutes and clearly needed to go to the vet. I decided to stay home that day, so I left a message at DS and notified my temp agency of the situation. Then I telephoned the hospital and got through to Dad, who initially seemed like his old self, but quickly became very tired. Hearing his voice was reassuring.
After getting off the phone I crammed the cat into his carrying case. The vet is well within walking distance, and has been treating every cat I’ve owned there since I moved to San Francisco in 1988. The cat howed most of the way down the hill and hissed, growled and yowled in the waiting room. The vet, after an examination, said I should leave him there for tests.
Late in the afternoon I walked back down the hill to retrieve him. they ahd been unable to get a clean sample because he pissed all over the examining table, but at least he was pissing. He screamed abuse at me almost all the way back up the hill, and even when I opened his cage and let him out into the apartment he was plainly furious, and hissed, grunted and avoided me for half an hour afterwards.
The news from Mom that night was better. Dad had improved, though he was weak.
I went to work the next day, worrying about whether anyone would be able to get in touch with me. As soon as I got home that evening, I called Mom.
“Well hello, Auntie!” she said when she heard my voice.
That was how I learned that my brother and his wife had had their baby. The most beautiful baby ever born, apparently.
The other good news was that Dad had been moved from ICU and I could call him the next morning. Mom said he was feeling good enough to grouse, and the birth of his first grand-child had definitely helped.
At work the next day I discovered that would be my last day there. They had someone they were getting ready to hire. I wasn’t sorry. I certainly didn’t dislike Giacamo, but there was never enough for me to do, and Giacamo always seemed to be troubled by some un-named impending disaster. Since he was going to leave before I did, I agteed to toss my key through the mail slot when I left. I did so feeling the usual sense of a little death. One more place that was familiar that I’d never see again…
Slowly the week sloped back up to normalcy. Dad felt better. I felt better. Another visit to the vet showed the cat felt better, and our Abby was eating and pissing vigorously.
That Thursday, when I telephoned Giacamo to tell him I’d be on on Tuesday to get my timecard signed, he said he had not seen the key when he came in. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” he hastened to assure me, “but could you have dropped it into your purse?”
“Absolutely not!” I said. “Maybe you kicked it under something.” He said he would take another look. It seemed a fitting end to the week.
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A heat wave hit The city last weekend. Our apartment was stiflingly hot, and I’d gotten disquieting news from home. Dad had undergone a biopsy. He has cancer. They would learn the following Tuedsay how quickly it is likely to spread and what treatments would be best. That kind of cancer is usually a slow-moving disease and it had undoubtedly been caught early.
On Saturday, Michael and I sat for much of the afternoon in the little park near Grace Cathedral. It was a gloriously sunny day. We sat on a bench and read, trying to stay in the shade. There were the usual dogs and children. A plump little boy with a black buzz-cut tried, unsuccessfully, to skip rope. A little Asian girl tottered past on roller blades. A graduation was being held at the Masonic Temple and we saw a young man stilll in his robes, talking to his parents. A female priest from Grace came into the park, talking with a small circle of folk. She was dressed in a wine-colored shirt with a dog collar.
When we walked back to the house, Michael was drowsy from the sun, so he lay on the couch to take a nap. He was asleep when the phone rang. It was Mother. Dad was in intensive care with a very high fever and possibly pneumonia, some infection probably picked up at the hospital when he’d gone for his biopsy.
I wasn’t fit for much of anything that night but sitting by the phone. I found, thank God, a perfectly horrible and mindless movie to watch on television, while Michael filed and sometimes glanced nervously in my direction. “How can you watch this crap?” he asked. I shrugged. I needed to lose myself in something and this loud film, punctuated with machine gun fire and special effects involving tentacled monsters that filled the screen and dvoured their victims in grisly, obscene gulps, was exactly what I needed.
It wound to a close, and I changed the channel to Minelli’s Madame Bovary. This, too, was something I could wrap myself in, a black and white world with an overwrought musical score.
But by the end, while poor Emma lay dying, I began feeling sick with anxiety. Michael looked over to see me silently wiping tears from my face. He held me while I cried.
The thought of Dad dying is as unthinkable as the thought of the sun going out forever. I couldn’t get my mind around it, and the effort to believe it possible made me feel rotten inside.
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It was already crowded at KQED. Michael schmoozed, I went in search of food because I’d had hardly anything to eat that day, and the buffet offered dum sum, crab cakes, shirmp, etc. I loaded a plate and wandered for awhile in the crowd, spoke to Jay Rosenblatt, who makes interesting short documentarie using old footage, but without the usual graininess and rough edges.
I got into a long conversation with Hank, who’d been my landlord back in the ’80s when I lived on Tehama with Tim. To my astonishment, he referred to me as one of the best tenants he’d ever had. (My housekeeping is lousy, and in the place on Tehama our cat’s urine destroyed the stairwell carpet.) The subject got onto ghosts, and Hank, who owns a lot of property South of Market, told us about one of his tenants demanding he get rid of a poltergeist.
The tenant was a very wealthy woman, someone who could easily buy any house in San Francisco she wanted, so, Hank observed, she was plainly nuts to be renting a ratty little apartment on Natoma.
“Your apartments aren’t ratty!” I said.
He shrugged. “You’re right. Funky. It was an interesting, funky old place where she lived with two roommates. Not a bad place, but why live there when you can afford something better?”
One night she called him and informed him there was a poltergeist int he house and he had to get rid of it.
“How do you know there’s a poltergeist?” he asked.
“You made a movie here, didn’t you? You made a snuff film, didn’t you? There was a homicede here and it left evil vibes and now there’s a poltergeist.”
“Now, in the first place, a film was made there, but I didn’t make the film,” Hank said. “In the second place, it wasn’t as snuff film, but I didn’t see any real point in explaining that to her. So I asked her, ‘How does this poltergeist manifest itself?’”
“‘The bathroom light flickers on and off when I go into the bathroom.”
“Did you check the bulb?”
‘It’s a poltergeist! I need to go to the bathroom! What are you going to do about it?’
Hank said that he got his toolbox, put an extra bulb in it, and went down tot he apartment on Natoma. When he got there, he found the woman crouched in the hallway, apparently afraid to venture anywhere near the bathroom. Hank went in, turned on the light, and the bulb came on and then blew out with a faint pfttt. He changed the light bulb, made a lot of noise doing it, then came out looking exhausted. “The poltergeist is gone,” he told her, and hte turned on the light to whos her it wasn’t flickering anymore. This seemed to satisfy her.
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Tuesday night was the Independent View party at KQED. After work at DS I took the Hayes all the way down to Market Street and got off near Fifth, intending to catch the 21 Bryant, which would let me off almost in front of KQEDS. I hate waiting for a bus, even when I have a book to read. My usual strategy is to walk along the bus route, periodically checking to see if it’s coming so I can hurry forward or double back to the bus stop. I walked to the stop near Fifth and Tehama. No sign of it. I walked another two blocks down to the next one. Still no sign. I walked
I had returned to my old neighborhood. The 21 was what I used to take back when I lived on Tehama with Tim. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much. There is still tht bare, backstage feel, still the mural of the beach on Bill Graham’s old building. The parking lot I used to cut through when I walked donw to the M&M for a sandwich is now fenced in. I can remeber the old parking lot attendant who used to work there telling me about seeing the concrete of the lot swell like a tide during the ’89 quake. We’d felt the house on Tehama rise and fall as if a giant had picked it up a couple of feet and dropped it.
So I walked, and walked, down Harrison past the End Up (visiting there one night with Scott Winnett, who stood beside me and made catty remarks about everyone’s clothes. The decor had reminded me of Rock City, a cheesy amusement park I used to visit in Lockout Mountain, which featured colored lights and plastic fairies stuck to cavern walls.) Past the Line Up (eating there with Michael and seeing a roach rise out of my salad, its antennae waving.) Down towards Eleventh Street (riding my bicycle to and from China Basin and my loft on Minna), down to the 16th Street Safeway… A bus didn’t show up until then. I was more than halfway to KQED. The bus was packed and I had to squeeze myself on. It wasn’t until I popped out at Mariposa that I realized Michael was on it too.
Pam Troy 