In the studio of lost youth – a (very minor) San Franciscan mystery for the ages
A short piece of non-fiction, which is based on a fake memory that everyone else forgot to make up.
I CAN’T REMEMBER HOW THE PHONE GOT CONNECTED. I can only tell you why I pulled the plug and hid the evidence – it was an illegal line and I’d just used it to call 911.
When the operator told me that I wasn’t calling from where I said I was calling from, I didn't say, “Wait! I can explain everything.” Because, I couldn’t have done. Not then, and definitely not now.
“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” ~ Harold Pinter
IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1997, that much I do know, and we – that’s me, Al and Dede - were in San Francisco. But when I say ‘San Francisco’, sadly, I can’t whisk you all away to Golden Gate Park, Haight-Ashbury, Pacific Heights, Fisherman’s Wharf or Chinatown. Alas, we were (voluntarily) slumming it in the Tenderloin – the city’s infamously gritty heart, a realm of cheap liquor stores, dingy dive bars, dreary diners, abandoned theatres, shabby single-room occupancy hotels and forlorn laundrettes, and where the alleyways all seem to scream ‘crime scene’.
Before flying west from Ireland, we’d fantasised about living in a gaff on a signature San Franciscan hill, but we’d ended up in the city’s flatlands, a place so squalid and forsaken that it has, according to local sources, “historically resisted gentrification” (in other words, it’s such a shit-hole, rich hipsters are afraid to enter).
So there we were, three skinny (and fairly cashless) 21-year old middle-class college kids (baggy jeans, brightly coloured t-shirts, or short-sleeve check shirts) sloping along the sidewalks, trying not to look too naive, but also not too shifty, as we passed all the hookers, tweakers, alcos and homeless junkies (clutching their shopping trolleys for dear life) on the sidewalk as we headed to our ‘studio’ on Ellis (and Larkin).
We had looked for a place in the Tenderloin, as we’d all got jobs in a restaurant cafe on Polk street called Quetzal, described by The SF Chronicle that very summer as the “best place in San Francisco to spend $12 on lettuce” – a reference to the colossal Caesar salad that I never got to try (I only remember eating the day-old bagels, which were, along with the house coffee, free, and what we lived on when broke). From what I remember, all the waiters were gay men; all the chefs were Mexicans; the bus boy was a Native American man called Ignatius Strange Horse (or just Iggy). That left us (and a few other underpaid sods) to take orders at the counter and take turns making coffees. One day, I had the honour of concocting the fabled Quetzal Mocha: a ‘quad-espresso’ mocha with whipped cream, hazelnut AND caramel syrup, chocolate powder, and I want to say there was a cherry on top, too, because there probably was. After 15 minutes, the customer came back for a second. “See you on the roof, dude,” he told me with a frenzied grin (He probably slept as little as some of the young meth-heads, who worked the sidewalk outside, offering to do tricks, no, not magic tricks, or just panhandling until they had enough to score).
From Quetzal, following Polk to the north, I recall the street became more affluent and if you kept going, there was a less edgy, more gentrified vibe. Vintage stores, wine bars, restaurants I couldn’t afford to eat in. Even the diners and laundrettes seemed less lonesome that way.
But our place was a few blocks in the other direction. Between Quetzal and ‘home’, the streets were always lively, so I remember feeling safe enough (although as a Dubliner, I knew the importance of maintaining a brisk tempo and avoiding ‘eye contact with the loopers’ when hoofing around the wrong parts of town). Still I guess we usually closed the door behind us with a certain sense of relief. Honeys, I’m home!
I don’t remember much about the studio on Ellis, other than it was just big enough to fit one double bed, in which me and Al slept, and a single fold-up bed, where Dede slept. There was a small kitchenette with no cutlery (we mostly just boiled frankfurters). There was also a TV that worked – and… a phone that didn’t.
Which brings me back to the minor mystery at the heart of this story. How did the phone get connected? My subconscious mind must have been working, all these years, to draft a hazy, implausible memory to make this tale make sense. Before writing this essay, I texted Dede and Al and told them I vaguely recalled Dede (proactively, optimistically…) heading off one day to the post office or phone company. Maybe my subconscious mind imagined her explaining ever-so sweetly that she had no green card and no social security number, and not much cash, but she really needs to get a phone line, and some American guy working at this (imagined) post office or phone company, tells her officially it’s impossible, but he’s so smitten by her that he lowers his voice and says: ‘I tell you what, sweetness, why don’t I see what I can do? On the down-low, if you get me…’ And lo, behold, when me and Al came back from work, our phone was working and Dede was calling her parents…
But this far-fetched explanation is completely untrue. Like zero per cent true. Dede never tried to get the phone connected. In fact, she doesn’t even remember us having a phone. When I read her text, I felt queasy. Shit. Was I just making things up (again)? Al – who is not known for his powers of recollection – replied, more hopefully: “I remember a phone…”
Before adding, less hopefully: “I think…”
“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.” ~ Frank Herbert
LOOK. HERE’S WHAT I DO REMEMBER.
I remember walking home that night, the night I called 911. I remember walking down Larkin and hearing the wolf whistles, howls and shrieks from inside the Mother Lode, a small drag bar that staged shows to a packed house every night. Where was I coming from? I must have been drinking in the Edinburgh Castle on Geary, which had everything we needed: dollar-a-bottle beers, a jukebox, a pool table. So let’s say I was there, drinking with a few Scottish pals of ours (yes, Dubliners hanging out with Glaswegians in San Francisco – “the longest way round is the shortest way home”).
Why am I walking home alone? Maybe Al is working an evening shift. Maybe Dede has taken the road trip she’s been planning all summer (unlike me and Al, she didn’t spend all of her money on beer). I can’t remember. But I am definitely tipsy. And possibly stoned – another fragment of a memory comes to mind. One of the regulars at Quetzal was an old gay guy from Boston. He received medicinal marijuana for a condition (something like glaucoma or arthritis), but he didn’t care for weed, so he’d just give his prescription baggie away to whomever he happened to meet next, which one day happened to be me.
I remember that.
I think…
“Memories are like dreams. Not reliable proof of anything. I can't prove a memory any more than I can prove a dream.” ~ Susanna Moore
WHEN I CAME BACK TO THE HOUSE ON ELLIS, where we lived on the top floor, there was a short South Asian man with a pot belly freaking out in the hallway. He hardly spoke English but he pushed his door wide open, no, not to invite me in, but so I could see why he was freaking out. There was a deluge inundating his place. The water was obviously coming from the studio directly above, but there was, I gathered (or maybe I checked for myself), nobody home.
Him (desperately): “You! Telephone? 911?”
Me (delightedly): “Yes! Me! Telephone! 911!”
So I ran upstairs, thrilled to be having an All-American Moment, and called 911. I remember the operator was female and robotically voiced. She asked for details of the emergency. I told her: “I’m at 365 Ellis. There’s a flooded apartment downstairs… it’s bad. You need to send someone…”
Then she said: “Sir, our system indicates you are not at 365 Ellis but 2504 Sutter.”
That’s when I thought ‘uh oh’. I continued talking. Words spewed out. She told me I was babbling. But I got the message through. The emergency was at 365 Ellis but, um, maybe I wasn‘t? Then I hung up, pulled the wire out of the wall, and hid the phone. What phone!
Not so long later, somebody came to the door. Were they cops? Or emergency services guys? Whoever they were, they asked if I’d made the call and I can’t remember if I said yes or no. I just remember thinking: ‘Is the smell of marijuana in this tiny studio very obvious?’
Whatever I said, they told me the ‘situation’ downstairs was resolved. They thanked me. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they just said ‘have a good night, sir’. Then I, with much relief, closed the door, and, well, I’d be satisfied with this story, if it weren’t for the ‘fact’ that it’s possibly a fiction.
“I even wonder if those streets still exist, or if they haven’t been absorbed by the dark matter once and for all.” ~ Patrick Modiano, In the Cafe of Lost Youth
SO I HAVE INVENTED ANOTHER TALE. A much more plausible one. You see, the phone was in the studio when we moved in but there was no connection. Maybe all we had to do was slip the super some cash to get a dodgy line. But we were too green to know that. So the phone sat there like a superfluous stage prop until one day – picture me and Al watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on the telly, or eating day-old bagels – Dede randomly picked the phone up and said: “WHAT! Holy guacamole lads! There’s a tone!” It was a glitch. A random anomaly. Just one of those things. A gift from a sympathetic universe. We tried ringing someone in Ireland and it worked. I even have a flicker of a memory that one day, one of us was on the phone, yakking away, and the person – whoever lived at 2504 Sutter, and received actual phone bills - picked up their phone, and chewed us out for this telecommunications hackery. Whichever one of us was on the phone just hung up, and we all laughed, safe in the knowledge we couldn’t get caught (um, unless someone used the phone to call 911?).
Is that plausible? Maybe. Maybe not. Unfortunately, I have no photos of this time. No 'evidence’. No proof. It’s all pretty much a mystery, one that can’t be solved. Perhaps, if I were to take a leaf out of the Patrick Modiano playbook – at least two of his novels feature an amnesiac private investigator trying, and mostly failing to retrieve the past – I’d fly to San Francisco, and seek out some of the ‘fixed points’ that helped us navigate the Tenderloin all those years ago, and walking round, absorbing the psycho-geography, and dredging up bits and pieces of my personal history, more fragmented memories would come back to me, and then I could patch together a more convincing story, one that Al and Dede might actually remember (or think that they do). But Google Maps indicates the ‘studio’ on Ellis is boarded up. Quetzal is gone (the Mother Lode too). There would be no option other than to start my investigation at The Edinburgh Castle, where I’d have a beer. Or maybe three – I’d need plenty of Dutch courage to brave the Tenderloin streets now.
But the thing is, I have a hunch, a pretty strong one, that as soon as I began traipsing around Polk, Sutter, Geary, Larkin and Ellis, I’d only start making new fake memories up. In the end, that’s the only way I can explain anything.
Great read, enjoyed it.
Great read over a cup of coffee this a.m, Conla. Thanks