There’s No Place Like It

I am sitting here with a little gift box on my desk that is covered with gold paper and adorned with a fake red ribbon. Every time you lift the lid it plays “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” due to a mechanism with which I am not familiar, though I suspect it is a microchip of some sort.

A friend with good feeling in his heart gave it to me during a weekend visit to the City by the Bay. He said, “This will remind you of home, you poor dog. There’s no place like it.”

He expected that every time I raised the lid and heard the song it would evoke images of fog creeping through the Golden Gate, with a visage of Herb Caen, like the face of God, formed in the billowing mist. That is not the case. Every time the lid is lifted, I salivate.

Unlike Pavlov’s dog, it is not a question of hunger but of slack-jawed weariness. I mean, I am really sick of that song.

Forget the tune itself and its oozy sentimentality over little cable cars climbing halfway to the bars, I mean stars. What rankles is the attitude of those who play the damned thing.

They look upon it as a liturgical theme whose very sound promises a form of salvation for those doomed to live in, you guessed it, Los Angeles.

Take my friend Arnie. I have known him longer than I have known my wife Cinelli who, because she is smart, would never give me anything as mawkish and bourgeois as a little box that sings.

Arnie, who also should know better, bought it for me because he felt that every day of my life in L.A. is spent grieving over the fact I no longer live in San Francisco.

“Here you go, old dog,” he said, tossing the box to me. The old-dog business is a colloquialism peculiar to certain working-class neighborhoods on the side of the bay where old God lives.

Arnie’s personal old dog, whose name is Thelma, remained in the kitchen the entire time we were there, cooking, one presumes, a kibbled-bit casserole. The puppies were away.

They live on a street where the houses are built wall to wall. The ceiling is sprayed with a substance that causes it to glitter, and the centerpiece of their living room is a lamp which, when lit, features bubbles of oil coursing through plastic tubing that dangles from the shade.

I opened the box Arnie had tossed me. There was nothing in it.

“Well, well,” Cinelli said, “old dog gave you an empty box.”

Old dog beamed. “Listen to it,” he said.

I did, and it was then I realized he had given me a box that played his city’s languid little canticle in a peeping electronic tone.

“Better it was silent and empty,” I said, closing it.

“You know,” Arnie said, “I really feel sorry as hell for you guys.”

“Why?” I said, becoming irritated.

The box fell from the arm of the chair and its lid popped open. I left my heart in San Francisco, high on a hill it calls to me . . . .

I slammed the lid shut. “Why?” I demanded again, feeling a little like Joe Pesci in “GoodFellas.”

“Old dog is just trying to be nice,” Cinelli said, soothing me.

Arnie shook his head sadly. “You deserve a better place to live,” he said, “away from all that ugliness . . . “

Under normal circumstances, I would shrug off such a comment. I mean, Arnie judges style by the measure of a lamp that bubbles when lit and lives in a house whose ceiling glitters like Formica floating in milk. Who is he to determine where beauty abides?

“Arnie,” I said, rising from the chair, “you’ve never even been to L.A. and you don’t know what it’s like.”

The box fell again . . . where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars . . .

“Damn this thing!” I said, stomping it.

. . . above the blue and windy sea . . .

I turned to Cinelli. “Nothing will stop it,” I said. “It’s a box from hell.”

When I come home to you, San Francisco, your golden sun . . .

She scooped up the box and got it to stop by clamping the crushed lid on tightly. Then she grabbed me, thanked old dog as sweetly as possible, clicked her heels together three times and we were home.

In a calmer mode, I say to you L.A. is not San Francisco. It is similarly not Paris, Prague or even Allentown, Pa.

What we are is a mass too big to characterize, too amorphous to hug, too erratic to trust and too important to ignore. A good song about us does not exist because we aren’t lyrical and because if we had anything that climbed halfway to the stars it would get lost in the smog.

But L.A. is home and, like a man with an ugly baby, I’m beginning to appreciate its inner qualities. So to hell with old dog and his drooling commitment to a song, speaking of which there it goes again.

My love waits there, in San Francisco, above the blue and windy . . .

Stomp, stomp, stomp! There.