Autumn 1998

Sometime in September of 1998 I started walking. I'd get to a point where I knew I wasn't going to get any more work done, and I'd pack up my stuff, leave the office, and start walking. I'd start somewhere south of Market, maybe walk down to the end of Howard, and go across Market and then just start walking up Sacramento, maybe until I reached Fillmore, maybe until I reached Arguello. Just looking around at the houses, feeling the breath entering and leaving my lungs, listening to the ringing in my ears.

I've had a MUNI map hanging on the wall of my apartment for as long as I can remember. For a long time it only had a little ladybug pushpin on it to mark my house, and a little 'x' to mark where my best friend T lived. I'm not sure when I made the decision, but at some point I started marking my route on the map with a highlighter pen every night when I'd get home. I wanted to see if I could cover the entire map in luminescent yellow-green.

I kept walking. One night, I started down at the Embarcadero, and climbed up through the Financial District, with its mundane, ugly office buildings with the embedded brass plaques in the pavement telling the homeless that they were allowed to pass over the sidewalk only by the kind sufferance of one bank or another, and were not welcome to stay. I walked up through Chinatown, panting slightly at the exertion of walking up the steep hill through the smell of rotting fish and abalone and ginseng. I walked over the top with the flag-bedecked Fairmont Hotel and Grace Cathedral off in the distance, and then walked down the back side of Russian Hill, through the densely packed houses of what I liked to call Bachelorette Storage Zone #2. I crossed Van Ness through Alta Vista Park into Pacific Heights, into Laurel Heights, and then Presidio Heights, feeling faintly stunned at the opulence of the houses and condominiums I walked past, wondering what kind of people would be interested in paying such astronomical sums to live in such proximity to each other. Every so often I'd see a rooftop sunroom lined with bookcases and telescopes and art, and knew that not all of these people were dead inside, like I half-hoped when I saw how much they had that I didn't. Eventually I crossed Fillmore and then Arguello and then made my way through the endless drab reaches of the Richmond, until I eventually reached the sea. In one evening I walked the entire length of Washington Street. The whole time, my newly-purchased cell phone kept me company, significant by its failure to ring.

I liked to stay out so long that by the time I got home my apartment looked new and strange, like a place where I'd once lived but had since left behind. My head would be stuffed with images of other people's houses, tiny parks cut into hillsides, dead-end streets that had an atmosphere that didn't feel as if it was contained within San Francisco, and it would be hard to reconcile this head full of strangeness with the mundane, comfortable familiarity of my own living space. While I walked, I liked to imagine the kind of life I'd lead if I lived in these other places I'd passed, who I'd know, what I'd mean to the people who passed unseen behind high windows and white curtains. What it would feel like to roll out of bed in the dark and wander into a bathroom entirely different from the tiny little cell with the separate hot and cold faucets in the sink and an airshaft window that let in the smell of my neighbor's horrible cigars.

I started to carry on little imaginary dialogues. In these fantasies, I'd be telling my interlocutor how I'd come to be so wealthy and powerful, how it hadn't really changed me or made me any happier, even though it had been the only thing I'd known to do. I'd give her a weary smile and eat some more of my very expensive dinner. I nursed fantasies of immersing myself in work, of getting an MBA, of becoming some kind of New Economy titan. It was an easy fantasy to come by given the times, and it helped me see how I could come to belong in some of these strange places I passed through. I once walked home from the Mission, over the top of the hill that separates Noe Valley from the Castro, and walked past two enormous, new white houses that were very modern and bulky-looking. Neither looked occupied, and the only sign of life was a television flickering in one high, far-off room. Who bought these kinds of places, nestled inside San Francisco's denseness but impossibly remote from it? What made them so afraid?

Eventually the compulsion faded, and I started doing other things with my time. My relationship to San Francisco had changed, though. I had gotten inside it in a way that I think few people ever do, and I had mastered a part of its elusive personality. My relationship with it had become that of somebody with an ex-lover of whom they're fond, but with whom they'll never really get along without sharp words or exasperation. Its dreams are of big ones of wealth and of poverty, and it sleeps with the susurrus of thousands of breaths, but all I want from it is comfort, and comfort is something that it often cannot provide.