We would arrive at Hayden’s and his girlfriend would be happy and strung out. We’d all get hugs and people would be spread across the floor, sweating like the drug addicts you see in the movies. There would be knolls of cocaine on the table and mason jars full of weed—Hayden pacing around the kitchen, rolling coke around in a sifter like he was a chef at Chez Panisse.
We sat on the floor, listening to John Coltrane or The Velvet Underground. We talked about the latest issue of The Economist and the United States’ invasion of Iraq. We took sides, someone playing the devil’s advocate positing the war’s possible merits. Then we spoke of the future and jobs we might have and Nick didn’t do any coke. He said, “No thanks, I don’t do that, but don’t worry, I’m cool with it.” He sucked in a big drag of weed. It came out in a dense cloud of smoke. “Once in college,” he said, “I lost my mind. I had been up on coke and acid for days and at one point I just cracked, just lost it. I had to step away… But it’s cool. You guys carry on. It’s cool.” His eyes teetered side to side as he talked. I could see desire in those eyes, the hard tug at his will as he worked to hold the line.
I left alone, walking from Hayden’s apartment in Russian Hill. It was going to take forever and I had done a line that would carry my legs all the way across town to my bed. I floated over Pine Street, listening to the mechanical chatter of the trolley tracks. They mumbled all of the time, never stopped, like aging, bickering relatives, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a trolley to roll over them. I saw a prostitute on the corner—I had heard they came out at night around there. She was blond or close to blond and her fishnets revealed slim legs. Her red vinyl jacket just barely covered her large bust, which seemed perky in the cool morning air. I was immediately lustful for her but I had to walk because if I stopped walking she would notice me and wonder if I was a john or a cop or a druggie. I saw her face and it was gold. She was the goddess of the block. There wasn’t a car in sight or another john on foot. It was as if the girl had been placed there for me. I walked by her, turning right down Pine Street’s steep hill toward Polk. I chickened out from contributing to the carnage of human souls—hers, mine, the whole city. It wasn’t light outside quite yet but the thick darkness of night had begun to lift and I knew people in that neighborhood. Where would we go anyway? I couldn’t have her in the apartment.
I grimaced down Polk Street and saw another sex worker but she was different. Crossing over to Polk from Pine, the scene turned into a village of coarse beauties with lipstick, breasts, and cocks. They wore leather around their shoulders and they were never delicate, they were always brutal or rough trade. They didn’t have time for people who pretended to be gay. I walked by one, her face black like mine with wisdom and regret.
I asked her, “Are you a real woman?”
She spat at me, “Fuck you, nigga!”
I quickened my pace, that last line of powder lifting me across town like a magical cloud rising from the gutters of bizarro heavens.
*
During the time I was poaching a corner in his loft, Christopher liked to call me his artist-in-residence, as if he were some great benefactor and I was his charge, like Basquiat toiling away on masterpieces in a basement. Yet, I had no masterpieces and I didn’t paint. I was supposed to be a writer but the words refused to obey. Instead, I wrote pieces of songs on Christopher’s out-of-tune piano but nothing ever became of them. I played my guitar, enjoying the reverb in the loft. Deep inside, I hoped a melody and a lyric would eventually stick. I needed money, so I flew down to Los Angeles to do a freelance music writing job. I sat in the van of a rock band called Film School that was breaking up or more accurately breaking apart and awaiting reformation in a new version of itself. That’s what bands did. They broke up. The players always kept playing. I captured their story on a voice recorder and took notes at a show they played at The Echo in Los Angeles as well as in the van on their way back to San Francisco. They were dissonant to each other. One of them drove, telling jokes only to himself. Another sat shotgun, looking out the window, and another was in his seat, working on a laptop with his headphones, writing new songs for himself, not for the band. The leader and I sat in the back and he smiled oddly, like a king watching the kingdom dissipate in front of his eyes. He didn’t give a shit about the crumbling empire. He was older, had been around, and he understood the necessity of dissolution. He was poised to bounce back like an artist in a basement, churning out masterpiece after masterpiece.
*
Gavin and I were looking at each other, wondering what to do. We had beers in front of us and people had packed the bar but that didn’t seem like enough. We liked each other because the two of us, we were always looking for something more, something riskier, perhaps something worse. We believed that art was a filthy kernel at the end of a grimy tunnel. Gavin’s wide blue eyes held firmly on the glow of the beer in his pint glass. I looked at him and then away. We got a call but it wasn’t Hayden. It was Gavin’s friend, Mary Ann. She worked in bio-tech and was probably the smartest, kindest person we knew—but she lived in the horrible Marina District and we didn’t like going there. That night she wanted us to come over to help finish off her drugs. We had said enough, enough of that kind of stuff. It wasn’t getting out of hand but we could see how it might, how it would shift us off the tracks and turn us into caricatures. We didn’t want that. We already liked the caricatures we embodied: enlightened art-losers who smoked, drank, and maybe coked but weren’t cokeheads. The cab was 15 dollars and that hurt. Mary Ann welcomed us into her clean apartment. Everything was modern and her friends wore Ralph Lauren shirts tucked into khaki pants. There were North Face fleeces strewn on the backs of chairs. She was showing us off. We were her friends from the other side of town. They thought we were rock ’n’ roll.
They chattered loudly about finance while putting more of it up their noses. We just watched and smiled and they laughed at us for not doing it. Mary Ann—always looking after us, wanting us to be happy in her home—brought us a bottle of Maker’s and a bag of pistachios. Gavin and I went back and forth, drinking pinches of whiskey and cracking open the salty nuts. Every time they took long lines up their noses something hurt inside: we wanted it so badly but we didn’t want to give in. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we were in control of our lives. We finished the whiskey and smoked a pack of cigarettes. They kept doing lines and laughing about interest rates or maybe even the baseball team and the homerun record. It hurt so bad that Gavin and I started punching each other. The sound—that long snnIFFF—killed us, like the siren calls of devils on our shoulders. We found more whiskey and persevered. We were reeling around Mary Ann’s apartment, falling over furniture and punching the shit out of each other. A blow connected to my chest and I soared over a couch, tumbling to the floor. Mary Ann tolerated us with poise and dignity, always laughing with warmth, never embarrassed by her rogue friends. We passed out on her couches and while she was high she put covers on us, took off our shoes. All of that whiskey and smoke had taken years off our lives but we woke up and felt fresh for once. We retreated back to the south side of town, ready for brunch or The New York Times weekend edition or the park or whatever it is people do on Sundays.
*
We were in Golden Gate, and there was a festival going on around us. It was 10 in the morning and floats filled with fantastically costumed people—some of them nude—rode past us. Gavin and I had pancakes and champagne at his apartment earlier in the morning and now we absorbed the energy of the park. Golden Gate stretched on for a thousand city blocks and everywhere we looked there was nothing but striking mayhem. We had run out of beer and I asked a favor from a kid who was with a group of friends. They wore the uniforms of the Duke University lacrosse team, which was in bad taste as the mostly white team had been accused of raping a black woman in a team house in Durham, North Carolina, that spring. They played their roles so well. The guy told me to fuck off and shoved a beer into my hands. When we wanted some liquor we chased after a float that called itself “Snakes on a Float,” which was funny because there had been a movie called Snakes on a Plane that had caught popular culture’s attention that summer. Like the simple plot of that film—deadly snakes let loose on a plane—there was a bounty