Satellites (#StillHereSF)

 This is a piece I wrote and performed as part of Still Here IV: disPLACEment, June 15, 2016, African American Cultural Center, National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco. #StillHereSF. 

(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.

 Pete had OD’d in the bathroom at a friend’s house in Berkeley. He passed out against the door. He was so heavy they had to call the fire department to remove the door’s hinges and get him out.

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 16^th 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 15^th 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 29^th 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 24^th 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 7^th 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 3^rd 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 24^th 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.

***

Two Poems and an Essay on Living in Baltimore and Working with Women at the Baltimore City Jail

I. View of East Baltimore from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 9^th Floor

November 30, 2004

construction crane

turns imperceptibly

holding taut the wrecking ball

poised

Johns Hopkins

waits for East Baltimore to crumble

when he is finished

only the prison & university

will be left standing

shoulder to shoulder

brick to brick

xxx

II. View of East Baltimore from the Public Defender’s Office, Baltimore City Detention Center

February 26, 2005

pigeon shifts outside the window

rustling a leaf stuck in the grate

no light comes through

pane’s painted over

know the noise by

flashing shadows

fluttering wings

the only natural light:

a crack in the opaque plastic

lining the stairwell on the southside

the view: a pile of concrete rubble, parked cars and barbed wire

the women duck down to see,

“what’s the weather like?”

third floor smells of jail food: greasy and acidic

one woman pauses during an interview

conspiratorially she says “don’t look now, but

there’s a mouse right underneath you. look at him go!”

another woman has so much pain it hurts to sit up

doctors said she had “a abnormal uterus”

wanted to take out a little piece and have a closer look

got arrested before her appointment

hasn’t told the guards yet

afraid they won’t believe her

“but why would I fake that?

I’ve bled five times this month

that’s never happened before.

I’m worried.

That’s not normal, is it?”

xxx

December 16, 2004

Where am I in this?

When I first got to Baltimore I had never seen anything like it. The segregation. The rows upon rows of abandoned houses. In San Francisco, property is too valuable to be left vacant. The whole city’s landscape has been turned over in the past eight or nine years since the dot-com boom. Newly constructed live/work lofts stand vacant because they are unaffordable, a gaudy new eyesore; not because they are abandoned or boarded up.

In Baltimore I saw for the first time the kinds of segregation I’d grown up hearing about. The dividing line between neighborhoods black and white: Greenmount Avenue. And that is not to say there is not segregation in San Francisco, because there is. If anything its “prosperity” has reduced the black population there from 16% to 8% in the past ten years. What were once thriving black neighborhoods are now being steadily coopted by white hipsters, bars and cafes. As a queer white girl I am by no means free from implication in the gentrification conspiracy. We queers are, after all, often the first “pioneers.”

And yet. I had never seen eight houses out of ten on a block abandoned before I came here. I had worked for years with heroin injectors doing outreach, needle exchange, overdose prevention. But I had never seen so much of the adult population strung out on dope in one small place. Never seen regular folks shopping at Safeway, nodding with shopping carts inside the store. The kinds of desperation I was used to I had assumed were the results of living in a city where housing is nearly impossible to come by if you’re poor and where the cost of living means there are around fifteen or twenty thousand people sleeping on the streets, under bridges, and in public parks every night. I had assumed that having a place to live, a squat, a roof of one’s own (not a homeless shelter, I know how unsafe those are), was the place from which to start making life changes. I’d seen it work for kids I knew. Get arrested. Go into a residential treatment program. Get a job, a house, a life. Or. Get SSI, get a SRO hotel room. Things start to stabilize. (Or they don’t and you end up back on the streets and start all over.)

To see so many people living here in “abandominiums” threw me off. To see so much poverty that it was clear no amount of housing could bring an equally stable life. The cause was clear: corporate divestment, manufacturing removal, suburban flight. No jobs. No money. Leaves a vacuum filled by street economy. It makes sense. I read about it in The Corner and got a better understanding of the city I’d just moved into. I thought hard about what it meant to be perceived as just another “white girl on a dirt bike,” except I was not buying dope on the corner, just chugging up Biddle St. heading to school for public health at Johns Hopkins.

xxx

On my first day at Hopkins there was a security briefing where students were warned not to walk alone at night, not to park their cars on the street, not to venture off campus or out of sight of the two hundred some security guards and police officers that patrolled the six block radius surrounding the hospital, nursing, medical and public health schools. The speech conjured up images of an ivory tower surrounded by fire breathing dragons and a moat with a drawbridge that was tightly closed. I contemplated throwing a Molotov cocktail at the podium. I wanted to ask the speaker who protects the people of East Baltimore from the police, and from interpersonal violence? But in a room of four hundred people, on the first day of school, I knew it wasn’t the time or place. I went up to the speaker afterwards and asked that he check the underlying racism in his language. Calling him on it helped me feel a little less crazy, but the reaction of a woman who overheard our conversation about how she never walks alone in East Baltimore served as a reminder that I was not in San Francisco anymore.

xxx

Since getting here and starting to grow accustomed to the dichotomous landscape of poverty and prosperity, of racial “disparity” (as systemic racism is so apolitically described in medical academia), I keep conjuring up this image from the film The Battle of Algiers. In it, this woman, driven to armed revolution by the oppression of her people, stands in a café, explosives in her purse, looking at the white (French) café goers, chatting away obliviously. She knows they are not responsible, directly. But, like the Afrikaners in South Africa who benefited from apartheid, like white middle class US citizens who benefit from privilege, they did not see that their comfort and ease came as a result of the exploitation of Algerian land and people. She looks around, feeling the weight of her decision, and, in service of greater revolutionary cause, orders a coke, plants her purse full of explosives beneath a stool at the counter, and leaves.

I keep thinking about what it means to be those café goers, and how much those benefiting from white privilege can be held responsible for the atrocities carried out in our service. How is it that the activist scenes here can be so segregated? How is it that everyone is not working around issues of race and fighting white supremacy/privilege, in a city that is majority African-American and so obviously in need of human resources? What is it that enables non-Black to fight for bike lanes, for “peace” globally, for abstract issues that we understand to have local implications (and they do) but which do not speak to, or generate from, the local community? What does it mean to ride critical mass down Greenmount Avenue, in festive Halloween costumes? To ride critical mass past the jail that we only enter in service or in 24 hour stints post-protest? Where is the dialogue--no, the action--around race in the mostly white activist community in Baltimore? How are our struggles not inextricably linked? How can I fight for my liberation and not others’?

How can “anarchist white boys from Towson” not see that everything they think they are fighting for is based on issues that effect first and foremost people of color in Baltimore City (prisons, capitalism, sexism, class-exploitation, police brutality, white supremacy)?

What is my role in this, as an anarchist queer Jewish white girl, studying at Hopkins on scholarship, there ostensibly to get some skills to bring back to the community, getting more disillusioned each day? What role do I play, riding the shuttle from Homewood campus to Monument St., a tourist in this town? I do my project in the jails, hoping that a needs assessment will help put some better services and policies in place to improve the lives of women, both in and out of jail. I raise my hand and spout revolutionary rhetoric every chance I can get. I get a reputation for being a Big Mouth. I know who my friends are. I make my opinions known. I vow not to remain in academia after this program. I check out what’s going on with activism in Baltimore, and try to contribute within the limits of my time and ability. I try to listen, make connections, and build bridges that will last after I am gone. I get off the bus and walk through the streets of Baltimore, alone.

April 30, 2015

post script: #BlackLivesMatter #Justice4FreddieGray

crush/repeat

My friend Sarah Brown put a call out for folks to do something for thirty days and make a piece based on the experience for the "Crush/repeat Fun-A-Day showcase" in Seattle, WA on April 12, 2014. I chose to take a 30 minute walk and write a sentence and/or take a picture of what I saw. I made the words and pictures into postcards (using a surprisingly cool template from Microsoft Word). Here is what they said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the back side of every postcard I put my return address and invited visitors to the "Crush/repeat" showcase to take one, take a walk, make a picture, and tell me what they see. I'm looking forward to seeing what, if anything, comes back in return.

I like art shows that are interactive. There was a neat show recently at Intersection for the Arts called "Why can't the First Part of the Second Party be the Second Part of the First Party?" by Bernie Lubell, which involved a room-sized wooden mechanism by which people could either pedal a cycle or walk on a treadmill to make gears turn that advanced a scroll of paper and made a line drawn with a golfing pencil get longer, among other things. It was neat seeing people interacting with the piece and either tentatively observing or stepping up and interacting with it to make it go and see what would happen as a result. Without the audience's participation, there was nothing to watch. In this age of voyeuristic enterprise (including blog-reading, ha!), it is refreshing to be challenged to really inhabit a space rather than just passing through it unchanged.

My first ever full-size quilt: purple nine-patch wedding quilt for my sister

In 2012, my eldest sister got married to someone who, like her, is left-handed, Jewish, vegan, and loves purple. Also, he translates Japanese text into English for a living and we grew up in Hawaii, greatly influenced by Japanese food, culture, and people. It was meant to be. The wedding took place in a Japanese garden; she wore lavender and gold; he wore a purple tie. To be with her new husband, my sister moved from golden California to frozen Vermont.

I knew I wanted to make her a quilt as a wedding gift, both to keep her warm and for their shared home. I had never made a full-sized quilt before and had always thought a nine-patch seemed the most doable for a beginner. After hours of searching out purple nine-patches for inspiration, I found it: a beautiful children's quilt with nine different purples and a grey theme:

Commissioned Nine-Patch by Silja Pikku-Kettu (All Rights Reserved)

Someone else was so inspired by this design, she made her own copy using rose and I loved that one, too:

Purple Nine-Patch Baby Quilt, by Jennifer LGB (All Rights Reserved)

My super-quilter friend Jessica recommended the perfect sewing machine (Husqvarna/Viking Emerald 118), told me to get a quilter's foot (which keeps the seam at 1/4" and is a lifesaver), helped me pick out fabrics at Stonemountain and Daughter, and suggested mapping out the quilt in Excel (go public health nerds!). Then came cutting out squares. Lots and lots of squares. Then sewing them into blocks of two, then strips of three, and playing around with different combinations to make 36 nine-patch blocks. (According to Wikipedia, in Jewish numerology, "the number 18 stands for 'life,' because the Hebrew letters that spell chai, meaning 'living,' add up to 18. Because 36 = 2×18, it represents 'two lives'"--coming together.)

-

(One tip my friend showed me was to sew blocks together so they ended up on a kind of clothes line and then snip them apart afterwards. This saved tons of time.)

 

I didn't plan exactly what the whole thing would look like; I just made a bunch of blocks using different combinations I liked and ended up with 20 of the combination above, which I put along the outside border, and 12 of an alternate pattern, which I put along the inside ring blocks around a four-square centerpiece.

Purple nine-patch quilt top

I realized after making the borders that I wanted the centerpiece to be something special, but because I hadn't planned the design in advance, I had to make the centerpiece out of whatever squares I had leftover.  I spent hours rearranging the remaining squares, alternately laughing and kicking myself at my lack of forethought, and channeling Tim Gunn (from Project Runway)'s perennial advice to "make it work" before arriving at the asymmetrical design (below). This process embodied the whole experience, which took over a year not because I spent that long sewing, but because at each step (from buying the fabric, to cutting out squares, to piecing together strips, to making nine-square blocks, to sewing on borders), I had to face my own fears: I didn't know what I was doing, it would show, and it wouldn't be good enough. 

To tame my "monkey mind," I thought of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of including intentional flaws in a mandala as a reminder of life's imperfection (and the related Japanese design concept of Wabi-sabi).  By "making it work," I was able to give myself compassion for not being perfect and continue with what I had instead of clinging to some ideal of what might have been. 

Purple nine-patch quilt centerpiece

Once the cover was done, I decided to have the layers quilted together professionally with a Japanese wave pattern, something I couldn't easily do by hand. I found a long-arm quilter (Melissa, of A Fine and Fair Stitch) in Berkeley, and handed over the cover and backing, along with a wave quilting pattern I had found online. She suggested alternating small and large waves, and did a beautiful, stunning job:

Next came the binding. After reviewing from among a few alternatives that Melissa provided, I decided on a pattern reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night painting, which added a slightly psychedelic feel. I learned how to attach the binding and, for the first time, properly miter the corners, through a great online class (also provided to me as a gift by Jessica, without whom I could not have possibly finished this quilt). Watching the video explaining how to do the binding was a joy in itself (not to mention super useful in being able to fast forward and rewind the instructions when I did it wrong over and over again). I have such incredible admiration for older women whose earnestness is not coated in twenty-five layers of irony.

Finally, after more than a year of procrastination, joy, self-doubt, self-compassion, needlepricks, craft-time warp zones, Savage Love podcasts, and words of encouragement from friends, the quilt was done! And even though it ended up looking very different than my original vision, I had to admit it looked great.

My mom--whose standards are impeccable-- loved it...

As did my sister and her husband (shown here in Vermont saying "shaka")...

In the end, I didn't need to worry about the quilt not being good enough. Instead, I could let the quilt communicate the love and  intention I'd extended first to myself and then to my sister and her husband, and by extension, to all people learning to love themselves--and their partners--beautiful and imperfect as they are.