Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  The interiors of the buildings were equally primitive. When Captain George Vancouver visited in 1792 on the Discovery, the first non-Spanish ship to enter San Francisco Bay, he was shocked to discover that the commander’s house not only lacked windows but did not even have a floor. He found himself standing on “native soil raised about three feet from its original level, without being boarded, paved, or even reduced to an even surface.” And he noted: “The furniture consisted of a very sparing assortment of the most indispensable articles, of the rudest fashion, and of the meanest kind; and very ill accorded with the ideas we had conceived of the sumptuous manner in which the Spaniards live on this side of the globe.”

  Food was also in short supply, especially in the beginning. The soldiers were dependent on a yearly supply ship from San Blas, about 100 miles north of present-day Puerto Vallarta. After the Presidio was dedicated, it took 15 months for the first ship to arrive with the corn, beans, lentils, chickpeas, lard, brown sugar, and chili peppers that formed the basis of the enlisted men’s mess. A soldier’s typical meals were roast corn or cereal and milk for breakfast; cereal gruel or corn for lunch; and beans, cornmeal gruel, or migas (fried crumbs made of crushed corn) and roasted or stewed meat for dinner. Wine or brandy was not available for the rank and file.

  This tedious and often scanty diet probably did not raise morale, and the sketchy military records show that several men got into trouble for fighting. A more serious problem arose in 1778, when thieves made off with 700 pesos’ worth of supplies—equivalent to the comandante’s salary. A soldier named Marcelo Pinto, another soldier, and two servants were accused and placed on trial at the Presidio. The wheels of justice in Alta California ground slowly: In 1782, four years later, Lieutenant Moraga was still waiting for a verdict. That same year, Pinto escaped but was soon recaptured; after an additional wait of a year and a half, he was sentenced to four years of labor on public works. After he was released, Pinto, who was from Sinaloa and had come with Anza on the California Mayflower expedition in 1776, found other ways to torment his superiors. When a soldier returned from duty one afternoon, he found Pinto hiding under a bed in his quarters, for reasons the man’s wife presumably could explain. The exasperated comandante had to write to the governor to ask what to do with the exploding Pinto.

  The officers at the Presidio were not all models of rectitude and competence, either. After the esteemed Moraga died in 1785, he was succeeded as comandante by one Diego González, who was so given to gambling, insubordination, and smuggling that he was placed under house arrest for three months and finally sent to Sonora. Another worthy leader named Lasso, who was “described by contemporaries as being careless and stupid,” was inexplicably placed in charge of the Presidio’s finances. Lasso proved incapable of roping in his budget, repeatedly losing large sums of money. After being relieved of his duties, he suffered possibly the most draconian wage garnishment of all time: His pay was cut to 25 cents a day for four years while he worked off his debt.

  As a fortress, the Presidio was a joke. The fortress built on the Cantil Blanco in 1793, called the Castillo de San Joaquin, did not have enough cannons to repel even a puny invasion, and the ones it did have were more dangerous to their gunners than to whatever they were aimed at. During the festivities for a saint’s feast day in 1792, a cannon exploded into 10 pieces, some of which flew as far as 125 yards. When the German-Russian navigator Otto von Kotzebue visited in 1824 and fired the customary salute, he claimed that a soldier from the Castillo came aboard to beg for powder so the fort could return the salute.

  If all the underfed, underpaid, illiterate soldiers at the Presidio were doing was playing cards while waiting for the annual supply ship to come in, it might be possible to visualize the outpost as a kind of decrepit Bali Hai, a Catch-22–like hideaway. But as servants of the crown and the church, the soldiers had to do the dirty work of colonial policemen.

  Indians were not required to join the church, but once they were baptized, they were no longer free to leave—a fact few of them understood. Since they were now Christians, the fathers were responsible for their salvation and saw it as their sacred duty to bring them back if they tried to escape and punish them to prevent future escapes. Because the conversion of heathens was the reason they were in California, the Spanish were under pressure to swell the numbers of neophytes by any legal means.

  The Spanish troops also had a more immediate motivation to round up Indians. As archaeologist Barbara Voss notes in The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco, the troops disliked manual labor and had come to rely on Indians to do it for them. Mission head Father Lasuén complained that the soldiers arrested Indians simply to use them as slaves.

  For these reasons, the Spanish troops dealt increasingly harshly with native communities that sheltered fugitives, or that simply refused baptism. After 1800, pursuing runaway Indians became the major activity of the troops at the Presidio of San Francisco. These raids inevitably led the troops to trespass on native lands. When the Indians who possessed these lands fired on the foreigners, rightfully regarding them as invaders, the Spanish troops were considered to be fighting a just war under European law and custom and had the right to punish and capture the Indians at will. Many raids whose ostensible purpose was to capture a handful of huidos—runaways—thus ended up with Spanish troops killing numbers of Indians and capturing others who had never run away.

  In July 1797, for example, soldiers from the Presidio fought with escapees from Mission San Jose and their allies. They captured 83 Christians and nine pagans. As was customary, the women and children were taken to the mission. Four Christian Indians and nine non-Christians were taken to the Presidio; they were sentenced to 2 to 12 months of hard labor in irons, placed on short rations and given 25 to 75 lashes. In October 1804, a punitive expedition was launched against a village refusing conversion. The women and children were turned over to missionaries. Thirty-two men were sentenced to labor at the Presidio at least through 1805.

  Accompanied by numerous Indian auxiliaries, the Spanish troops ranged increasingly far in their quest to bring the savages to heel. By 1793, no native villages remained on the San Francisco peninsula, and virtually the entire Bay Area had been emptied by 1810.

  After Mexican independence, little changed. The new government lacked funds to pay the troops, and the Presidio’s population dwindled through attrition. When Kotzebue made a return visit to it, he said, “Everything was going on in the old, easy, careless way.” By 1835, the comandante, Mariano Vallejo—who went on to become the most famous and influential Californio—decided that the Presidio was so decrepit that it was unsalvageable and relocated his troops to Sonoma. People from the new village of Yerba Buena, a cluster of shanties on the little cove on the sheltered eastern side of the peninsula, removed any useful building materials from the main garrison and the Castillo. In 1839, only three men were still nominally stationed at the Presidio, but they appear to have deserted, leaving it completely unmanned.

  In 1843, a 19-year-old Bostonian named William Thomes recorded his impressions of the fort as his ship entered the bay: “As we drew near the presidio a Mexican flag was run up, in answer to our signal, and then the solitary soldier, who seemed to have charge, thinking that he had done his duty, pulled it down, put it away, lighted a cigarette, and went to sleep for the afternoon.”

  Thus ended the great Spanish imperial adventure that had started three and a half centuries earlier, when Columbus established the first city in the New World in Santo Domingo: a soldier slumbering in a deserted quadrangle, an empty flagpole rising above some decaying walls, the Castillo to the west collapsing slowly into the sea.

  Chapter 15

  The Chronicler

  San Francisco Chronicle Building, Fifth and Mission Streets

  One Saturday afternoon in early 1997, I walked blearily out of my apartment on Nob Hill, chasing some carbonated sugar water after a night that had begun at a South of Market
dive and ended seven hours later in North Beach. The San Francisco Examiner was lying on the doorstep. I glanced at the headline. “Herb Caen Dies,” it read.

  I stared at the paper for a moment. Then I looked slowly at the houses across the street, past the humming murmur of the cable car lines, up through the maze of telephone lines, into the cloud-torn gray sky. For a moment, the city’s heart, too, seemed to have stopped beating. Then it came back to life, and it was changed.

  It was not diminished: It was bigger. It was older, wiser, more haunted by history. It reached further back into the past, a past of neon jazz joints and starlets and big-nosed convertibles, glasses glowing in dark rooms, muscular men unloading cargo on the waterfront, white apartments rising up in the fog. The city had arranged itself around its chronicler, the way the forest rearranges itself around the empty place when one of the big trees falls.

  It had always been his city, it struck me as I walked up Leavenworth Street, but it was only now that I really knew it.

  Herb Caen was two things above all: He was a great newspaperman, and he was a great lover of San Francisco. What made him unique was the way he brought these two things together. He brought a deadline poetry to the life in the streets, the roistering and gossip and tragedy of 700,000 lives. His daily column was the city’s agora, its Roman forum. The scoops, the sparkling one-liners, the praise and derision, and the endless dish he served up brought the city’s people together, if only for 10 minutes over a cup of joe. But Caen was much more than the world’s greatest gossip columnist: He was also a razor-sharp wit, a shrewd commentator on civic and national affairs, and an unabashed fan of his beloved city, whose set pieces celebrating San Francisco were way too good for a guy crashing daily deadlines. Think Walter Winchell crossed with Jon Stewart, with a little Anthony Lewis and Lawrence Durrell thrown in.

  Here’s Caen as three-dot man: “Long Gone: The day Frankie Flier drove his Cadillac into the parking lot at Seventh and Mission and with his lawyer started to cross the street to Federal Court. ‘How long will you be gone?’ the attendant asked after him. ‘About five years,’ answered Frankie, who a few minutes later pleaded guilty to a narcotics charge and was sentenced to—10 years.”

  Caen as fearless commentator: “The purpose of capital punishment [is] to set an Example. And if this is so, why isn’t it done properly? Why isn’t Caryl Chessman gassed in the middle of Union Square at high noon, so that thousands of people (plus millions of TV viewers) can witness the fate of wrongdoers and vow, then and there, never to step outside the law? But no, that would be an indecent spectacle, abhorrent to those who prefer to live by euphemisms. He must be done away with in a gloomy little room surrounded by a protective nest of walls, before the eyes of a few select witnesses—as though the act itself, the final demonstration of the majesty of the law, were some dark and dreadful thing. And a dark and dreadful thing it is.”

  And finally, Caen as bard of the town he found so fairy-tale-like that he christened it “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” (this was back in the innocent 1940s, when “Baghdad” evoked the Arabian Nights, not a war-ravaged monument to American folly): “San Francisco, the city born with the soul of a harridan, is more herself when the street lights flick up on her hills and in her valleys. The night becomes her. Suddenly there are implications of melodrama in the blackness of the Bay, splotched here and there by the amber reflections from the bridges. Sharply, you can hear the sighing of water among the rotting teeth of the piers that bite, like a row of jagged teeth, into the harbor. The cable slots sing more loudly among the quiet streets, and the fog drifts in and out of alleys, turning them into stage sets for a play that needs no actors. Only at night do you seem to get the old feeling—novelist Frank Norris always felt it—that ‘anything can happen in San Francisco.’”

  Caen was a living link to an almost mythical age, the fedora-hat era when a sweaty glamour hovered over the whole sidewalk-pounding enterprise of being a daily man. Writing a daily column is wiltingly hard work, but he did it with a panache and muscular zest that made the macho creed civilized. During my five years at the Chronicle’s great rival, the Examiner, where Caen was lured for a spell in the 1950s before returning to the Chron for good, I would sometimes see him parking his white Jaguar and strolling, with Jeeves-like insouciance, down Fifth Street, homburg jauntily on his head. The lesson of that supreme saunter was simple: You gotta enjoy it, all of it. Just knowing that he was there, pounding away in the same building as me on his old Royal, was as reassuring as a flask in the pocket or money in the bank. In an age when journalism has lost its style, its eccentricity, its balls, Caen was a Stoli-quaffing, nightclub-going, skirt-admiring anchor.

  And then there was his humanity. Caen upheld the great democratic tradition of the American press—one fading as TV anchors and even elite print journalists occupy income brackets and sensibilities far removed from the people they’re writing about. Caen hobnobbed with the wealthy and powerful, he enjoyed the good life, but he always retained a newsman’s humility, a solidarity with the taxi drivers and waitresses and secretaries and dockworkers who made the city work. In a column after Pearl Harbor, he defended Japanese Americans. He stood up for the hippies (while poking fun at their follies). His early opposition to the Vietnam War, his opposition to all forms of bigotry, truly marked him as the apt chronicler for this most liberal of American cities. And he fought hard to save what was unique about San Francisco—opposing the freeways that were strangling it and the high-rises that were destroying its skyline.

  There is something hilarious, and touching, and absolutely right about the fact that one of Caen’s wives named San Francisco as a co-respondent in her divorce suit. She was the one he never left.

  As the years went on, and the city moved further away from the enchanted, sparkling Baghdad-by-the-Bay era that he loved best, his tolerance acquired a pathos, an even greater emotional resonance: You knew that he was not entirely happy with what had happened to his city, but he refused to turn sour and bitter. He kept up with what was going on, could laugh at and appreciate the blue-haired punks on Folsom Street just as 40 years earlier he had laughed at and appreciated the hepcats in North Beach.

  Duke Ellington, I think, once said that he stayed young by playing with young cats. Caen, old drummer that he was, kept swinging until the end. He taught a lot of us ’60s kids who had erroneously thought that we had the market on tolerance—look at us now in our judgments and weep!—what that word really means. He taught us how to grow old.

  Herb Caen said he wanted his gravestone to read “He never missed a deadline.” That is a fine and fitting epitaph for a man who upheld the best traditions of his profession—and had a hell of a good time doing it. But his true memorial is larger.

  It is all around the city, in every corner of this jumbled steep old treasure-hunt village running away from civilization and down to the sea, from the restless wind-blown waves at Ocean Beach to the rotting piers at Red’s Java House, from the filthy numberless byways of Chinatown to the bleached stark vistas on Twin Peaks, from the lights in the big houses on the hills to the music in the little ones in the valleys. It comes alive and will always come alive every time anyone reaches far enough into imagination and tolerance to see the city as he did: whole and alive, intricate and majestic, a place in the heart at continent’s end. As long as people love San Francisco, Herb Caen will live on.

  Thanks, Herb. We’ll see you around town.

  Chapter 16

  The Country in the City

  35 Prospect Street, Bernal Heights

  During three or four months in 1953 and 1954, a group of young Parisians undertook the weirdest series of city walks of all time. These adventurers—Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, and one or two others—wandered around Paris in a calculatedly illogical way, trying to short-circuit their received images of the city. Abandoning rational goals or destinations, they surrendered themselves to the terrain and to whatever adventures befell them. Debord said the purpose of these walks, whi
ch he called dérives, or creative drifts, was to “emotionally disorient” themselves and to “study the terrain.” Chtcheglov wrote that “dériving” was so intense that doing it for a month was “really pushing it” and that the three- or four-month stint was “the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.” The fact that he and his pals were constantly drunk may not have helped. Actually, three or four months may have exceeded the limit—Chtcheglov later went insane.

  Being French, Debord—who is best known as the czar of the avant-garde movement known as Situationism—was required by law and the needs of future academics to claim that these wacked-out walks were part of a new science, which he dubbed “psychogeography.” He defined psycho-geography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” When I first heard about psychogeography, it struck me as one of those Grand Theories that, to quote the philosopher John Searle’s immortal words about Jacques Derrida, “give bullshit a bad name.” But then I realized that when you got rid of the pretentious pseudoscience, the dérive was really not that different from what I was trying to do as I wandered around town. Its ultimate purpose was to rip off the veneer of routine, allowing the city to emerge in all its heartless, infinite splendor.

  I wondered what Debord would have made of San Francisco. For Paris is mind-blowing in a very different way than San Francisco. Paris is drenched in history: The glories and horrors of mankind are memorialized on every corner. The strange juxtapositions revealed by the card shuffling of the dérive are human ones. San Francisco, by contrast, is all about the collision between man and the universe. It is on auto-dérive. Anarchic, blown-out, naked, it shuffles its own crazy deck. To walk its streets is to be constantly hurled into different worlds without even trying. As William Saroyan wrote, “This city has the temperament of genius. It is unpredictable. Any street is liable to leap upwards at any time … It is a city with no rules. Like nature itself it improvises as it goes along.”