Fashion for Writers

If you look closely, you can make out my San Francisco uniform–polka dot dress, grey over-the-knee socks, yellow Hasbeens, my canvas backpack which I dragged across many a Greyhound station floor, and my sunglasses that I sat on twelve times but remained intact. I miss San Francisco a lot. It wonderful to see Meggy and Chris (can you see their pink faces in the above photo? I’m also very interested in this ghost woman in kick-ass bell bottoms and what looks like a gold charmeuse tunic top!)

It was also wonderful (even more wonderful than sneaking into the computer room with my best friend when we were in second grade to play Leisure Suit Larry and pausing the game midway through to look up ‘hooker’ and also ‘rubber’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which elucidated nothing) to hang out Tony, Vauhini, Anthony, Alice, Ryan, Chris (the real), See-Yew, Pearl, Jennifer, Oliver, and my other friends who will probably be embarrassed/annoyed by this shout-out, unless none of my friends read this blog, which would be a good thing (I can get away with more smack talk.)

Before I left, I listened to hip-hop EPs like Soul Clap by Showbiz and A.G. and made collages with my boyfriend. I painted his nails purple.

I took the Greyhound from Iowa City all the way to San Francisco the next day. It took about fifty hours. We stopped at a lot of towns that look like this:

If there’s one word to sum up what a fifty hour Greyhound trip is like, it’s this without the “i”:

The hound:

See what I mean?

I wrote forty pages of notes while on the Greyhound. I felt lucky the whole time because I knew I had chosen to take the Greyhound. I could have easily flown instead. I knew every time we stopped at a McDonald’s that for me it was a rarity to eat so much fast food, and that in my day-to-day life, I’m lucky enough to have access to healthy food and reliable health care, and if I ate, oh let’s say, three McDonald’s breakfasts, and a fried chicken basket from KFC, it’s all right because I’m in good health, and because I can choose to eat differently once I’m off the bus.

Almost everyone on the bus complained at some point. There were about nine hours of delays each way, on one five-hour leg of the trip, the air conditioning broke while we were going through Wyoming and Utah. It was 98 degrees that day, too. I already told you about the schizophrenic boy who had just gotten out of jail and was hovering like a hawk over the man next to him and punching his knees at anyone who looked at him and eventually started to bully a seventy-year-old woman, which prompted the man next to me to stand up heroically and say, ‘C’mon now baby, you don’t do that to family,’ which prompted the man in front of me to act even more heroically, which led to the end of everyone in the back of the bus being cowards, who were terrorized by this one young man.

I noticed there were two different kinds of indignation. One was: I’ve been taking the bus too damn long to be treated like this, and I promised myself I was never going to take the bus again and here I am, again. This was the kind of frustration I heard mostly from people of color, the elderly, and people who were clearly living close to or below the poverty line (there was a lot of talk about trying to make forty dollars last 5 days on the Greyhound, or how a month’s worth of SSI was nearly gone after three packs of cigarettes and a Greyhound ticket.)

The other type of indignation was: What the fuck? Is this for real? I’ve never been treated like this my whole life. This is bullshit and I’m never taking the bus again. This was the kind of statement I heard mostly from white, college students or recent graduates who were taking the bus for the first or second time, or the occasional white, professional, who was taking the bus a short distance. I’m in this group.

The difference between the two groups is that for the latter group, if they had a bad bus experience, they very well could choose to never take the bus again. Not so for the former group, who were all taking long distance cross-country trips like Sacramento to Philly, and most of them had been riding the bus for years, and I had a feeling that no matter how much Greyhound had wronged and would continue to wrong them (massive delays, overbooked buses, air conditioning not working for 5 hours during the middle of a 98 degree day, etc.) there would probably come a time in their life when they had no choice but to get back on the bus to go where they needed to go. This is why I tried not to complain at all, and why I felt so lucky to be on the bus, just visiting.

My first night in San Francisco was spent eating okay but not great Chinese food (you can tell when Chinese food is mediocre and inauthentic when every dish is smothered in some of kind generic ‘brown sauce,’) beers at El Rio, and lots of spirited conversation about sowing one’s wild oats, which is the closest I’ll ever get (in its homophonic glory) to sewing at this point in my life. The next day, Mexico beat France and the vuvuzelas were out in full force in the Mission. I took this picture on 24th and Mission, a block away from my old apartment. There were so many cars honking their horns as they drove past, and so so many people draped in the Mexican flag. It was everything I love and miss about San Francisco. My contribution was smiling a lot and whispering, Yeah! Mexico! to the celebrators.

There used to be an outdoor taco stand across from this parking lot on 24th and Treat Street. I used to get lengua, cabeza, and pollo tacos with heaps and heaps of cilantro and onion and salsa and then walk down the street for a cup of Philz coffee, the best coffee on earth, even if my friend and former boss, Paul, once told me some pretty devastating secrets about Phil, the man in a fedora cap who used to hit on all of my blond friends (all two of them) and make the coffees himself back in 2005, 2006.

If you have a chance to visit Philz, you must, must get a cup of Tesora. Its handmade using a secret recipe and each cup is individually brewed using a single-cup drip filter, and they sweeten it and milk it to your liking and every cup comes with a sprig of mint, but I usually steal an extra sprig anyway.

I didn’t have time to eat all the foods I was looking forward to eating–noticeably absent from my YES I GET TO EAT ETHNIC FOOD FINALLY tour were: $2.50 Bánh mì sandwiches from Saigon Sandwich, the Shaking beef and fish wraps from Bodega Bistro in the Tenderloin, Hawaiian poke (pronounced poke-ay) tuna from Amberjack Sushi, a super burrito from Mariachi’s, a trip to Clement Street in the Inner Richmond to visit Green Apple Books and eat Burmese and Chinese food, extra spicy Tom Yum noodle soup with emerald glass noodles at Osha Thai, Thai brunch at the Wat Mongkolratanaram Temple in Berkeley, and the saddest of all, I was really hoping I’d have to some time to take the Caltrain down to Mountain View to have a soy sauce ramen, fried rice, potstickers, and unlimited kimchee from Ryowa on Villa Street and then the requisite hop across the street to have a frothy pearl milk tea from Cafe Verde. The last time I visited San Francisco, I totally snuck into Ryowa and had a second lunch after eating mediocre club sandwiches with my friends at a nearby hotel.

I did get to have some eating adventures though!

My first burrito at 10:30 in the morning at La Corneta, and it was a Super baby shrimp burrito!

Spring rolls from Slanted Door! (Sorry for the grainy photos, I only brought my Holga and my point and shoot with me to San Francisco.)

Look at that baby! And that’s pre- dipped in obscene amounts of peanut sauce.

Pupusas with Jennifer at Balompie‘s, and we caught a tiny bit of the World Cup.

Crazy delicious Senegalese food with Pearl at Bissap Baobab with plenty of ginger infused cocktails and their insanely spicy (even for me) hot sauce.

Monster burrito at the always disappointing El Farolito (don’t believe the hype!)

My least meal before racing to catch the Greyhound was at Papalote‘s for a fish burrito and amazing salsa.

Before:

After:

I promise I did do more than just greedily eat while in San Francisco. I stopped by Modern Times bookstore and Dog Eared Books and picked up my friend Bonnie’s zine, What I Did on My Summer Vacation by Bonnie Johnson, which was amazing and made me cry. It’s about volunteering with No More Deaths, being one of two white people at a Jamaican dancehall booty-happy party, ignoring the tourist crowds, surfing and love in Oaxaca, attending urgent summits on the ‘realities of US trade and migration policy… how NAFTA and Operation Gatekeeper play out US-Mexico relations, the effects of the CIA and IMF activities on the Caribbean,’ and meeting voodoo priestesses in the Caribbean. The zine was full of love and humanity and if you live in San Francisco, you should get a copy!

I shyly sang karaoke one night with my friends and felt excited every time they sang Lady Gaga, even though I don’t think much of her. By the way, my friend Ryan made an awesome fanzine, Prison for Bitches, dedicated to Lady Gaga, and it’s filled with the best things like Johnny Ryan and Helen Jo and Angie Wang, and an interview by Anthony and some clever writing by Tony, and an absurd but enjoyable list of the best Lady Gaga singles by Ryan, and it’s just really awesome, and you can buy it here, or preview it here.

I danced to semi-okay 80s music another night and made friends with the bartender, who kept saying, “I’ll take care of you,” and was inadvertently responsible for the demise of all of us because he kept giving me free whiskey. I met some people in the writing group that I started with my friend Max when we were students at Stanford (take note of this, Tony!) and I’m glad Meggy recently joined. My friends bought me drinks at Elixir and some bastard suggested we civilly sip Absinthe when the night was about to end (just kidding, Anthony,) but it turns out there’s no way to be civil when drinking Absinthe. Incivility is pleasurable.

We walked around the Mission a lot, and I remembered how much I loved all the brightly painted houses, especially the ones on Capp and Folsom and Florida and Alabama Street. I visited my old apartment and blew it five kisses and said, I’ll always love you! I wonder if anyone saw a strange Asian girl blowing kisses to a metal door.

I took the Bart to Oakland and failed to get a pork belly Cubano and noticed that the post offices in Oakland are beige. I played Sodoku in Oliver’s bathroom and got bored with it immediately. I think that’s it. Is that it?

A corner store by my old apartment. I never did get to try their Cubanos.

The view of Mission Street that I would often see while waiting for the 14 bus.

The view of the land at a bus stop in Wyoming.

There’s more, but I doubt you’d want to hear about it and it’s sweeter to remember some things in secret. Just like how in The Tin Drum, when a circus performer asks the physically stunted Oskar to join the circus and let his talents shine, Oskar responds by saying, “No thanks. I think I’ll let my little art flower in secret.”

That’s it, then. Bye!

With love,
Jenny