Still Slouching

Dedicated to Joan Didion, who has no say as to whether I dedicate anything to her or not

My first apartment in San Francisco was on Clayton and Waller, a block off Haight Street near the Panhandle. My friend Sloan had been living in a room in the apartment since June, and when I decided in August to move to California instead of backpacking through Italy (the rationale being that Italy wasn't going anywhere, as if California was), something convenient happened. The girl living in Sloan's front room got caught in Tijuana with a magic mushroom and was incarcerated in Mexican jail for four months. So this four-month sub-let opened up, and I boxed plenty of summer clothes (Ha! Ha, ha!) and my guitar and shipped everything out of Chicago via UPS. My father addressed each box to "Kid Terrific Incorporated," because it's cheaper to ship to a business than a residence. Also because he is strange.

To begin to explain the Upper Haight, which is what the rest of the country is referring to when they talk about the famous Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I found this diary entry from the end of my first two months there:

I am crossing Clayton at Haight, past the gray-beard whose matching pajama set makes him look like he just escaped from somewhere, walking up Clayton through the winter drizzle to my apartment on the corner, past the yellow puke in the middle of the sidewalk, and I think about how I have been here for seven weeks now, and how I have seen people puke on the street, piss on the street and in bus stops, scream at each other for nothing more than bumping shoulders, and I think that this city is ugly.

Now, the truth is that at that point a number of other factors were figuring into my disgust for the Haight, and by extension the city of San Francisco. I was unemployed. My money was running out. I had nowhere to move to at the end of my sub-let. My girlfriend was sleeping with anything that moved in Manhattan, although to be fair, I didn't know this at the time. But I missed her and was miserably in love with someone who lived about as far away from San Francisco as you can get, it was raining, I had eaten nothing but burritos for days, had been pooping nothing but burritos for days, and someone had puked right in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my apartment. This would be enough to make anyone manifest hatred for the first thing in sight, and the only thing in sight to me was my neighborhood. So I hated the Haight, and blamed everything on everyone who lived there.

Now I realize that I was wrong to hate the Haight in response to outside factors, such as the people at Sidewalk not calling me back and women who can't keep their Levi's buttoned in bars with names like "The Clit Club." Because Haight Street is ugly in it's own right, and I am here to tell you why it is so disgusting and why you shouldn't go there.

First of all, you can't walk a foot without some young runaway from a good home in Marin asking you for money or cigarettes. I lived in Chicago for four years, where there is legitimacy in the homeless population. Chicago is a racially and economically segregated town, and no one chooses to be homeless in a city where people die from the cold. Incredibly, homelessness is a completely different phenomenon in San Francisco. The element of choice is baffling, and I do not understand teen-agers asking me for change when they cart some of the healthiest looking dogs around on hemp leashes. The streets are black with trash, piss and puke, and kids literally clog the sidewalks from the infamous McDonald's on Stanyan down Haight past Masonic.

Second of all, people walk too slow! If you live in the Haight, and you're trying to get down the street to a bus to get out of the Haight, and you have been awakened that morning as you have been awakened every morning at 7 a.m. by the bearded smelly man who lives under your window yelling to himself, you are irritated from the beginning. Then you hit Haight Street and take a right, and besides the cluster-fuck of people sleeping right in your way, there are tourists here! And you hate tourists! Because they walk too slow! And you don't understand why they come to the Haight anyway, because it's so amazingly dirty, and all the hyper-stylish stores are overpriced, and except for the Pork Store Café there is no reason to come to this neighborhood by choice, only reason to avoid it, and you wish you didn't live here, and later you're relieved that you moved to the Castro where everyone is happy, and gay, and if someone is walking too slow there is still room left on the sidewalk to go around them.

Third of all, the Gap.

Fourth of all, Ben and Jerry's on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, not because of the business itself but because of its location. Blatant capitalism.

And these are the reasons not to go to the Haight, ever, never ever. And next time I will write about something that makes me happy about this city, as there is no reason anyone should believe me at this point when I keep saying that I love San Francisco. I do. Just not the Haight, or the Marina because I'm too poor to live there, or Russian Hill and that yuppie-scum bar Johnny Love's, or the Tenderloin except for Glide Church, or Piers 1 through 39, and Pier 39 especially.

Jenny Pritchett

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