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.

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.

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.