Wednesday, January 18, 2006Driving Across the Bay Bridge - 1976Standing on the train platform tonight, the rush hour cars hurtling by on either side of me, I have my iPod plugged in and I'm listening to a radio show that my friend Scott put together for me. He compiled and played up on KDRT in Davis awhile back in honor of my finishing the book.The mix is called "Kathy's SF Mix" and it's a collection of songs that are powerfully evocative of San Francisco in the 70's. There's the entire Jefferson Starship album of Blows Against the Empire, some David Crosby, and a lot of Jerry Garcia. And even though I hadn't actually even heard some of the tracks he found, the entire thing is so me, it's pretty scary. I'm standing on the platform and it's cold. The freeway is a mad river to either side. I'm on this concrete island in between and through my ears are sounds of a city I loved intensely so long ago. I feel a wave of fear. The edginess of being cold and so near to the speeding traffic, the wind blowing my hair. And I am thrown into a vision, a memory, just a piece of some larger picture that like a dream has faded away, leaving only one fragment. The Bay Bridge. It is 1976 and we are driving a bird-shit green Ford across the Bridge to go to Coit Tower. I am in the company of the street people who are my current friends. They are junkies, or occasionally junkies, and it isn't the drooling in the corner stuff that you always read about. They do heroin occasionally (I never actually see it first hand) and we panhandle by day. We choose our corners on Telegraph and sit around collecting "Spare Change for the Free Clinic," which is, basically, us. There is a girl there named Doretta, a fleshy blond whom I like but don't trust. There is the guy who I guess is sort of my boyfriend, even though he isn't and I will in short order be so wronged by him that he becomes, and remains to this day, a person I would easily and without remorse kill on sight (if he's still alive which I'm sure he isn't). He has long dirty blond hair, plays the guitar so beautifully it brings tears to my eyes, lives in Albany with his mom, a 75 pound junkie who hates my guts. It is his car. A rambler or something. Someone has stolen his gas cap and plugged it up with a black bandana. This freaks him out. It is a sign, he says to me with some irritation, as though I should know these things. People want him. In several states. It is a warning. He shows me the .357 under his front seat, wrapped in a brown bag. The car is a piece of shit but it is the only one we have. So we take it places. To Mt. Tam occasionally. Occasionally to the City. The City glitters across the bay and my throat tightens up. A place of such complexity, beautiful like a diamond. The facets so deep and endless that you could spend lifetimes and never know it completely. The lights in the highrises glittering in the sharp night. Unknowable people, living unknowable lives. It is the 70's and there is a movement happening. It is happening in the Height and out in the Park on Sundays. It is happening in Union Square and on the Ave in Berkeley. It is a time, for me, of extremes. It is back when I'm not always the oldest one in the room. I am 19. One kid is about 16, a little guy with a shock of curly platinum hair. The others are 20ish. With burnt out eyes and souls and the crusty ashy hearts of people who are about to crumble and disappear. I am in a car with people I don't trust, and they are the only people I have. We are going to Coit Tower to smoke dope and look at the bay. It seems like a fine thing to do. Doretta yells at the middle aged people as we get off the freeway and onto the surface streets by North Beach. "Hey! You got some smack?? We shoot it in our EYEBALLS!!!" And we all laugh as we wind up towards the tower. It's not that far away, that moment. I am walking back from the car dealership because my horn went out recently. Yet another aspect of warning, security and defense. All my defenses have been broken or violated recently, and they are being consciously and meticulously shorn back up. What does this mean? That I am now enclosed in a house of motion detectors, sensors, window locks and a dog. That I have used my horn so much it has had to be replaced. And how does this square with my intense desire to make this a year of greater vulerability, more openness, increased intimacy? Walking back through my small home town, the music continues in my earphones. I think about the depth and extreme of that night driving across the Bay Bridge. Life was so complex and wondrous and frightening. And here I am, three decades later. Pleading with the universe to not let me slip into the comfort zone of age, fatigue and safety. No, of course I don't want to live in fear. I have plenty of that and can manufacture even more in the wee hours of the night. But I don't want to give in to a place where the spectrum is constrained by complacency. I love my edges hard, the contrast high. I want to continually be looking at a City of baffling complexity, feeling the excitement of the absolute most present moment, and know that the edge is still available, still magnificent, still a little bit bigger than I can comprehend. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 7:53 PM  
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