(Note: highlights words corresponded with images shown in a slideshow. I have included pictures I or my friends took; all other images can be located through links to their original source.)
Satellites
I
I had been living in New York a year and a half when I got the call
I knew something was wrong when Mary, who ran the outreach program for homeless youth on Haight St., where I worked in the late 90s, left a message saying, “Call me.”
It was Pete, she said. Pete the anarchist raver, six feet two, whose blond dreadlocks in two ponytails should’ve looked silly but worked on him somehow. Pete, who wore bright orange vests and went to Burning Man, who DJ’d the Anarchist Café, playing house music no one would dance to but him and me. Who loved chocolate chip cookies as much as I did, and would bring cookies to our Tuesday meetings at a café in the Tenderloin, where we ran the DOPE Project, teaching drug users to save each other’s lives from overdose. Pete, whom I’d last seen at the Harm Reduction Conference in Oakland and implored to help me take over the world, ignoring how terrible he looked.
When Pete died it was January and in the 30s in New York. All I could think about was wanting to jump in the ocean, to defibrillate my heart into absorbing the news. I rode my bike down Flatbush to Coney Island, where old Russian men in speedos paced back and forth slapping their chests. I stripped down to my boxers and walked into the freezing water, the cold clutching my lungs and stinging my skin as I pushed in deeper. It helped but it wasn’t enough. I remember thinking, “I don’t know what else to do.”
I had moved to New York for the same reasons as everyone—the art, the culture, the ambition. PS 1, basketballon W. 4th St., Bagels on the Square. The home of American Jews, the place my mother was born. I’d come chasing memories of rifling through jazz records and staring at posters of queer bodies on visits to St. Marks Place as a teenager, but living there was a shock. 14 hour work days, women traipsing through snow in three inch heels and fur-lined coats, poor people wearing designer clothes. A man on Wall St. grabbing me by the shoulders and shoving me aside because I wasn’t walking fast enough.
I’d moved to escape the bubble of San Francisco, to meet people who didn’t agree with me on everything, to learn and grow. And it worked. I did things in NY I never would have done here, like buy a pinstriped Calvin Klein suit and learn the meaning of business casual. The non-profit where I worked took us to see a Broadway show every Christmas. I got to wander the streets of the Lower East Side, watch The Muppets Take Manhattan under the Brooklyn Bridge, and see my first nephew being born.
And yet, even though I met other artists and queers, I never felt quite at ease there, especially as one of the only white faces in the Caribbean part of Brooklyn where I lived. I realized I would need to be there another 15 years—if not 50—to truly feel a part of the place. My sister said, about life in New York, “Your calendar will fill up but you won’t be part of a community.”
I debated whether to go back to San Francisco. When my friend Gretchen gave me a tarot reading to help me decide, the card I pulled showed a man, curled up in a ball, surrounded by swords, all pointed at him. I was paralyzed with indecision, feeling like I had to prove I could tough it out.
When I flew back to San Francisco for Pete’s memorial, it was like seeing a sky full of stars for the first time. The service was at a chapel in the Castro, overflowing with weirdos in bright orange, in honor of Pete. All my friends were there, as was Pete’s family. At the service I found out Pete had been a choir boy, which explained his fondness for the irreverent hymn sung at his memorial, “God is a lesbian / She is a lesbian / God is a dyke.” The service turned into a parade down to the Mission, with the Extra Action Marching Band leading the charge down 16th St. with their trumpets and drums. My best friend and I held up a banner of Pete’s name I’d sewn on the plane, strings of orange silk streaming behind us, while the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence sprinkled a special blend of orange glitter over the crowd. It was emotive, earnest, celebratory, everything I hadn’t realized I was missing so much in New York.
The second memorial, back in New York where Pete had once lived, was overcast by comparison. It was in the basement of a church on 126th St. No one said much, and then people went out to drink. There were stories; there was arguing—but no glitter, no marching band.
I knew then what to do: I needed to leave New York.
I needed to come back to San Francisco before any more of my friends died, before everything I held dear was gone.
I needed to ride the 14 Mission and have someone ask me, “Hey, didn’t you go to Everett?” To be recognized after 25 years.
I needed to run into awkward Dyke March hookups at Rainbow Grocery, whose wet buckets of bulk tofu I used to reach into when it was on 15th and Mission.
I needed to ride the 22 Fillmore, where I last saw Bob Smith, my friend Noah’s father, before he died of AIDS in 1991. He was hugging his oxygen tank and a brown leather briefcase, heading to the beach, he said. Opening up his briefcase, he showed me its contents: a Walkman and two CDs from the other Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure. He was a man doing exactly what he wanted with the time he had left.
I needed to still be connected to this place and its history, even if I wasn’t squatting its abandoned buildings as a homeless teenager or antiwar protestor anymore. I needed to feel affirmed in my crunchy queer punk vegan identity, where all of me could be seen and people talked about astrology.
I needed the layers of heartbreak and joy that imbue every corner of this city with memory.
I needed to come home, even if it was to a home I didn’t recognize, to see what was still here.
II
I somehow thought moving back to the city would bring Pete back, but of course it didn’t. Nearly ten years later, I have his picture on my altar but I’m still here and he’s still gone.
So what does it mean to still be here when I now live in Oakland—which itself is rapidly changing—and the places I remember are gone—the Noe Valley Community Store on 29th and Sanchez, the Real Foods on 24th St. where I was with my mother during the ‘89 earthquake, bottled juices shattering all around? Epicenter on Valencia, where I used to buy any 7 inch record with a girl’s name in the band. The street names are the same but the places have changed, as have I.
What does it mean to still be here when the gravitational pull loosens? When the friends I knew growing up in this city I only see on Facebook, the very medium dissolving our physical connections in real life? What does it mean when my friends get fed up with the high cost of housing and move away? I am not one of those people who moved to the City to reinvent herself. I did not leave behind a box of trophies and yearbooks in my parents’ basement. I don’t have a cheaper home town to move back to when I find a partner and decide to have kids. This is it.
III
When I first got back to San Francisco from New York, I couldn’t walk down the street without thinking about white hegemony, the irony of a city priding itself on its radical politics while getting whiter each year as black and brown people get pushed out to the margins in places like Pittsburgh, Antioch, Brentwood. I was so alarmed at the changes every time I emerged from 24th Street BART that I hid up in Bernal, haunting the Alemany Farmer’s Market and watching the L Word on TV at the Wild Side West. When I had to move to Oakland to be closer to my job, I avoided the city altogether, coming back only to get Inka in bulk at Rainbow and to see old friends.
But preparing for this show, I find myself paying vigilant attention to what places remain, and choosing to spend time in them again. Wanting to still be here in the present, not just in the past.
In Glen Canyon, where I used to get high with my friends during lunch at McAteer. Where I remember playing flag football in the rain in 7th grade, “Sweet Child of Mine” blasting on the boombox, feeling for the first time since my family moved to the city from Hawaii when I was 10 like I fit in amongst the goths and punks and metalheads.
In Yerba Buena Gardens, where I take my nephews when they visit from New York, walking through the MLK Memorial, I catch my breath under the thundering waterfall, remembering a time before it was there at all. When across the street, at the seven-story squat on 3rd and Mission, we lay on the floor as technicolor images of the traffic below drifted across the ceiling like satellites, a nick in the black paint covering the windows having made a pinhole movie camera whose projection only we could see.
In La Boheme Café on 24th and Mission, where Nicaraguan poets still play chess and drink wine. Where every time I walk in I cross my fingers the owner will say, “Long time no see!” and not “There’s a five dollar minimum for Wi-Fi.” Where I meet a friend visiting town after moving to LA. I order tea and we share a vegan chocolate chip cookie and talk about the strangeness of his new life. As we stand up to leave, he offers me the last bite of the cookie. I take it, and think of Pete.
***
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