We finished the issue today. The last days are in some ways the worst. There are always a thousand piddling things wrong that have to be fixed. I correct and run out one page and it comes back smeared with red and I have to do it again. Everyone was on edge. Faren silent, Trevin snappish, Shelly exasperated because Charlie was giving contradictory orders. But, we got it out. Tomorrow, Charlie can leave for wherever he is going a comparatively happy man.
New neighbors have moved in downstairs. Earlier this evening there was a lot of scraping and bumping, loud music, and voices echoing up the stairwell. The phone downstairs is hooked up now (I bumped into the phone man yesterday coming out of our apartment) and they’ve gotten about three calls so far.
At one point this evening one of them, the blonde one with glasses, rang the doorbell and asked me to move the car so they could get the furniture in. Across the street were at least two pick-up trucks loaded with furniture, and three men talking to each other in Spanish. Lucius was upset. He kept crowding by the door at the foot of the stairs, meowing and hurrying up to me as if he expected me to do something about it.
It was an absolutely beautiful, clear day, and I was looking forward to getting the laundry done early. There was a problem with funds – I could only dig up $5, and I needed some detergent, so I walked down to Market Street to visit the bank machine.
The first thing I noticed, as I approached Market, was a man pushing a trolly loaded with balloons. I thought a store must be throwing a party of some kind. When I saw everyone gathered up and down the street, though, I realized I was seeing the beginning of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Reasoning that traffic would be impossible anyway with Market closed, I settled down on the curb to watch.
It was one of the longest parades I ever saw. I enjoyed it. I usually enjoy parades. But I noticed that I seemed to be one of the few people who stuck around for the whole thing. I sat between a young punk with black hair and a Vietnamese mother and her little boy. These gave way to a Hispanic man with his children, a man with a happy little boy and a plump, crying little girl, and a shy Asian tourist. The only other constants were a couple of exasperated traffic cops, a man with his pet Llasso Apsos (who yapped furiously every time other dogs or horses alked past), and a tough old codger with a camera who I think was a reporter. He kept dodging in and out in between floats and processions, sometimes planting himself in the street and snapping pictures as marching bands eddied past him. He did this even with a sort of Spanish Saber Women’s Association, plunging into the ranks of sword twirling ladies with a courage that impressed me.
There were a lot of marching bands, some good, some bad. All of the high school kids looked hot under that sun. In one band, which was wearing dark green jackets and tall busbies, a girl had to go sit on the curb with her head between her knees, and another looked so red-faced and shaky I was afraid she was about to fall over.
My favorite part was the horsemanship club. The first rider was a real desperado, a tough looking black man in fancy silver cowboy get up with fine silver appurtenances on his stirrups, saddle and bridle. Another rider’s horse was almost out of control. He was walking alongside it, struggling to hold its bridle as it skipped and tossed its head, its eyes rolling. The representatives of the horsemanship club riding in the truck behind him looked quite disapprovingt.
The IRA had some representatives there, including a float that showed Ireland as a beautiful girl wearing a shawl, in a cage guarded by vicious, mocking British soldiers and taunted by a caricature of Margaret Thatcher. This drew some cheers. The whole thing lasted three hours. After it was over, I went to the bank and attempted unsuccessfully to draw $20. When that didn’t work, I went home, borrowed $20 from Tim, and set out to do the laundry, forgetting to take anything to read.
At Powell Street there were two evangelists, the usual black man in the white suit, red feathered hat, and AIDS pasteboard, and an old white guy with a megaphone, which I thought was kind of unfair. On the corner of Powell and Geary was yet another evangelist, waving a black, floppy-covered bible, pacing and declaiming alongside a meek little old lady who was wordlessly passing out tracts.
Then I passed a demonstrator, apparently against the Iran Iraq war. A lady on the street behind me crowed, “I’ve never seen a real, live demonstration before!” She was plainly from out of town.
In front of Neiman Marcus I walked past a group of people demonstrating against the wearing of furs.
This is a very opinionated city.
At Waldenbooks I bought a new diary (this one is about finished) and a paperback true-crime anthology.
The black evangelist with the red feathered hat and pasteboard was for years afixture at the Powell Street Cable Car turnaround, where he could moodily grumble into his microphone at a captive audience of tourists queuing for a ride. I remember him as very dapper, with sunglasses and a well-trimmed beard in addition to his hat and three-piece suit. He would bring a small carpet to mark out his territory, and a chair where he sat next to his sign, along with a posted warning that he would charge a fee to anyone who photographed him — thus following the venerable San Francisco tradition of making a spectacle of oneself, then objecting because people notice. (The Castro did the same thing for years, its residents costuming wildly on Halloween Night, then complaining afterwards in letters to the Chronicle because “outsiders” were taking pictures.)
I was a regular in the area, so the black evangelist’s occasional growls were frequently aimed at me. Whenever I walked by, he’d raise his microphone to his lips and mutter into it something about women who weren’t virgins being unworthy of marriage. Obviously, that ship had sailed and there was nothing I could do about it, so I never bothered to respond.
At work today Charlie took a few pictures of Trevin, Shelly and me. I had dressed up in a mini-skirt and black sweater, though I didn’t have much makeup on. If the photos are black and white it shouldn’t make much difference.
I took the cat carrier back this morning. As I went in, the blonde lady breathed the word “safe,” with relief. I hope the fact that the carrier’s been chewed on one side doesn’t get her into trouble.
Friday, March 11
This morning on my way to work, I heard that Ronn Owens would be interviewing Gerald Straub, the man who used to work for Pat Robertson. Because I didn’t want to miss it, I bought a cheap transistor radio at the Montclair Pharmacy and listened to the interview with the earplugs while I worked.
Straub is a voice in the wilderness. He wants to talk about the Robertson political agenda and everyone else wants to talk about money and sex scandals in TV evangelism.
We finished the first section today. Tomorrow, Charles and Shelly will take it in. We developed the pictures Charlie took yesterday and decided on one where I am being squashed between Shelly and Trevin. If none of those had turned out, we would have used a Christmas shot in which I’m sort of leering into the camera looking like one of the children from Village of the Damned.
Ronn Owenswas San Francico’s morning talk show DJ, in the prime spot of 9:00 am. He prided himself on being the “reasonable” alternative to Rush Limbaugh. For me, Owens is best summed up by his response one morning to the single black caller who phoned in to answer Owens’ question to his viewers, “Are you better off now than you were before Reagan was president?”
“No,” the caller had said. “I’m WORSE off. And so is every other black person I know.”
“Oh come now,” Owens had responded, in his friendly, “reasonable” tones, “I’m better off. Everyone else so far who’s called says they’re better off. Don’t you think you’re being just a LITTLE myopic?”“
This morning after an abortive attempt at filling out the Taxpax form ( I really do have what amounts to a phobia about filling out such forms.) I discovered a premium notice from State Farm — $375 – due February 28. All of the forebodings and terrors I had felt staring at the TP form crashed in on me, and for a few minutes I just paced around the living room, flapping the premium notice and wailing inside.
At 8:30 I drove down to the Cat Clinic to pick up the cats. There was some trouble running out my bill on the computer. The vet complained to me that the program was lousy and kept screwing up billing and inventories. She assured me Capone (the bobcat hybrid) had been good. This surprised me. His last vet gave him an F in deportment on his card. He and Lucius (the Abyssinian) had refused breakfast that morning. Then she went back to get him.
There were a few thumps and the faint – almost just the impression – of a surprised voice attempting to soothe. When she emerged from the back, she was carrying the carrier in one hand (with Capone in it) and Lucius in the other. Capone refused to allow Lucius in the carrier with him, and my attempts at conciliation just got a few more growls. She leant me a cardboard carrier for Lucius, explaining that she wasn’t supposed to do this, and would I please return it tomorrow morning.
In the car, with Capone in the carrier in the back, and Lucius in the cardboard carrier up front, Lucius went berserk, screaming for help, moaning, and tearing at the inside of the box. I got so frazzled I turned the wrong way down Polk Street and had to do a U-turn to get out. Lucius managed to get his paw out of one of the holes and snag me viciously in the arm. I hope the woman at the vets doesn’t get into trouble when I return the carrier. He chewed it up pretty badly.
Once home, I called the insurance office and the male secretary who answered assured me that if I got the check to the office that day, it would probably be all right. I rushed over to Berkeley and wasted about fifteen minutes looking for the office on Shattuck. When I found it my insurance agent let me in. Like the other man he was – mostly – reassuring, and I left after writing him a check and giving him my day number. I got to work at 10:15. Charlie made no comment, except to give me a bangle watch that had come in the mail as a sample.
The 20th anniversary issue is going to contain pictures of the staff. Charlie may have a picture taken of the new set-up. If I’m in it, I hope I can get my glasses off and my lipstick on before he snaps the shutter.
And now to take another shot at filling out the Taxpax form.
We drove over to the Victorian Theatre to see Thy Kingdom Come, a documentary about the religious right.
The Victoria is a small, rather rundown theater in the Mission District. It’s very primitive. The concession stand sells only popcorn and Coke poured from a four-liter plastic bottle. The theater itself is obviously meant and still used for live performances. (Lights are still up for it.) It has the rococco appearance of an old vaudeville theater.
The help was casual and friendly, the audience small and partisan. As for the film, it was good, and I’m very glad Robertson had just come in a disappointing third in South Carolina. Otherwise, the film would have been too disturbing.
The pin to the reel fell off once, and there was a short interruption when they had to change reels, but we enjoyed ourselves.
From the vantage point ofthe2024 election year and the shadow Trump casts, I can only shake my headand tell my younger self — who, of course, cannot hear me — she doesn’t truly know what “disturbing” means. Yet.
I had phoned Fritz this morning and told him I would be there at two. At about two thirty I got to Geary.
Fritz lives in the Tenderloin, about eight blocks from here. He’s terribly old and fragile, and it takes a while to see how tall this bent man used to be. He seemed delighted to see me and eager for the chance to sit and talk.
His place is tiny and packed with memorabilia. There was a venerable stack of National Geographics, the inevitable set of the OED, a stuffed Fahfrd and Gray Mouser, an oil portrait of his late wife, and many other things. I couldn’t look at much for fear of being rude.
He sat me in an armchair and offered me some coffee, but I really didn’t want any. We talked for over an hour. He told me about visiting Sutro Tower with a friend, being let in to ride its elevator and look out at the view by an engineer there who was a science fiction fan. He talked about the problems he was having with his eyes, (His manuscripts now are all written in very large longhand) Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the fog horns that used to sound from Alcatraz. Fritz speaks slowly, with long pauses, either because he has lost his voice or because he has lost his train of thought. When I left, he took down my phone number.
He needed a typist.
I can still see Fritz leaning forward in his chair after I’d read out loud to him a fight scene he’d written in longhand. When I finished he would chuckle, slow and deep as a tolling bell, and rub his hands. The oil portrait of his wife, a beautiful, sharp-faced woman, canted her eyes sideways at us.
Another painting, this one of his famous father in armor as the Ghost in Hamlet, gazed soulfully over our heads. Father and son resembled each other so closely it could have been Fritz Leiber Jr.
Somewhere in that cluttered apartment were letters from Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.
I swear I am not deliberately posting a cluster of diary entries about deaths. This is just the order of the entries.
Tim and I drove to Berkeley to eat before I dropped him off at work. We stopped first at Comic Relief on University, which had a new issue of Love and Rockets. As we were leaving, we noticed a copy of Dori Seda’s Lonely Nights mounted in a plastic frame, and a rose beside it with the words, “In memory of Dori Seda.”
We turned around and went back in.
Unfortunately, the woman we are friends with had gone into the back to work on taxes and was replaced at the desk by a young man we didn’t know who wasn’t very forthcoming. “Oh Dori Seda died,” he said.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Complications. She was in a car crash.”
We walked out, shocked. Just a couple of months before, we’d met Dori Seda at a party Comic Relief had held. She was a tall artiste with a mane of frizzy brown hair, a round bunny face and a space between her front teeth. It’s a cliché to say of a well-known person “I felt as if I knew her,” but I did. Her work was always so funny and ribald, and it felt familiar.
No, Dori Seda did not die from a car crash. She died, far too young, from a bad bout with the flu, her lungs undermined by the silicosis she’d contracted when she worked in ceramics.Seda’s art was so good that, a few years after she died, I talked with someone for several minutes at a Bay Area party while wondering how Iknewthe man. I had seen that face, and I was sure he must be an old friend.
In fact, we’d never met. He looked familiar because, as afriend of Dori Seda’s, he’d appeared frequently in her comics.
I loved the humor and realism of her art, which was so unlike many female cartoonists at that time. Women underground cartoonists too often depicted being a woman as being grotesquely self-hating — which I suspect is how many male publishers of underground cartoons imagined us. Seda was good-looking, and she drew herself that way — along with all that went with being an attractive woman in a circle of male artists and cartoonists who had come of age in the sixties and seventies.
One of my favorites of her panels was a door-frame view of an angry guy she’s just brushed off. He’s holding a six-pack in one hand and raising his middle finger in the other, just before she closes the door on him. The caption reads “Pissed cuz he didn’t get laid.”
Which I’m afraid summed up so many men in the ’80s when you were young, female, and cute.
This afternoon while I was working, I heard Charlie talking to someone, another male who wasn’t Trevin. I turned to look and saw Charlie showing someone the mystery books he kept at the end of the hall. The man’s face was turned away, but I could see he was tall and gangly and wore wire-rimmed glasses.
I went back to work, wondering if the man were a visiting author or a prospective employee. Charlie brought him in to see the back office, showed him, rather proudly, the Pagemaker set up, and I got a better look at the vistor’s long, angular face and brown hair. He looked kind of like Orville Redenbacher’s grandson. After they left the room I quietly asked Faren who he was, and she said he was Kim Stanley Robinson.
Charlie interviewed him in the living room. Occasionally I came in, bringing a new page for Charlie to examine. Robinson left at about 4:30 after signing some books for Shelly and posing for some pictures.
Last night at about midnight, I heard a woman’s shrill voice down the street shouting “Get out! Get out of the car! To want to be my boyfriend and threaten to rearrange my face! Get out!”
I tiptoed over to the window to look out and saw a car pulled up a little ways down the street, a man walking slowly away from it, head down, feet dragging, like one of those cartoon figures drawn to represent shame. The guy would walk a little ways towards Sixth Street, the car following slowly. A few times he lifted his head as though he’d been called, the car stopped, and he walked over to the window to talk for awhile. Then he would walk away dejectedly, the car would follow again, then, stop, and he’d go over to the window again.
This happened about three times before the car finally drove away for good.
Our short stretch of Tehama between Fifth and Sixth Street was often a conduit for strange conversations late at night, muttered drug deals, barely coherent quarrels among homeless wanderers, or loud comments by lost, intoxicated clubbers echoing off the housefronts.
Pam Troy 