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.

Spiderland

My wife Rhumba was born with poor hearing; the shape of her inner ear doesn't focus sound well. She can't hear well on the phone, in classes, and in meetings. She can hear me well enough; then again, my voice carries like the call of a peacock.

A few years ago she got her first good pair of hearing aids. And when we returned from the audiologist that day and stepped out of the car, the first thing she said was --

"What's that NOISE?"

"Noise?" I had to think -- it was just the usual background noise. "Uh, the traffic, I guess." Our house backs up against a four-lane highway.

"It sounds like this all the time?"

"Yeah." From thirty yards away, on the other side of the house, came the roar of a semi-truck's Jake Brake -- rather like the sound a lion might make if it tried to roar and gargle with mouthwash at the same time.

"So why did you let us buy this house?"

"Because it's not noisy in the house."

"You didn't think about the yard?"

I didn't. I never think about the yard. I'm an indoors kind of guy and always have been.

Rhumba and I have friends who practically live in their backyards. By adding landscaping and decks and hot tubs and various amenities, they've made their backyards into integral parts of their houses.

We can't do that: short of erecting 100 yards of concrete sound wall around three sides of the lot, nothing's going to fix the thundering road in back of the house. But even if we could have constructed a backyard pleasure dome for our ease and enjoyment, who knows whether we actually would have? Again: we're indoor people.

So we threw a couple of storage sheds in the back yard, planted a few giant and indestructible bushes, and forgot about it. I cut back the wild grass with a string trimmer from time to time, and feed the compost heap with kitchen scraps once or twice a week. Otherwise we don't go there much.

But the spiders do.



They build vast webs between house and bush and fence and shed. And because no one walks there, the webs endure. And so the spiders feast well, and breed well. And the next year -- there are even more webs. And next year, yet more.

I won't say it's a warm and fuzzy thing, to wander sleepily into the backyard with a steaming bag of veggie scraps for the compost heap and suddenly confront a black-and-white-striped, eight-legged horror hanging in the air at eye level. I wouldn't say that at all.

But I will say that the spiders have now completely colonized the yard. This past month I could not walk any of my typical routes to the compost heap without breaking the web of an eight-legged overachiever. With my face.

Imagine sudden shock of tiny, tough silk wires suddenly cutting into the skin of your cheek, snapping just before they begin to cause pain (just before). Imagine that they are slightly sticky, as well. Does it sound gross? Icky? Oh, yeah. Especially because your next move is a quick full-body pat-down to make sure the spider didn't land on your chest or torso when you collapsed her web.

Did I say they were big? And furry? And striped?

I guess I could go back there and kill 'em all, but why? They cause no real harm. We have spiders in the house, but not the monster striped furry kind, which are harmless and don't come in. (Some of the house spiders -- tiny, drab, unassuming arachnids with primitive webs -- are actually more dangerous than their king-sized outdoor siblings. But that's another story.)


And there are advantages. Precisely one fly made it into the house all summer. One. Moths? Gone. Mosquitos? Missing in action, though the county pest control people may be responsible. Our hovering mini-monsters have fulfilled their duty to the food chain and stripped the air of flying insects. We don't use pesticides, so they've made themselves valuable to us. Even if they're icky.

I also know that a yard that is criss-crossed with giant intact spider webs, is a yard that no one's been wandering around in. This is Santa Cruz. People wander every damned place, and I know for a fact that strangers have roamed through our back yard and even slept in it.

But I'm pretty sure that no one's been back there lately, because they'd have broken the webs. Spiders as cheap security guards? Who'd have though it?

Finally, I'm just a live-and-let live kind of guy. Sure it's my back yard. But I'm not using it. I'm not interested in it. And until I am, someone harmless might as well make use of it, even if they have eight legs and look like the nightmares you remember all your life.

And is even that entirely true? Enjoy Spiderland. And do click on the photo.

The Supermarket Cookie of Mercy

Human kindness can take many forms. It can address many kinds of human misery.

My least favorite form of misery? The dehumanizing situation that no one will admit is dehumanizing. Oh, keep a stiff upper lip, others say. It's not that bad, they say.

They lie, of course, or fear to tell the truth. And you can bet that somebody profits while others are treated like dirt -- are told very clearly, if indirectly, that they are dirt.

So when somebody actually has the courage to say, yes, it is bad, it's hard on you, we're sorry -- Lordy, I can forgive almost anything.

I'm always very late paying property taxes. Late as in 3 pm on the last day. And if you're that late, you actually have to go down to the county tax collector's office to pay in person. So I do. It's only ten blocks from the house.

And it used to be that, as you inched forward in the endless line with dozens of sweaty people waiting to give the county several thousand of their dollars, you passed by a counter that held a large metal mixing bowl of -- Oreos. The Oreos were only there on tax deadline day.

I don't eat Oreos. If I'm going to eat useless calories, I want ones that taste better, and don't hit the pit of my stomach like a lead washer.

But I always took one, and ate it. Because I appreciated the gesture.

The gesture said, "Yes, we know it's tough. We know it's a lot of money. We know you're not happy. So... have a cookie. We're civil service. It's all we can do."

That's a lot of message for one Oreo to bear. But I could taste it. Small gestures can mean a lot. And I'll take my mercy where I can get it.

A couple of years ago the old tax collector retired, and the new guy did away with Oreos on tax day. Curse you, Fred Keeley! But I'll always remember.

Some years ago I worked for a company that had been taken over by a vast comglomerate. Everything changed overnight. We were given all new duties and tough deadlines. We were told the office might close; and when people started to quit before our big project was done, we were told the office would stay open forever, after all. The new management took no questions; they simply told us to work hard and trust them, with big and insincere smiles.

This went on for weeks. Finally, in a department staff meeting, my manager got off-message for minute and said, "Look, I know things have been hard here lately, even unreasonable..."

"THANK YOU!" I shouted. "THANK YOU!" It just burst out. Because somebody had actually admitted that we were being used. It was a huge relief, like a weight was lifted. Everybody around the table looked at me as if I'd started raving about crop circles. In the end, they understood. A month or two later, when the big project was finished, management abruptly closed the office. Most of us quit rather than take the relocation offer. Because we knew we couldn't trust those guys. But there had been that moment of mercy, when my boss couldn't quite keep his humanity from bursting through.

Tonight, Rhumba and I sat in the car listening to the radio as a man who is President of the United States said things that had never been said from a place of such high authority in my meory. That health insurance companies hurt the American people, and must be held accountable. That Republicans have been telling bald-faced and cynical lies to frighten people into opposing health care, and that he would "call them out" if they tried it again. That private industry without government control and regulation will hurt and harm the American people.

He said all these things which I have believed, which my friends believe, but which no one in Washington has said as the debate over health care and social issues grew more and more vile and dishonest and destructive over the last few months, with no one willing to call out the people who were willing to tear America apart for their own personal gain.

Obama may in the end wimp out on us. But, tonight, he said it. Something that nobody at the highest authority has said in a long, long, time:

It IS that bad!

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

Status Report

It's been awhile since I've posted. Blogging has taken a back seat to a few other things -- some good, some bad. Here's my life:

The Job

The job continues to devolve. Mr. Bigboss proved true to his word: we are doing more with less. Much less. And much more. The routine lunch hour is a thing of the past. Breaks are a fantasy. Everyone has two jobs now; some, three. Every job is top priority and must be done yesterday. And it is. But not well. Which, of course, breeds more jobs.

There's a growing split in the organization between the salesmen and the administrative staff. The sales staff's sales goals are grindingly difficult, so some of them try to push off their administrative duties off on the rest of us. We're no better off, and we're pushing back. Mr. Bigboss is oblivious to the situation, or doesn't care, so both sides fight guerrilla wars up and down and across the org chart.

Somebody was hospitalized. Somebody melted down on the job. The cops got involved, although it didn't make the papers.

Mr. Bigboss held an ill-advised "You're Appreciated!" party for the staff. He showed his appreciation with crackers, onion dip, and Safeway-brand canned soft drinks. Among us are a few people who've achieved amazing things under pressure; none of them were singled out to be honored.

Instead, "I'm Special!" buttons were handed out to each and every one of us. In his happy salesman's voice, Mr. Bigboss told us to embrace the "new normal" and be positive. He then asked if anyone in the crowd would like to say a few words -- hoping, apparently, that one of us would toe the new company line and tell us all that we should get happy.

Nobody said a word. Not his lieutenants, not the first-line managers, not a one of the grunts. We left him hanging out there, cajoling one of us to say something, for a solid sixty seconds.

We've done this to him before, the day he announced layoffs last spring. Won't he ever learn? We'll do what he asks, because we have to; but we won't pretend to like it. That's one sale he'll never make.

Fun (TM)

Eighteen years ago, I almost sold a children's book. I got an agent, he interested an editor. Negotiations began. Then the publishing company abruptly slashed spending, fired the editor, lost the manuscript and cut off contact. My agent quit the business in disgust. I wrote another book, but I couldn't get any other agents to talk to me.

So I gave up. I didn't love my line of work at the time, but it offered large money and a modest amount of respect. Why put a lot of hard work into children's books for $3K advances? Especially if two-thirds of the work was just trying to get someone to read the damned things? I hate selling myself. So creativity took a back seat to comfort.

But things change. Now my job pays bupkis (yes, and I'm lucky to have it iknowiknowiknow), I get little respect, and the work is both boring and stressful.

And my plan to keep my self-respect, to be more than a survivor, has been exercise some creativity again -- after all this time. That's why I began blogging; but blogging is no longer enough, by itself. So I'm dusting off the old manuscripts and will self-publish them.

The Internet offers lot of easy, cheap ways to do this, with on-demand publishing services like Lulu and CreateSpace. You lay out the book according to their standards in your own word processor/design program, email them the file, and they put it up on their site. If someone goes there and orders your book (it's up to you to make them want to), the publisher prints one book, sends it out, and send you your cut. Few or no up-front fees. Ain't technology wonderful?

I'll probably sell a couple of dozen copies at most, mostly to friends. But just the act of creating, laying out, and art-directing a couple of books is proving to be a mad amount of fun.

And I'll publish the text here gratis for you loyal readers. If you're interested in reading the story of a young man whose athletic shoes have been possessed by ancient Egyptian spirits. Or a rather demented 1940s "boys' adventure" about Nazi spies, radio show super heroes, filmmaking, and food. Lots and lots of food. (And that's the one that almost got published!)

Bruce

Bruce, my answering machine dropped all its saved messages the other day, and I don't have your number anymore. I can't remember where I wrote it down. Call (yet) again!

Physical Weirdness

I feel old for the first time, if "old" can be defined as maintaining three or more points of pain for a prolonged period of time. I pulled a tendon in my right elbow months ago, and it's only slowly getting better; my back's been giving me hell for two weeks and won't quite clear up. And I just wore a hole in the back of my heel on a long, ill-advised walk to unkink my back. I can walk, bend, stretch, and lift. But it all hurts. So I tend to sit in one place a lot.

Most or all of this will probably clear up, but I'm getting a preview of my 70s, I'm afraid.

Borscht

It's the food of the gods, dude. Makes Rhumba and I feel human again at the end of a long day so she can thrash away at her knitting machine and I can work on my own projects, far into the night. What's in beets, anyway?

Labor Day

Have a good one. Don't work!