The Apartment

Had a nice phone call with Bruce the other day. Bruce is a blast from my past: my old life up in San Francisco and the East Bay, 20 years ago and more. And in fact I may not have physically seen Bruce in 20 years. I'm not sure.

But LK, a mutual friend, hipped Bruce to this blog, and he's been reading. And after a while he wanted to call me and catch up, so the same mutual friend passed along my phone number.

And, after about two weeks of speaking to each other's answering machines, we finally managed to both be at our phones at the same time. We had a nice chat about this, that, and the other. Including the other thing we have in common besides a mutual friend or two:

An apartment.

Thirty years ago I moved to San Francisco to make my name in insurance company advertising (yeah, really). I also came to the city to have an exciting life if at all possible. It actually wasn't; that's something that comes from within.

But I took a cheap apartment on a nondescript block between Van Ness Avenue and Polk Street., and proceeded to experience the city.

And for a young, awkwardly shy man, it wasn't a bad neighborhood: central to the Polk Gulch gay district, the fern bar inferno of the Marina, and the hoity-toity restaurants and salons where the denizens of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights deigned to come down and nosh among we mortals. There was always something to see, five movie theaters to visit, and good restaurants that never closed.

I never felt safer in my life, at any hour of day or night. True, bad things can happen when it's just you facing off another guy and no one else is around. But in that part of town, someone else always was.

It was also the quietest place I've ever lived since childhood: in the absolute back of the building, 40 yards off the street. The only sound I ever heard was faint, tasteful music from the apartment above where Roger the apartment manager presided over a majestic quadraphonic stereo system and five thousand vinyl disks of classical music.

Mostly in a neighborhood like that -- all one- and two-bedroom apartments and nothing else -- people came and went in a few years, as I did. But some people came and stayed. Roger the Manager had been there for decades. Gay, middle-aged, cultured, and of modest means, he cobbled together a living out of managing the building, pulling shifts at a corner grocery down the block, and working at an abstruse record store downtown that stocked only movie and musical soundtracks. He got his health checkups at the free clinic and his cavities filled at the UOP Dentistry School. And he did all that because he wanted to live in San Francisco and nowhere else.

And there was Mike the silver-haired Irishman who lived in a tiny studio around the corner and clerked at a liquor store. He was a great talker, had a million stories -- and the photo albums to prove them. A pianist, a Korean-war jet pilot, an aerospace guy, a dealer in Asian antiques, married and divorced a couple of times -- and now, at 60, all he wanted out of life was a small apartment, an easy job within walking distance, cheap tickets to the opera, and an occasionally drinkie. I had a few with him down at the Marine's Memorial, the Buena Vista, and a few other places. I'm not much of a drinker, but he made it fun.

And Mike introduced me to Bob the Hippie Philosopher, a forty-something underachiever with a doctorate in psych and big plans that never quite materialized. He, too, lived alone in a tiny apartment. His big score while I knew him was landing a gig as Santa Claus in one of the big department stores. And Mike and Bob both introduced me to Stan the public television activist, who fought a losing battle to keep the local PBS station from turning into a hellhole of yuppie programming. Who also lived alone in a small... yeah, you know.

It was kind of strange to hang out with guys who were decades older than me, but they were a riot. Sometimes when they didn't intend to be. I'll never forget the time they started ranting about Unitarian women. There was a big Unitarian church a couple of blocks over, and all the local middle-aged singles went over there for classes, activities, and the opposite sex. The guys assured me that the church was lousy with well-heeled, middle-aged Unitarian divorcees who were always interested in the right man. But only to a point.

"They'll date you, they'll go to bed with you," Bob said . "They'll be your girlfriend. But they won't marry you!" The other guys all grimaced in sympathetic frustration. It was an interesting reversal of traditional roles: the guys wanted to settle down with a sugar mama, but the women had the economic power and liked their freedom, thank you very much.

I could have stayed in the neighborhood forever and become one of the guys. I had the temperament. And San Francisco has all the cheap, public luxuries that a man on a limited budget could hope for. It's the necessities that are expensive.

But I fell for a woman -- the wrong one, it turned out -- and left Polk Gulch to live with her for a few years over in the Richmond District. I didn't see the guys anymore . I finally broke up with the wrong woman and ended up in the Haight for awhile, which was less fun and more menacing than I expected. Haight Street was a lot like Pacific Avenue here in Santa Cruz, except that the worst night on Pacific was three times better than the best night on Haight.

And that's when I got a call from Bruce. He was staying with our mutual friend out in the 'burbs, but wanted to move into the city to live and work. Did I have any leads on a cheap apartment?

Hmmmm.

I told him I'd see what I could do, and called Roger. "Yes, we just had an apartment come vacant," he said. "Your old place, in fact." I talked up Bruce as a paragon of reliability. Roger passed the word along to the owner's son, and it turned out I had some cred with him from paying my rent on time for three or four years straight. Bruce looked at the place, applied for the place, and got the place. And he's been there ever since.

So when Bruce and I talked, of course we talked about what was going on around the old apartment building. The place was in the same hands, more or less, but they'd brought in a management company which prettified the joint and hiked the rents to the sky. And Roger is still there, though pushing 80 by now and no longer apartment manager. San Francisco's rent control laws protected him and Bruce from the worst of the city's rent inflation these past decades.

So Roger is still there; Mike died in place; God knows what happened to Bob; and Stan ended up in "active mature residents' co-housing" in a progressive college town. Which is not a lot different than living in a small apartment above a busy street near people you know.

In that neighborhood most people came and went in a few years, but some came and stayed. I went, Bruce stayed. So did others. I hope he has his guys to hang with, just as I did 'way back when.

I wonder if the Unitarian women are still around.