on the sidewalk, near the valet-parking stand, where swift, uniformed boy-men clutched car keys and kept away the junkies. Not long ago, this place held a secondhand furniture store and a women’s community meeting space.
“Not much antisocial behavior going on there,” I sniffed.
Anton just shrugged. “You think this place is changing because there’s valet parking on the block,” he said. “But I thought it was changing when you showed up.”
I could still taste Anton’s pot on my tongue as I made my way home, could still hear his voice in my head. Perspective is everything: The way a place is when you arrive is the way you want it to stay, the way you believe it’s always been. Anything new that comes along you see as alarming. It’s hard to remember that you’re just a visitor, too. It’s hard not to be bitter.
Stoned and hopeful, I put in a call to Brady. “I think I have an idea for a project,” I told him.
“Sweet,” he replied.
I knew Brady Liu from KQED, where he worked as an audio engineer. Years ago, when I started producing local programming for the station, Brady edited my segments; we went on to create City Snapshot together. In that stressful, light-deprived, budget-crunched environment, Brady was my better half, the only person I ever wanted to spend time with outside the job. We would get high in the alley after work and take long, detouring bike rides home, or go to indie-rock shows and drink beer and talk politics. We were unlikely friends in some ways: he was straight, outdoorsy, half Chinese and all Californian, the first person I befriended who’d been born and raised entirely in the Golden State. Words and phrases exotically dude-ish to me, like right on and rad and sweet (pronounced sah-wheat) fell naturally from his lips; he took it for granted that winters were for snowboarding and summers for backpacking, and of course you were a vegetarian and composted your organic peels. But under the mellow exterior, he was a true neurotic. He suffered greatly, my boy Brady, because he couldn’t, on one hand, live up to the ideals passed on by his (white) Buddhist-feminist-anticapitalist mom, who worked at a nonprofit in Berkeley; and, on the other, he didn’t have enough ambition to please his father, a gruff, task-oriented chemist with a long list of professional accomplishments for whom Brady’s decision to spend years in public radio was a waste of his talent. In the last conversation I’d had with Brady, he spent far too much time agonizing over whether shifting his voter registration to the Green Party was a valiant or a foolish course of action. “I want to vote my conscience,” he’d said. “But on the other hand, if I vote Democrat, I’ll at least cancel out my father’s vote for the Republicans.” It was on the subject of fathers that Brady and I had the most in common.
Which is why I was so surprised to find him lukewarm about my idea to build some kind of report around my father’s secret year in San Francisco. “So, like a personal story? Like a father-son thing?” he asked me on the phone that night. “Because, no offense, dude, but you’ve got to have a real angle for something like that to work.”
“That’s where the beatnik thing comes in. How he was part of this wave of people who came to SF in the late fifties.”
“Right on,” he said, then added, “though that’s also pretty familiar turf.”
“Yeah, of course, sure,” I said quickly. “You’re right. I’m still looking for the angle.” It had been a while since I’d floated a creative idea to Brady, or to anyone, for that matter, and I was breaking rule number one: Know your story before you pitch it.
“You might just want to give this some time,” he said. “Let the dust settle.”
“What dust?”
“Um, your dad dying? You might be, you know, too close to this material?”
I could hear him picking his words carefully. I felt transparent. “No, it’s not like that,” I said. “This has been a long time coming. I already have distance on it.”
“Well, let me know what you come up with. You know I can’t wait to start something up with you again.” Brady and I had always worked together effortlessly, the way automobile drivers merging into a single lane know when to pause and when to proceed, but over the past six months, we’d been on completely different paths. After City Snapshot, Brady, a station employee, jumped right into another show; as a contracted employee, I was let go. We had big hopes for our next collaboration—national hopes, This American Life hopes—once we, once I, figured out what shape this might take. Before we got off the phone, Brady told me how crazy-busy his life was, not just at KQED, and not just because he and Annie were looking for a place to live, but also because of a new side project, working with some guys I’d never heard him mention before, helping them set up a music website. “Streaming audio content. Indie stuff from all over North America. It’s very right now,” he said. “It could be huge.”
That next morning I woke feeling the weight of every bone, zonked-out from smoking too much of my new purchase the night before. Getting myself out of bed took some convincing. The world was expecting exactly nothing from me. I lumbered around my kitchen, spilling a bag of coffee beans on the floor, jarring my elbow on the countertop as I swept up the mess, later knocking my first filled mug across the table. I remembered AJ laughing when I knocked over my oatmeal. I was a one-man danger zone.
My apartment was only four small rooms (one with a couch and desk, one with a bed and dresser, a kitchen with a table, a bathroom with a good-sized tub), but I found endless distractions within these walls—one of my curses as a freelancer. That morning, I watched an hour of housewifey TV. I unpacked the luggage still parked outside my closet. I pruned and repotted houseplants, looking neglected after my time away. I made myself balance my checkbook, the pathetic bottom line reminding me that my last freelance job, producing a few promotional spots for the smaller of San Francisco’s two public radio stations, had ended before Christmas.
So I called Bob Flick. When I was hard up for money (that is, more hard up than usual), I took temporary assignments with a company called New World Transcripts. Bob was the manager there, a gregarious, efficient dork. I liked him, but I hated the work—transcribing videotaped interviews for various market-research firms, listening for hours to earnest consumers trying to put into words exactly what they sought in a cordless phone, a breath mint, a cheese-flavored cracker—but since I typed ninety-five words a minute, it was easy money. Bob said he would send some work my way—a new client who had combined shampoo and conditioner in one bottle. “You rinse out the first application,” Bob explained, “and leave the second one in.” Woo-hoo! Well, it was something to tide me over until my brother-in-law sent that ten-thousand-dollar check my way.
The clock read 11:50 when I finally remembered Colleen. Friday at noon was our standing lunch date. We would meet at Café Frida, in the Mission, where neither the food nor the coffee was especially good, but the boy-watching could be compelling: scrappy, shaggy-haired hipsters wearing tiny, ironic T-shirts, absentmindedly scratching their bellies while reading Noam Chomsky. We’d been meeting like this for over a year, ever since Colleen left her job as a graphic designer for Levi Strauss. These days she worked at a little South of Market shop run by a gay couple who made cheap, outlandish clothes, perfect for drag queens and club kids (and no one else, really). Colleen managed the store and promoted their events, though what she really wanted to do was design her own clothing line. One of the owners had a crystal meth habit and the other was prone to depression—we called them Up and Down—but working for them, she said, was better than answering to a chain of corporate department heads.
I rushed into the café, sweaty from the ride over. She rose to hug me. Her head was wrapped elaborately in a colorful silk scarf that hid her hair and made her features seem larger: her caramel-brown eyes more expressive, her lips wider, her slight overbite more pronounced. She gave me the once-over, taking in my three-day stubble, my ripped sweatshirt, my damp brow. “So you’ve given up hygiene for the new millennium?”
“And you’ve started chemo?”
“Ha ha.” She dropped back down into the chair. “I’m in Hair Hell.”
“Woody said it was very pink.”