San Francisco Dark (1-3)

San Francisco Dark
This is how you fall in love with a city.

Hey sorry I tried to send you a message the power is out downstairs. Up here too. Everywhere. Everywhere? How far? Everywhere. Well I was gonna go to the store anyway. This host fella, he always looks at me like I'm being funny. I don't think it's a language thing. Do you have a fan? It's pretty hot down here. He laughs. Can I have another towel? Haha, he says. No, no more towels.

What an attractive place to convert the heathens.

Everywhere means the Safeway I've been using to feed myself. I think back to last night coming back from the Haight. This friendly guy and this sweet dog who lives to chase her ball, they're going to rent me a room. He's worried about having a roommate, concerned, maybe, that I have habits he hasn't considered. Exhibitionism perhaps. Maybe I insist on installing a bidet wherever I stay. The subject makes some folks uneasy. Maybe in the guise of science but out of spite for the world I employ a device to amplify my snores. One must not overly be careful.

When I returned I devoured the microwave burritos in the freezer, on the shelf labeled Bedroom 2, the only place I am permitted to keep my microwave burritos. There is no stove in this place. That's part of the joke. I ate them both, the steak and cheese and the bean and cheese, and they went down easy and I did not regret it. I remembered my friend's first time on LSD in 1995. He got so hungry. He didn't usually eat before 2 a.m. those days. He got up every few minutes to 'consume burrito units'. Hilarious whether you were there or not.

I did not consider the consequences of eating all the food I had left. I assumed I would as every day go to Safeway the next morning for goods and, if I desired, sundries as well. I was not stocked for emergencies, planning only to be in this damp basement room for ten days before providence guides me to a hole I can call my own. Didn't even stock up on the good Greek yogurt I like.

Outside I see now what the host fella was saying. Traffic light at the corner is out. Golden Gate Park is darker than usual. A thicket of redwoods and ominous windmills. Wolves howl. Not quite but there are coyotes around. This might be the chance they're waiting for. I saw a guy feeding a pack of raccoons in the middle of the day in there. I got the feeling he lived in the park and his parents were being patient, like he was showing them a drawing to put on the fridge. It's daylight now but gray and pixelated like the fuzz from a bad UHF channel. Stores are not open.

The guy I met last night, the guy who's going to rent me a room, sends me a question that seems important enough to warrant an immediate response. I try. Not sent. Not sent. Hold the phone sideways. Not sent.

San Francisco Dark 2
At the cafe on La Playa where I've enjoyed coffee and all manners of sandwich the owner stands out front looking sour. Always happens on a Saturday, he says, right at 1 p.m.. Busiest time of the week. Rumors trickling through odd cell signals. They're saying 3:45. They're saying 4:30. I heard it goes up past 35th. I heard Geary. No one can get answers. The air is heavy. We are slick and the light is failing and up the street the movie theater where I was going to watch Gremlins to celebrate Christmas is closed. Everywhere means movie theaters and everywhere folks need electricity to run things. Dim sum places and banh mi joints. Sparkle Laundry is shit out of power and luck with the rest. Folks outside on patio furniture, waving and nodding and waiting for dark to descend. More of the neighborhood than I've seen before. Trying to get it all in before it goes away.

Random guy: hey do you know if Hockey Haven is open? No but let's find out. I don't know what Hockey Haven is but I follow him anyway. I need to play some pool, he says. We trade stories about what we've seen.

Hockey Haven is open and very dark inside. Still serving? If you have cash. This is how you make friends anywhere in the world. People pooling their singles to split a pint. Stories. Only light is from red candles in round-bottomed cups. Like the Pontiac back in the day in Wicker Park when Buddy would forget to pay the bills. Regulars in finger gloves gripping their drinks. Ghost stories. S'mores over candles. Turns in front of the gas oven on a milk crate if the pilot will light.

This guy over here is a contractor. People say I remind them of Robin Williams he says and I squint and now I see it and he's literally wearing a horizontal striped shirt and now that's all I'll ever see. Dark comes up from the floor and drifts out of our mouths. Stories swapped, ales quaffed. The owner is from County Clare. She was a bartender and bought this place from the previous owner to make it her own. That's badass, I say. She doesn't screw around. That's all I do sometimes. She understands.

On the sidewalk someone works for a billionaire with three private observatories. She and her husband are supposed to go to a holiday party. I don't know if we're going to make it, not sure we should even try. Don't run into anything on the way.

Any word yet? No word yet. Now they're saying 6:30. They're gonna have to close things up, you can't even see inside, whole thing's a feckin' liability. I'm gonna write a play about this I say to no one and almost mean it. A play that takes place in the dark. Like the audio scripts I used to write only the audience has to sit through it live with the lights down, you can see a flicker here or there but everything is left maddeningly unresolved.

Down the hill the place everyone in the neighborhood talks about. You have to get the burger there someone told me. Everywhere means no kitchen. Now I recognize just how hungry I am. I'd do terrible things for a burrito unit or two. Someone hands me two bagels. Someone else invites me inside. Do you think it's that comet, someone says? Oh the one that's been fueling itself from the Sun? Nah why would it just affect us? Maybe it's not. No messages in or out. We're the experiment. Test subjects. General agreement that this is the case.

Out in the Midwest the angry-hearted watch the News, swallowing stories about how we're all stabbing and robbing each other out here, all the hardworking upstanding corporate retail business savaged by looters. Driverless cars stuck in intersections (I saw one of those to be fair), all these smug liberals out here finally getting what they deserve.

Toward the ocean through the fog it's a Batman comic, like that one weird series where he exists in Victorian London, where he tracks Jack the Ripper through the smoke and glow from the gas lamps. Only instead of Scarecrow I meet a nice guy walking dogs and everyone makes extra efforts to be friendly and disarming.

What a lovely place to be confused and blind.

At the bus depot I ask how come some of the transit lines still have power, you can see the sparks, and he says they have their own independent generators, some of the lines but not all, and there's no way to communicate between buses anyway so nothing's running at least not most of it and none of it out here. So you guys don't know anything either? No man, we don't know. Cyber attack, maybe. Well that makes me feel better ha ha, I say, thanks have a good night.

I tear a chunk off a pocket bagel. I may have a slice of cheese warming in the fridge. About as dark as it gets out here and thank goodness this part the city is built on a grid. I want to go see the ocean but you can't even see that, biggest thing on Earth be damned.

At 4 a.m. the lights come on. The Big Bang with a chorus of horns.

San Francisco Dark 3
Three days later everyone's still talking about it. Never had an outage like that, someone says, and someone else says I remember a worse one, a tanker crashed into a bridge, and someone goes that was a movie or that was New York and the facts don't matter anyway.

Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend there was a fire at a substation. Worse is the same one caught fire twenty-two years ago and never got fixed. Relying on short memories is unwise in a place full of folks with institutional knowledge. You can clear out the critics but someone always remembers that one thing that happened that one time, maybe they were a victim, maybe they still have a limp from it, maybe they’ve vowed vengeance on the bastards who caused it, they are Inigo Montoya and so forth and RIP Rob Reiner.

The Sparkle Laundry is open but things are in disarray. Hot water won’t stop running in some of the machines and the lady is on the phone with the utility company or the city or whoever has a notion or prescription for such an event. Guy trying to force a quarter into a slot in one of the big industrial size washers with his keys. I can see it in there, he says. There’s an air of panic. No one wants to be here longer than they need to be. Me included. Change machine is out. I try a five, I try a ten. Other guy says let me try and inserts a single. Hope. Suspended reactions. It spits the bill out with a whirr. We are in dismay.

All is not lost. I have a community here, in this place where I’ve been for all of eight days. There's a coffee shop that is also a woodworking shop for kids. I met the owners at a child's birthday party a few weeks ago. She wrote a column for the Standard, a publication I’ve read a few times and still don’t quite understand. Indie rag propped up by a technocrat who likes having his own personal press I suppose.

Hi again. Huge favor to ask. Quarters are a hot commodity, she says. I know I get it, I say. What is this the ‘90s? Everyone going around asking for change to make a phone call. She pulls out a 6 oz plastic tub, the kind you get a single serving salad in from the Safeway deli. I can spare two bucks worth. You are all that shines in this world, I say.

I was a stranger here a week ago and now I'm not. Three years in a much smaller town in Northern Michigan and my only friend was the guy who lived downstairs. I could go on about the decisions I made and the habits I enslaved myself to, my fantasies of having neighbors who don't sport Deus Vult tattoos under their longjohns. Not that you can ever be sure but I worry much less about the motives of a fifth generation Japanese American lady who runs the local laundromat.

Mundane as all of this is it feels like a revelation. I think about preppers, in the Heartland and the desolate parts of California not far from here. Loners versus the Whole Fucking World. No one's coming. No one's getting you out of your mess. You blame the government. You blame everyone. You stock up on ammo and MREs. If the power goes out you're looking for someone to shoot.

Community feels like a luxury to me these days but for a lot of people it's still the norm. To be part of something resilient. To improvise opposition to chaos.

What a beautiful place to not think about death.