by
Gary Kamiya
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The Volunteer Coordinator at My Internship
Through my stepbrother’s wife’s brother’s now- ex-girlfriend, I scored an internship at a tutoring center, where my primary responsibilities were taking out the trash and improving youth literacy.
In any new place—to make that place worth going to—there should be someone you aspire to kiss. One night, I followed the paid employees to the bar Amnesia (other nights they went to the Make Out Room or the Beauty Bar, names that doubled as offerings). I stuck to the edges, unnoticed, until out of nowhere the volunteer coordinator with the good sense of humor came over and talked to me when no one else did, which meant I’d love him always.
We didn’t kiss that night. Or any other. It’s now ten years later, and I’m still extremely not over it.
At the second publishing house I worked with commas. Nine hours of the day, every business day, I added and removed commas. I was alive one out of every four seconds. I could not believe that this was what people did all day, that “having a career” is people signing emails Cheers. I needed someone to kiss. But no one there wanted to kiss me, which isn’t why I got fired, but I did get fired without having kissed anyone at all
One spring evening, I met an actor at a one-man show—he was the one man. After his show, this non-gay actor living in San Francisco and I went to a bar together, and then once we were blitzed with fernet, we left the bar together. Outside, he pressed me against a wall, fitted his knees between my knees, and he gave me my first (and last?) cinematic kiss, a kiss that a homeless person interrupted to hand us a map of San Francisco, a memento.
cute
And this may be my real issue: that I can’t sit comfortably at the top of the caste system I’d worked so hard to conquer and just enjoy it. I hit all the goalposts. I have all the right schools and corporations on my resume. I live in the right house, in a decent neighborhood. I’ve been thin enough; my hair has been long enough; and I’ve lived in the Instagram light of contour as my successful (white) boyfriends pay for my (terrible) IPAs at the ballpark as I make sure to overtip the Black and Brown servers, wondering how it’s gotten to the point where I, too, need absolution. I’ve “made it,” but sometimes wonder, what’s the point?
On top of that, the newcomers to San Francisco didn’t love the city like we did. They arrived from around the world to work for companies who seemed only to be creating apps to do the tasks your mom wouldn’t do for you anymore. They worked too many hours and got fed and boozed at work, so they didn’t spend nearly enough money at the local businesses that made SF unique. Not that they had much money left over, considering they were paying $3,000 a month to live in our loved ones’ former apartments. For a large number of the people who moved here, San Francisco was just a place to work and make money for a few years before going back to wherever they came from. They often didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the cultural carnage they were unintentionally part of as they created massive wealth for a handful of people and their investors.
Those of us who, through a combination of rent control and dumb luck, were able to survive this maelstrom, watched as the city that was such a part of the way we defined ourselves as people became nearly unrecognizable. The betrayal was gut-wrenching; it was like going to high school and your best friend from middle school became the bully who picked on you.
Cohorts and I from the theater wanted to press the envelope further and founded the Diggers, an anarchist group dedicated to imagining and then acting out a culture that offered us more compelling adult options than “consumer” and “employee.” The Diggers decided that those homeless, hungry kids were “ours” and needed to be looked after. To that end, we devised a way to feed six hundred people a day in Golden Gate Park. We also created a free medical clinic, where UCSF med students saw patients at the Digger Free Store once a week. We did it to prove that the city’s excuses for inaction were lame. In our Free Store, one could find anything required for an urban life—clothes, bicycles, tools, furniture, TVs, radios, books, shoes. The Italian farmers at the market gave us food they couldn’t sell that day. We scored more behind Safeways where ripe- that-day fruits and vegetables were set out for the morning garbage pickup. We repaired and restored castaways and throwaways and put them on display in a clean, bright storefront that implied, by its very existence, the question: “Why become an employee to make the money to become a consumer? We’ll give you the stuff. Now, what do you really want to do?”
San Francisco’s fate may be sealed. Her lovely weather and views, her small size that can be fenced off by a great wall (or uniformly high property values) may finally allow the wealthiest to claim it in its entirety. The new owners will get rid of the trash, the homeless, the poor, and the unsightly. The workers will live in the suburbs, be forced to use cars, gas, and oil to enter Malibu North and serve. The city inhabitants living on trusts, investments, inheritances, and fiscal good luck will glide through the open, no-traffic zones, from one fabulous wine tasting to another exquisite dinner, displaying their multi-thousand-dollar investments in tattoos-as-displays-of-disposable-income, stopping en route, perhaps, for a bit of upscale shopping.
The dream of the sociopathic class that never shares will be fully realized. The corpse of the lovely girl dancing in the ’60s has metastasized into a frozen photo—stilling the heart and leaving only the sparkling body of the city as beautiful as ever. Her body is stressed trying to raise the cash for her cancer treatments. Beauty is a rare commodity. It sells designer clothes, expensive perfume, and extraordinary performance. It’s always for sale. And so, alas, is my beloved San Francisco.
i think when i first read it i disliked this sentiment but now im like yeah fair true
We were all doomed, really, doomed without knowing it. We were like a species of an animal that was so comfortable in our habitat that we didn’t quite realize we would soon be hunted to extinc- tion. We drank at the 500 Club when it was an actual dive bar and not just marketed as a dive bar, blind to the tech companies moving in, not truly hearing their utopian promises and fanfare, not realizing that all the money flowing through them like a gushing river would also flow into snatching up Bay Area real estate and juicing San Francisco rents. We dined on heaping platters of Mexican food in the kaleidoscopic festival of bright holiday lights at La Rondalla. We went to poetry readings at the Elephant Café, where street poets like Julia Vinograd read during the weekly open mic and a gruff bartender with the thickest walrus mustache on the planet served the cheapest red wine on the planet. We bought precious books by precious experimental authors at Small Press Traffic, a bookstore that only sold literature published by small presses (imagine that). We bought ravioli and salami at Lucca, an Italian grocer that had been there since the turn of the century, thumbed through magazines on UFOs at Naked Eye while picking out bootleg videos to watch, and then we’d go hear Angela Davis speak at Modern Times Bookstore, which not only carried tracts on Central American politics, but also books in Spanish
Four or five nights later I would find myself shivering on the back patio of a bar in Potrero Hill, soaked through with summer drizzle, huddling under a burner while the few people I knew in town caroused at a nearby table. Two jockish strangers, thinking me drunk and alone, started to hassle me. “What’s up, bro? Having fun?” They tried to drag me out to the street; my friends didn’t notice. “I’m just cold,” I whimpered. But I wasn’t just cold. I was thirty-three years old, single, a barely published fiction writer starting to suspect that the life of the starving artist wasn’t as glamorous as advertised. Later that night, walking the dog up a steep hill in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I thought about packing the car and heading back to broiling Albany, then groaned at what a sad little fantasy that was.
“I don’t know about this,” I told Jack, crouching to smooth her damp fur. The rain, at least, had stopped. It was very quiet. In the distance I could see a slick of moonlight glimmering on the bay.
:(
In my choice to let go of that apartment, there’s guilt that I still carry, if I choose to examine it. It’s guilt that I didn’t cherish that San Francisco while I still could, or even appreciate my dad while he was still scribbling in his notebooks at Café Flore, which is now gone, like so many other cafés and landmarks of my youth. When my father was still alive and I was a callous teen, I used to complain to him about what I thought of as his irrelevance as a writer. No one I met had ever heard of him, and money was a constant struggle for us. I was too young to know how few writers, even the talented and influential ones, can support themselves with their writing.
But in the aftermath of his death, it felt like he was completely erased from the city. In the half hour after he died, in his room at the Maitri hospice, I gathered Dad’s personal belongings—his wallet and his glasses, a bag of his clothing—and waited for a ride from a friend. Haphazardly I opened his wallet and stared: here were all his IDs, his driver’s license, his First Interstate Bank card, his membership cards. Items once so precious—signifying a citizen, a history, a point of view—were now worthless. And so, I felt the same about the city. Its value evaporated before my eyes.