The other morning I was sitting in Dolores Park cafe, the bustling food emporium across from ye old Dolores Park Firstly I thought, What did we all do before Dolores Park cafe? It seems as if it had been there forever, where did everyone congregate before they opened their glass doors, and what occupied the corner of 18th and Dolores before they moved in? I asked my astrological friend Jessica, whose zodiac office is right around the corner, if she could remember a time before the Dolores Park cafe, and indeed she could. She remembered a rice n’ tofu joint called Good Karma and run by hippies. Things shift around so often in San Francisco, I often think locations should have charts displayed that track all the former businesses that thrived and failed within its walls.
Then everyone could know that before the Pork Store
on 16th was the Pork Store it was Bitterroot, which who cares really but before it was that it was briefly a military-themed restaurant called Take Orders with a camouflage floor and dishes named after Oliver North, Colin Powell, and Tank Girl. It was run by this really manic gay guy who also wore camouflage pants. Before that it was Aunt Mary’s, the best place for a big sour creamy Mexican breakfast Or, what about Kilowatt once being the queer bar Paula’s Clubhouse, hosting 99-cent queer video nights and punk dance clubs and drag events. Anyway, I guess we could all live without remembering that the Dolores Park Cafe was once sprouts central, but the turnover in San
Francisco is sort of astounding and occasionally makes me ponder.
So, I was in the cafe reading Rebecca Brown’s latest, a collection of essays called The End of Youth, published by our own
City Lights, about ‘carrying on after youth’s hope is gone.’ Rebecca Brown is a really great writer but she is not known for her cheerfulness. She is known for stories where super codependent lesbian lovers saw off their arms and keep them bloody in the tub or burn out their eardrums, leaving themselves deaf and intentionally more dependent on their lovers. It’s real intense and often creepy writings, which I happen to dig, and The End of Youth is about Brown’s family, specifically her mother and father, investigating them and making peace with them as parents and as a couple of f’d-up humans in the world. In the piece ‘The Smokers’ she meditates upon and really excavates the smoking preferences and histories of herself and her family, a seriously hard-smoking family. Coming myself from such a clan I was impressed by the detail, the descriptions of ashtrays and rituals, the nasty debris smokers leave in their wake, like balled-up kleenexes mucky with tar from cleaning out the filters her mom was using to help herself taper, then quit her habit, though she never did. And at the end of the essay Brown reflects on how smoking brought them so much pleasure, a break in the midst of their hard lives and disappointing relationship, a way to step away and be alone and imagine something else with your smoke. It’s a surprising end, dropping you off from the story with respect for the depth of the writer’s vision and understanding of humans and their sadness and need. And then I moved on to ‘My Mother’s Body’, which is about her mother dying–I told you, this isn’t light stuff–and fuck it was so heavy and sad and truly beautiful that I began to cry a bit into my bagel there at the counter of the Dolores Park Cafe, and hurriedly scarfed down both the essay and my food and dashed outside to call my mom, who I suddenly had a deep longing for, on my cell phone. I love my cell phone. My credit is so bad that I couldn’t get one without an impossible $500 deposit, so it is actually officially my boyfriend’s cell phone, but really it’s mine. I called my mom. She almost didn’t pick up because she’s a nurse in Florida, works at a crummy, profit-driven nursing home that is perpetually understaffed and shitty
to their workers and her supervisor was trying to get her to come in on her day off and so she was in hiding, screening her calls. When she heard me she picked up. I didn’t tell her I’d just read an impossibly sad story about a dead mother because that would be wicked depressing and my mom is a scorpio and she’d just spend the rest of the day thinking about how she’s going to die someday, and considering her line of work she probably thinks about that enough as it is. I just said hi and that I missed her and let her take over the conversation, cause she likes to talk. At the moment she was shaking becausesher and her husband had completed the traumatizing task of clipping their corgy dog’s nails. The corgy dog, Cody, named I think after Kathie Lee Gifford’s son, is a tormented soul with mournful eyes and a constant bark and tiny flipper-like paws that propel him desperately around their home. You get the feeling that Cody is really some other type of life form being punished with an incarnation inside a corgy dog’s body. He is truly, cosmically unhappy, and the clipping of the nails sends him over the edge They have to wrap him in a beach towel and muzzle him to do it, and my mom was exhausted from it, ‘shaking’ she said, and her husband was lying in bed recovering from the ordeal. I’d
spent the week watching my boyfriend pill our cat who had neurotically licked a sore into her back and was now taking antibiotics and steroids to heal it up, so we bonded over having to bind our pets in towels to care for them, and then my mother surprised me.
My mom doesn’t really go to the movies. The last movie she went to see was Passion of the Christ, which confused and scared me. My mother’s politics are wonked and wily. I’m sure she does not consider herself even having of politics, but she thinks about things, and has cares and concerns and sometimes, at least to me, they contradict. Like, she’ll flip her middle finger up at a throng of christians blocking an abortion clinic, but she’ll go see the Mel Gibson christian propaganda movie. She’s a true democrat and hates the republicans, but tied big yellow ribbons around our front porch columns during the first gulf war, and was filled with such distaste for the antiwar protesters on the news that she vowed to go into Boston and stand with the pro-war demonstrators, an especially scary group in Boston, consisting mainly of Irish men, old ones with war medallions and young ones with drinking problems. About The Passion or
whatever that movie is called, my mother said, “It was awfully
violent.” She sounded disturbed and offended. She said, “If someone asked me if they should see it, I don’t know what I’d tell them.”
What surprised me was that, on her day off, when not playing
rodeo with the depressed corgy dog or skulking around the answering machine hiding from her supervisor, my mom was going to take herself to the movies. To see Fahrenheit 9/11. In Florida, in the suburb where she lives, at least an hour away from the nearest ‘city’, which would be Tampa. Because the movie is, incredibly, playing out there, so that folks like my mom and her neighbors can check it out. My mother, last I checked, didn’t like Michael Moore, though I didn’t know why and
honestly didn’t want to investigate it. I’ve found that the key to a
happy relationship with her is to not engage when she says supportive things about the war. She did not and will not vote for the current president, so I content myself with that. After years of trying to turn her into a radical feminist militiawomyn, an effort that really put a dent in our relationship, I now try this passive, tongue-biting tactic during our once or twice a year visits and it seems to fly. But now my mom seems indignant that Disney, who I think owns most of the state she currently resides in, tried to censor Moore’s new flick.
“It’s just a movie,” she said, annoyed. “Let people make up their own minds. So it says bad things about the president, nobody likes the president.” Yeah, right, I agreed. What’s the big whoop? I figured if my mom, way out in a place where alligators occasionally clambered onto your lawn, was going to see the movie then me out here in San Francisco could see it. So me and my boyfriend caught a matinee on our five-year anniversary date. We have a pattern of seeing really grim movies on romantic holidays. One recent Valentine’s Day we spent the evening holding back tears at a showing of Southern Comfort, the great
and terrible documentary about a transsexual man living out in the sticks who is dying from cancer due to the shabby medical care he received, meaning he received no medical care, because his cancer was in his leftover female parts and no doctors would treat him. So he died for being trans and the film tracks the months leading up to his death and the strong and vibrant southern trans community he was a part of and you all should see it, though probably not on Valentine’s Day. And you all should see Fahrenheit 9/11, which was practically sold-out on a Wednesday afternoon, which made me very happy. And if
you’re seeing it in San Francisco chances are your theater will come with a radical heckler who will call out even more bits of damning information at the screen, which I enjoyed. A lot has been said and written about Fahrenheit 9/11, so I won’t say anything more then it is a really crucial film to see, even and especially if, like me, you are a know-it-all who keeps up on the news and think you already know everything about the deep evil of this administration and their war in Iraq. Like Bowling for Columbine, you’re seriosuly crying one second and then you’re laughing a sad, absurd and unbelievable laugh, and then you’re crying and ultimately you’re left with this sort of energized despondency, like you want to do something really big to
stop the war, bigger then another march through civic center with bored cops escorting you on their motorbikes. And I don’t know what that bigger action is. All I could think to do was call my mom on my cell phone outside the theater and ask her if she’d seen it yet and what did she think and if she didn’t see it she should go right away and bring our cousin Michael who is 18 and sweet and considering joining the military because right now his only other option seems to be continuing to work at the Dunkin Donuts he’s currently employed, same situation as all those soldiers in the movie. I had to leave my excited message on my mom’s answering machine because my mom, she’d
been called into work.
