26 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
PERSONAL HISTORY
THE HARD CROWD
Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco.
BY RACHEL KUSHNER
“
I
t’s alright, Ma, I’m only bleeding.”
You live your life alone but teth-
ered to the deed of a mother. You live
your life naked to the world and what it
will pile upon you. And, no, you will not
avoid death. You won’t survive it. And
by “you” I mean not just Jesus, who is in-
voked in this Bob Dylan song, whether
intentionally or not, but you as in you,
the person reading this. Someone loves
you. That’s not small. You suffer and she
watches, living or dead. She can’t protect
you, but it’s alright, Ma, I can make it.
Jimmy Carter used a famous line from
the same Dylan song—“he not busy being
born is busy dying”—to make a point
about patriotism: America was busy being
born, Carter said, not busy dying. Italics
mine. This was in his acceptance speech
at the 1976 Democratic National Con-
vention, in Madison Square Garden. I
watched it on television with my grand-
parents, in their bed, as the three of us
ate bowls of ice milk from Carvel, whose
packaging, like everything that year, was
bicentennial-themed, in red, white, and
blue. For Carter, a lifelong Christian,
surely the idea of being born had an un-
dertone of religious conversion, of be-
ing brought closer to God, not just born
but reborn: in a state of constant renewal,
rejuvenation, renovation, change. I liked
Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who wore
denim separates on the campaign trail
and was approved by my anti-establish-
ment family. I was seven and could not
have understood what Carter meant,
what Dylan meant.
You are busy being born for the whole
long ascent of life, and then, after some
apex, you are busy dying—that’s the logic
of the line, as I interpret it. Here, “being
born” is an open and existential cate-
gory: you are gaining experience, living
intensely in the present, before the pe-
riod of life when you are finished with
the new. This “dying” doesn’t have to be
negative. It, too, is an open and existen-
tial category of being: the age when the
bulk of your experience, the succession of
days lived in the present, is mostly over.
You turn reflective, interior; you exam-
ine and sort and tally. You reach a point
where so much is behind you, but it con-
tinues to exist somewhere, as memory
and absence at once, as images you’ll
never see again. None of it matters; it is
gone. But it all matters; it lingers.
I
’ve been replaying film footage I found
on YouTube that was shot in 1966
or 1967 from a car slowly moving along
Market Street, at night, in downtown
San Francisco, the city where I grew up.
The film begins near Ninth and Mar-
ket and moves northeast through Civic
Center, past multiple bright signs and
theatre marquees against the night sky,
their neon, in pink, red, and warm white,
bleeding into the fog. This view of Mar-
ket is before my time and not quite the
street I recall. It’s fancier, with all this
electric glitz. Neon is a “noble” gas. What-
ever else that means, it fits this eerie film.
Civic Center was where we kids went
looking for trouble. In the daytime, cut-
ting school to flip through poster dis-
plays in head shops, and at night going
to the Strand, a theatre where grownups
shared their Ripple wine and their joints.
This section of Market is the southern
edge of the Tenderloin, where a friend
of mine, older than the rest of us, was
the first to get a job, at age fifteen, work-
ing at a KFC on Eddy Street. Her em-
ployment there seemed impossibly ma-
ture and with it, even if Eddy Street scared
me. As soon as I turned fifteen, I cop-
ied her and got hired at a Baskin-Robbins
on Geary. Spent my after-school days
huffing nitrous for kicks while earning
$2.85 an hour. At sixteen, I graduated
The author (left) and her friend Emily, circa 1983, at a Woolworth’s photo booth. to retail sales at American Rag, a large PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATT DORFMAN / SOURCE: COURTESY THE AUTHOR
