Category: 21st Century

March 24th, 2024

Michael had another busy week where he was out almost every day. On Monday night he went to an event at the Lumiere.

The Lumiere is a tiny, single screen theater on California, which sepcializes in independent and foreign films. A few months ago it held a sort of “Coming Attractions” event which became a nightmare of boredom. The MC, a thin pale man with a shaven head and a thick-lipped, poignant face that made him look like a character from City of Lost Children, stood in fron to the audience and read down the list of what would be playing for the next three months, describing in longwinded monotone the plot and stars of each and every movie. I can remember leafing through the calendar and staring down at it in disbelief, unwilling to accept that he was going to read through each and every movie listed, while around me other people turned over the pages of their own calendars, exchanged glances, and shook their heads. The only thing in my life I can compare it to was the time an elderly coach (retired) was brought back to address the assembly at my high school and spoke for three hours.

The publicity agent wanted no repeat of this, so this time he asked Michael to do the honors. I didn’t attend Monday night, but perhaps I should have. Michael came home looking slightly deflated. The audience had been huge. The place was packed. He’d done his best, but he felt his jokes had fallen flat. (Whatever Michael may say about himself, he is at heart a showman.)

Another lost San Francisco venue. The Lumiere closed years ago. It’s now a clothing boutque. Every time I pass it I’m saddened by the sight of the closed-off, now dusty and derelict ticket window.

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March 19th, 2024

Rumors of more food downsairs sent us into the lower level, very dark, very crowded, and noisy with a drum machine. Costumed performers on stilts, decked out in neon moved stiffly in time to the “music.” We found quite a srpead of food from Mediteranee. At one point, the Old Flame brushed past and I called his name, but he either didn’t hear or pretended not to hear and continued on his moody moony way.

We returned to the surface. Michael went out to talk to someone on the patio, but the wind was cold that night, and my leather jacket just not enough, so I retreated indoors. Michael and our friends returned bearing truffles. A lot of chocolate was at that reception. Ghiradelli squares were passed out in handfuls, cardboard-thin little bars with mushy chopped almonds in them. The Joseph Schmidt truffles were much better, but really, they can’t be appreciated at a party. They should be worshipped in solitude with a glass of port and a good book.

Two different people approached me asking to be introduced to Michael. One was a cameraman who works with the Spanish language network. The other was a funny looking fellow with narrow glasses, a receding harline, and a vaguely aerodynamic look. He was a filmmaker. Both seemed certain Michael has influence that could help them, and unconvinced by his assurances that this is untrue. The filmmaker, who is working on a feature, gave Michael his card.

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March 15th, 2024

Rain, or rather, a perpetually falling mist. Everything is blurry. The Golden Gate Bridge is invisible, our street a white ribbon rising up and getting lost in the flat gray page of the sky behind Pacific Heights. It’s almost muggy, and the air is still, breeding insects. Last night, after the wind dropped and the temperature rose, I killed a mosquito, squashed into a red spot against the living room wall.

The closing night party for the Film Festival was on Thursday evening at the Masonic Center. We walked up the steps past an alfresco patio and bar, which I could not imagine anyone using on such a bitter night, and into the large foyer where a live jazz band played and a few tables were set up. Sticks of sate, (no sauce), a table of sushi where we were only allowed on piece each. Another table of Joseph Schmidt truffles, another with a selection of cheese. I stationed myself at the cheese table with a plate and loaded it with wheat thins smeared with supermarket brie. There, I fell into conversation with a stocky, gray haired man from Michael’s Film club, then made my way to another table, this one with handrolls. I helped myself to three, some peanut sauce, and a Calistoga. Then I wended back to Michael.

We bobbed around in the foyer as the crowd grew and the band seemed to get louder and louder. A guy I’d dated briefly before Michael appeared in the crowd with a thin long-haired girl and pretended not to see me. (If he hasn’t changed, I have no doubt that as soon as I was out of sight, he was frantically hissing at her that there was someone present he had to avoid.)

The Masonic Center can be spotted in the 1968 Steve McQueen film BULLITT, its facade with its faux-Egyptian carvings visible in a scene shot from across the street at Grace Cathedral. I’d passed it frequently, but this was my first time inside.

Film Festival parties were all about schmoozing and schnorring. Hungry filmmakers, writers, critics and other movie folk would descend upon the tables and gorge themselves (ourselves) on the free food, holding up paper plates, chewing, casting our eyes about to see what was offered, in what quantities and where it came from. Conversations were frequently interrupted by friends with bulletins about a table offering sushi/handrolls/sate/truffles/gelato/lavash/dolmades/jello shots in the other room.

The old flame I saw was a moody, good-looking Scorpio who , every time we went out, spotted some ex-girlfriend in the restaurant/movie theater. He’d spend part of the date with his head down, hiding his face with one hand like a mobster walking from a courthouse past reporters. I haven’t seen him in years, either because he’s moved from The City or because he finally cut such a wide swath through Bay Area women that he can no longer go out at all.

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March 10th, 2024

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.

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March 5th, 2024

My new temp job, at DS, is just down the street from a place I temped a year and a half ago, the AARS (Asian American Recovery Services, a drug rehab center). DS is a little store-front interior decorating company, owned by a fellow who, until very recently was running the business out of his house. The neighborhood is in the hinterlands of Hayes Street, a long bus ride from almost the foot of Van Ness near the Opera House.

Like many such neighborhoods in San Francisco, it’s a bleak stretch of street and pavement, with very little shade except a few skimpy sidewalk trees and the shadows of the two-to-three-storied buildings that line it. Most of them are old by SF standards, going back to the early 20th century, with curlicued decorations, faces and flowers carved over the doorways, sills and windows, and fretwork outlined in colored paint, but even these are usually grimey, and the upstairs windows are curtained with bedspreads or sheets, or heavy drapes that tie in the middle.

The storesfronts tend to be bars, laundromats, cafes, or dark little businesses with obscure and uninspiring missions. The bars look cheap and uninviting, and the cafes are frequented by weary-looking people who seem resigned ot living cheaply most of their lives. Next door to the place where I am working is a storefront that doesn’t even have a sign in it. The only clue to what it might be is a simple cartoon in counterpoint of a businesswoman carrying a briefcase. Your guess is as good as mine.

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March 1st, 2024

The party was in the second floor space of some Mission retaurant, a ritzy joint that’s part of the upscale trand driving so many businesses and people out of the neighborhood. I got only a confused impression of the place, a broad concrete hall, a stairway decorated with foreign movie posters, a sort of foyer in whichg a projector had been set up and was soundlessly showing a movie against a far wall, and then the party, which was in a dark broad balcony overlooking the restaurant. It wasn’t too crowded, or too loud, and there were tables set with heaps of cheese and tortilla chips and salsa. We commandeered a long table set in a niche behind a column.

I sat across the table from the young dark-haired girl, Corrie. We talked politics for a while, happily damning everyone. She is studying film and working on her thesis, a pair of documenatires. One of them is about two very elderly women in a home for old Reds. The women, she told me, are the only lucid residents left in the home, and her documentary is about how they try to cope.

A couple of times I went over to the balcony and looked down at the empty dining room with its rows of round white tables, its cunningly stark decor. I wondered wistfully when management would kick us out.

The dark-haired girl was replaced by a small man in his twenties, his head shaven to a black fuzz. He talked briefly with me about Gladiator, then spent the rest of the time with Michael.

2:00 AM finally loomed and management in the form of a slender, good-looking man in a suit (Corrie had sworn she saw him speeding the last time she was at the restaurant) came upstairs to respectfully implore us all to leave. We trickled down to the wide, concrete corridor where we’d entered. Outside, Michale, Jon and I hailed a taxi.

Since Corrie was talking about the man inside the restaurant, I assume she meant he was strung out on speed rather than driving a car.

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February 25th, 2024

By the time I got to the Kabuki, most of the movies were either done or almost done. I wandered around looking for Michael and saying hello to people. Finally I found him in the Q&A session of a movie on the secon floor. A German woman was talking about the problems of filming a movie in Brazil. We listened for ten minutes, then Michael said he was ready to leave.

We ended up in one of those hard little knots of company and conversation that ensue just before or after an event, when ther are rides to catch and places to go. Finally, someone observed we needed to get to the party and after various negotiations, renegotiations, and false start we scattered into a couple of cars that would take us to the restaurant. Michael and I rode with a heavy-faced woman, a younger, dark-haired girl, and an African filmmaker. I sat in the back between the filmmaker and Michael. On our way over, we got onto the subject of a documentary in the festival that I had disliked intensely, and I launched into a rant about it as the kind of smug, elitist self-justification I used to encounter growing up in the deep south. It only occured to me as we’d turned onto Mission and came in sight of the restaurant that it was quite possible that documentary’s director and/or producer was, at this moment, in the car with us.

Fortunately, they were not.

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February 20th, 2024

We had a house-guest for the film festival, Jon, a tall, tall man, a chemist, with pale gray, amost white hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. He’s a member of a film club Michael helps moderate in San Jose, and he slept on our couch in between trekking off to the Kabuki or Castro to watch films.

Jon lives out in the countryside near Palo Alto in a communal complex where meals are taken in a large house close to the road. His own house there was purchased for a dollar, sawn in half, and moved to the commune by truck, carried slowly down the road in the dead of night. When they got it to its lot, they discovered the two halves no longer quite fit together, and they had to use a jack to make the house whole again. Jon showed us the seam in his wall once when we were there for dinner.

As soon as he arrived, he and Michael took off for the festival. We all agreed to meet at the Kabuki at 11:30 pm, and so late that night, after fortifying myself with a cup of cafe au lait, I dressed in my standard party costume (black jeans and black sweater) and walked to Japantown.

Youth lingered, though I did not consider myself young back then. These days I cannot imagine agreeing to begin a night out at 11:30 PM.

Jon still lives in his uneven house at his little communal community and still sleeps on our couch during the film festival. We are such fast friends now that we spent last Thanksgiving weekend together, the three of us renting an air b&b in Nevada City and spending three happy days walking, hiking, drinking wine and playing dominoes.

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February 16th, 2024

Shel’s party was on Saturday night. Shel has moved to New York and is now living in the East Village, but his landlord doesn’t know that. Mark is living in his place now, and Shel had returned to pack a few more boxes before driving back to New York. I’m sure Shel felt odd that night, as one always does when you return to an old home.

Shel’s a thin, dark, rather good-looking man in his late thirties, always a bit tense and watchful, fond of Frank Sinatra and martinis. The apartment is on Russian Hill. Technically, I suppose, it’s a single bedroom, though it consits mainly of a long hall with a kitchen at one end, a medium sized room at the other, and a bathroom and large closet in between. It’s a standard San Francisco apartment with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and anachronisms like a phone nook and an ironing closet. The room at the end of the hall has a futon where I suppose Shel once slept and Mark now sleeps. The little kitchen, with a tiny four-burner range cowering behind the refrigerator, has a shelf of cookbooks now, and spices and bottles of exotic liquors, where before it had mainly breakfast cereal and martini fixings.

It was a mix of Mark and Shel’s friends, which meant a lot of filmmakers and people from the magazine where Mark works. Bluff, talkative family men, skinny women writers, a Korean girl I’d talked to at Shel’s going-away party in January, Karla and Larry, a British couple, both of them working class vegetarians and leftists, Milford and Donna, a couple we had frequently encountered at Mark’s dinner parties. Mark, energetic and serious, danced with a tall, laughing woman in the parlor. Milford talked in the kitchen, Donna sitting nearby. Michael drank wine and grew very redfaced and hilarious. After my own glass of wine, I sat on Michael’s lap, no longer hearing most of what was being said and wondering, after looking around later, where Donna had disappeared to. Milford was still holding court beside the refrigerator, emphatic, almost belligerent.

Finally, after almost everyone else had gone home, we got up to leave, but on our way out Michael got snagged on Shel, who was standing near the door, and I was stranded out in the hall for fifteen minutes before giving up and coming back in. Found Donna sleeping peacefully on the parlor futon while Mark and his lady continued their dance a few feet away.

I have changed the names to protect the innocent. I’ll only say that “Mark” had a food column and “Shel” is a fairly well-known indie filmmaker, still living in New York, still slender and good-looking but gray, with a wife and a teenage daughter. The other partiers are still part of the San Francisco film community and occasionally their faces, altered by time, resurface in our lives in indie features and docs. “OMG! That guy being interviewed is LARRY! “

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February 11th, 2024

It’s the first week of the 43rd Annual San Francisco Film Festival, so I haven’t seen much of Michael. So far I’ve seen only two films. Wisconsin Death Trip, which I liked, and Peau d’homme couer de bete, which I did not care for.

We went to the opening night party on Thursday night. Michael had to film that evening, and he called from KQED just before heading out. I walked down the hill to the Regency Ballroom, which had the usual floodlights and Will Call table.

For the first forty-five minutes I wandered around the huge, dark ballroom, sampling the food at various tables — pungent soft white cheese spread on nutty bread, Calistoga berry juice, handrolls with peanut sauce, chocolate crepes, Aidelle’s sausage…. The music was very good, but loud. When I found Michael standing and talking to a couple, I could barely make out what anyone was saying. Barring a dance club, I’ve never understood the point of gathering large numbers of people in a room and then blasting them with music so it’s impossible for anyone to communicate without getting a sore throat. Eventually, we moved upstairs to a quieter second floor lobby nerar tall open windows that let in fresh air. We all talked about ghost stories, movies, what we loved and what we hated, and ate sorbet until they turned on the lights and send a security guard over to kick us out.

Outside on the sidewalk, the conversations continued. I talked to a thin, bearded older man who either knew me from a previous festival or was pretending to know me from a previous festival. He told me he spoke seven languages and had travelled all over Europe.

At the time, Michael was co-hosting a show on independent film at KQED. The result was, as his partner, I found myself in more conversations than usual at film events. Michael had some level of facial recognition from being on television, and I still suspect some hungry filmmakers were, quite understandably, trying to network with him through me.

I liked the book Wisconsin Death Trip was based on, so it’s no surprise I liked the movie. Of Peau d’homme couer de bete I have absolutely no memory. Who knows? If I saw it now, I might like it.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Category: 21st Century