the bar when I got home. I always did.
There was another bar up the street
from the Blue Lamp that had a double
bed in the back where a man lay all day,
as if it were his hospice. You’d be play-
ing pool and drinking with your friends
and there was this man, in bed, behind
a rubber curtain. Even the names of
these establishments, all part of an in-
formal Tenderloin circuit, evoke for me
that half-lit world: Cinnabar, the Drift-
wood, Jonell’s. I remember a man, young-
ish and well dressed, who would come
into the Blue Lamp and act crazy on
my shifts. Once, he came in threaten-
ing to kill himself. I said, “Go ahead,
but not in here.” Did I really say that?
I can’t remember what I said.
There was a girl who started cocktail-
waitressing at the Blue Lamp on busy
nights when we had live bands. She told
me that her name was Johnny but also
that it wasn’t her real name. She was a
recovering drug addict who missed her-
oin so much she started using it again
in the months that she worked at the
Blue Lamp. She bought a rock from one
of the Sunday blues jammers and that
was literally what he sold her. A pebble.
He ripped her off, and why not. If Johnny
is still alive, which may not be the case,
do I really want to know the long and
likely typical story of her recovery and
humility and day-to-day hopes, very
small hopes that, for her, are everything?
The glamour of death, or the banality
of survival: which is it going to be?
My friend Sandy, whose real name I
have redacted from this story, came into
the Blue Lamp asking me to hawk her
engagement ring for her. We had grown
up together and she’d even lived with my
family for a while. My parents loved
Sandy and love her still. They did their
best. By the time she was looking to sell
her ring, she had been living a hard life
in the Tenderloin for a decade, working
as a prostitute, and had become engaged
to one of her johns. Who knows what
happened to him. Maybe he bought a
wife somewhere else.
I didn’t pawn Sandy’s ring. I can’t re-
member why. I did a lot of other things
for Sandy. Tried to keep her safe. Took
my down comforter to her flophouse in
Polk Gulch, the very blanket she’d slept
under when she shared my room in ju-
nior high. Kept a box of baking soda in
a kitchen cabinet of every house I lived
in, so that she could cook her drugs. She
had a dealer who liked to eat cocaine
instead of smoke it or shoot it. He would
slice pieces off a large rock and nibble
on them, like powdery peanut brittle.
Sandy giggled about this idiosyncrasy
as if it were cute. Anything she described
became charming instead of horrible.
That was her gift. She was blond and
blue-eyed and too pretty for makeup,
other than a little pot of opalescent gloss
that she kept in her jacket pocket and
which gave her lips a fuchsia sheen. She’d
say to my parents in her sweet singsong,
“Hi, Peter! Hi, Pinky!” Even when my
dad went to visit her in jail. Hi, Peter!
I don’t know where Sandy is now.
Under the radar. I’ve Googled. It’s all
court records. Bench warrants, failures
to appear. I wrote to an ex-husband of
hers through Facebook. He’s brought
up their children by himself. No re-
sponse. I don’t blame him. Probably he
just wants a normal life.I
never wrote about most of the peo-
ple from the Blue Lamp. The bar is
gone. The main characters have died.
Perhaps I feared that if I transformed
them into fiction I’d lose my grasp on
the real place, the evidence of which has
evaporated. Or perhaps a person can
write about things only when she is no
longer the person who experienced them,and that transition is not yet complete.
In this sense, a conversion narrative is
built into every autobiography: the writer
purports to be the one who remembers,
who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer
is no longer that person. In writing things
down, she is reborn. And yet still defined
by the actions she took, even if she now
distances herself from them. In all a writ-
er’s supposed self-exposure, her claim to
authentic experience, the thing she leaves
out is the galling idea that her life might
become a subject put to paper. Might
fill the pages of a book.
When I got my job at the Blue Lamp,
I was living on the corner of Haight and
Ashbury. Oliver Stone was making a
movie about the Doors and attempting
to reconstitute the Summer of Love for
his film shoot. I disliked hippies and didn’t
even want to see fake ones, in costume.
I suspect now that this animosity may
have been partly due to the outsized in-
fluence of my parents’ beatnik culture and
their investment in jazz, in Blackness, in
vernacular American forms as the true
elevated art, even as my early childhood,
in Eugene, Oregon, was loaded with hip-
pies. By my twenties, they had begun to
seem like an ahistorical performance:
middle-class white kids who had stripped
down to Jesus-like austerity, a penance I
considered indulgent and lame.
Oliver Stone filmed on our corner,“If you don’t have any small children, you can substitute mushrooms.”