When I Go Out
“San Francisco has made me great at peeing,” my Room mate to me this morning.
Last night the realizations that I had failed to interact with another human outside of the magic box in front of me in the last three days, that I had live review deadlines rapidly approaching, and that my clocks were an hour fast, making me the recipient of a bonus hour to my evening, all spurred me into pants and out my door towards the Rickshaw Stop.
I met some cool people and my night got progressively better with the quality of music. I was, however, under the distinct impression that one of my new acquaintance’s happiness declined in direct proportion to my own enjoyment. I’m not so vain as to think that this was my doing but I’m not so as insensitive to completely dismiss the possibility that I am the Dorian Gray of concert going. This post isn’t about the show though. It’s about the aftermath of the show. As it was winding down, I began checking the time and asked if anyone knew what time the last train out of Civic Center was. I thought it was like 12:20 (turns out it was 12:21) but I wanted to catch the end of the set and, as I wasn’t sure that the train stopped at 12:20, I allowed myself to be convinced very easily that 12:20 was too early for a city’s train to stop running. I figured it wouldn’t really be a big deal if I missed my train anyway and that I should probably see what happened if I did at least once so I could gauge whether it would be worth it on future occasions.
What happens when you miss your train is this, you go back upstairs and talk to the teller. He stamps your BART ticket and you ask him about an all night bus your room mate told you about. He says that he doesn’t have that schedule, he’s not sure if there’s a transfer from Oakland to get to North Berkeley, and that it’ll take so long you might as well just take the train at four. All of that seems reasonable and you decide to look for an all night diner.
On my way to Happy Donuts I was still in pretty good spirits. I had an excuse to eat donuts and was actually LOLing at those Window ads about not being denied. I stayed at Happy Donuts until three, when I was going to be kicked out for dozing off, and my time there was pretty uneventful. I heard two Russians talk about how hard it is to get wi-fi in the mother country, one man complain about a lack of bear claws, and a traveling salesman talk about jewelry with cashier. (He had a Rolex but he was afraid to wear it because he’d mess it up. They also talked about how you know it’s a good place when they have all the bulletproof doors and chambers because the stuff is definitely real.)
As in pretty much all aspects of life, things got far more interesting when I got off the internet and went outside. I’d made it about a block before a well to do looking guy in a Mercedes tried to pick me up on Market St. I briefly weighed my options but ultimately declined. I was already aware that I resemble a “man of the night” but what I didn’t fully understand about San Francisco is how absolutely impossible it is to relieve yourself in a legal fashion. Nobody here wants anyone using their bathroom, not even paying customers like me who may or may not be male prostitutes. In “The Childcatcher” (Lycanthropy, 2003) Patrick Wolf declares that we are living in the “age of constipation.” Now, either he was wrong, the age has passed, or he was trying to make one of those things that people use in poems; because what I saw was closer to the “age of defecation.” Everyone was letting fly with with their bodily functions left and right. I myself had to embark on two different stealth pee missions. The first of which was far stealthier than the second, emboldened as I was by my new peers’ disregard for privacy and by my own fatigue. Seriously, the first time, as I channeled my inner Batman in the shadows next to a mural, a man cut through the parking lot banging two drumsticks together. He dropped one and it began to roll in my direction. Ninja that I am, I went unnoticed and set out behind him on my way back down the street. I progressed maybe a block before running into a woman taking a shit on the front of a cafe. Across the St. there was a man proudly standing on the raised stone platform in front of a fountain, urinating into it in a way not unlike how Hank Venture did in the ghost pirate ship episode. There was more but it was pretty much more of the same. Thankfully, the fountain marked my arrival at the all night Carl’s Jr. I was migrating to and I didn’t have to watch too many more people turn the world into their bathroom.
The Indian woman behind the counter was very stern and made it clear that you had to order something before you were allowed to sit. I took my time thinking it over and settled on a cup of coffee but can easily see how someone who had to go through this routine regularly might become overweight. While in line I heard one man plead, “I got a house, talk to me.” I saw a man choke another man for no reason I could figure out; although, when he released him, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of hard feelings. I saw a couple share a Carl’s Jr. breakfast over a bottle of white whine and I saw a woman knock over that bottle of wine. No one cried over it. A man played Spanish radio off of his phone and no one seemed to pay any notice. One man hunched over and finished off the very end of a joint he’d obviously been saving. Two men discussed whether I was homeless or a hipster. The point of contention seemed to be the cheap headphones around my neck. When they discovered that the headphones were attached to an iPod, the consensus quickly became “hipster.” God, I need some new pants and a shower.
The only other things I can tell you about my night is that when you’re spending a few hours waiting for a train, Johnny Cash’s songs start to become even more interesting and sometimes when you’re trying your best to stay awake you turn off Bitte Orca and put on Love Gun. It’s been a long time since I walked around a city that tired, watching the street lights melt, but the soundtrack doesn’t really change all that much. You’re destined to play the songs you used to play, and for me that turned out to be The Honorary Title’s debut. It might have something to do with the fact that Bryan Sheffield was talking about their farewell show on Twitter this week.
