Category: San Francisco

March 16th, 2024

We’re in for another procession of gray days. No real sun until Tuesday, the weatherman says.

Yesterday I could not get up to the roof or exercise on my bike. When I wasn’t conferring with people via zoom or phone, I was up to my elbows updating and/or correcting the website. By 6:00 pm, I longed for mindlessness. For our dinner I made tomato bruschetta and unwrapped a brie.

My evening indulgence a couple of times a week since the quarantine began is a glass of port, sipped from a 2-ounce, Bristol-blue cobalt port glass that’s part of a set I inherited from one grandparent or another. A glass of port at the end of the night seems to have been a tradition in the early-to-mid 20th century, since both sides of my family did it. I can remember my dad’s father, Dick, (The nouveau-riche Texas/Alabama side) having a beautiful crystal decanter of Sandeman’s tawny port on his sideboard. My mom’s mother, Mollie, (The oldveau-riche Tennessee side) would, with great ceremony, be handed a glass of port by my grandfather every evening after dinner. Last night after I poured my own glass I saw Mollie looking back at me from the sideboard mirror, and I raised it to my/her reflection.

Neither Michael nor I are big drinkers, but we do have a couple of unopened boutique bottles we bought last autumn from the Lost Spirit’s distillery in Los Angeles — Abomination malt whiskey, and Carousel brandy. We agree they’ll be opened in celebration of something, but whether that will be the lifting of the quarantine or the results of the next election is still up for debate. It would be great to actually share them with friends, as in tapping glasses in the living room.

Last night, as we were folding the clothes he hauled up from the laundromat, Michael said he wanted to do another load of laundry today, and I put my foot down and said no. I’ll wash what needs washing myself here, in the apartment. I found some detailed instructions online about the best way to do this, and my current plan is to fill the bathtub with warm water and detergent, dump our jeans into it, and allow them to soak for awhile, occasionally swishing them around and squeezing. I remember a friend of mine in college putting her dirty clothes in a tub with detergent and hot water, and then taking off her sandals and prancing around on them to “When Electricity Came to Arkansas” like an old-fashioned wine-maker crushing grapes. She said she got the idea from Stephen King’s The Stand. Don’t know if I’ll go that far at my age.

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March 14th, 2024

When I drove to Tim’s Berkeley office I found it empty except for a few boxes, partitions, moving men, and a handful of employees, one of whom told me she thought Tim might be helping “set up the lab” at Alameda. I got directions from her and drove down.

It’s not difficult to find in that it looks like a spanking new commerce center just off the tubes. Sun now has a building of its own, very modern, and upscale looking. All I could see out front, though were what looked like moving people. Several large women, one with tattoos up and down her arm, conferred with some tough looking men next to a pick-up truck with a little girl in the cab. I wandered into the building and inside I ound a maze of partitions and offices, marked with numbers and names.

Occasionally I’d bump into a workman. Finally, as I was passing, one spoke to me. “Know where I can call out for a pizza?” he asked. He was short, dark and powerfully built, and talked like he was from new York. I told him I was a complete stranger to the place and sked him if any Sun employees were around. “They’re in the back having a fuckin’ feast,” he said.

In the back I found a small semicircle of Sun employees sitting on the floor in a bare room, surrounded by munchies and beer. I only recognized two of them aside from Nat Goldhaber. When I asked about Tim, they said he wasn’t there. “Tim blew off two hours ago,” a dark, bearded man said with stiff disapproval. I went back out to my car, to drive home, smiled at the little girl in the truck, who smiled back. (She was a dark-eyed little thing, bent over a book.)

Tim and I had takeout sushi for dinner – then we went out to buy a couple of CDs. This time we went to a shop on Haight Street. It carried mainly records, but there were few racks of CD cards. The clerks were pretty avant-garde, one skinny with a dry thatch of bleached hair tinted green at the ends and a tight leather outfit jingling with jewelry and chains. The other was plump and British, with black wire glasses and a simple punk cut pulled back into a stiff, short ponytail. We bought the new Talking Heads album and Sinead O’Connor.

Tim at that time worked for TOPS, (Transcendental Operating System) which had recently been sold to Sun. I remember Nat Goldhaber, now listed in Wikipedia as “an American venture capitalist, computer entrepreneur and politician” as a pleasant, pink, oval-shaped man. His new age outlook would have meshed with Tim’s interest in the occult. In 2000, Nat was the vice-presidential nominee for the Natural Law Party.

Those Haight-Ashbury record-store clerks, whose clothes and appearance struck me back then, would not warrant a second glance today. The Talking Heads album was likely NAKED, the Sinead O’Connor her first, THE LION AND THE COBRA. Two of my favorites. I believe I still have them.

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March 11th, 2024

Our first Zoom event at work last night. We had ninety reservations and roughly sixty people showed up. I’m becoming comfortable managing a Zoom meeting, though I miss being there, standing in the back of the room, watching the audience, hearing the sound of laughter and claps. In a way, this was a leap back to when I first started my job seventeen years ago. Back then, before automated reservation systems, I had to handle every reservation via phone-calls and emails. Now I’m sending out Zoom links to every attendee, and keeping track of the list all the way up to the minute of the event. Looks like I’ll have to return to my old habit of doing follow up calls/emails on the morning of the event asking reserved attendees to notify me if they can’t show up, so I can make room for people on the waiting list.

So, events online are both more personal and more impersonal. I must interact directly with every member one way or another, and when they show up, just before I turn off the camera, I often catch glimpses of tiny corners of their homes, a sofa, a picture on the wall, a book-case.

We need to do laundry today. It’s been piling up, and while Michael handles that downstairs at the laundromat, I’ll be cleaning out the refrigerator. When you spend the majority of your time in one living space, never going out, but moving constantly from room to room, opening and closing the same cabinets and closets, it leaves deeper, grottier tracks.

I think the cat is losing patience with us. Not only is she retreating into the bedroom beside the radiator in the afternoons, she’s begun holing up under the bed and unplugging our bedside lights. Our bed is one of those platforms that sits flush on the floor except under the headboard, where there’s a narrow passage, so once she’s under there, it’s hard to get her out. It’s also a pain in the ass to plug the lights back in, because it involves pulling back the mattress, folding back the slats of the platform, and lying full length on the frame, craning to see the plug. If it happens after dark, forget it. I’ll be reading in bed with a flashlight. This morning at about 6:30 am we had a battle of wills in which, after stomping repeatedly across us to wake us up for kibble, she burrowed under the bed and began thumping around because she knows if I hear that, I won’t pretend to be asleep any more but will roll over on my back yelling her name.

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March 9th, 2024

It was a good day for mailing. One of those gorgeous spring days that make it unthinkable to be anywhere but outside. While we checked the issues at Locus, we listened to some records – Godley and Creme, Timbukthree, etc – and afterwards I loaded my car with Trevin and Shelly and took in the airmail. It was so beautiful outside that physical labor was no hardship. This time there were no hassles at the post office – in fact, they had someone to help us unload the cars.

Fritz called today, and asked me to read an excerpt from his book to him over the phone. He then said he would like either me or Shelly to read to him, since he’s having trouble reading his manuscript. I told him we would be delighted, and Shelly asked me to tell him she would be glad to do it, unaware that I already had. I guess he’ll get in touch when he needs someone to read for him.

Mailing always followed collating. We would drive to the Main West Oakland Post Office, the back of Charlie’s car loaded with canvas bags of labeled magazines. The main post office is a massive complex of square, blocky buildings in the concrete desert of auto shops, junkyards, overpasses and empty lots that is West Oakland. I usually saw it from a BART window overhead as I rode the line to and from the East Bay to San Francisco. On mailing days, we would pull the car over to the loading area and one of us would go in to hand over a postal money order. After that, it was a matter of tossing the heavy bags, bulky with bound squares of magazines, into a huge bin filled with other, similarly loaded bags. We were young and strong, and I remember liking the physical effort, the sense of satisfaction once it was all done and we could drive the empty car back to Charlie’s house in the Oakland Hills.

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March 7th, 2024

Protestors, some of them wearing MAGA hats and waving Confederate flags, have been defying stay at home orders in Ohio and Michigan to stage demonstrations. A news photo from Ohio by photojournalist Joshua Bickel shows a group of them crammed against the windowed, locked door of the Ohio statehouse, faces distorted, mouths agape, vividly illustrating why zombie films are as much about political and social satire as horror.

So, we watch from where we shelter as the call to “put on your big boy pants” gains momentum. Putting on “big boy pants” apparently means not being squeamish about all those vulnerable people who will die if the quarantine is lifted too soon. It’s especially infuriating when the “big boy pants” enthusiasts point out — accurately — that being poor and unemployed endangers human lives. The same powerful people who have made poverty lethal in this country now cite that deadliness as a reason to ignore science and lift the quarantine.

Is America on the road to another civil war? One of our two major political parties is confronting the fact that, unless they take drastic action, they are not only going to lose the presidency, but may end as a mainstream political force. The Wisconsin election, in which voters were forced to choose between voting and personal safety, illustrated how far the GOP is willing to go. Yes, they lost that election, but historically, the American right’s response to defeat has been to double down, not back off. Our Republican president is talking about wielding absolute authority. He’s threatened to adjourn congress. So far, the leaders in his own party seem unwilling to say “no” to him. It looks from here as if many Republicans are willing to dismantle our entire system if doing so can keep them in power.

Right now I’m suffering from low-grade anxiety, not about the virus, but about managing a big zoom event tonight at the library. We’ll see how it goes.

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March 4th, 2024

Tonight we collated.

The issue came earlier than we thought, at about 2:00 pm.

Tim came to collating for the first time, perhaps because Charlie wasn’t there and Tim’s office is in the process of moving to Alameda. When I went to pick him up, there were boxes all over the place, and he took he loaded his Mac and disks into the car. It was weird having him at collating. He helped me seal envelopes and stuff boxes, then I sat down to show him how to bundle issues, not an easy thing to do because Tim as impatient and didn’t like the chore. Eventually, he settled down to the task. We’ll know tomorrow if he knew what he was doing.

Russ was there, of course, and Carolyn, and Lisa.

Shelly prepared beef and chicken tacos.

The party broke up at about 10:00 pm. I gave Russ a ride home. All the states were finished.

A bare-bones entry, probably because I was tired. “Collating” was a monthly chore in which bound copies of the finished magazine arrived at Charlie’s house to be labelled and bundled by zip code so they could be carried to the bulk mailing center in West Oakland the following day. To complete this, Charlie would throw a party, inviting various “Locus people” (friends, writers, contributors and ex-employees if they’d remained in good standing). He’d prepare a meal, usually barbecue, and everyone would gather in his living rooom among stacks of magazines, most of us sitting on the floor. Various states in the forms of labels would be passed out, assigned to people based on their level of expertise. The largest, most demanding zip code was Portland.

Lisa Goldstein author of The Red Magician, was a collating regular, and Russ, a local fan who was slender, gay, sandy-haired, opinionated and entertaining. It became a regular thing for me to give Russ a ride home to the Castro afterwards.

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March 2nd, 2024

Beautiful sunsets are practically the norm in San Francisco if your window faces west. We can’t see the Pacific from here, but we can see the mists and fogs over it, and sometimes those create blustery, Caravaggio-like effects of red and purple in the sky as the sun sinks. “Oh look. A ten,” either Michael or I will say, and we’ll both stand for a moment watching the colors blaze or fade.

Getting people outside to watch, however, requires a rare combination of factors. The temperature drops as the sun goes down, and the wind rises, and most Northern California sunsets are best enjoyed from behind a window. Last night was not Caravaggio quality, but unusual in that there wasn’t much fog, so the Golden Gate Bridge was nicely etched against a clear pink sky. No fog means it’s not as cold and windy, so we could see the distant silhouettes of people who had gone up to their roof to enjoy it.

During that long pink dusk we began hearing, close by, a playful beat on something metal. Our cat, always alert for any strange noise, ran to the living room window and crouched, peering out, and I joined her, expecting to see someone walking down the street tapping a tin drum. The only pedestrians were a couple, a man and woman deep in conversation who had nothing in their hands, but along with the tapping I could also hear distant hoots and cheers. Something was plainly being celebrated. The sunset? The mild night? A sports event? How could there be a sports event?

Had Trump resigned? Alas, no.

It remains a mystery.

I cooked a chicken chili last night, an old favorite I’ve been making for over thirty years. Back when I was in my South-of-Market, black-leather-wearing, white buzz-cut twenties, the go-to cookbooks were the Silver Palate series, now the most battered, food encrusted books on my shelf. Their chicken chili is not only delicious, but a comforting taste from the normal past and a reminder that life can still be good.

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February 29th, 2024

Work wasn’t quite dreadful but almost. Charles veered between amiability and depression. In a rather weird fit of confidingness, he gave me his secret trove of tapes to label – the stuff he keeps in his bedside drawer so that nobody else can see it. Porn and Dr. Who.

The rest of the time he spent harassing Shelly and bemoaning the poor organization of the Dbase files. I struggled with Dbase for the second half of the day. The report readers kept fritzing out and I kept having to rebuild them.

One of the first things I did was drive to Chuck’s place. There was nobody either canine or human in sight when I drove up, and when I knocked on the door all I could see through the glass at first were the two wolf-dogs baying. Finally Chuck’s relative, in her bathrobe, showed up, put a hammerlock on the white dog, and told me Chuck was in the back.

Chuck looked dreadful. He’s always wizened, but now he was in his bedroom in pajamas. I got the subscription labels, commiserated with Chuck about his bug, and left, but only after the relative wrestled Akita (who was letting out territorial growls) out of my path.

We may collate tomorrow, but if the issue gets here it won’t be until about 7 pm. I hope it arrives Thursday instead. Charlie leaves Thursday at 6 am and it might be easier if he’s not here.

The girls downstairs are playing music and a while back one of them was singing. Soundproofed walls my ass! I don’t mind, though. They’re burning an incense that’s making the whole place smell sweet. It took me a while to figure out what it was. It’s the same stuff the high priest at a coven I attended used to burn.

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February 26th, 2024

New theory about the little black box my neighbor keeps putting on his roof — maybe he’s measuring air quality, which is vastly improved? Except when the fog rolls in, distances seem crisper, more colorful.

My exercise now is a daily half-hour ride on my stationary bike in the early evening, while I work my way through Netflix’s The Roman Empire, narrated by Sean Bean. I’m curious about how he’s going to die this time.

For late-night viewing, we’re slowly working our way through international mayhem via Netflix, PBS, and Amazon. Last night we discovered Detective Montalbano, which we liked. Unlike Scandinavian, French, and British detectives, he’s refreshingly free of angst. So nice to see a series about a detective preoccupied, not with the dark traumas of his past, but with whether or not he can enjoy a good plate of pasta without a phone-call from his long-distance girlfriend or news of another dead body.

It’s almost 11:00 am. Soon, very soon, My supervisor will wake up and pick up her phone, and I will be, until 5:00 pm, enmeshed like Laocoön in emails and video-conferences.

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February 24th, 2024

The racket of our neighbors moving in continued late into the night. Two husky women about our age, artists. Downstairs, alongside their front door, their street-side wall is a working garage door. Every few minutes, someone would drive up with stuff to unload and it would open. We could hear it grinding up slowly and majestically like a drawbridge.

This morning I somehow set the time ahead. Tim and I started off for work at 7:30, took a look at the clock on the Chronicle Building, and drove back home. We left again at 8:30. I managed to spill moussaka all over the car.

Charlie was gone when I got to work. When Shelly returned from the airport she told me he had said I could either work on the Dbase or type Fritz’s manuscript. Naturally I chose the manuscript.

While I was typing I listened to the news on the radio. First, they announced troops were being sent to the Honduras – then they said they weren’t. Then they said they were. Then, tonight, there was a press conference, and it was official. Such bullshit! A last ditch effort to either start a war or get more funding for the contras.

They’re still getting used to the apartment downstairs. At one point this evening the lights flickered, there was a bright flash and a heavy thud from downstairs. I started to hurry down, but heard one of them laugh and say, “Oh my God! Can you believe it? I don’t believe it!” From this I gathered that neither of them were lying unconscious and electrocuted, so I went back upstairs. The lights are still on.

I got a cancellation notice for my insurance today. Have to call my insurance agent tomorrow to ask him if I’ll have to reapply.

I didn’t. It was fine.

This was back in the day when you could have a face-to-face relationship with your health insurance agent. Mine was an amiable, gray haired man with a moustache whose office was on Shattuck in Berkeley. I liked him, but in the United States, especially back then, every conversation with a health insurance agent was slightly fraught and could include biting one’s tongue. I remember him explaining that the catastrophic health insurance plan I was on had to be discontinuted (and shifted to a much more expensive premium) because of the AIDS epidemic. “A client caught it, and by the time he died, we’d had to pay for EVERYTHING!” he said, his voice hushed with shock.

Which I had assumed was what health insurance was for, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to say so.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Category: San Francisco