Authors: Bill Barich
Saloons were an integral part of life in the city. It was a brawling town that also offered gambling houses, bordellos, opium dens, and bull-and-bear fights. The streets sometimes had the raucous energy of a polyglot fraternity party gone amok, but you could escape from the riffraff by skipping into a hotel and enjoying a civilized, first-rate meal of French, German, Italian, or Chinese cuisine.
San Francisco after dark was not for the timid. Questionable cats such as Billy Holung prowled the alleys of Chinatown, while the
Sydney Ducks committed mayhem on the main boulevards. A vigilante group, the Hounds, had assigned themselves the task of routing the Ducks, but they often drank too much, forgot their mission, and instead beat up poor, shanty-dwelling miners from Peru and Chile.
Throughout the 1850s, Gold Rush fortunes were made in San Francisco on the sale of mining supplies and general merchandise and by providing transportation to the foothills. People struck it rich, too, while practicing the budding art of real estate piracy. On the western frontier, pioneers had simply laid claim to acreage, but land was at a premium in a compact city, and the selling of “town lots” became the local equivalent of three-card monte.
Documents pertaining to title were scarce, so a fast-talker such as Sam Brannan could grab two hundred lots just by vowing that John Sutter had deeded them to him—Sutter, lost among the Moravians, had no way to disagree. The most heinous realtors sold lots on a landfill of garbage, junked furniture, sand, whiskey bottles, and the timbers of sunken ships. The lots were destined to sink into the ooze.
Shipping was among the chief industries in early San Francisco. There was a large fleet of fishing boats, as well, and a prosperous construction trade. Jobs could also be had at the sugar refineries where California sugar beets and Hawaiian sugarcane were processed. The patriarch of sugar, Claus Spreckels, a Hanoverian German, earned so much money that he formed his own railroad to challenge the Central and Southern Pacific lines of the so-called Big Four—Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford.
These instant fortunes demanded fancy flourishes. Mansions went up on Nob Hill—
nob
was a contraction of
nabob
. The rich rode to and from their palatial homes on the newfangled cable cars that made hilltop living possible. The mansions had gas lights, crystal chandeliers, and fourteen-foot-high ceilings. Parisian chefs turned out
vol-au-vents
and elaborate
gâteaux
.
In formal salons, a veneer of social pretension evolved to the unlikely accompaniment of opera music. The bawdy tunes of the mining camps were banished, but Lola Montez, a former mistress of Ludwig of Bavaria, attracted a fashionably mixed crowd whenever she did her Spider Dance, slapping at the make-believe insects whose bites caused her to shed nearly all her clothes.
An earthquake burst the pretty bubble. On April 18, 1906, at 5:13
A.M
., a sudden shift in the tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault almost destroyed San Francisco.
The Costanoan Indians had spoken of earthquakes in their legends, but few San Franciscans understood that they were living on a geological eggshell. Fewer still were ready for the sight of their streets buckling and caving in. Electrical wires tore loose and threw sparks, gas mains shattered, and the city burned for three days. So many looters were out that the U.S. Army had to be summoned. When the smoke cleared, about five hundred people were dead and about 28,000 buildings had crumbled. The estimated damages ran to more than $400 million.
San Francisco did not regain its health until the 1930s. It was a solid union town by then, with a lively port, ample hydroelectric power, and a skilled workforce. A. P. Giannini’s Bank of America had the courage to fund such massive construction projects as the two trans-bay bridges, the Oakland-Bay (1936) and the Golden Gate (1937).
The federal government, in the throes of an arms buildup, looked to the city’s assets and handed several defense-industry plants to Bay Area concerns, encouraging a new wave of migration to the coast. During World War II, shipyards that had long been dormant started operating around the clock and sometimes turned out a finished ship in less than a week. As a consequence, San Francisco’s population boomed to a record high of 827,000 in the 1940s.
The war had a similar effect on other parts of the state. About 2 million people came to California to work in the defense industry
between 1940 and 1945. More than a million soldiers passed through on their way to the Pacific theater, taking with them indelible memories of sunshine and palm trees.
In many respects, World War II affected San Francisco as profoundly as the Gold Rush. So many Americans set foot in California for the first time that the state lost its air of mystery and became connected to the rest of the country in a new and different way. Growth and change on a previously unknown scale lay ahead, and there was nothing that San Franciscans, bench-sitters in Eden, could do to stop it.
H
OW STRANGE IT FELT
to be home again in San Francisco, slipping briefly back into my real life. I wrestled against the fit of it, craving the freedom and the stimulation of the road. It soon became clear to me that being away had not helped my marriage—a naïve hope, at best. There was more distance than ever between us, and no miracle cure or
deus ex machina
was going to make it disappear.
Evenings were the most difficult time. My wife would return from her job as a social worker, and we would have a drink or two and eat a pleasant enough dinner before dispersing to sit by ourselves in separate rooms. Neither of us could face the gap that was growing between us—it was something I had no experience of, this odd sense of a particular kind of love, the one that sustains a marriage, slowly vanishing while another, more general love remains.
We didn’t quarrel much, maybe because we both knew I’d be leaving again in a few days. When we did argue, our house was often the focus. However unfairly, it had become the repository for all my griefs. Originally, it had been built as a summer cottage for an affluent family who lived in an even foggier neighborhood closer to the ocean. Its east-facing windows had granted them a fine view of San Francisco Bay, but now we looked out on a wall of apartments ten feet away.
The house was lightless, claustrophobic, and noisy, I complained, ignoring the high ceilings and the warm hardwood floors. It lacked privacy and needed repairs that we couldn’t afford, I continued, without ever mentioning the fireplace in the living room or the backyard garden and deck. Most of all, I railed about what it cost us every month. The same amount of money could buy us a spacious ranch on a trout stream in Wyoming!
I felt the way that Nate George felt up in Napa, as though I’d been robbed of the choicest sections of my city and exiled to Noe Valley, my own personal Angwin, a prisoner in California.
My wife was not unsympathetic, but she had no intention of giving in to my restlessness or my whim. Quite sensibly, she had put down roots. She had responsibilities at work and a social circle that she treasured. In sum, she had a life of her own, one that seemed to be at odds with my life after so many years together.
In the ideal world, where human beings are wise and good, we would have solved our problems in an instant, but we were mortal and sat instead in our separate rooms, in silence and in pain. The troubles were not as simple as I describe them—they never are—but the house did turn into a metaphor for them, and foolishly I let myself be locked inside it, somebody who’d lost the key to a vital relationship and couldn’t make it whole again.
W
HERE HAD MY LOST CITY GONE
, that old San Francisco of light and magic? I went searching for it, kicking over the traces of the past. On Haight Street now, everybody was twenty-two years old and dressed in black clothes that were torn or slashed as if by a razor blade. Their hair came in many intriguing colors—chartreuse, puce, and shocking pink—and their bodies were often pierced or embellished.
Among the faithful and the posers, I saw gaggles of teenagers from the suburbs who were determined to go precisely where their
parents had cautioned them not to go. They were easy prey for the hardcore cases peddling loose joints and more elaborate drugs, mostly ragged men in their thirties and forties who had matted hair and were red-faced and missing teeth. The sight of them brought back memories of Haight-Ashbury’s decline in the 1970s, when heroin and general bad vibes dealt a final knockout blow to peace, love, and understanding.
On Cole Street, my first apartment: a boxy building with six units and curb appeal, where I slept on a mattress on the floor. The street was nothing then—a couple of Palestinian grocers, a hardware store, and two bars, one for lesbians and one for gay men. I tried hanging out instead at the Kezar Club nearby, but somebody always wanted to pop me one on account of my abundant hair or my ignorance about football.
Stanyan Street was next: a seven-room railroad flat I shared with a roommate, who was a book salesman from Texas. He wasn’t a hippie, exactly. He had a real bed, not just a mattress, and piloted an electric-blue Porsche and seduced more women in his end of the flat than I could count on all my fingers and toes. Secretaries, artists, wandering matrons, they hiked up a tunnel of forty-odd steps and gladly surrendered to his charms, while I sat reading the books that he sold.
On the floor beneath us, lonely men who were drying out or failing to dry out rented single rooms. They were mournful and without prospects. Divorced guys, I’d think. I was young and arrogant, and I knew almost nothing about life.
From the roof of our building, we could watch the forty-niners play at Kezar Stadium. “Tar Beach,” we called the roof, dragging up chairs to bask in the sun. Sometimes the roller-derby crowd piled into the adjacent Kezar Pavilion for an evening match, eager for a fix of whiplash violence, and we heard screams and bottles breaking long into the night.
Our true paradise in the Haight was on Belvedere Street. An
associate of the Black Panthers, who was desperate for tenants, leased us his home for a year, so that he, a writer, could go abroad to research a book. What a sweet man he was! He even helped us move in, carting our ratty belongings on his shoulders and probably earning himself a warning from the Landlords’ Guild. Then he was off to Germany and Algiers, trusting us with a house that was bigger, better, and grander than any I’d ever occupied before.
There was a single drawback. After midnight, we had a few disturbances. A rapid knocking on the front door, followed by a breathy whispering. “Reggie? Hey, Reggie! Let me in.”
We’d open the door a crack to show our faces, disconcertingly white. “Reggie’s not here,” we’d say.
On Belvedere Street, we could walk into the backyard and pluck a plum or a peach for breakfast. The kitchen was done in butcher block and had Dutch windows looking out at the garden. We threw many neighbor-disturbing parties during which hippie wretches in their atrocious attire danced barefoot on the lawn and slept under the trees.
O man. California.
I got to know my wife-to-be on Belvedere Street. She was dating the book salesman, of course, but while he chatted up his other girl friends on the phone we would sit in the kitchen having heartfelt talks. When he quit selling books to accept a short-lived job in New York, heading the wrong way to make his fortune, my wife-to-be and I were soon together and very much in love.
In 1974, we got married to start a family. The wedding was a lively affair at an Italian social club in North Beach. Our minister held credentials from the Universal Life Church, and a Buddhist priest signed our wedding certificate. My wife quickly became pregnant and almost as quickly miscarried, beginning a string of miscarriages and two ectopic pregnancies that would ultimately be attributed to a Dalkon shield.
Hard times but good ones. Two years after our marriage, we
were off to Alexander Valley. San Francisco, I could see now, would never be the same for me again—so innocent and so lacking in the brute confusion of middle age.
T
HE AIDS EPIDEMIC
had brought the biggest changes to San Francisco in the last twenty years, straining the city’s budget and placing an extreme demand on its compassion and its psychological reserves. An epidemiologist friend had first told me about AIDS in 1981, when it was still being called a “gay cancer.” So little was known about the modes of transmission at the time that he wasn’t sure if he could safely kiss his children good night.
My friend was doing some research on tuberculosis now, but he arranged for me to speak with his colleague, Dr. Mark Jacobson, at San Francisco General Hospital. The hospital was an odd structure for the city, dark and foreboding and built of bricks that were sooty and crumbling. It seemed to belong to a much older epoch in human history, when medicine was in its infancy and plagues were still common.
San Francisco General was a public facility, so its staff had to deal with the city’s dispossessed. The signs in the lobby were in English, Spanish, Polish, and a couple of Asian languages. In the elevator I boarded, a man of about thirty was steadying himself with a pair of canes. His skin was a grayish color, and he was tight-lipped and paper-thin. It hurt him just to move.
On the fourth floor, Jacobson was waiting for me in his office cubicle. He was in his early forties, a former hippie who still had a beard. He had come to California from Kansas City, his hometown, as a college student, and had fallen for its natural beauty and had lived on a rural commune in Mendocino for a while. Now Jacobson was a specialist in infectious diseases and clinical pharmacology and held the rank of assistant professor at the UC Med School in San Francisco.
Ward 5A—an AIDS ward—had opened at General in 1983, he
told me. It was the only such ward in the country then. Its beds were prized because patients were assured that they’d get the best, most advanced treatment possible.
There were about twenty beds available on the ward at present, or about one-tenth of the total bed space at the hospital. Patients in the throes of an acute episode, such as pneumocystis, usually got them, although a bed sometimes went to a homeless man who couldn’t be placed elsewhere. The patients stayed for about ten days on the average. It wasn’t uncommon for a patient to visit the ward a number of times as his or her condition deteriorated. After the initial acute episode, most people lived for about two years in increasingly declining health. They died at home or in a hospice.