THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 31
Middle School, a kid who’d “had trou-
ble fitting in,” as the platitudes tell us and
the record confirms. He was a nerd, he
was New Wave, he tried to be a skater, a
peace punk, a skinhead, and eventually
he went on “Geraldo” wearing a tie, talking
Aryan pride. Before all that, he was a kid
who invited us to his apartment to drink
his dad’s liquor. People started vandaliz-
ing the place, for kicks. Someone lit the
living-room curtains on fire.
T
ouch Me Hooker, the band my
neighbor on Haight Street was in,
included a guy I grew up with, Tony
Guerrero. He and his brother Tommy
lived around the corner from me in the
Sunset. My brother skateboarded with
them, was part of their crew until he
broke his femur bombing the Ninth Av-
enue hill. Later, Tommy went pro. When
we were kids, Tommy and Tony started
a punk band called Free Beer: add that
to a gig flyer and you’ll get a crowd.
When I see people waxing romantic
about the golden days of skateboarding,
I am ambivalent. Caught up in the ug-
lier parts. I think of people who were
widely considered jackasses and who died
in stupid ways suddenly being declared
“legends.” I can’t let go of the bad mem-
ories. The constant belittling of us girls.
The slurs and disrespect, even though we
were their friends and part of their cir-
cle. Can’t let it go, and yet those people,
that circle, come first for me, in a cosmic
order, on account of what we share.
As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe
that’s why I was so desperate to escape
San Francisco, by which I mean desper-
ate to leave a specific world inside that
city, one I suspected I was too good for
and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I
had models that many of my friends did
not have: educated parents who made
me aware of, hungry for, the bigger world.
But another part of my parents’ influence
was the bohemian idea that real mean-
ing lay with the most brightly alive peo-
ple, those who were free to wreck them-
selves. Not free in that way, I was the
mind always at some remove: watching
myself and other people, absorbing the
events of their lives and mine. To be hard
is to let things roll off you, to live in the
present, not to dwell or worry. And even
though I stayed out late, was commit-
ted to the end, some part of me had left
early. To become a writer is to have left
early no matter what time you got home.
And then I left for good, left San Fran-
cisco. My friends all stayed. But the place
still defined me, as it has them.
Forty-three was our magic number,
in the way someone’s might be seven or
thirteen. I see the number forty-three
everywhere and remember that I’m in a
cult for life, as a girl from the Sunset. I
scan Facebook for the Sunset Irish boys,
known for violence and beauty and scan-
dal. They are posed “peckerwood style”
in Kangol caps and wifebeaters in front
of Harleys and custom cars. Many have
been forced out of the city. They live in
Rohnert Park or Santa Rosa or Stock-
ton. But they have SF tattoos. Niners
tattoos. Sunset tattoos. An image of the
Cliff House with the foaming waves
below, rolling into Kelly’s Cove.S
ometimes I am boggled by the gal-
lery of souls I’ve known. By the lore.
The wild history, unsung. People crowd
in and talk to me in dreams. People who
died or disappeared or whose connec-
tion to my own life makes no logical
sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a
past that seeps and stains instead of fad-
ing. The first time I took Ambien, a
drug that makes some people sleep-fix
sandwiches and sleepwalk on broken
glass, I felt as if everyone I’d ever known
were gathered around, not unpleasantly.
It was a party and had a warm reunion
feel to it. We were all there.
But sometimes the million stories
I’ve got and the million people I’veknown pelt the roof of my internal world
like a hailstorm.
The Rendezvous, where Pearl Har-
bor performed in her white stockings
and her starched nurse’s hat, was down the
street from the hotel where R. Crumb’s
brother Max lived. We knew Max be-
cause he sat out on the sidewalk all day
bumming change and performing his
lost mind for sidewalk traffic. We didn’t
know he was R. Crumb’s brother. Weknew that only after the movie “Crumb”
came out. I’m not sure if I’ll ever watch
that movie again. Too sad.
Harley from the Cro-Mags is a fixed
memory from Berkeley, but whatever he
wanted never registered. Maybe he just
wanted to sell me vegetarian cookbooks.
This was a few years after he almost held
up the artist Richard Prince, who lived
in Harley’s East Village building. Rich-
ard said, “Hey, pal, I’m your neighbor.
Rob someone else.” (Harley denies that
this happened.)
Richard Prince got his start at the
same gallery where Alex Brown showed
his work, Feature. There was another
artist at Feature who supposedly painted
on sleeping bags once upon a time. I ac-
tually never saw the Sleeping Bag Paint-
ings. I heard about them and that was
enough. There’d be a moment in a late-
night conversation when someone would
inevitably mention them. We’d all nod.
“Yeah, the Sleeping Bag Paintings.” Rob-
ert Rauschenberg made a painting on a
quilted blanket. That’s pretty close and
way earlier: 1955. The blanket belonged
to Dorothea Rockburne. I guess he bor-
rowed it. A quilt is more traditional and
American, while sleeping bags are for
hippies, for transients with no respect.
I thought, as I wrote the previous
paragraph, that I could be making this
stuff up, that no one had painted on
sleeping bags, the fabric was too slip-
pery. But last night I ran into the guy
who had. I hadn’t seen him in twenty
years. He confirmed. Not just the paint-
ings but himself and also me. We exist.T
he things I’ve seen and the people
I’ve known: maybe it just can’t mat-
ter to you. That’s what Jimmy Stewart
says to Kim Novak in “Vertigo.” He
wants Novak’s character, Judy, to wear
her hair like the fictitious and unreach-
able Madeleine did. He wants Judy to
be a Pacific Heights class act and not a
downtown department-store tramp.
“Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.”
Outrageous. He’s talking about a wom-
an’s own hair. Of course it matters to her.
I’m talking about my own life. Which
not only can’t matter to you—it might
bore you.
So: Get your own gig. Make your
litany, as I have just done. Keep your
tally. Mind your dead, and your living,
and you can bore me.