CONFESSION: One of my favorite San Francisco quotes is this one, One day if I do go to heaven I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco’. Oh, to be here. Quotes about San Francisco are always love letters, lavish or gritty, meandering or ravenous, but that’s one of my favorites. On Saturday night, after a very long day of chauffeuring one of M’s old MIT classmates and his lovely wife around our fair and fickle city for their new home, we discovered we were bring sprinkled upon. It was, well…spittle from the sky, basically, but in July. It brought with it a double rainbow (like the ice cream!) and the sweetest fresh rain smell on our sweet little block, which is greener than most.
I am happy to report that they got the flat they wanted best – they sign the lease tonight and are making a cross-country move from New York City to San Francisco this August. It was actually super fun to check out some of the places we had to pass up that wouldn’t take pets! As a thanks, they took us to dinner at Sinbad’s, an old-fashioned, super romantic seafood restaurant situated right on Pier II, adjacent to The Slanted Door. Watching night tuck the last bit of twilight away was gorgeous, especially with the Bay Bridge looking right over our shoulders. I got lost in wistfulness just looking at it…I knew I’d miss that drive over the water, heading into San Francisco, in some ways just as special as being a part of it.
Also, we bought a very dreamy couch from Pier 1. Praise Dolly.
Here’s another bit about San Francisco-as-heaven, one of the best parts from HBO’s Angels In America (though I’d do very bad things in order to see it onstage, in a heartbeat):
Roy Cohn: [under the impression that Belize is the Angel of Death] Can I ask you something, sir?
Belize: [going along with it] “Sir”?
Roy Cohn: What’s it like? After?
Belize: After…?
Roy Cohn: This misery ends?
Belize: Hell or heaven?
Roy Cohn: …heh…
Belize: Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn: A city! Good! I was worried… it’d be a garden. I hate that shit.
Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
Roy Cohn: Isaiah.
Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.
Roy Cohn: And Heaven?
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.
Roy Cohn: The fuck it was!
