I Left My Heart in [blank]

“I left my home in Georgia, headed for the ‘Frisco Bay”

–Otis Redding, Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay

School was out for summer and I was in a mood. The kind of mood where I sit around playing California Dreamin’ on repeat as my semester ramped down because that’s exactly what I was doing: dreaming of California, a place that I’ve never been to but have heard so much about due to the total tonnage of songs dedicated to it. I’d made it through my semester and, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news lately, but that semester was a little bit more difficult than usual.

Around this time, my metrocard was getting low and the temperature was getting high. I found myself wanting to be in a walkable city with famously mild weather.

All of my friends were back to their corners, jet-setting to their own summer plans. I decided to do something that I’ve been dreaming about for a while:

I booked a flight to San Francisco. 

In proper girl-on-a-budget fashion, I made plans to sleep on a friend’s couch and then toggled back and forth between the $120 flights on airlines with shoddy safety records, and 15 hour layovers in the midwest, and the slightly pricier tickets from more reputable airlines. 

Prior to actually visiting San Francisco, I envisioned a politically-correct mecca, filled to the brim with the liberally-enlightened. I’d seen the same iconic images as everybody else: picturesque, Victorian houses stacked up and down hilly streets, a blue-burnt sky behind them, and the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted on the horizon. 

What I found instead was a not kid-friendly, gritty and grimy city brushing up against a hypoallergenic tech sector. (The amount of signs I saw advertising for strip joints was actually kind of impressive and made it look like a local delicacy). Each street was elbowing the next, with Lululemon-clad women boarding the bus one minute and Boho-hippies boarding it the next. The bus would then migrate over to the decayed financial sector, which has become more of a homeless sector, having lain dormant since the pandemic. 

All of these multitudes and more were compacted onto a tiny peninsula.  

I was trying to understand where this “out with the old and in with the new” mentality came from.  I read the same articles as you (well, some of you): tech people setting up camp and redefining the city, homelessness populations being the largest in the country and turning into a way of life, and the cost of living skyrocketing to untenable heights, all taking root in San Francisco over the past decade.

I had to lay eyes on this for myself.

You’re probably wondering why I went to San Francisco in the first place. I want to set a novel in San Francisco (don’t ask me why because everybody asks me why and I don’t know why, which would indicate that I make questionable decisions) and felt that I could not tell the story authentically until I took the city by storm myself. I slept on my friend Raj’s couch (This is Raj. Say hi to Raj). 

Raj has been my brother’s best friend since they were 2 when I was in utero. 

While he went to work, I tooled around town. 

I arrived the day after the city held one of its biggest traditions, which had inconceivably included both marathons and raves, so I basically showed up during a city wide hangover. It was like a day at the beach when everything is so calm that the water barely moves. 

My first stop was City Lights Bookstore, the indie bookstore where Alan Guinsburg debuted Howl many moons ago. After nearly ending up at a lamp store a few times thanks to my GPS, I arrived at City Lights, a beautiful bookstore that was nearly Alan Guinsburg themed at this point, but didn’t sell any of the hockey romance novels that my mother keeps trying to get me to read. Sad. 

From there, I went to see this bay that everyone talks so much about. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, which is blue at a distance and only red up close. I could see Angel Island and Alcatraz on the horizon beside one another. 

I closed out my day at Pier 39, seeing –and smelling– the sea lions. 

The sea lions on Pier 39 made me irrationally happy as they spun through the water and then flopped onto the stacks of sea lion bodies on the dock. I enjoyed witnessing the Greco-Roman wrestling matches of the sea lions who’d sardined themselves onto a dock and were now biting and barking at each other.

I started to think that if I were to be reincarnated as any animal, it would not be too bad to come back as a Pier 39 sea lion. I particularly related to the one antisocial sea lion on a different dock who refused to socialize with the other sea lions. 

He wasn’t dead. He moved a few times. He was just chilling like he was dead. 

I spent much of my first day bumbling around, courtesy of my nonexistent sense of direction. Raj was an excellent tour guide, explaining to me the different socio-political forces at play in San Francisco, the geography of where I was, and the best spots in the city. He actually knew the history of where he was and so could tell me the significance of where I was standing at any given time. 

Once I was in San Francisco, I felt like I could feel the city’s character muscling its way to the surface, a character that shuns the very idea of the tech industry being anywhere near Haight Ashbury, the home of free love and public fornication. San Francisco is trying hard to maintain its reputation as the beat-poetry, psychedelic-rock birthplace by trumping its newfound granola-tech-people-with-homeless-encampments-lining-the-streets-reputation. 

You’ll be sure to learn my thoughts on how that’s going by the end of this four part saga.

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

P.S.: Check out my last blog post about my friend Alyssa’s Senior show.