The Royal Family (114 page)

Perhaps you’ll get the idea from all this that Geary Street is the soul of nothing but practicality. While that would almost be true, I ought to mention Eighth Avenue, where the middle-aged street vaguely remembers its ocean infancy, the mnemonic being the Star of the Sea Catholic church (I forgot to mention the kindred Lighthouse Lighting and Lamp Repairs a few blocks back), but that’s mere dutifulness, like a grown man’s grimacing smile when his maiden aunt tells him how cute he was in diapers; for by Seventh Avenue, Geary Street has reverted to type, insisting that water was not meant to lie foolishly in oceans, but to be
used,
which is why from beneath the used car lot’s gleaming numbered windshields and shiny hoods there trickles a braided river of soap-blotched
water like a molten leopard, thereby underlining another of Geary Street’s important principles: Business ought to be clean.

Davis Realty, the Dragon Restaurant, the car wash and the gas station—thus the heterogenously mundane sweeps on, and by Fourth Avenue many proprietorships have become outlets, chains, warehouses, copy services, banks, dental offices, storage lockers. Swelling and bustling, Geary Street propells itself into the next level of mercantile prosperity, getting but not spending.
*
At Stanyan Street, which itself imust be considered another of the most important of the unimportant streets, not only as a traffic artery, but also as a demarcation between “the streets” and “the avenues”—here too end the Richmond and Sunset Districts, with Golden Gate Park concluding between them—Geary Street widens, rushing into even more incontrovertible
ordinariness
, which it proclaims more aptly than ever by means of Commercial Street.

As a prize for this redoubled speed and salesmanship, Geary Street gets its first tunnel at Emerson, where it
brightly and shallowly
dives, so that no bad sorts can lurk there. Geary prefers the higher class of operators who pay taxes and whose wares are returnable, subject to fine print boilerplate on various warranties; and so it quickly expels us from that tunnel of shining yellow tiles, conveying us to Lyon Street, where we gain our first dissectionist’s view of the white spinal columns of the financial district, that paradisiacal goal of the street, heaven of boutiques, department stores and jewelers. Of course, all that’s still as far away as the imaginary countries painted on the backdrops of the Opera House, but Geary Street has heard rumors from a passing 38 Geary bus that someday, after many city blocks, generations and improvisations, it will find at the summit of its old age a gem laid down for the taking—namely, Union Square, immense emerald set in the stonework and brickwork and pavement of San Francisco—and emeralds, like all precious things, possess the ability to render us first shyly self-conscious, then, as the infection of overpowering greenness strikes us, rolling down on our heads like cabbage balls from a Chinatown produce truck, burying us beneath its stacks of green bean bundles, we numbly doubt our own existences, seeking ourselves amist the shining labyrinths of green eternities. Why on earth instead of real emeralds do I go on describing Chinatown’s produce shops, harbors for nomadic Chevvy trucks full of wooden crates of celery? Why mention an earringed Chinese girl, her arms full of broccoli, coming down the gangplank? Because Geary Street, longing though it certainly does for emerald fulfillment—why, even the baser joys of jade would do! —cannot really believe that it is entitled to anything that fine. In green pears and apples, in the fresh chlorophyll of plants, in greengrocers’ stocks it can believe, for the vocations of its shopkeepers who toil patiently on its westernmost reaches provide them. Every day, Geary Street turns vegetables into dollars and sense. It can rely on their greenness. But soon it must shake off its provincial rudeness, for it will intersect Van Ness Avenue not too many blocks hence, and beyond Van Ness lies downtown itself. Yes, Union Square will crown Geary Street’s career, but can it wear such a tremendous emerald without blushing? It wants to; then it will have finally arrived. But can so broad and bluff and workaday a street pull it off? And so Geary Street retreats into dull meditations on broccoli.

Lusting all the more and nonetheless for the pale beauty of that distant cluster of towers surrounded by parkland, Bay and sky, Geary Street, which is as endless as the 38
Geary bus itself with the long black accordion-bellows between segments so that it can go around corners, now exerts itself to the fullest, contorting itself, rolling round and round past parks and murals and the occasional grafitti’d fence at Divisadero, Scott, and Steiner. At Webster it dips down through Japantown, then up again in respectful advance of Sushiland. Japantown will be as brief a diversion as Little Korea and Little Russia. Geary Street is in a lascivious hurry for riches now, its wide grey ribbon, adorned by dashed white lines and rectangular patches of blackish-grey or whitish grey asphalt, making haste to approach that angelic venue of old age—

. . . But it never can, never will, at least not in its present incarnation, because at Laguna and Gough fatality sets in, and suddenly Geary Street, renamed Starr King, shunts rightward past the Montessori House and Universalist Center, and the motorist who, trusting Geary Street for all these blocks, crosses Van Ness, abruptly finds himself on
O’Farrell Street
as he enters the Tenderloin . . .

How could this calamity have happened? Because Geary Street, which parallels him one block to the left, has become one-way, the
other
way. Continuity is impossible. Geary Street will indeed stretch all the way to the heart of the financial district; the prophecy will be fulfilled; but only that most worthless of human beings, the pedestrian, can get there that way. All is vanity.

Thus, at least, runs the explanation dictated to me by my Lutheran forbears. Hubris and graspingness must be punished. Midas’s touch is a curse.

And yet nobody else thinks so. Whenever I take a little drive down Geary Street to buy apple juice or condoms, I realize that the street has become more smug than ever. I don’t see any wriggles of shame in its pavement! And so I ask myself: What if the revocation of its bidirectionality were not a chastisement at all, but an
arrangement
in which it connived? What could be more important to such a street than two-way access itself?

The crux: Could Geary Street have consented to its own maiming in order to avoid being defiled by the Tenderloin? O’Farrell Street runs right through that district, and is accordingly hooker-studded, greased by the excrement of lost addicts, stamped on by pimps, leaned on by crack dealers with the serenely downcast faces of Kabuki string-players who sit cross-legged on royal cloth; whereas Geary Street almost escapes from the Tenderloin, or at worst uneasily grazes it, anxious to achieve the fancy brasserie on Geary and Mason, attended by the cylindrical pillar which showcases a smallbreasted young blonde whose face and crotch are supposed to sell bluejeans. This is the kind of prostitution which Geary Street prefers. Just as it converts emeralds to broccoli, so, too, dimly seeking to emulate the Orthodox saints whose paths it crossed back on Twenty-Sixth Avenue, it slimes reality over with its native sea-fog, until all relations between human beings have been blurred into orthodox respectability.

•

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.

 

I C
ORINTHIANS
13.1

•

Sacramento is River City, they say, out of logic as long and gentle as the sweep of the American River. What they are actually doing (and by “they” I mean the Chamber of Commerce) is casting about for a slogan to make Sacramento’s ghastly conformity seem somehow
different—
to them it wouldn’t matter whether Sacramento were Mountain City, Ocean City, Oil City, Balloon City, Army City, Love City, Emerald City, or the veriest necropolis—the gimmick’s the thing, good citizens! —But I’m not being fair. To impute to my City Fathers this much cynicism is necessarily to suppose them capable of seeing through their own inventions, and I have no reason to think that these warm-hearted merchants didn’t look around them most pridefully once they’d transformed Sacramento into River City, that they didn’t say: By golly! What a beautiful pair of rivers we have here! —even the ones whose bid for necropolisdom had been downvoted, buried in the graveyard of uncommercial ideas. And they’d have meant it; I’d stake my last share of AllCo shopping mall stock! If I were only a higher being, I’d be watching them on television, applauding their sincerity. At least I can do that much for John. Miss Deborah Treisman, who allowed some pages of this novel in
Grand Street,
and rejected others from
The New Yorker,
asserted that John was a mere caricature, like the so-called “postcard view” from Russian Hill of pale buildings and accidental trees clothing the steep, fog-colored slopes of the city. Deborah, I’m absent-minded, I admit; I make mistakes. What if, resting jovially upon my labors, like the capitalist compradores who now sit on the deck of the Virgin Sturgeon restaurant, toasting their newborn River City, what if I’d forgotten to bring
anybody
to life? The Queen’s but a figment, mouthpiece of my pompous symbology, her whores only grimy cardboard props dripping with the semen of the vulgar; Irene similarly assumes a merely erotic aspect; Henry Tyler remains limited to being Henry Tyler, which is to say, a grey nothingness. But
John,
now—oh, but
John!
How can he be a caricature, when I can’t get rid of him?

A masculine Christian name, that of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist,
explains my Oxford English Dictionary;
hence, from early ME. times one of the commonest in England. Also used as a representative proper name for a footman, butler, waiter, messenger, or the like.
John’s also a
priest
; he’s
John-a-dogs
the dog-whipper (a very unlikely occupation for
this
John, who loves Mugsy); he’s
John-of-all-trades
, which might well be true; in my slang dictionary he’s a
dried fish
and a
policeman
; on the San Francisco streets he’s a
customer of prostitutes
. John, in short, is Everyman. Deny him life, and we’d be compelled by all statutes of consistency to reduce the Evangelist first to torpor, then to the veriest non-existence.

John himself, I am sure, would plead the real and essential nature of his own being, without disfiguring himself with the least tic or twitch of affectation. And whatever he says, he means. In a word, John was born with the gift of
sincerity.

Thus the conception of River City, hanging in the air like a rainbow mist, engaged John’s sincerity. Our Sacramento boy had swum, waded, waterski’d, rafted, fished, and frogged all around town. He believed in the riverine nature of his home town and even thought he understood it. John daydreamed less than most, but sometimes when he was tired or when Mr. Singer exasperated him, he let his mind rise higher than the Transamerica Pyramid, then higher still, the fish-blue fog of San Francisco gradually getting as white as the paint on the fuselage of a brand-new airplane, then blue beyond the clouds’ white fur, and even before Captain John has activated the
FASTEN SEATBELTS
sign the eyes of lordly passengers already begin to be beguiled by farmland checkerboards—surprising how many farms are still left, squatting on their squares of green and brown! Now to the south one can see the wide silver shining of the wet Delta. In spring the fields are so lushly green as to approach turquoise. Summer quickly comes to blast them. —Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing, please raise your innermost barriers and insure that your souls are securely stowed beneath your feet and that your mindlessness is in
full, upright, LOCKED position;
welcome to Sacramento, where, low to the ground, it’s all so sad and dull.

But to John it was not dull, and he refused to believe in the sadness.

Maybe it wasn’t sad. John’s Sacramento nostalgia proceeded with the abnormal smoothness of the riverbank’s curve—so many rivers! Or were they just a couple of rivers doubling? Amidst bright fields those darkly tree-lined, dishwater-colored rivers offered strange light. To Henry Tyler, needless to say, the rivers meant less than those river-trees, which resembled the hair on the Queen’s armpits.