Your Hope Lies West

There’s something about the hobo pouring over Faust in the public library and reeking of piss. About the dribble of spit you wipe out of your beard while you whizz down a hill reckless and free (traffic signals be not for me). About the financial district seen over the tops of Postcard Row Victorians, downtown atwinkle and cold. About the jeans so tight you can see what brand of cigarettes he smokes. About the insecure girl you meet who tells you she’s slept with a Pulitzer winner and that she comes from a loving home. About the fact that, like New York, you’re always astounded when you meet a real native of this place. About squeezing into a thin hoodie against the fog, still sweating off the momentary sun. About the spit-clap of bus wires showering sparks into the street while the electric motor whirs. About the bike rider who pats my trunk when I almost kill him in Chinatown and asks me to please be more careful next time. About crawling down streets in your car at 4 AM and stopping at green lights because you wanted to change the CD. About chatting with the corner-store clerk at that very same intersection because he’s the only one who will. About loving that you’re not in that taller city anymore.

About knowing that the lease is up in three days and that soon you won’t have a pot to piss in and your food stamp card doesn’t recharge until another week and the residential hotels have no-vacancy signs and the exes are inhospitable or—worse—warm. There’s something about San Francisco.

Something about this place makes you know you will stay. When your lease is up and your belongings once again fit all too easily into the back of your sedan, you will not get on the Bay Bridge. Or the Golden Gate. Or those other two at the bottom of the Bay, whatever they're called. You will not drive to the Sierras and camp in Non-Designated Camping Areas. You know you will not drive to Laguna to live with your aging father and his two young “roommates,” or to your mother in the desert with her rock lawn and newspaper clippings (“I just thought you would find it interesting, is all”). You will neither pill your worry away nor construct mental dioramas of your romantic suicide attempt, which may or may not involve a note bequeathing all your possessions to the aforementioned hobo. You will do none of these things; not because you're afraid to, but because you don't need to. Not anymore.

You will wake up each morning for a month (because that’s how long you’ve had to prepare, you lazy fuck, you) knowing that when the day comes where you’re piling your roommates’ things into moving vans and helping them into their own smart, individual apartments, you will be all wry smiles and Marlboros when they repeatedly ask where you’re going from here.

“Lunch,” you’ll say, and you’ll mean it.

Because you won’t want to leave. For once. Because from your living room you can see City Hall shining through the fog. Because you can get fresh oysters for sixty cents a pop at the Sunday Farmers Market and have them on the grill in under ten minutes. Because the women in the Mission have more creativity in their flatus than you do in your, well, anything. Because you’ve vomited here. You’ve cried here. You've been plucked out of BART tracks by friends after a particularly morose and surly New Year's Eve party. You’ve walked your friends through murky troughs of shit here. It’s where your men are, and your women friends, your martyrs, your Mary’s.

You will not leave. Not because you have nowhere else to go, but because you want nowhere else to go.

It has everything you need right now. The people here are everything you'll ever want.

There’s something about San Francisco that makes you know it’s yours.