Funky Town : Slackers. Tekkies. Punks. ‘Dirt surfers.’ Rockabilly wrestling. No matter what you’re into, San Francisco has your scene.

San Francisco in 1965 was the best place in the world to be.

--Hunter S. Thompson

*

Two sweaty, balding, 200-pound men in leather masks and super-hero underwear fling each other around a 20-foot- by-20-foot ring as an unsatisfied fan yells, “Where’s the beef?” While the “The Unholy” slams opponent “R-U-R 2000” on his back, another worked-up fan screams, in vein-popping-football-coach voice, “Get up! Get up! you [expletive]!”

In between rounds, a band with duck-tail hairdos plays Buddy Holly-style music.

This is, as the nightclub hosting the event calls it, “Incredibly Weird Rockabilly Wrestling.” It is subculture run amok: After R-U-R comes back to beat The Unholy with an Air Jordan body slam, a boyfriend-girlfriend match takes center stage. Our leather-claddominatrix wins with a flurry of back-handed slaps and fire-cracker whippings--and a humiliated boyfriend is forced to take off his mask to reveal his identity (to the pitying boos of the men in attendance). Next comes the punk band that takes the stage and stops in the middle of an unintelligible song to gang-slam wrestling referee “Peyote Jeff Manson.” Poor guy.

Here we are, 30 years since gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson proclaimed this town to be the stimulation center of the universe--and it still is. Maybe you can find rockabilly wrestling, outdoor raving and the newest in designer drugs in other cities. But in San Francisco, you can find it all on the same block of 11th Street. On the same night.

Many, in fact, see the Bay Area as the American capital of the new youth subculture.

“I don’t think any other city compares,” says Todd Roberts, managing editor of the Los Angeles youth zine called Urb. “The people of San Francisco,” added local cyberpunk author R.U. Sirius, “take their subcultures almost too seriously.”

The Bay Area boasts more zines (magazines for micro-scenes) per capita than any other region in the nation--according to the zines’ zine, Factsheet Five--and more “cybercafes” (coffee shops with computers) than any other metropolis, according to the on-line “Cybercafe Guide.” It must also have the population with the most free time (although we could unearth no statistics to prove it).

“I’ve never been in a place where so many people don’t work,” says London-native and ex-Angelino Graham Seaman, a Bay Area music producer.

The Bay Area is also home to the West Coast’s hottest dance clubs (Sound Factory, Paradise Lounge, DNA); the country’s computer culture bible, “Wired”; the skateboarders’ monthly, “Thrasher”; the darlings of punk rock revival, “Green Day”; the International Transpersonal Assn. (a group affiliated with “breathwork” meditation and psychedelic-drug therapy), and, of course, Slacker Stout beer (“Easy Flowin’ ” is its motto).

It is a place where 25-year-old men try to dress like Dick Tracy (it’s hip; it’s fresh), fetish culture flourishes (leather underwear has become an art form in these parts), and the personal ads are unabashed (sample titles: “Adventurous and Leftist;” “Nude Dude”).

Of course, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago can be unabashed. But San Franciscans will tell you those other towns are too trendy. Too trendy? San Franciscans, they insist, are really, really into what they’re into--even if what they’re into is trendy too. “Half of our staff has waiter jobs to pay the bills so they can work here during the day for free,” says Chicagoan David Eggers, editor of the satirical, San Francisco-based zine Might.

Or, as a visitor from L.A. put it, “L.A. is more like a fashion show--more pretentious.”

San Francisco takes itself to be cerebral--a place where LSD once fueled the imagination of its youth culture. Today, the once nerdy computer has largely taken LSD’s place.

At the Icon Byte Bar & Grill south of Market Street (SoMa to the oh-so hip), a Macintosh takes center stage on a Friday night, allowing customers to “gopher” through cyberspace in between bites of their cyber cuisine (regular food with tekkie names, as in the Byte Burger). The place glows with video performance art. On some nights, patrons cross the street and check out the restaurant’s Climate Theater, home to “digital puppetry,” “roving robots” and strange cabaret.

“It’s not supposed to be like a day at the office,” explained co-owner Marcia Crosby.

“San Francisco,” added one modest costumer, “is always on the cutting edge of everything.”

Across town, the bohemian Horse Shoe Coffee House (dusty wooden floor, busy bulletin boards) represents the downscale version of the cybercafe. Here, a funky old PC spray-painted in school-district brown offers the world of cyberspace for 25 cents, which gets you five minutes’ worth.

Michael Stark has a handful of quarters in his trench coat. He says he is playing “Virtual SYSOP,” a program that allows him to pretend he’s hacking people’s computers and breaking into banks. “It’s a pretty fun game,” says the 21-year-old. Uh-huh.

*

After hours you might catch a techno-driven rave in effect on the beach under a full moon (though one zine editor laments, “That’s kind of passe now”), or maybe even a Chemica Sutra party (“Sex Under the Stars,” says a flyer).

And under the Day-Glo light and onshore winds of a new morning, Haight-Ashbury still goes off, albeit with a decidedly nouveau look: A Gap stands at the historic corner of Haight and Ashbury. Kids roam the strip to spend $70 on the latest old-school sneakers. And most of the sit-ins happen at any one of the half dozen or so coffee shops along the street.

While hipsters and tourists shop for used vinyl, a new generation of hippie teens lives on the streets begging for beer money and selling acid. Locals call them “dirt surfers.” Why do they flock here? The question is addressed to four such kids in holey jeans and blackened tennies:

No. 1: “Drugs.”

No. 2: “Just to party and have a good time.”

No. 3: “There’s all kinds of people like us here.”

No. 4: “It’s all about freedom.”

In San Francisco’s 7-by-7 miles of central city, decades themselves are subcultures. Even the ‘60s--time of Jefferson Airplane, Rolling Stones and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters--are reduced to the historical equivalent of fashion accessory. If we go there--to the world of decade as fashion--the ‘40s are more this season.

At the Haight’s Club Deluxe, pin-up girl posters, a vintage chrome cigarette machine (“It’s always breaking down,” says the bartender) and the sounds of Frank Sinatra serve the senses of trendoids intent on bringing back postwar revelry--even if they’re not sure which war inspired it. The ‘40s serve as a place of make-believe--where swing, saddle shoes and sexual innocence rule.

“Everyone gets dressed up in ‘40s clothes,” says Melissa Robertson, a manager at cross-town rival Bimbo’s 365 Club (established in 1931), which has a stage big enough for three rows of big-band brassiness. “But most people that come are in their 20s.”

*

In the heat of the afternoon, a gorgeous 25-year-old blonde with red nails, satin dress and a silver wedding ring sits on a chrome bar stool sipping an umbrella drink--a Santa Rosa Tea--at Club Deluxe. There’s a hand-painted Varga Girl on the back of her biker jacket. “Sunny Buick,” she offers.

“Huh?”

“Gypsy Sunshine Buick,” she says. “That’s my full name.”

“I’m very embarrassed by that,” she says. “I was a love child. My mom was in her 30s and hanging out with hippies in the Haight.”

Buick has chosen to drive down the same street as Mom, but careened a bit. For one, she dresses like Grandma. “I’ve been dressing retro for 10 years,” she boasts, explaining that she “works retail” to support her vintage taste. “People my age are romanticizing a simpler kind of life.”

Also, she pokes fun at Mom and her ilk for going from Haight to haute in a hurry. “I see irony in the fact that my mom is now a banker,” she says.

She returns to the ‘40s: “I feel very protective of my scene,” Buick says. “There are a lot of new kids who have no respect for us. They think they’ve discovered this whole new thing.”

But, she says, “No matter what you’re into, you fit in in San Francisco.”

Historians say this subcultural smorgasbord is true to the town and its history.

“Nothing could be less homogeneous,” says UC Berkeley historian Arthur Quinn. “The first subcultures rose with the Gold Rush. There was not an overarching moral code governing the city. Diverse people congregated here--Irish, Italians, Chinese--and it was always wide open sexually,” he says.

“Any social behavior was very personal.”

Some criticize San Francisco for being too cliquish.

“Compared to 25 years ago, it’s more tribalized,” says Sirius, 42 (a.k.a. Ken Goffman). “It’s separated out into different groups who don’t necessarily like each other much.

“You have your slackers, cyber people, separatist girl cultures,” he says. “There’s a really wild sexual underground scene here.

“All these cultures touch each other, but they are separate.”

Others rejoice in the madness that is San Francisco--a city that does not necessarily have the youngest population of any city in the country (median age: 35), but one that may have the youngest attitude.

Says Eggers, editor of Might: “It’s a fertile environment for loopy, unusual ideas.”