all allure and strength and zero innocence, running away from shame, running to revenge?
Who but a foundling has the moral right to seize not just a city, but a neighborhood, and fashion a block or two of it into home? When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything: that’s the Devi Dee philosophy.
My Corolla became my boardinghouse after two expensive nights in the Tenderloin hotel owned by a Mrs. Patel. Asia dogged me, enfolded me. Mrs. Patel’s Asia smelled of Lysol and rancid cooking oil. During the day I scoured the city for a cheap room. I drove from Presidio to Portrero, from Russian Hill to Hunter’s Point, parking the car whenever I liked a view or spotted a dog that needed petting.
Oh, how the city seduced me! I thrilled to the skyline’s geometry. Rectangles, cylinders, rhomboids, pyramids: all shapes belonged. And I loved San Francisco back, loved its parks filled with lovers, sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, loved its drowsy drunks let alone on streets, its nose-ringed schoolboys riding public buses, its skinny gray ridges stuck with pastel matchbox houses, its tangerine Golden Gate and sailboats in the Bay, its streaky sunlight on foggy days, its Day-Glo graffiti inside streetcar tunnels. WE FUCK HOGS. DUNIA LOVES JORGE. BEAT SENSELESS. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU. COPS WET THEIR PANTS .
I parked the car, and strode unfamiliar streets, tapping businessmen for fives and tens, starting small by picking up pennies and dimes, paying attention to the bases of parking meters, then lifting wallets from too-tight jeans,snatching purses off coffeehouse tables. The streets of California are paved with silver and papered in green; I could even stop for lattes when petty thievery made me thirsty. Some days I explored the city on borrowed bikes, the Dee System of pickup and delivery. This is the West, and I was claim jumping. From now on, life was a board game: Pass Go. Go to Jail. Looks and a body: that’s a Get Out of Jail Free card.
It was the Haight I finally picked as my space. My space, my turf, my homeland . It was where I should have been born if the Fresno flower child had strayed no farther from home than Ashbury and Haight. But then I’d have had a different look and less curiosity about sex and transcendence. I’d have inherited the Haight Street I’ll-cross-when-and-where-I-want-and-at-my-speed posture of entitlement. I had to practice a camel-like imperturbability as I crossed the streets on red, while motorists waited.
The Corolla-As-Motel-Room needed some getting used to. I wadded up dirty laundry to make myself a kind of sleeping pallet. For privacy I taped freebie weeklies to the windows. No cops hassled me, no creeps hustled me. What they said of the Haight, I mean the historical epoch, the mood I’d missed, I mean my bio-mom’s times and wants and needs and not the place, was still true. Do your own thing, do it proudly, and no one will bother you. Feel free, and you shall be free. I was a Cowbabe in Goodwill chaps riding a Japanese auto. Clear Water was never this free, this strong!
The car was room, and board came from neighborhood soup kitchens. Faustine and Debby were brought up Catholics, but Devi followed her nose: the Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Baptists, Black Muslims and some religions that entwined love and profit, charity and sex, faith and ecology, space and time, combinations I hadn’t stumbled upon upstate. At the Church of Divine Intergalactica, parishioners wore crowns of Viking horns and feathered headdresses, headgear meant to collect outer-space signals undetectable on normal wavelengths. I felt free; I was free. It just happened overnight; one day I was afraid and on the outside, the next day I was a kind of outlaw, on the side of other outlaws. Maybe I was programmed that way; it seemed totally natural to identify with dropouts, to step around cops, to look out for scanners and closed-circuit monitors. All that shrapnel on cherubic faces, all those brandings and tattoos,
Who but a foundling has the moral right to seize not just a city, but a neighborhood, and fashion a block or two of it into home? When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything: that’s the Devi Dee philosophy.
My Corolla became my boardinghouse after two expensive nights in the Tenderloin hotel owned by a Mrs. Patel. Asia dogged me, enfolded me. Mrs. Patel’s Asia smelled of Lysol and rancid cooking oil. During the day I scoured the city for a cheap room. I drove from Presidio to Portrero, from Russian Hill to Hunter’s Point, parking the car whenever I liked a view or spotted a dog that needed petting.
Oh, how the city seduced me! I thrilled to the skyline’s geometry. Rectangles, cylinders, rhomboids, pyramids: all shapes belonged. And I loved San Francisco back, loved its parks filled with lovers, sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, loved its drowsy drunks let alone on streets, its nose-ringed schoolboys riding public buses, its skinny gray ridges stuck with pastel matchbox houses, its tangerine Golden Gate and sailboats in the Bay, its streaky sunlight on foggy days, its Day-Glo graffiti inside streetcar tunnels. WE FUCK HOGS. DUNIA LOVES JORGE. BEAT SENSELESS. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU. COPS WET THEIR PANTS .
I parked the car, and strode unfamiliar streets, tapping businessmen for fives and tens, starting small by picking up pennies and dimes, paying attention to the bases of parking meters, then lifting wallets from too-tight jeans,snatching purses off coffeehouse tables. The streets of California are paved with silver and papered in green; I could even stop for lattes when petty thievery made me thirsty. Some days I explored the city on borrowed bikes, the Dee System of pickup and delivery. This is the West, and I was claim jumping. From now on, life was a board game: Pass Go. Go to Jail. Looks and a body: that’s a Get Out of Jail Free card.
It was the Haight I finally picked as my space. My space, my turf, my homeland . It was where I should have been born if the Fresno flower child had strayed no farther from home than Ashbury and Haight. But then I’d have had a different look and less curiosity about sex and transcendence. I’d have inherited the Haight Street I’ll-cross-when-and-where-I-want-and-at-my-speed posture of entitlement. I had to practice a camel-like imperturbability as I crossed the streets on red, while motorists waited.
The Corolla-As-Motel-Room needed some getting used to. I wadded up dirty laundry to make myself a kind of sleeping pallet. For privacy I taped freebie weeklies to the windows. No cops hassled me, no creeps hustled me. What they said of the Haight, I mean the historical epoch, the mood I’d missed, I mean my bio-mom’s times and wants and needs and not the place, was still true. Do your own thing, do it proudly, and no one will bother you. Feel free, and you shall be free. I was a Cowbabe in Goodwill chaps riding a Japanese auto. Clear Water was never this free, this strong!
The car was room, and board came from neighborhood soup kitchens. Faustine and Debby were brought up Catholics, but Devi followed her nose: the Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Baptists, Black Muslims and some religions that entwined love and profit, charity and sex, faith and ecology, space and time, combinations I hadn’t stumbled upon upstate. At the Church of Divine Intergalactica, parishioners wore crowns of Viking horns and feathered headdresses, headgear meant to collect outer-space signals undetectable on normal wavelengths. I felt free; I was free. It just happened overnight; one day I was afraid and on the outside, the next day I was a kind of outlaw, on the side of other outlaws. Maybe I was programmed that way; it seemed totally natural to identify with dropouts, to step around cops, to look out for scanners and closed-circuit monitors. All that shrapnel on cherubic faces, all those brandings and tattoos,
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