Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Past Courtland I went and past Locke, a Chinese hamlet of the Gold Rush that brought back memories. There, many moons ago, a friend had taught me to catch crawfish by baiting a trap with dog food. The mud bugs foolishly crawled in to dine on MPS chunks and later we dined on them, a bounty unsuspected, soaking the crawfish in milk overnight and boiling them in a big kettle with bay leaves, salt, peppercorns, and lemon slices.

  Lunch at Williams’s Big Horn in Rio Vista, maybe the most curious restaurant in the state. It was part short-order grill and part Museum of Natural History. Old man Williams, long deceased, was a big-game hunter who had stalked trophy game across Africa, one step ahead of Ernest Hemingway, killing many species of animal now endangered or extinct. Their taxidermied heads and carcasses were mounted on the Big Horn’s wall, so that you sometimes locked eyes with a dik-dik or a gazelle while you were chewing on your burger—a disconcerting moment, at best.

  To the east of Rio Vista stretched the cornfields of Brannan and Bouldin islands. Here the San Joaquin River merged with the Sacramento and became a single, mighty stream that gradually widened into Grizzly, San Pablo, and San Francisco bays. The open land was disappearing, swallowed by lookalike suburbs, Antioch, Pittsburgh, Concord, and Walnut Creek, and soon there was nothing at all to see but houses—big houses, small houses, crummy houses, and terrific houses, houses fully paid for and houses mortgaged to within an inch of their lives.

  Houses everywhere.

  CHAPTER 11

  MY OWN HOUSE in San Francisco, a Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1913, was the first we’d ever owned. It stood on one of the steepest hills in the city. At the hilltop, there was a warning sign that showed a big semitruck going down our street at a frightening angle. Next to the truck was the word Hill, beneath which some wit had scribbled “No shit.”

  It was the house’s precarious position that had made it cheap enough for us to buy in 1982—although, in California real estate circles, “cheap” is a relative term.

  Waking early that first morning at home, unable to stop the forward motion of the road, I left my wife in bed and went out for coffee. A contingent of elderly regulars was already making the rounds. They were familiar faces to me, old-timers in Noe Valley, our neighborhood. They’d seen it go from a blue-collar district to a gentrifying enclave of younger homeowners and had survived the changeover from American cheese and salami to goat cheese and andouille sausage.

  Through a Mediterranean haze, I looked downhill to the shimmery blue of San Francisco Bay. The city could be achingly beautiful on the cusp of summer, its pastel colors ideally wedded to the season. William Brewer had mistrusted the mild weather on his initial visit to San Francisco in June of 1861. He found the climate “healthy, very healthy, lovely” but also monotonous, a drift of feathery days that undermined the work ethic and induced a soporific laziness.

  To Brewer, a Yankee raised on Puritan values, San Francisco seemed to pose a moral threat. He regarded it as a dangerous place where delicious but unconscionable things might occur. From the balmy air, he took a troubling hint that the afterlife might not be any more rewarding than the life he was currently leading.

  Had Brewer stayed for another month, he would have felt differently, I believed. By mid-July, winds from the northwest would be pushing the punishing heat of the Central Valley toward the coast, where the warm air would collide with ocean vapors, sucking the cool moisture from them and creating the city’s trademark fog. Summer in the city could be a mockery, really. I had once worn a pea coat to a barbecue on the Fourth of July.

  The miracle mile in Noe Valley was Twenty-fourth Street, a shopping strip both utilitarian and frivolous. Most stores were not open yet, but some workers were unloading crates of organic produce from a panel truck parked by Real Foods. They were the star actors in a cosmic California vegetable pageant that played daily at trendy groceries in the city, and they had costumed themselves accordingly in earrings, shredded Levis, and pirate bandannas—an outlaw band in revolt against iceberg lettuce.

  Some San Franciscans felt so virtuous in the presence of tofu, kelp, and unsprayed guavas that the ambience in Real Foods could be weirdly precious and cultlike. On occasion, I had fantasies about starting a Fake Foods nearby, where the carrots would be irradiated and the cook would spit into the soup, but much more often I quietly joined my fellow effetes in paying top dollar for tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes. In my lifetime, the genuine had become a costly item.

  A young Japanese man came dancing down Twenty-fourth Street in the blossoming light. He was crew-cut and had on a bop suit with a little plastic Ornette Coleman saxophone dangling from a cord around his neck. He was ready to break into some spacey jazz licks at any minute, courting inspiration as he passed store windows that displayed such esoterica as Iranian caviar, strings for steel guitars, and ponchos from Argentina.

  The sight of him was refreshing after my journey to the hinterlands. He was part of what gave San Francisco its unique character. Whether you liked it or not, anything at all could come at you from around a corner. Many Californians didn’t like it and projected their fears onto the city. It posed a moral threat to them, as it had done to Brewer. They rejected its liberal attitude, its tolerance, its chaos, and the wild diversity of its population.

  All the wishes and the emotions that were secret, hidden, repressed, or quashed in such places as Termo or Yolo or even Sacramento were freely available, even in Noe Valley. Having been away, I recognized again what an island San Francisco was, adrift in the great sea of California. Just as I had been drawn to it while I was groping toward a dimly glimpsed future, so, too, did others flock to it for refuge and companionship.

  The gay teenager from Nubeiber, the Hupa devoted to film noir, the woman in Fort Bragg wanting to master Indonesian cookery, they cycled through our hub in a dauntless effort to become themselves. The city was willing to take in every misfit Californian, as well as misfits from elsewhere—the wounded, the defrocked, the intellectually adventurous, and the sexually prurient—and it bound them together into a community that somehow managed to work. That was its genius and its salvation.

  On Twenty-fourth Street, I came to an upscale coffee store and stopped for a cappuccino. The owners had put a bench out front, where you could sit in the sunshine and let your mind wander. The bench had never been crowded, but something had happened during my absence—it had been discovered, and every seat was taken. Customers were leaning against cars, too, and colonizing the front steps of an apartment building, propping up an entire coffee-drinking scene.

  What had once been singular was now plural. The experience of bench sitting as it used to be, before anyone knew about the bench, could not be conveyed to the new arrivals, who probably held a misguided belief that they were bench sitting, even though many of them were not technically anywhere close to the bench!

  As I waited in line behind a turbaned man in Birkenstocks, and smelled the rich coffee aroma, I thought to myself, Here’s the dilemma of California in embryo.

  SAN FRANCISCO WAS YERBA BUENA FIRST, a village on the bay at Yerba Buena Cove, where wild mint, the “good herb,” could be harvested.

  The village had fewer than forty residents as late as 1846, but it grew quickly after that into a densely populated city complete with a razzle-dazzle cast of international characters such as the Sydney Ducks, a ready-made criminal class exported from the penal colonies of Australia. Eventually, it would spread itself over forty-three hills and forty-four square miles to become one of the most elegantly situated cities on earth.

  From its infancy, San Francisco was prone to disasters and had a tendency to burn. Arsonists weren’t capable of resisting the thrill of torching its redwood buildings. Six major fires roared through the business district between 1849 and 1851, culminating in the Great Fire of May third, whose dimensions were spectacular enough to merit a Currier & Ives lithograph that showed landmarks like the Apollo Saloon going up in flames.

  Saloons were an integral pa
rt of life in the city. It was a brawling town that also offered gambling houses, bordellos, opium dens, and bull-and-bear fights. The streets sometimes had the raucous energy of a polyglot fraternity party gone amok, but you could escape from the riffraff by skipping into a hotel and enjoying a civilized, first-rate meal of French, German, Italian, or Chinese cuisine.

  San Francisco after dark was not for the timid. Questionable cats such as Billy Holung prowled the alleys of Chinatown, while the Sydney Ducks committed mayhem on the main boulevards. A vigilante group, the Hounds, had assigned themselves the task of routing the Ducks, but they often drank too much, forgot their mission, and instead beat up poor, shanty-dwelling miners from Peru and Chile.

  Throughout the 1850s, Gold Rush fortunes were made in San Francisco on the sale of mining supplies and general merchandise and by providing transportation to the foothills. People struck it rich, too, while practicing the budding art of real estate piracy. On the western frontier, pioneers had simply laid claim to acreage, but land was at a premium in a compact city, and the selling of “town lots” became the local equivalent of three-card monte.

  Documents pertaining to title were scarce, so a fast-talker such as Sam Brannan could grab two hundred lots just by vowing that John Sutter had deeded them to him—Sutter, lost among the Moravians, had no way to disagree. The most heinous realtors sold lots on a landfill of garbage, junked furniture, sand, whiskey bottles, and the timbers of sunken ships. The lots were destined to sink into the ooze.

  Shipping was among the chief industries in early San Francisco. There was a large fleet of fishing boats, as well, and a prosperous construction trade. Jobs could also be had at the sugar refineries where California sugar beets and Hawaiian sugarcane were processed. The patriarch of sugar, Claus Spreckels, a Hanoverian German, earned so much money that he formed his own railroad to challenge the Central and Southern Pacific lines of the so-called Big Four—Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford.

  These instant fortunes demanded fancy flourishes. Mansions went up on Nob Hill—nob was a contraction of nabob. The rich rode to and from their palatial homes on the newfangled cable cars that made hilltop living possible. The mansions had gas lights, crystal chandeliers, and fourteen-foot-high ceilings. Parisian chefs turned out vol-au-vents and elaborate gâteaux.

  In formal salons, a veneer of social pretension evolved to the unlikely accompaniment of opera music. The bawdy tunes of the mining camps were banished, but Lola Montez, a former mistress of Ludwig of Bavaria, attracted a fashionably mixed crowd whenever she did her Spider Dance, slapping at the make-believe insects whose bites caused her to shed nearly all her clothes.

  An earthquake burst the pretty bubble. On April 18, 1906, at 5:13 A.M., a sudden shift in the tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault almost destroyed San Francisco.

  The Costanoan Indians had spoken of earthquakes in their legends, but few San Franciscans understood that they were living on a geological eggshell. Fewer still were ready for the sight of their streets buckling and caving in. Electrical wires tore loose and threw sparks, gas mains shattered, and the city burned for three days. So many looters were out that the U.S. Army had to be summoned. When the smoke cleared, about five hundred people were dead and about 28,000 buildings had crumbled. The estimated damages ran to more than $400 million.

  San Francisco did not regain its health until the 1930s. It was a solid union town by then, with a lively port, ample hydroelectric power, and a skilled workforce. A. P. Giannini’s Bank of America had the courage to fund such massive construction projects as the two trans-bay bridges, the Oakland-Bay (1936) and the Golden Gate (1937).

  The federal government, in the throes of an arms buildup, looked to the city’s assets and handed several defense-industry plants to Bay Area concerns, encouraging a new wave of migration to the coast. During World War II, shipyards that had long been dormant started operating around the clock and sometimes turned out a finished ship in less than a week. As a consequence, San Francisco’s population boomed to a record high of 827,000 in the 1940s.

  The war had a similar effect on other parts of the state. About 2 million people came to California to work in the defense industry between 1940 and 1945. More than a million soldiers passed through on their way to the Pacific theater, taking with them indelible memories of sunshine and palm trees.

  In many respects, World War II affected San Francisco as profoundly as the Gold Rush. So many Americans set foot in California for the first time that the state lost its air of mystery and became connected to the rest of the country in a new and different way. Growth and change on a previously unknown scale lay ahead, and there was nothing that San Franciscans, bench-sitters in Eden, could do to stop it.

  HOW STRANGE IT FELT to be home again in San Francisco, slipping briefly back into my real life. I wrestled against the fit of it, craving the freedom and the stimulation of the road. It soon became clear to me that being away had not helped my marriage—a naïve hope, at best. There was more distance than ever between us, and no miracle cure or deus ex machina was going to make it disappear.

  Evenings were the most difficult time. My wife would return from her job as a social worker, and we would have a drink or two and eat a pleasant enough dinner before dispersing to sit by ourselves in separate rooms. Neither of us could face the gap that was growing between us—it was something I had no experience of, this odd sense of a particular kind of love, the one that sustains a marriage, slowly vanishing while another, more general love remains.

  We didn’t quarrel much, maybe because we both knew I’d be leaving again in a few days. When we did argue, our house was often the focus. However unfairly, it had become the repository for all my griefs. Originally, it had been built as a summer cottage for an affluent family who lived in an even foggier neighborhood closer to the ocean. Its east-facing windows had granted them a fine view of San Francisco Bay, but now we looked out on a wall of apartments ten feet away.

  The house was lightless, claustrophobic, and noisy, I complained, ignoring the high ceilings and the warm hardwood floors. It lacked privacy and needed repairs that we couldn’t afford, I continued, without ever mentioning the fireplace in the living room or the backyard garden and deck. Most of all, I railed about what it cost us every month. The same amount of money could buy us a spacious ranch on a trout stream in Wyoming!

  I felt the way that Nate George felt up in Napa, as though I’d been robbed of the choicest sections of my city and exiled to Noe Valley, my own personal Angwin, a prisoner in California.

  My wife was not unsympathetic, but she had no intention of giving in to my restlessness or my whim. Quite sensibly, she had put down roots. She had responsibilities at work and a social circle that she treasured. In sum, she had a life of her own, one that seemed to be at odds with my life after so many years together.

  In the ideal world, where human beings are wise and good, we would have solved our problems in an instant, but we were mortal and sat instead in our separate rooms, in silence and in pain. The troubles were not as simple as I describe them—they never are—but the house did turn into a metaphor for them, and foolishly I let myself be locked inside it, somebody who’d lost the key to a vital relationship and couldn’t make it whole again.

  WHERE HAD MY LOST CITY GONE, that old San Francisco of light and magic? I went searching for it, kicking over the traces of the past. On Haight Street now, everybody was twenty-two years old and dressed in black clothes that were torn or slashed as if by a razor blade. Their hair came in many intriguing colors—chartreuse, puce, and shocking pink—and their bodies were often pierced or embellished.

  Among the faithful and the posers, I saw gaggles of teenagers from the suburbs who were determined to go precisely where their parents had cautioned them not to go. They were easy prey for the hardcore cases peddling loose joints and more elaborate drugs, mostly ragged men in their thirties and forties who had matted hair and were red-faced and missing te
eth. The sight of them brought back memories of Haight-Ashbury’s decline in the 1970s, when heroin and general bad vibes dealt a final knockout blow to peace, love, and understanding.

  On Cole Street, my first apartment: a boxy building with six units and curb appeal, where I slept on a mattress on the floor. The street was nothing then—a couple of Palestinian grocers, a hardware store, and two bars, one for lesbians and one for gay men. I tried hanging out instead at the Kezar Club nearby, but somebody always wanted to pop me one on account of my abundant hair or my ignorance about football.

  Stanyan Street was next: a seven-room railroad flat I shared with a roommate, who was a book salesman from Texas. He wasn’t a hippie, exactly. He had a real bed, not just a mattress, and piloted an electric-blue Porsche and seduced more women in his end of the flat than I could count on all my fingers and toes. Secretaries, artists, wandering matrons, they hiked up a tunnel of forty-odd steps and gladly surrendered to his charms, while I sat reading the books that he sold.

  On the floor beneath us, lonely men who were drying out or failing to dry out rented single rooms. They were mournful and without prospects. Divorced guys, I’d think. I was young and arrogant, and I knew almost nothing about life.

  From the roof of our building, we could watch the forty-niners play at Kezar Stadium. “Tar Beach,” we called the roof, dragging up chairs to bask in the sun. Sometimes the roller-derby crowd piled into the adjacent Kezar Pavilion for an evening match, eager for a fix of whiplash violence, and we heard screams and bottles breaking long into the night.

  Our true paradise in the Haight was on Belvedere Street. An associate of the Black Panthers, who was desperate for tenants, leased us his home for a year, so that he, a writer, could go abroad to research a book. What a sweet man he was! He even helped us move in, carting our ratty belongings on his shoulders and probably earning himself a warning from the Landlords’ Guild. Then he was off to Germany and Algiers, trusting us with a house that was bigger, better, and grander than any I’d ever occupied before.