The Actual City

I CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO 10 YEARS AGO, ECSTATIC. I drove over the pass at Truckee with everything I owned in the car, the theme from “Chariots of Fire” blasting on the stereo, returning at last to the place of my birth. I had known early childhood there, then gone east for 25 years. So I remembered almost nothing of the actual San Francisco, just the clear light and the smell of eucalyptus.

By the time I was grown and living in a small town, I had constructed a San Francisco of my own. Voraciously, I dreamed the city’s hills in that flat Midwestern place, where the overpass at the interstate was the highest vantage, the surrounding prairie a mockery of the sea. My San Francisco had real surf. It had the Pacific sparkling in its notches.

When my break came I took it seriously, driving west with my possessions and my fantasies, finally descending the Sierra grade into the orchards, then piercing the coast range at last to see it, the water, the bridges, the far cliffs, the Sutro Tower, the Pyramid--all, of course, exactly as I had imagined.

I arrived hungry and spent the summer sampling. I learned that if you set out to eat in a different restaurant in San Francisco every night, you’d be dining out for seven years. Where I’d lived in the Midwest, you’d be done by Thursday.

By day, I discovered the coasts of San Francisco, Land’s End and the soaring undersides of the bridges--beneath the vast Bay Bridge at 3rd Street or the Golden Gate at the Fort Point, where the city’s best breakers wrap into the harbor, the riprap biting tubes into the swells.

For that summer, I possessed a perfect San Francisco, with waves and restaurants, with neighborhoods set into the ridges and valleys like provinces: Potrero Hill, like a village on its own peak, its view of downtown better than any view from downtown; the Mission district with its fruit markets and salsa clubs; the astonishing Castro with its gingerbread Victorians and its movie-house organist. I relished finding places only the locals knew, like the Zen Center bakery in Cole Valley and the Glen Park ravine.

I possessed it all gladly, especially the weirdness, like the tower, the loony, striped, three-legged Space Age monument atop Twin Peaks that--though nobody ever said so--is also the city’s most prominent architectural feature, as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

I claimed even the funky parts of the city, like the corrugated cement factory, the last of its kind, dusty and Rube Goldberg-esque and incongruously beautiful, a work of the Ashcan School, there in a neighborhood of studios and art bars and a theater called Artaud. It was all fabulous and real.

And expensive. My fantasies hadn’t included the actual cost. Others, who believed as I did about San Francisco, had already arrived and found the jobs, such as they were. I moved into an industrial space South of Market and with some effort landed an assignment writing a Philippine foods catalogue, working from the pictures.

So after that summer, I began to live in another San Francisco--the city of workaday habit, in which one becomes blase. I became a tsk-tsker, as bad as Herb Caen.

But you get in a groove. So now I just go to Zuni for foie gras and El Toro for burritos. And I’ve seen the views, from every peak in the city. But now I just go to the Headlands, over and over.

One day on BART--still clean, safe public transit--a guy asked me how to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. “What do you want to go there for?” I said, nervy as any local. “That’s for the tourists.”

“But I am a tourist,” he said proudly.

It made me wonder. Had my San Francisco somehow disappeared? Had time and the rise of the yuppie class reduced it to a touristy movie set for my habitual life and urban problems? Was I really living in San Francisco land ?

I went back up to the Headlands again, out Divisidero to Geary to the Golden Gate and across, to the cliffs above the beach at Rodeo, where I had been a million times, to think about it.

No, I decided. That’s not what’s happened at all. It’s just that I dwell in the actual city now. To those of us who live here, the only invisible part of San Francisco is Fisherman’s Wharf.