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vintage-clothing store on Bush Street
that later, suspiciously, burned down.
Business was slow. I straightened racks
of dead men’s gabardine, slacks and jack-
ets that were shiny with wear, and joked
around with my co-worker Alvin Gibbs,
a bass player from a semi-famous punk
band, the UK Subs. On my break, I wan-
dered Polk Street, past the rent boys who
came and went from the infamous Le-
land Hotel. It, too, later burned.
The Baskin-Robbins where I worked
is gone. You might think personal mem-
ories can’t be stored in the generic fea-
tures of a global franchise, and so what
does it matter. I also figured as much,
until my mother talked me into having
breakfast at an IHOP where I’d been a
waitress, for the purpose of a trip down
memory lane. “Why bother?” I’d said to
her. “Every IHOP is identical.” I was cer-
tain that nothing of me could linger in
a place of corporate sameness, but she
insisted. We sat down in a booth for
two, and I was plunged into sense mem-
ory. The syrup caddies on each table,
which I’d had to refill and clean after
every shift; the large iced-tea cannis-
ters, sweet and unsweetened; the blue
vinyl of the banquettes; the clatter from
the kitchen, with its rhythmic metal-
on-metal scraping of grease from the
fry surface; the murmur of the TV from
the break room where girls watched
their soaps. A residue was on every-
thing, specific and personal. My mother
sat across from me, watching me reën-
counter myself.
The YouTube footage of Market
Street in 1966 is professional-grade cin-
ematography, perhaps shot to insert in
a dramatic feature. I want to imagine
that it was an outtake from Steve Mc-
Queen’s “Bullitt,” but I have no evidence
except that it’s around the right time.
The camera pauses at an intersection
just beyond a glowing pink arrow point-
ing south. Above this bright arrow is
“Greyhound” in the same bubble-gum
neon, and “BUS” in luminous white.
This is how I know that we are near the
intersection of Seventh and Market.
The Greyhound station was still
there when I moved to San Francisco,
in 1979, at age ten. I don’t remember
the pink neon sign, but the station, now
gone, remains vivid. It had an edge to
it that was starkly different from the
drab, sterile, and foggy Sunset District,
where we lived. I remember a large
poster just inside the entrance that fea-
tured an illustration of a young person
in bell-bottoms, and a phone number:
“Runaways, call for help.” And I can
still summon the rangy feel of the place,
of people who were not arriving or de-
parting but lurking, native inhabitants
of an underground world that flour-
ished inside the bus station.
Next to Greyhound, up a steep stair-
case, was Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor,
where my oldest friend from San Fran-
cisco, Emily, a fellow Sunset girl, got
her first tattoo, when we were sixteen.
This was the eighties, and tattoos were
not conventional and ubiquitous, as they
are now. There were people in the Sun-
set who had them, but they were out-
law people. Like the girl in a house on
Noriega where we hung out when I was
twelve or thirteen, whose tattoo, on the
inside of her thigh, was a cherry on a
stem and, in script, the words “Not no
more.” I remember walking up the steep
steps to Lyle Tuttle’s with Emily, enter-
ing a cramped room where a shirtless
man was leaning on a counter as Tut-
tle worked on his back. “You guys are
drunk,” Tuttle said. “Come back in two
hours.” If anyone cared that Emily was
under eighteen, I have no memory of
it, and neither does she.
Later, I briefly shared a flat on Oak
Street with a tattoo artist named Freddy
Corbin, who was becoming a local ce-
lebrity. Freddy was charming and char-
ismatic, with glowing blue eyes. He and
his tattoo-world friends lived like rock
stars. They were paid in cash. I’d never
seen money like that, casual piles of
hundred-dollar bills lying around. Freddy
drove a black ’66 Malibu with custom
plates. He had a diamond winking from
one of his teeth. Women fawned over
him. Our shared answering machine
was full of messages from girls hoping
Freddy would return their calls, but he
became mostly dedicated to dope, along
with his younger brother, Larry, and a
girl named Noodles, who both lived up-
stairs. Larry and Noodles came down
only once every few days, to answer the
door and receive drugs, then went back
upstairs. Later, I heard they’d both died.
Freddy lived, got clean, is still famous.
The shadow over that Oak Street
house is only one part of why I never
wanted a tattoo. I find extreme stepstoward permanence frightening. I pre-
fer memories that stay fragile, vulnera-
ble to erasure, like the soft feel of the
velvet couches in Freddy’s living room.
Plush, elegant furniture bought by some-
one living a perilous high life.A
fter the light changes on Seventh,
the camera continues down Mar-
ket, passing the Regal, a second-run
movie house showing “The Bellboy,”
starring Jerry Lewis, according to the
marquee. When I knew the Regal, it
was a peepshow; instead of Jerry Lewis,
its marquee featured a revolving “Dou-
ble in the Bubble,” its daily show star-
ring two girls. On the other side of the
street, out of view, is Fascination, a gam-
bling parlor that my friend Sandy and
I went to the year we were in eighth
grade, because Sandy had a crush on
the money changer there. We wasted a
lot of time at Fascination, watching
gaming addicts throw rubber balls up
numbered wooden lanes, smoke curl-
ing from ashtrays next to each station.
It was quiet in there, like a church—
just the sound of rolling rubber balls.
Those hours at Fascination, and many
other corners of my history, made it into
a novel of mine, “The Mars Room,”
after I decided that the real-world places
and people I knew would never be in
books unless I wrote the books. So I
appointed myself the world’s leading
expert on ten square blocks of the Sun-
set District, the north section of the
Great Highway, a stretch of Market, a
few blocks in the Tenderloin.
The camera pans past the Warfield
and, next to it, a theatre called the Crest.
By the time I worked as a bartender at
the Warfield, the Crest had become the
Crazy Horse, a strip joint where a high-
school friend, Jon Hirst, worked the door
in between prison stints. The last time I
ever saw Jon, we were drinking at the
Charleston, around the corner on Sixth
Street. I was with a new boyfriend. Jon
was prison-cut and looking handsome
in white jeans and a black leather jacket.
He was in a nostalgic mood about our
shared youth in the avenues. He leaned
toward me so my boyfriend could not
hear, and said, “If anyone ever fucks with
you, I mean anyone, I will hurt that per-
son.” I hadn’t asked for this service. It
was part of Jon’s tragic chivalry, his re-
active aggression. His prison life continued