by
Gary Kamiya
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Rookie agreed. “That never happens!” he exclaimed happily. “But watch out for sneaker waves.”
“What’s a sneaker wave?”
“That’s a sneaker wave.” He pointed behind me at the sudden wall of water coming our way and quickly paddled out and over the rising swell. Contrary to my usual risk-averse instinct, I went the other way and paddled in. The wave reared up as it caught me, and it was not just a sneaker but a screamer: the biggest I’d ever ridden in my life, an overhead freight train of water that blew my hair back and roared in my ears. Even now, I can’t believe that I managed to stand up. By the time I realized I was still alive—still standing! still riding that wave! all the way to shore!—a shit-eating grin had colonized my face. The fact that it took me thirty minutes to paddle back out, and the fact that I got hooked by a fisherman in the process, failed to scrape off that smile. I’d tasted what was possible.
I’m first- generation, nothing special; I know people whose roots stretch much deeper. But I still see newcomers as an invading force—here to colonize, pillage, vanquish. The gold rush all but obliterated the Ohlone. Hippies displaced Black families from the Haight. The gay liberation crowd took over the Castro. Techies overran the home I remember. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the balance again. Businesses that had been around my whole life ran desperate fundraising campaigns. Many went dark forever, dragging chunks of our collective culture into the murk of history. Change is always violent to that which came before.
The city is less familiar every day. The extreme poverty in our expanding tent cities is heart-wrenching. And I’m irked by the entitlement, the flashy cars, the souped-up strollers. And yet, those strollers carry San Franciscans, homegrown sons and daughters like me. They may come of age feeling inseparable from this new San Francisco, as I felt inseparable from the version that made me. Someday they’ll be usurped, too. Understanding that your hometown thrives on cycles of mass migration and collapse doesn’t make the loss less keen. That bitter backward glance is part of growing up in a chameleon place.
i do object to the implied locus of agency here (what does it really mean to displace someone?) but i concur with the conclusion
When I moved here, I imagined some kind of consensus that we were all players on the same “good team.” After all, each of us wakes up each morning to see the most beautiful mountains and somehow-still-blue water as we listen to the public radio report on the state’s governor signing one bill after another that will make our state a better place: nonprescription HIV medicine; healthcare for gig economy workers; a sanctuary city for immigrants. I was returning to a place where a lot of us go to sleep at night thinking about how we can wake up and make the California dream available for all.
lol
The fact that I must be mistaken about some of this doesn’t bother me. But I’m not sure what to include. There is my hesitation in the café and his persistence. The way I followed him out of the café and back in again. The roar of his car when he started it. The way the headlights and grille of his old white car filled my rearview mirror. The gentleness with which, next to my house, he lifted the strand of rose thorn out of my way so that I would not scratch myself. The hard metal chairs. Then the awkwardness of the bright light by my bed. The way my mind hovered like a little professor in glasses in the air above what was happening down below, and judged this and then judged that.
I used to like to go over every moment of that first evening, when he and I sat there at the table with friends on one side of me, friends on the other side of him, the noise of the performance so loud that no one could talk, when we walked out together, not knowing each other, and bought two bottles of beer each to bring back in, had drunk one bottle each, and had still one bottle unopened in its brown paper bag by our feet, and sat without opening it, saving it for a little while. This seemed to me, in a way, the best moment of all, when it had hardly begun. When we opened the second bottle of beer we would also be opening everything that came after, through the late fall and the winter, but as long as we sat without opening it we were on a sort of island, and all the happiness lay ahead of us, and would not begin until we opened the second bottle of beer. I couldn’t see this at the time, because I didn’t know what was going to follow, but later I could look back and see it.
Looking back at that evening was almost better than experiencing it the first time, because it did not go faster than I could manage it, I did not have to worry about my part, and I was not distracted by doubt, because I knew how it would come out. I relived it so often, it might have happened just so that I could relive it later.
i like this
He had not read the story I knew already, the one he had described to me as a novel the first evening we met, a very clear, precise, and confident story about a man and a woman in their middle age who meet at the seaside where the woman is on vacation and the man works for a hotel, the setting vaguely European. It contained quiet, well-turned descriptions, including one about the effect of the sun on the woman’s pale legs, that I liked each time I read them. I liked so many parts of the story that the rest of it also seemed good. Now I wonder if I was drawn to him because he had the sort of mind that would want to write that sort of story, the sort that I liked already, or if he was drawn to me because I had the sort of mind that would like the sort of story he liked to write. A friend of mine, after reading the story, said he did not like it, because the characters, so very silent and distant with each other, yet so firmly tied by their wordless understanding, were not people he would want to know. I did not think about that, but only about how the story was written.
At times I have the feeling someone else is working on this with me. I read a passage I haven’t looked at in weeks and I don’t recognize much of it, or only dimly, and I say to myself, Well, that’s not bad, it’s a reasonable solution to that problem. But I can’t quite believe I was the one who found the solution. I don’t remember finding it, and I am relieved, as though I expected the problem still to be there.
In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one.
lol relatable
For the same reason, I think, I almost never rode in his car. I told him I did not want to ride in it because the roar from the broken muffler was so loud, but now, of course, that does not seem to be a very good reason. I could have put up with the deafening roar, or even enjoyed it, if I hadn’t been afraid of being consumed by his world, if I hadn’t clung stubbornly to my own—my own car, my own house, my own town, and my own friends.
In the first few days, I had been impatient, as though things were resisting me. Now I was angry, not only at him, but also at myself, at certain other people, and at things in my room. I was angry at my books, because they did not hold my interest enough to stop me from thinking about him—they were not alive now, they were not ideas but only paper. I was angry at my bed, and did not want to go to bed. The pillows and sheets were unfriendly, they looked off in another direction. I was angry at my clothes, because when I looked at them I saw my body, and I was angry at my body. But I was not angry at my typewriter, because if I went to use it, it worked with me and helped me not to think of him. I was not angry at my dictionaries. I was not angry at my piano. I practiced the piano very hard now, several hours a day, starting with scales and five-finger exercises and ending with two pieces which improved steadily.
There was a lot of hatred in me. It was a feeling of wanting to get rid of the thing that was bothering me. The hills that had been brown in September were now green. But now I hated this landscape. I needed to see things that were ugly and sad. Anything beautiful seemed to be a thing I could not belong to. I wanted the edges of everything to darken, turn brown, I wanted spots to appear on every surface, or a sort of thin film, so that it would be harder to see, the colors not as bright or distinct. I wanted the flowers to wilt just a little, I wanted rot to appear in the creases of the red and violet flowers. I wanted the fat, water-filled blades of the sea figs to lose their water, dry up into sharp, rattling spears, I wanted the smell to go out of the eucalyptus trees at the bottom of the hill, and the smell to go out of the ocean, too. I wanted the waves to become feeble, the sound of them to be muffled.