My roommate's friend from Dallas spent the weekend on our floor. Sally had never been to San Francisco. Sally was intrigued by San Francisco. I was intrigued by Sally. After the first half hour, when she told me, "You know what they say, right? Southern by choice. Texan by the grace of God," I spent the rest of the weekend writing everything she said on the take-out menu from a restaurant we went to in the Marina. Apparently, if you're from the Lone Star state, the rest of the Union exists in shabby comparison to a republic that lives and dies by the right to secede at the drop of a hat. And would, if there were anywhere to go besides the Gulf of Mexico.

Friday night, Sally has just arrived at our apartment in the Castro. Her cherry-red Corvette, rented from the airport, is parked outside. The first story she tells is about a brawl she started in a bar in Dallas, the general sort about how she wrenched her neck back and forth at another girl while shrilling about how she didn't care about the size of her ass, so why should this girl? And I am amazed that this woman, the same age as I, has actually what we call "scrapped" with another person, you know, hit them and stuff, and may very well do so again. I have never struck anyone in my life, except my brother once for walking across the kitchen floor after I had mopped. I was twelve, he was ten. Later in the evening, under the track lighting of Alegrias, Food from Spain, Sally took a look around and noted, "People don't fight much here, do they?" No, I thought, but we would often like to. Simply ignoring bad karma people might be an act of unspecified refinement, but it's certainly not as delicious as decking them out of the blue. Especially in a city like San Francisco where no one would ever expect it.

"Look at all the mow-wahn-tains!" Sally screeched, throttling through the Presidio on a rim. We were on our way to a dinner in North Beach, and I was sitting in the backseat with my roommate's boyfriend, Alex. He ventured, "Uh, Sally, it's kind of hilly around here….," as he stared into the void beyond the eucalyptus trees. As she reached the stone gates on Lombard, our driver asked, "What was that?"

"That was the Presidio," I reported authoritatively.

"An old army base," Alex said. "Closed. No one lives there."

"Thanks," Sally said, and I started to grasp that people who do not live in San Francisco do not necessarily care about the city to the point that they know anything about it. Places like, say, Dallas are infinitely more important to them. This was a new concept to me. I love San Francisco. Are there other cities in the U.S.? Do people live there by choice? Are they not always in the process of moving here, or at least planning to?

We drove up Lombard, the three new-natives in the car waiting to see what Sally would think of our famous twisty drop-stop street. When we hit that cobblestone block of hair-pin turns, Sally ignored the amazing view of the Bay and was quiet. Finally, she quipped, "Did they do this on purpose? Why is this here?" I swallowed my, "Isn't this cool?" as I realized she had spoken the exact thoughts I had had upon first discovering this particular block. No, I didn't remember it from that one TV show once. And no, I would never have walked up Lombard that one time if I had had a topographical map of the city - on the MUNI map, it only looked like the fastest route from Fisherman's Wharf to Union Street.

Only Sloan, Alex and I had any concept of what parking might be like in North Beach on a Friday night. We hit Columbus and took a right. We drove for five minutes. We didn't find parking. "Oh my Gawd, I hate this place!" Sally yelled, lighting a cigarette. "I'm never coming back here again!" We turned up a side street, and suddenly Sally yelled, "Look at the hoochy mama!" Alex and I looked. On the corner stood a woman, waiting to cross. She had shoulder-length brown hair, a long-sleeved black top with a frilly collar, a black knee-length skirt and black clunky heels.

"Where?" we said.

"There! Look at that hoochy mama!" Sally screeched again. Oh. Well, actually, I had been on the look-out for neon pink, I admitted. Alex volunteered that camel-toe would have caught his eye, maybe big hair, some kind of Robert Smith-inspired make-up, anything reflective. And a mid-riff top. Definitely some skin showing somewhere. Anywhere. This woman looked as harmless as Shirley Temple.

"Well, anything above the knee is hoochy-mama in Dallas," Sally told us. What an odd city is Dallas, I thought, as we turned right onto Kearny in the neon glow of Big Al's.

Sloan had had enough of driving around.

"Let's go to that place in the Marina," she said. "That tapas place we saw."

"Tapas?" Sally said. "What's tapas?"

"Oooh," I said. "Let's go there."

Now hurtling West on Lombard, Sally was on the lookout for strange folk, hoochy mamas and all. After living in the Haight for two months, nothing grabs my attention anymore. But suddenly Sallly announced, "That man has decorated himself." A young guy with long hair had attached handle-bar streamers to both sides of his glasses, and they mixed with his hair as he faced the wind. Suddenly, images of Halloween in the Castro flooded my brain: the eight-man car wash; the fully-rigged "Operation" game, complete with Charley Horse and red flashing nose; the "astronaut" who breathed marijuana fumes in and out of his helmet through a specially-designed bong strapped to his back. These were decorations, I thought. This man was dressed for the breeeze.

We parked the car on a side street after sending Sloan out to stand in a parking place and trudged back toward the main drag. A bus passed on Chestnut, and Sally said, "Oooh, I want to take a bus."

"Wait, I have to write that down," I said. As I grabbed for my pen again, the cable above the car flared blue and white, sending sparks to the ground. Sally stopped dead. "Whaw was that thing on fire?" she asked. "I got to come back down here tomorrow and take a picture in the daytime, that shit's like Terminator 2." If only the mayor could hear such an analogy, I thought, we might finally see some improvements on the MUNI.

Alegrias, Food from Spain, is a small tapas restaurant on 2018 Lombard, and we were seated right away. When the waitress came by for our drinks, Alex, Sloan and I decided to split a pitcher of Sangria. Sally declined, opting for beer, and the waitress began to name every beer in the house. Sally smiled politely, summarily rejecting all options, as the woman came to the end of her list. "Do you have anything that's not imported?" Sally asked finally. "Do you have Coors?" Well, no, in fact, they did not, the woman replied, smiling just as politely. "Well, I'll just have tea then," Sally announced. "With two lemons. That's very important." The tea came. With two lemons. "But whaw is this hot?" Sally asked. "Look, they brought me a little pot and everything. Ah just want tea, cold tea." The tea came back, with two lemons, ice cubes and a straw.

Sally had a giggle fit and took a picture of the menu (it had "bunny" on it), and ordered potatoes and a salad ("What's a praw-wahn?" she asked). In our closed environment, there wasn't much to dissect about our odd and off-beat city, and she regaled us with stories about that grand old state I so much want to visit now. The meal left me with little to record on the take-out menu, except when the Spanish guitar player got too close, and Sally said over her shoulder, "That music is irritating." We hit it off, my romanticism with all things new to her scrupulousness with all things foreign, and the next day she eagerly displayed for me the spoils from her jaunt to Sausalito. My favorite was a bumper sticker that said "Quit Honking - I'm Reloading." No kidding about the right-to-bear-arms state: Sally owns two shotguns and a handgun, and after she drew the little one on her roommate in Dallas when he crept into her room in the middle of the night, he still announces himself by pounding on her door and shouting, "It's me! Don't shoot!" She also mentioned that after getting her gun license, cops approach her car with weapons drawn when they pull her over, since her status as a gun owner registers with her license plates. She left Monday afternoon. I was at work, dreaming of the Gold Coast in the Deep South.

Jenny Pritchett

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