Tales of San Francisco

As I admired the sunset from the hill above Golden Gate bridge, the city of San Francisco glittered far away in the dying light. This city doesn’t need an introduction. Even if you’ve never set foot here, you’ve already been. The movies took care of that. The hills, the cable cars, that damn bridge. It’s all been burned into your retinas by decades of film and half-remembered dreams.

Sunset above the Golden Gate bridge.

The allure of California has been beckoning to people all over the world for a long time. Scott McKenzie told everyone to wear flowers in their hair, and suddenly the world wanted in. But San Francisco was always more complicated than that. Less beach party, more back alley. Less sunshine, more shadows.

For me, the gravitational pull of San Francisco probably started with the flickering glow of VHS tapes, where the city itself acts as a vibrant backdrop to the action. I have walked through the smelly alleys of Chinatown (luckily without running into Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China), shaken the bars of Al Capone’s cell on Alcatraz (without getting locked in by the marines from The Rock), driven across Golden Gate bridge (without being attacked by a vampire in the backseat, as in Interview with the Vampire) and walked past City Hall without starting a fire (as in A View to a Kill).

Breakfast for champions at Mel’s Drive-in, another place steeped in movie history.

Wander around long enough and you hit Columbus Avenue, where the past refuses to die quietly. City Lights bookshop still stands like a middle finger to the mainstream, where Beat poetry is still stacked high and the walls are humming with the ghosts of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. A nearby street is named Jack Kerouac Alley in honor of the most prominent author connected to the Beat movement.

City Lights bookshop.

A few blocks north, Caffe Trieste pours espresso that could wake the dead. Francis Ford Coppola once wrote the script to The Godfather here, probably with a view of someone yelling in Italian over a chessboard. His office sat in the green triangle of Columbus Tower further down the avenue, keeping watch over the whole beautiful mess.

All that you don’t really need is to be found at Amoeba Records.

And then there’s Haight-Ashbury. The birthplace of peace, love, and questionable hygiene. Record stores are dripping with nostalgia and dust, where the main temple is the cavernous Amoeba Records. I don’t need more CDs, but I buy them anyway.

At a motel, the day before the start of Iraq-USA war 2003.

We left town broke, caffeinated and with the rental car groaning under the weight of plastic jewel cases. Northbound, we chased something older through the mist as we steered towards the redwoods of Muir Woods.

“Early November north of San Francisco
Driving fast to find you
I feel familiar winds that usher in each evening heavy on the mountains
Rest clouds left there since morning
You always said
“There’s just no other place”
A sign nailed to a redwood signifies arrival “welcome to the Lost Coast”
— Grey Eye Glances, The Lost Coast (1998)

San Francisco didn’t change me. It just reminded me who I was.