The Solace of Memory
“I prefer memories that stay fragile, vulnerable to erasure, like the soft feel of the velvet couches in Freddy’s living room.”
Rachel Kushner wrote that line of fragile and soft memory in a New Yorker essay (The Hard Crowd: Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco, January 18, 2021 issue; the book of the same name will be available in April 2021). I don’t have many photographs from my days living in San Francisco during the late ’80s and early ’90s for the same reason. We were living our lives and not nailing them down with pictures.
My time in San Francisco, like Kushner’s, turned into books. Mine are about a young woman working at a bakery and living near the Swensen’s Ice Cream at Union and Hyde. My protagonist gets caught up in a murder investigation. While it is a mystery, it’s also a book about growing up. What was it like to be 19 and living in the City that grew out of the needs of prospectors during the Gold Rush? A place that rose from the ashes after the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire that lasted for three days and burned something like 500 blocks. Kushner writes about fire a lot in her piece. Buildings were often destroyed by well-timed fire in those days.
For Kushner, her memories of growing up in San Francisco’s Sunset District were a mixed bag. She ran with a rough group of kids some who didn’t make it to full adulthood. It reminded me that my memories of San Francisco are rose colored. I pushed aside the seedy and the painful. But Kushner’s unflinching words reminded me things I’d long forgotten.
In about 1983, I had a one-legged boyfriend named Johnny who lived in a residence hotel at the end of North Beach and sold heroine. He had lost his foot after he tried to hop a train and fell onto the track on his way to see Evel Knievel in Oakland. His time in the hospital after the accident introduced him to the drug. As Kushner writes, you can’t put truth like that into fiction because it seems too far out. My homage to Johnny in my second book, Free For All, was to make him a punk rocker named Wicked Smith who had both his feet.
Once, when I was out of town, Johnny let a mercenary live in my apartment. I came home to black scars on my kitchen table from cooking drugs and a bathtub covered with what looked like black soot. Another time visiting Johnny in his tiny room on a cold winter night, an old and battered Gregory Corso was sitting in a rickety chair as Johnny gave him a shot.
There was a feralness and unparented feel to that time that, I have decided, formed some of the best comics like Aisha Tyler, Ali Wong and Margaret Cho. I count Sam Rockwell in this group. He has an edginess that doesn’t dip into harshness. You can’t take your eyes off any of them. They’re like jewels buried in the dirt. You are going to dig them out. They each grew up on San Francisco streets because, like most of us, their parents worked.
Kushner’s evocative essay brought back so many of those “vulnerable” memories like when I watched Mort Sahl perform in a North Beach nightclub. At the time, I was still drinking too many sugary cocktails and had to step outside to barf in the gutter half way through his set. The street barkers outside the strip joints didn’t raise an eyebrow.
Kushner knew a lot of musicians. There was a thriving punk rock scene in the City partly because the spike-dog-collar and Doc Martin booted musicians could make a living working at Tower records.
Thank you Rachel Kushner for the memories strung together like a pearl necklace traded for cash at a pawn shop on Polk Street.
It was a time. A time stranger than fiction.
Autumn Doerr is a television producer and the author of The Lexi Fagan Mystery series.