The Spaniard

There was a Spaniard on Bart this morning who was drunk and belligerent and terribly tired, seated near the center door of the front car. The man surely had red hair once upon a time, but now it was faded into a rusty gray, like a threadbare sweater. His skin was freckled, his shoulders slumped, his face pitched between the two of them in a brooding sort of way. There were two Asian tourists seated in the chair facing the man, and he was talking to them in an angry, sneering Latin tongue, counting on his fingers, raising his voice, dropping it into a menacing whisper. The tourists looked thoroughly frightened. Then, just as suddenly as their fear had surfaced, so it was given reason to re-submerge. The Spaniard was asleep, snoring peacefully with his eyes fastened shut, the bridge of his nose parallel to the ground.

Street Music

The lady next to me wasn’t wearing any shoes. She did have black stockings pulled tight over her feet, however, and a Celtic blanket of red and black wrapped about her shoulders. The guy next to her was Jewish, probably 55, his hair and his beard a slate gray. He was taking pictures with a nice Canon camera. There was a crowd of 15 or 20 more people on the sidewalk, 4th and Market, near the new Bloomingdales and the white neon glow of the Apple store.

Only one of us was dancing.

She was in her 20s. Her head was shaved, and her body was sinewy. She looked liked she had just outlasted a bout with cancer, and she was dancing like it, too, her arms and legs flailing about in the dark. Anytime pedestrians walked through the crowd, she implored them to stop and dance. “It’s Friday night,” she said. “I love San Francisco. Were you born here? I wasn’t, but I wish I had been.” One guy with a “Ya Mamma Nigga” sweater walked on through without slowing down. Another lady stopped to shake her booty, then continued on.

The band’s name was Sinclair. It consisted of a drummer, a bassist, and a lead singer who could play the electric guitar, scat, and sing. Their songs often began with the lead singer playing a rift. Then the drummer joined in and so did the bassist. The music that emerged was beautiful and raw, like it was growing from the streets. It was at times melodic, then crude and uncut. There were squeaking brakes, car horns, Friday-night banter. A red hook-and-latter knifed down Stockton and swung a right onto Ellis. Everything blended in.

When I got home, I checked the band’s profile on MySpace. Sinclair, I learned, performed seven days a week on the streets of San Francisco, even on days they had gigs secured in clubs and bars around town. They had won a Battle of the Bands up in Sacramento as well, but they were still awaiting their big break. A recording of their music was playing in the background as I read this. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed, as though I had found I shiny penny on the sidewalk only to discover it had lost its luster by the time I got home.

The recording wasn’t even bad. It just lacked the surround sound.

A game of chess

“Come on, Yoo-hoo.”

He slid his rook two spots from the other guy’s king. The other guy took his bishop.

“That’s just silly.”

He was standing over the board, and the other guy was standing, too. He was tall and thick, like a biker. The other guy was the engineer-type, a blue nylon jacket wrapped around his waist.

He retreated with his rook. The metal zippers on his leather jacket jingled as he slid the piece. The other guy took one of his pawns with a bishop.

“Fucking son of a bitch. I’ll kill you, Yoo-hoo.”

The board was checkered green and white, ducktaped to a table at 5th and Market. There were cigarette butts and sunflower seeds on the ground. The other guy slid his queen up the board and took his rook.

“Shut your mouth.”

He swiped at his king and knocked it half way across the board in resignation. Then he chuckled, and the other guy did as well. He fingered a cigarette in his left hand as he passed 50 cents across the table with his right.

They put their pieces back in place to start again.

“You ready, Yoo-hoo?”

Pain au chocolat

Sometime around midnight last Saturday my girlfriend Ali suggested we wake up early the next morning and get pain au chocolat on Fillmore Street. A pain au chocolat is a French croissant filled with a sliver of chocolate at its center. When Ali was living in Paris last year, she developed a highly refined sensibility for what makes a good pain au chocolat good and where to find the best of the good ones for a reasonable price. Fillmore Street, Ali assured me, boasted the best pain au chocolat she had tasted since her return from Paris. I happily obliged her request.

The boulangerie, it turned out, was just down-slope from Fillmore, on Pine Street. It had an apricot awning and a pastel blue coat of paint ornamenting its exterior, and the inside—with its beige stucco walls and its spread of pastries, tarts, and breads—felt perfectly Parisian. One of the employees was French, too, but behind the cash register was also a nice, albeit earnest, Asian-American woman and a young man of perhaps 20 with blond hair and the laidback demeanor of a surfer dude. He was the one who reached into the display case and pulled out a hazelnut pain au chocolat for me and a plain pain au chocolat for Ali.

“Right on,” he said as Ali signed off on her debit card.

We headed back up to Fillmore Street and ambled a few blocks north. It was a beautiful day. The sky was clear and blue, fluffed by the occasional cloud, and the pear trees lining the road looked lush and ready to blossom. The sidewalks were crowded with people: young couples with their babies, masters with their dogs, gymnasts with their yoga mats. Ali and I walked until we found a Peet’s Coffee that had a few seats open at the counter in the front windows. We secured our spots and settled into a wonderful, slumberous few hours where everything felt just as lazy as if we had been lounging at a café on Isle de la Cité. We ate our pain au chocolat. We drank tea. We tried our hands (and failed) at the crossword puzzle in The Times Magazine. We played checkers.

The store across the intersection from Peet’s was a black shoebox of a building, a Marc by Marc Jacobs that looked odd on a street lined by one- and two-story Victorian structures, all of them painted soft blues and yellows and greens. There was a black lady standing near the entrance of the black storefront. She was thick and rotund, covered almost entirely from head to toe with scarves and leather. She held herself with an air that made it hard to miss her, even from across the street. She could have been a prostitute or an aristocrat. Her hair was dyed the color of saffron rice. The 22 Fillmore bus arrived, and she got on.

There were three homeless men plying the intersection. The first was an overweight white man in his 50s who looked tired and sad and confused. He wasn’t asking for change. His beard was grown out and gray, dripping in a few spots with what appeared to be heavy whipping cream. There was also a dollop of the cream on his nose. His pants were too big, his fly halfway down, his shirt disheveled. The second homeless man was in a wheelchair. He had a large cast over his right foot, which was swelled (perhaps artificially so) beneath a yellow wool sock. All I remember of the third man was his rheumy eyes and the defeated way in which he asked for help.

A bus broke down on the opposite side of the street. The driver was Middle Eastern and meddling with some strings at the back of the trolley. He unhitched a lever and guided one of the bus’s two cables into the electric wires overhead, like a sailor raising a mast. He did the same with the second cable, then strode back to the front door of the bus and drove off up Sacramento Street. A while later, another bus stopped on the west side of Fillmore. The driver got out and performed the same routine. I saw three or four couples craning their necks from the back of the bus—looking up at the constellation of bus wires suspended over the intersection—wondering what exactly had gone wrong in the midst of all of that confusion.

A large, white, shaggy dog was resting beside the bench outside Peet’s. The dog’s master was a boy of only 16 or 17, dressed in red flannel pajama pants and a blue hoody. Dog and master alike had a serenely tranquil manner to them, as if they had just finished a session of meditation, and neither seemed particularly interested in the attention that a big dog in a city of toy breeds had garnered them. I asked the teen what the dog’s breed was, and he told me it was a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle, or a “Golden Doodle.”

“A Golden Doodle?”

“Yeah.”

“But how did he get so big?”

“He had big parents, I guess.”

I bid the young man good morning and went back inside.

At the gates of Chinatown

About a month ago I walked past a cab driver playing a trumpet in the front seat of his taxi. He was on break, I gathered, because the "For Hire" fin on the top of his car was off and his head was down, his lips pursed around the brass mouthpiece of his instrument. He was parked on the corner of Grant and Sutter, near the gates of Chinatown, and he was black with a brown leather cap tilted down over his eyes. The music drifting from the base of his trumpet was slow and jazzy and beautiful, as out of place and transcendent as the Italian opera singers in "Shawshank Redemption."

Today I ventured back to the corner of Sutter and Grant in hopes of finding that cabby on his break again. He wasn't there when I arrived, so I sat down on a bench and waited. A cab driver swung around the corner of Grant and Bush and pulled up to the yellow curb. His "For Hire" sign was still lit up as he stood out of his car, shut the front door, and stretched. He was Middle Eastern without much hair. A young lady emerged from the Baldwin Hotel and flagged him down, and he went to the trunk of his car and helped her put her luggage in. She was attractive and buoyant. Her hair was dark brown, pulled back into a ponytail, and she had a crescent of teal blue makeup above each of her eyes to match the blue in her dress. Her boyfriend strolled out of the lobby a minute later with more of the luggage, and they all got into the cab and headed south.

The bench I was sitting on was bolted down in front of Farinelli Fine Antiques, a store that looks, at least from the outside, like a garish cross between the boutiques of Union Square and the bric-a-brac of Chinatown. In the window alone I spotted an emerald green eagle, its wings and claws outstretched, a fat glass Buddha, 10, perhaps even 15, chandeliers, and a set of Italian crystal glasses on sale for $10 each. There was also a silver, flat-screen TV boasting the wonders of Farinelli: "Over 16,000 square feet!!! 19th and 20th century decorative arts for your house, including ..." and then a flood of pictures.

To my surprise, the shop extended up three floors, each of which seemed to get more gaudy and cluttered than the floor below. At the top there was a story reserved for a photographer’s studio, then a thin white cornice and a row of metal spikes to deter pigeons from defecating on everything built below.

The owner of the shop emerged from the front doors and started singing a song in Italian. He looked Italian, too, with wavy gray hair and a tan, angular face. He was probably in his early 50s. A passerby asked how he was doing, and he said "Wonderful." By the time he'd added, "I have a nice collection here," the passerby was gone. Two Japanese boys walked up to the shop window slowly, as if it was haunted or magical, and turned at the command of their mother for a photograph. The older of the two boys spread his hands like the claws of the emerald green eagle in the window. The younger of the boys put up the peace sign.

On the other side of the entrance, a homeless man was rubbing the bronze mane of a roman soldier's helmet. There are three bronze statues outside Farinelli, two of them Roman soldiers hunched down close to the ground with their shields on guard, the third a mermaid reclining on a rock. The homeless man centered his hand on the mane of the soldier and made the sign of the holy cross, as if he were the Pope blessing a warrior in his legion. Then he rocked back on his heels and pulled out a McDonald’s cup from his tattered jean jacket to ask for change.

The shop owner moped back into his shop, and I decided to follow him. I picked my way through a few of the Baroque goods inside, then listened as an Asian-American woman asked for a glass chess set. The owner signaled to the guy at the register.

"A glass chess set."

The guy at the register signaled to another guy in the back.

"A glass chess set."

And finally the chess set emerged without anyone having done any work at all.

The shop owner asked the woman if she was from San Francisco.

"No, Alameda."

"Everything here is very reasonably priced. Usually 50 percent off. Do you need an area rug?"

"A what?"

"An area rug. I have wool, silk, all 80 percent off the regular price."

"Are they imported?"

"All of them."

The woman looked curious. She tucked a bit of her black hair behind her ear and then followed the shop owner up the stairs, as he was already leading the way.

A Walk

San Francisco, California—the pitter patter of rain in the Tenderloin. A man moves in heaves and starts down the sidewalk, like a ship that's lost its way at sea. His hair is gray and shaggy and wet, and it falls half way down his chest, where it tangles with a set of green and red Mardi Gras beads that hang from his neck. He is missing teeth, three or few prominent ones, and he has a crushed can of beer in his hand. He takes a sip from the empty can, then drops it on the ground.

UC Hastings, the law school, looms over the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The sun is gone and it's nothing but a gray February day, yet the ivory tower still casts a shadow. It must be 30 stories at least, and somewhere up there a law student is looking down at the old man with the Mardi Gras beads and wondering how he got there, where he's going, and why some people end up out there in the rain, breaking the law with a can of beer, and others end up in here, studying the ways to uphold it.

At the top of the hill, a lady bends over in the crosswalk and scratches at a penny on the ground. It slides a little. Then she's got it in her hand and she lifts it to her eye and puts it in her pocket. St. Anthony Foundation is at the bottom of the next block. Men and women, some of them in their 20s, others in their 70s, are lined up here, where the woman with the penny just joined the queue, heads hung, jackets masquerading as umbrellas.

The light turns green. A rush of cars hit the gas, and Leavenworth gets loud and slushy. There's a black man crossing the street. He looks like he might stop and loll right there in the center lane, where the cabby is beeping his horn, but then he moves on and makes it to the sidewalk. He's got that glazed look. He joins the line for St. Anthony's, too.

Then there's color. Up at the next block, 30, perhaps 40, kids are crossing the street with their parents, all limbs and jackets and pink and red and blue umbrellas. There's a man sitting in a white van and an Asian lady standing a few feet away from the driver-side window, out on the street. The man locks his door.

Kitty-corner, a lady in her late 20s with black and teal shoes, white socks, and a black rain coat is asking for change. She's not wearing any pants, and the skin between her shin-high socks and the base of her raincoat is black and coarse with goose bumps. The kids make their way past her on down the street toward Market.