This week we attended the 2010 AIDS Walk Kickoff Celebration. Last year we raised over $11,000 and were #7 overall out of all AIDS Walkers. We have made the commitment again this year to raise over $10,000 for this cause very dear to our hearts. Please help us kick off our fundraising and donate now!!

Our annual AIDS Walk BBQ Fundraiser will be held Saturday, June 26th at our house (233 Central between Oak/Page, SF). You will enjoy an entire day of delicious food, microbrews, live music, comedy and entertainment in exchange for your sponsorship. We will be holding both a silent auction and a live auction with many fascinating items and services for you to bid on.

AIDS Walk San Francisco is a crucial source of funds for San Francisco AIDS Foundation which helps Bay Area HIV/AIDS service organizations, including Project Open Hand where we volunteer every Tuesday delivering meals with love to people who are homebound with AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. Your donation puts food on the tables of those who can’t fend for themselves.

You have the unique opportunity to make a difference in thousands of people’s lives every day! Seize the opportunity and please donate!

Hope to see you on June 26th!
Marie Crinnion & Richie McAllister

Food/Beverages from: 21st Amendment • Asqew Grill • Hobson’s Choice • Liquid Experience • Magnolia • The Gold Cane • Tres Agaves
Comedy by: Yayne Abeba and friends
Music by: Jethro Jeremiah • Dogman Joe • Fishbitefish • The Swamees and more!

Follow This Link <http://awsf2010.kintera.org/richardmcallister?faf=1&e=3437023878> to visit our personal web page and help our efforts to support AIDS Walk San Francisco

I watched the best minds of my generation lose themselves amongst their thoughts trapped and full of anxious curiosity,

Sitting in bus stations or on street corners hoping that this ride will lead them to some kind of answer satisfactory to the questions they cant figure out, and wondering what stop to get off at to be able to meet the boss or the parents or the P.O. before the court date and the wedding and the promotion that should go to someone more capable of planning their life, in more than steps taken only to find the next so the mind isn’t left to wander,

Who believes they are worthless unless noticed or ugly unless told otherwise needing this reassurance to avoid those wandering the streets in heels and long coats asking any bartender where she can find a free drink while flashing the lace hidden from the cold air outside,
Who hope never to be compared to anything labeled yet label themselves by leaving at 10 o’clock Friday night to be back by four the next day and out again at seven and finding themselves in their bed alone at lunch on Sunday wondering who the hell let them, in or how they found their way back from wherever they went or if they even left in the first place,

Who run in fear with retro shoes and bloodied lipstick and spray cans gripped tightly passing the dirty looks with guilt but pleasure for this was their goal wasn’t it?

Who cry alone in their comforters at night after crawling back through the window and hiding their flask and birth control and wishing they had stayed out just long enough to have one more cigarette before leaving themselves with no distractions from seeing how far they have wandered from home, too far to recognize themselves in the stores or on the railroad tracks and instead looking at street signs to find the places they have lived their entire lives,

Who look at the rooftops as canvases and basements as recording studios before noticing the no trespassing signs or civilians with their shotguns aimed out the barred window of their 5th Street apartment,

Who have little chance of surviving their own creativity and give into it despite the fact.

Who rush back and forth for the adrenaline of avoiding responsibility and finding independence through secrets of rainbow colored pills and that white powder that really seems to help get rid of the need for much anything else,

Who question mysterious deaths of those people pointing out that the water we drink is owned by a company also funding the deaths of innocent people in a different part of the world,

Who wonder what will happen to everyone if the circus is stopped and the planets align for a much clearer view of our island like isolation from anything and everything that could exist in the endless unknown we are surrounded by.

Those who say remember the times, before eights, quarters, ounces and pounds before eight balls dollar bills and razor blades and when grandmas house meant cookies instead of an unguarded medicine cabinet remember the times,

Remember the times we were happy.

Who wait and wonder and defend their meaningless causes with words stolen from another while blowing smoke rings to pass the time and others sit shaking and high trying to find that 20 bucks hidden under the seat cushion to fund their destruction through the night.

Remember the times we were happy?

Who scream for help as he approaches with the snarl so recognizable as the foreshadowing of pain that goes back to the earliest memories when he said “I’m your father, I wouldn’t never lie to you” walking through the schoolyard as he drives you away from your mother to bribe your innocent mind by playing hooky and convincing you it was her fault the balloon floated away at your birthday party, and then locking you inside a glass room laughing at your pain after destroying any sense of self confidence you may have ever possessed in your fragile teen years showing you he will take any measure for control even if it ends your life at least he can he say won and he tried to save you.

Who sit watching adult swim and family guy until 3 unable to sleep from their daily doses of prescriptions wishing the serotonin levels in their brain could be normal and stable without 100 mg of 5-hydroxytriptophan or at least a quad stacked pill named after some designer handbag to make the intensity of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine seem more glamorous,

I’m with you little girl being driven away by strangers to one to those “fix you” camps where they strip you of your identity to show you they can create whoever they want out of how they leave you,

I am with you believers in your reckless attacks against anything and everything that could possibly stand in the way of finding what you want and impatiently seek to have,

I am with you young lovers hiding below the cliffs to hold on to every moment you have together before the sun rises and the world turns back into a secret… or is it a lie?

I am with you big brother as you wait for the sentencing of your most recent offense too much like all the others and walk into the courtroom knowing it may be your last free steps for at least five years,

I am with you big sister as you drink vodka for breakfast so that you don’t have to remember waking up into the world you have created for yourself,

I am with you, in the asylum, where you will stay,

For your mind has taken over your body and your eyes no longer wish to see the world the way it is presented. And they will never accept that.

There really was nothing that galvanized San Francisco more than the early days of porn.
In 1972 the mob had begun dabbling in the idea of becoming movie producers, and in a relatively short period of time managed to pull together a film that would indelibly change the landscape of American cinema with a modest cash investment of $25,000.
The movie ended up striking a raw nerve in the imagination of the film going public, and in response generated our nefarious underworld brothers a sum total in excess of $600,000,000 from box office and ancillary return. It was a figure that, if even remotely true (and there is some debate), would make it the highest grossing film of all time despite President Nixon who vowed to stamp out pornography through a series of anti-smut laws.
By the time the film was banned in 23 states, its star Linda Lovelace had already cemented the title as a household word with an inventive talent the likes of which few had ever witnessed before, or much less even considered.
It was the first time in U.S. history the middle class had openly embraced a pornographic film, leading to endless congregations at seedy movie theaters in the 27 states that simply ignored Tricky Dick and his mandate to clean up national corruption.
Years later the same film would go on to help launch the golden age of VCRs when people who had bought the clunky and expensive first generation home video machines would also purchase her now famous flick for private in-home study.
In fact, an entire pornographic industry mushroomed overnight as a result of this one particular title, and today it continues to rake in billions of dollars each year without any discernable end in sight.
The film bonded total strangers at a time when our war in Southeast Asia made it nearly impossible to feel the ground beneath our feet. The violence had reached us directly by way of television, allowing anyone for the first time to watch overseas combat conveniently from their own living room chair as young infantrymen took their final breath in shocking frontline detail.
It was not a nice time to be an American, and because of the gradual deterioration of our national fabric, we craved any distraction we could get.
And when the mob decided to gamble on the motion picture business and rolled out DEEP THROAT to an unsuspecting public, it turned out to be exactly what we needed.
Never before had organized criminals introduced a product onto the open marketplace that inspired more squeamish joy in the national dialogue than when they became filmmakers. And after DEEP THROAT retired from an impressive ten-year run (in movie theaters, let’s not forget), the mob retreated once again back to their usual posture of silence and obscurity far below the lines of public awareness—unless of course you count Vegas or Frank Sinatra.
As for the children growing up in the shadow of DEEP THROAT, none of us had any idea what took place in the downtown darkness of the Pussycat Theater on Market Street, but we all knew something had changed, and drastically. The effects had long been felt beneath our footsteps, and reached into our growing vocabulary at a time when the only thing I really cared about was playing with toys.
But there came a point where I could no longer ignore the feeling that something had crept in and taken hold in a way I did not understand, and no matter where I looked for answers as to what that was, I couldn’t find a thing.
Other boys and girls began using words that didn’t make sense. Their whispering faces would often burst into combustive laughter, and I generally went along with them, but honestly didn’t have the slightest idea what was so funny. When they eventually interrogated me as to whether or not I understood their jokes, I quickly found myself exposed as an imposter in front of all of my peers. It was not an easy day.
Especially because we were five-years-old.
My friend Derek had taken pity on my situation and persuaded the others it was time to let me in on the secret. I didn’t have any way of knowing this, but for Derek it meant shouldering a great deal of risk, and had to be handled skillfully like breaking the news about Santa Claus to a kid that still believes.
What if our parents overheard the conversation? What if they caught us whispering about something we weren’t allowed to know? It would almost certainly provoke the two most feared words for anyone under the age of ten: “You’re,” and “Grounded.”
Derek led me far from the others, and pulled us into a huddle behind a giant whitewall tire on a green Ford truck. He kept his voice low and measured.
“Do you know how babies get made?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, but had no idea.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then prove it,” he said. “Tell me how it works.”
I strung together a convoluted explanation of random words I had heard the other kids using, but didn’t really know what any of them meant, or how they fit together. Derek finally put his hand up as a way to signal the end of the nonsensical rambling.
“The mom and the dad,” he said. “They get naked. The dad gets on top of the mom and stays like that for a really long time. He puts a baby inside the mom’s stomach, and when it gets big enough, it crawls back out again.”
“No it doesn’t,” I said.
“Oh yes it does,” Derek shot back with a healthy jolt of authority, and immediately won the argument because his voice was stronger. “It’s what we’ve been talking about. They have to get naked,” he said. “At the same time.”
I held onto the whitewall as though it was the railing of a boat taking on water. The dull sunshine felt hot against my face and I didn’t know how to respond in light of this unsettling news.
“We’re not supposed to know,” he continued. “It’s a secret, so you can’t go around telling anybody.”
“Okay,” I whispered with a touch of strain in my voice.
“Good,” he said, getting back to his feet. “But that’s how it works. They HAVE to get naked.” He paused as if to emphasize the gravity of the already heavy words. “Now you know,” he said with dreaded finality.
Derek glanced around the Victorian neighborhood to ensure our conversation had gone unnoticed, and with the burden now lifted, he slipped away and was gone.
But I remained pressed against the Ford.
I took small shallow breaths and thought of nothing but my mother and father—all the mothers and fathers, really—getting on top of each other in some kind of naked and ritualistic collusion. It was the one secret no one had bothered to disclose or mention. My face went blank and I began to feel myself floating inside a narrow protective bubble that materialized from out of nowhere and swirled up to take me far from the horrible movie playing in my head. The flat and immutable street curved upwards somehow like a rocking chair and I shrank to the ground as if recovering from a solid punch to the gut.
It was the day San Francisco became dangerous. People were getting on top of each other—and naked.
Without laughing.
I quickly found myself indoctrinated into a sub-culture that became obsessed with uncovering the conspiracy that would give us a glimpse into the terrible secret the adults were hiding, and we all knew there was more to this story—much more. We had gotten hold of a small crumb, but wanted the whole damned cake.
School became an unmanageable nightmare filled with nothing but lurid fantasies of naked teachers climbing on top of each other in a strange and desperate attempt to grow babies.
And even though we didn’t understand how that could possibly work, there were many speculations from the boys and girls who had found themselves privy to the same piece of troubling propaganda and equally untethered from schoolwork.
A few of us approached the teachers for a better explanation, but they skillfully deflected our advance into a lesson about reading the hands on a clock. Others were brave enough to go home and ask their parents, but all they got were a few adoring smiles and the stern encouragement to go outside and play.
Nobody would tell us how babies grew or why getting naked was a part of the process, and it was exactly the lack in this specific detail that served to reinforce our growing fear. If placed in the wrong hands, nudity became a loaded weapon. I mean, what sort of life could any of us possibly hope to have if babies started crawling around because we had been careless or negligent with clothing?
We pondered this chilling question for the better part of two adult years, which is nearly the equivalent of an entire ice age for children, and during that time our interest in finding the answer accelerated to the point of near-hysteria.
We couldn’t understand why every day at school wasn’t largely focused on the subject of nudity if only to lay out a few helpful safety provisions to guide us along. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever a teacher would ever allow students to wander off in a world filled with as many potential dangers, and everywhere, as this one clearly did.
And don’t think for a moment we didn’t notice the lack of scheduled holidays in observance of nudity, or the conspicuous absence of statues in Golden Gate Park commemorating the dauntless individuals who had marched to the unspoken and treacherous beat. There were no TV commercials or radio spots. No posters or billboards with children crawling out of people as a way to provide an obvious and much needed service announcement. It was perhaps the most disquieting newsflash to crawl across the ticker, and ever, yet all visible signs of its existence had been lifted from public view and driven underground.
We knew because we looked.
The answers were hidden somewhere, but finding them meant conducting our own investigation—a journey we would embark on and take the entire distance if it became absolutely necessary.
And this naturally led to the formation of Kissing Clubs.
A Kissing Club was a secret organization set up for anyone pursuing the answers to the great cover up, but in them was no written membership or club uniform. We didn’t prescribe rules of order or cobble a series of bylaws together. You could come and go as you pleased, quit or join anytime, even bring along a trusted friend as long as they understood the nature of the path.
Boys and girls would often rush through the inconvenience of cake and ice cream at afternoon birthday parties to cloister themselves in flimsy tree houses or rumpus rooms where meetings took shape in dim lighting to facilitate organized kissing in the most expedient manner possible.
The clubs, however, could only take us so far, and it soon became evident we needed something more—and something with a much stronger punch.
That’s when the pictures started showing up.
Packs of rabid kids would gather at distant corners of the schoolyard to stare at photographs of naked women who had all been liberated from adult strongholds. They appeared contorted into various and impossible positions, and looked as though it had slipped their mind to put on clothes before going outside.
Our stolen pictures reflected the moment they realized this blunder, but more from an inconvenience should the temperature happen to drop than out of a fear that babies might start crawling out.
It made them some of the bravest people we knew.
The pictures soon led to the idea of sex—but only as a vague and distant concept. We were, after all, in the middle of Free Love, in the middle of the 1970s, and in San Francisco of all places. If ever there lived a confluence for the entire spectrum of sexual pursuits, we were standing at Ground Zero.
Our two-year expedition had left us isolated on a plateau of naked pictures and kissing games, and although it had never been stated openly, we all knew the stage had been set for the next significant step forward.
But no one had the vaguest notion as to what that was, or even what it meant, really. That is, until one day
At The Commune on Belvedere Street …
I sat engulfed by a giant beanbag chair inside the living room as a tall man with a beard and ponytail approached whose name was Jack. Jack was one of the boarders that lived in the house we referred to as a commune. We called it a commune because of the many people who lived there on subsidized government housing through a program called Section 8, and because everyone shared in the cooking, cleaning, and shopping responsibilities—I mean we didn’t concern ourselves with harboring false prophets or building a crooked Utopia or anything like that, but functioned as an improvised family system that kept itself firmly on the grid and made us untraditional as far as communes went.
“Hey man,” said Jack, snapping my mind into the present. “Can I borrow your Super-8 projector?”
The 1970s had also given way to a popular form of do-it-yourself home entertainment with the Super-8 movie craze. Households frequently owned small-gauge cameras and projectors to chronicle the growing years of their infant children, and doubled as a creative tool for making short films with a technology that predated anything video or digital in nature. It was still very much the analog world, and in fact, once video cameras eventually hit the consumer market, Super-8 found itself on a fast track into the Smithsonian and needy film schools around the country.
But until that day, parents, filmmakers, and storytellers kept themselves blissfully occupied with Super-8, laying out the fertile groundwork for a thriving mail-order industry to inevitably show up and put down its roots.
Catalogues were sent out by the millions that made film shorts available for purchase starring past and forgotten luminaries such as Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, and an assortment of serial detectives like Charlie Chan. People collected Super-8 movies the way they collected books and records.
And what was even more popular, but not talked about quite so openly, were the X-rated titles purchased on the sly in the late night hours of adult bookshops, or by way of regular U.S. post through an entirely different kind of catalogue altogether. In those same households, with those same cameras and projectors, and if you looked close enough, you could almost always find stacks of small-gauge pornographic films tucked deep into lock boxes or floor safes, and brought out to be enjoyed on rare and special occasions—such as the weekends.
My grandfather had given me his old silent Bell & Howell and a stack of comedies he no longer wanted after upgrading to a far more sophisticated projector system that offered the latest advancement on the Super-8 platform—sound.
Jack was asking for the Bell & Howell.
“Which movie do you want?” I said. “I got a whole bunch.”
“None,” he shrugged. “I just need the projector.”
But that didn’t make much sense. The only thing a projector could do without a movie was produce a frame of white light.
“You want the projector, but you don’t want a movie.”
“I got my own,” he said, holding up a small flat box with the face of a young blonde woman on the cover. Her eyes looked nearly shut and her mouth open as if reacting to a playful slap on the back that might have landed too hard.
“What one is that?” I said, leaning in for a closer look. “Can I see?”
“Sorry,” said Jack as he pulled the movie away. “It’s not really for kids.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but gave him the Bell & Howell anyway to catch a second glance at the woman’s face, and when I did, I swear she winked as Jack disappeared into his room and closed the door.
And as I stood there, I began to realize exactly what was going on. It was the first time I had actually seen one of those other films up close, and knew immediately Jack had been telling the truth: they weren’t for kids—which is why I couldn’t tear myself away from that door.
Jack was watching Super-8 porn as I listened from the other side to the muddled clackity-clack of the projector and imagined the woman from the front cover dancing around on screen. I felt a strange and paralyzing surge of energy I couldn’t place: inert and magnetic—sublime and frightening. It repelled and attracted me at the same time, and I lacked all vocabulary for the paradox. It was primal, and something that once activated never shuts off again, like animals making their first kill. The picture of the blonde woman intensified in my mind to a lively and vibrant spectacle and quickly took hold in the form of a haunting before I had any chance for escape.
The news that an X-rated film had made an appearance in the commune also electrified my circuit of friends as I began to find something intoxicating about the rush of attention it received. I knew immediately this was a dangerous place for anyone to end up because I could feel myself becoming completely invincible.
And the only real problem with complete invincibility is you begin to make really stupid promises you probably shouldn’t make.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
“What? How?” my friends responded, but carefully, to underscore the dare without dashing out the idea—I mean, what if I was crazy enough to actually go through with it?
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I swear to god I’ll get that movie somehow.”
We recognized the film as the one critical link in the evolutionary chain we had long been crafting to venture as far as possible into the adult world, and a small following gathered around the idea of its recovery. Photographs of naked women began to appear small and unremarkable against the prospect of Super-8 porn, and the only thing that really began to matter anymore was getting that film.
It seemed like days before Jack left the house, and when he did I snuck into his room and searched the closet and dresser drawers. I looked beneath the bed and loveseat, but found nothing remotely pornographic in nature. Jack’s room was immaculate and impressively dull for a commune, leaving me with no other option but to sneak back out and look someplace else.
I opened up hallway closets and dug under the piles of sheets and towels.
I combed through the basement and tore into the tops of old boxes. I scoured the living room and cleared out credenzas. I climbed up in the attic and down into the foyer to pry open the lid of an upright piano, a place where the others who lived in the house had often hid their favorite illegal contents in small plastic bags.
I invited friends over to search a giant wall of small red drawers, any of which might conceal the film, and created a din in the process that became tumultuous and shook the walls.
“What are you doing?” my mom interjected as she trundled in. “What are you looking for?”
“Nothing?” I said with as much innocence as I could possibly manage, but I don’t think she believed it, mostly because my friends continued to search without once looking up. Eventually she gave up on the idea of helping out altogether.
“Well, let’s hope you find it,” she finally said as she walked off into the next room. “Whatever it is.”
But we didn’t find it. We didn’t find anything beyond organized junk, and decided on a new approach entirely since the house was quite big. Even to adults it was sizeable. To seven-year-olds it was the Serengeti, and the film was somewhere in the vast open sand.
We stormed the kitchen and ripped into piles of newsprint. We dug through the fireplace and opened up the flue. We moved couches and felt inside the frame with the urgent efficiency of our small nimble hands.
We sketched out a map and negotiated territories. We checked, and double-checked, and once or twice we even triple-checked, but came up with nothing more in the wake of all our additional effort.
And at the far end of it, all we could do was walk into the darkness of the San Francisco night with cold empty hands.
“It’s not there,” my friend Oliver stated, and somewhat flatly. “There wasn’t ever a porno film in the first place, was there.”
“Yes there was,” I said, but with a little hesitation because after all that work, I wasn’t sure myself. “Maybe Jack got rid of it.”
“Jack didn’t get rid of nothing,” Oliver said. “No one gets rid of porn. You went and made up that whole stupid story.”
“No I didn’t,” I said, but it was pointless to argue because my friends turned and disappeared into the evening fog with nothing more than a disgruntled huff.
I found the climate at school to be not much better. My access to naked pictures had been ostensibly revoked because it was agreed I had failed to retrieve the most invaluable object here on the good planet earth. The punishment for so large an offense, as I soon realized, was to find myself designated as persona non-grata, something I recognized would be a significant problem.
Because it meant I would never see another naked woman again.
And when I finally made it home in the late afternoon, all I wanted to do was turn on Channel 44 and assault my brain with a battery of cartoons to forget about the blonde woman and the mess she had created. But no matter how much I turned up the volume, the knob didn’t go nearly far enough to drain away her image, a battle I fought on and off for the remainder of the evening and well into
Saturday Morning …
The house sat deep in slumber as I dragged myself half-awake into the breakfast room for a bowl of cereal and to plan out the rest of my life since naked women would no longer be a part of it.
I felt liberated somewhat from the idea of finding that stupid movie, and as I ate in complete silence I stared around the tiny space we didn’t altogether use that much. I mean, who builds a separate room just for a morning meal?
On the other hand, I have to admit, I was always glad it was there because the breakfast room was probably the one place in the whole house where no one ever went. With all the people in the commune and their friends endlessly dropping in for another slow-motion sojourn, there was hardly a moment it didn’t feel like a bus station. In the breakfast room I always found solitude from the party that had no end in the respite of six wooden chairs and a simple table.
My vision crossed over, and then on top of itself, doubling the already busy pattern in the wallpaper and forced some of the lines to float above the surface. My mind went blank and I thought of nothing more than the steady cadence of my own chewing.
My eyes snapped back into focus on the architectural accents that lay hidden from the world’s daily little tortures and landed on a built-in cabinet that held a glass pitcher and a few scattered pieces from an old tea set. For some reason I found myself unable to look away because in the silence of the early morning light there was something that struck me I had not previously considered.
And I stopped chewing.
The cabinet was the one place in the whole house we had failed to inspect thoroughly. It had been opened briefly, and the teapot pushed aside, but the amount of time given to its actual examination couldn’t have allowed for more than a superficial glance at best.
I dragged my chair across the hardwood floor and placed it against the cabinet to step up and stretch my hand out over the top.
My fingers crawled across a thick pad of dust until it landed on something loose and hidden from view. I felt along the side and slid the object back towards the edge until it fell over and crashed to the floor.
And when I looked down, the blonde woman stared back up with that same strange look on her face, laughing this time the way a genie laughs that just escaped a lamp.
I snapped up the film and ran for the basement clutching it tightly to my body until I flung it into a dark corner behind the boxes with the torn open lids.
And I stopped and stood there, breathing and waiting a long silent moment. I listened carefully for any signs that someone else had gotten up in the house, but the only thing I could hear with any resonance at all was the pounding of the four chambers inside my own chest.
I figured it might be a good idea to stand there a little while longer and wait out the rest of the morning until I was a bit more relaxed before taking the news out to my friends.
“Bullshit,” they said, and insisted on viewing the evidence firsthand I told them I had. But with the balance of power firmly back on my side, I first made sure to negotiate my way from the walking death of persona non-grata and agreed to reveal the movie as long as I had guaranteed access to the naked pictures without further encumbrance or limitation.
They conferred briefly to consider my offer, and in a few short moments returned, and quite cheerfully, to announce we had reached an agreement.
The news spread quickly to the rest of the kids who had kept tabs on the recovery of the Super-8, and since on most days we all lacked anything in the way of proper adult supervision—I mean let’s be honest, the hippie generation would probably never win the award for Parents of the Year—it wasn’t long before we were able to organize
A film festival …
The house was cold and void of all qualified authority figures—as well as its twin brother, Sobriety. The projector sat tucked in the stillness of the basement, loaded up and ready to go.
The garage door had been left unlocked, and the faces arrived one at a time, mute and tentative as they contemplated the darkness in front of them like standing in line for the Haunted House on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
The young bodies sat in front of a blank wall with the girls clustered on one side, the boys on the other.
And when we had finally settled in, there was nothing left to do but switch on the movie.
A strip of white and grainy film leader projected sideways lettering that spelled out “Fuji Film Corporation” before the room went completely dark.
The movie began with an ordinary house and the same blonde woman approaching as if inviting someone in for tea. She looked sweet, if not devilish, and frankly we didn’t know who she could have been talking to because there wasn’t anyone else around.
She was dressed nicely, as if she might have belonged to a swanky law firm somewhere, in conservative pumps, dark skirt, and a tan blouse that struggled to hold itself together.
She let her hair fall loose and fiddled with the buttons on her cuffs as I noticed my body tightening into a progression of interlocking square knots. My mind simultaneously raced to assemble a series of complex equations in an urgent effort to determine the statistical probability of my own chances for survival.
It considered that if you took the given rate of Super-8 film to be 24-frames-per-second (there was also 18, but movies out of a catalogue almost always arrived in 24 because it was simply a higher quality), for every 50 feet, there were exactly two-minutes and thirty-seconds of total running time. And since this particular film took up the better part of a 200-foot reel, it meant she had roughly ten minutes from start to finish to tell the whole story.
And I wasn’t sure I could hold my breath that long.
There really was no plot involved—certainly nothing we could follow. There were no signs of escaped criminals in tandem manacles looking for a place to hide. There weren’t any zombies with unsolvable hunger pangs prowling around for a nutritious meal. The police hadn’t shown up carrying battering rams or search warrants. There were no gentlemen callers with cryptic instructions from God or a dog. She didn’t appear to be injured. She wasn’t in distress or pain, or sought the assistance of collies or crime fighters. To be sure, this woman didn’t need anything at all.
She simply dropped her blouse and let the undergarments slide across her body until she wasn’t wearing anything at all. She then broke character momentarily and giggled to herself, or perhaps shared some private joke with the man behind the camera. But whatever the reason, the woman collected herself back up and retreated to the house as if her unseen accomplice had pointed to his watch as a reminder of the time constraints with Super-8 film. This was, it can be said with a great deal of confidence, not a high-budget production.
They rarely were.
The scene cut, and we found ourselves inside the house surrounded by a modest living room set. A dark leather couch sat in dead center behind a coffee table on a long stretch of shaggy carpet.
But that wasn’t all.
A man without clothing occupied that couch as the woman arrived in nothing but the law firm pumps. The man noticed with a sort of robotic turn of his head and got up to draw the woman in close. It was also the exact same moment when the physical credentials that qualified him for this specific line of work were made shockingly clear to us.
And as they stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder with little to wear between them, it became apparent these were not terribly attractive people. It’s not that they were ugly, or malformed, or even mildly unfortunate looking—far from it. I’m sure they could have cleaned up nicely had they spent a little time in the company of a brush or razor. Any imperceptible effort would have paid substantial dividends if only in the interest of the audience who might someday be watching them.
But I’m sure it was unlikely this would ever happen. They were clearly fond of their hair, and all of it. Every tuft and sprout.
In counterpoint to the conservative 50s, the 1960s had ushered through a sharp contrast to the basic living habits that encouraged people to look past the importance of grooming altogether. The influence had reached its zenith by the 1970s, and when this film was made, the actors were firmly perched on top of that zenith.
The man appeared somewhat primitive with patches of thick uneven body hair spiraling in random and asymmetrical directions across his chest and back. It gravitated into a bulbous cluster around his middle section, indicating a biological defense mechanism that activated on cold nights when blankets just wouldn’t do.
The woman had paid some scant attention to her arms and legs, but the rest of her hair looked as if it had simply congealed into a thick and irregular mass in an area the Australians refer to as the “Map of Tasmania.”
If you look at Tasmania, you’ll understand why.
But to me, it appeared as if she wore a catcher’s mitt held up by invisible wire, and led me to believe we were well on our way to a game of Naked Catch—something I would have welcomed if only to restore a normal breathing pattern, and especially because, if nothing else, it confirmed why ancient cultures had always made such a big fuss about this sort of thing.
Let me explain.
If you were able to travel backwards through our historical chronology, and made it all the way to Ancient Greece, there you would find yourself among a widespread population of people who spent a great deal of time in fear of the very same image as this woman and her catcher’s mitt.
Polite Greek society required its female citizens to keep Tasmania shorn at all times, and went so far as to introduce the character of Medusa into popular folklore. Medusa was a scary old crone whose head bore snakes in place of hair, and represented what happens to women if they failed to bother with these strictly enforced grooming habits. The analogy was meant to deter all men from gazing upon the illegal and neglected abominations unless it had somehow become their wish to spend the rest of eternity as a twisted pillar of stone.
The catcher’s mitt in the basement had an equally alarming effect on all of us for the one simple reason it was an enormous amount of body hair to process all at once.
The man spun the woman around and pushed her forward as though waiting for a football, and what he did next sent me spiraling into the same bubble of light, once again, that swept up and surrounded me on all sides from out of nowhere.
I tumbled forward this time into the living room to observe these people in full grim detail, while back on the plane of reality my fingers gripped the side of my chair as I discovered I weighed 10,000 pounds more than I did only moments ago.
The man rocked against the woman as ocean waves crash into highland bluffs. It was an unfamiliar type of starvation that appeared detached from all sense of reality. His expression bordered on pain and hostility, and I expected paramedics to rush in any minute with shock paddles and D5W because he was stuck in some kind of endless loop and behaved not unlike a broken record.
It looked exhausting and must have taken years to learn. There wasn’t a single one of us in that room who could have accomplished anything like it, much less with another person. And more importantly, why didn’t the teachers distribute regular field assignments to bolster our skill set in this one particular area? But what stopped us most was the sudden and stark realization that there on the wall was a bleak and terrifying future of what we would eventually become: big hairy, disgusting people.
And it was not how I understood, “They get on top of each other,” to mean.
No one was on top of anyone. Derek had misstated the exchange entirely, reducing his overall credit rating by at least fifty basis points as oxygen to my brain continued a steady decline. At the edge of total blackout, I forced in a substantial heave to supply enough air for a small pocket of consciousness to remain.
The broken record finally stopped and rolled on his back—and figuring this whole naked business was now over, I let go of the chair and took in a slow deep breath. The reprieve unfortunately was only momentary, however, because the woman flung aside the coffee table and climbed on top of the man.
And I was forced to reinstate all of Derek’s basis points.
The 200-foot reel began to spin more rapidly—a dynamic in the laws of basic physics that occurs every time an object approaches the center of a spinning body, decreasing the overall distance it must travel to complete one cycle.
Meaning the film was nearly over.
These people didn’t have much time to reach the end of this hairy collision with a narrative structure lacking all recognition of any kind. We didn’t know who was meant to win, or even how that was done exactly, or if we would ever learn the subtle undertones of how these people saw the world and their place in it. As far as we knew, they didn’t have first names.
But what bothered us most was the fact that we couldn’t see their faces any longer, left to stare at the woman’s back as she pulverized the man into paralysis until they got up, switched places, and the man climbed on top of the woman.
Making it the single most pivotal moment of the entire film, giving us the necessary information we had long been seeking to clarify Derek’s description of these strange naked entanglements when he first broke the story.
But the movie didn’t end as we might have hoped it would.
Their faces twisted into a series of terrifying convulsions, and I could only imagine the man behind the camera yelling as he watched the film gauge drop precipitously towards zero because they doubled their speed to a fevered and cartoonish pitch.
The man all of a sudden stopped for no obvious reason, and sat up on his knees. He looked troubled and distracted, and I expected him to collapse into a lifeless hairy mass.
He arched further backwards to gaze at the ceiling where I could see nothing of any particular interest, and opened his mouth as if shouting to a pack of bandits who were crashing into the living room by digging through the roof.
His body froze, and I feared the worst because there was no possible way for him to continue without invoking his own certain demise.
And at that point, another strange and unexpected object exploded without the slightest portent, or warning to us at all. It emerged in the form of a large and grotesque arm belonging to a terrible monster, alien from this world, bursting into the basement through the wall the movie played against. A sharp and otherworldly claw opened up like a demented flower and grabbed my throat to hurl my body from one side of the darkness to the other.
No one in the audience appeared to notice, or even care, I had fallen under attack, and I came to realize the preservation of my life would depend entirely on the efforts I made to save it.
I saw my body from outside of myself fighting a hazy and weighted slumber and striking a series of sharp pointed jabs to the back of the demon’s hand. The monster let out a pained and muffled bellow from somewhere inside the wall and retaliated by squeezing my throat tighter until my eyes had doubled in volume.
My arms let go and fell to the side as I resigned myself to a space creature I could not see. I choked in one final breath and waited for the darkness to embrace itself like the end of an old movie, until there was nothing left but the
Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap …
Of infinite stillness.
I opened my eyes cautiously upon keeping them shut for a long, tense moment, and found I was still in the basement among the other kids, but with the hand and claws nowhere to be found.
The take-up reel spun freely, slapping the tail leader against the projector’s outer housing.
And we continued watching, all of us having turned into small twisted lumps of stone, even though there was no movie on the wall anymore.
Just a frame of white flickering light.
I switched off the Bell & Howell, landing us inside the middle of darkness with nothing more to process and nothing left to see. It was the first time since discovering the secret world of the adults that we felt like children once again.
The lumps didn’t move or get up. We couldn’t.
Our eyes adjusted in the darkness until we became nothing more than a series of vague outlines. One of the braver outlines finally stood up to find its way out, and another quickly followed.
The rest got up as well until they all emerged into daylight together as a long line of statues.
There were no more whispering faces, and not one combustion of laughter. Nobody attempted to joke about, or define, what we had just seen. It was pointless to give any meaning to the last ten minutes of time, or attempt to provide a context, because there wasn’t any. The only thing we knew for certain was that the journey was over, and we had made it, safely or otherwise, all the way to the other side.
Whatever those people had done up against the wall, they now sat wrapped in a celluloid living room around a small plastic take-up reel.
No one had said a word.
The metal cooled and cracked inside the projector as I felt along my throat to the spot where the monster’s claws had grabbed hold of it, and stopped against a ridge where I could feel its ghost still hanging on.
And when I climbed upstairs, I went straight for the breakfast room to push the chair against the cabinet and return the movie to its original hiding place. I dropped it squarely into the dust, and after making sure it couldn’t be seen from anywhere in the room, I began to notice the joyful shouts and playful shrieks from my friends as they started to play their games once again outside.
I opened up the window as a few of them scattered off in unscheduled directions, and before I knew what was happening, I ran outside as fast as I could to recapture the same tones of joy that come without effort whenever children play.
But the claws didn’t let go.
We never spoke about it again—as if someone had shown up with a giant pair of cosmic scissors and cut out the whole ten minutes from all of our lives.
The truth is, there was nothing left to say, because in that discarded patchwork of time we already understood why the adults would tell us nothing. We understood why there were no statues in Golden Gate Park, or television commercials, or billboards of crawling babies. Nobody said anything for a good reason, and from that moment on, neither did we.
Because it was the day we joined the conspiracy.
The Super-8 was forgotten about and left on top of the cabinet, high above the glass pitcher and tea set, and with little chance of those two hairy people finding their way back into the open world again.
At least I’m sure that’s what we had hoped, for any of us who gave it a second thought that is.
But we made sure no one ever did, and the story was quietly left behind.

—THE END—

I say Chronicle writer Nevius is out of line. As hairdresser Mike says, “He’s finding nothing better to do than harass those innocent gleaners out tenaciously trolling for their cans, bottles and pans to recycle.” He is trying to close down our historic co-operative recycling-depot, that is used by locally indigenous low-income people. He wants to sanitize our jolly nabe into some tidy suburbia. My kids grew up here, and they’re fine! Say No to Nevious!

In the past 30 years, for those who were in the here and know, the period of 1982 to 1993’s was much less safe in our nabe than it is now, what with the occasional random violence going on. Like when that evil Maggs the Skinhead bit this guy’s nose, in 1984, right behind me he was too. Then Maggs went and stole the Hells Angel’s machine-guns and died in a battle with the FBI up North, Humbolt way. Deserved to go.

Then the dotcom boomers raised rents and busted leases and attempted to mess with rent control. At the same time, we had commuting workers coming in, in shifts selling bags. All day. Three shifts. Not to say things are perfect now. You still hear whistles at night. The answer then, back in the eighties, was the same as now – better police work. The cops are paid to be our friends, with guns. We don’t need no tacky amateur squads of private patrols marching in goose-step up and down the strip, but god help us, there they were – a private goon squad, dressed in green, back then in ‘87, I kid you not.

The SF culturally aware (almost) cop-culture we have now, especially when compared with the cowboy-cop culture of the seventies, is better than it could be. So let us further encourage our peace officers to make the peace, with smiles and well wishes, to do their job wisely and help protect our freedoms with understanding.

For more information visit www.benjerrys.com/haightashbury or check out their FaceBook page here.

The fire was reported at 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday, December 22, which officials say began in the tradesman area of the building, which is a side area of the building that is used to access the garbage area and the utility box.

The fire then burned its way into the two residences above, however there were no injuries reported. Three members of a family who were in the first floor apartment were helped out by a woman.

“All I smelled was a lot of smoke and I tasted gas literally in my mouth. Then I went in the back and was looking for my father and he said call 911,” fire victim Maria Miller told ABC news.

“We did have fire between the walls there and we had a search in progress. There was a report of someone who was not found in the building. We found that not to be the case. Everyone has been accounted for at this point in time. This is just a big fight for us in this particular fire. It is just a lot of fire in a lot of different places,” SF Fire Department Lt. Ken Smith told ABC.

By the end the fire had spread next door to a clothing store, and is estimated to have caused half a million dollars worth of damage in all.

At this time investigators are not calling the fire suspicious.

abrody(at)haightbeat.com

Brennan said in an email newsletter that there is no hard timetable yet, but that he anticipates that the store will open in late 2010. The previously planned mixed-use project that would have included 62 apartments and a three-story underground parking lot had been cancelled due to opposition from the neighborhood, other delays, and excessive fees imposed by the City.

Brennan said he regrets the fact that he will not be able to build the mixed-use project, but is happy to announce that the Haight will nevertheless have a full-service grocery store for the first time since Cala closed its doors in May 2006.

When the approved project appeared to be nearing its death, Brennan made contact with Ted Loewenberg and Mike Gerrity and gauged their thoughts on how the neighborhood would feel about simply replacing Cala. Both stated that although they were disappointed, a grocery store alone would be beneficial to the neighborhood.

For more info read the article by the SF Business Times here.

abrody(at)haightbeat.com

We’ll start at 9:00am at the Children’s Playground, above Buena Vista West at Waller Street, with a brief meet & greet and instructions for the day.

There will be warm and tasty refreshments (courtesy of a generous BVNA member), and informative exhibits about our Park, California native plants, trees in our Parks, Volunteering, etc.

Then, we’ll plant over 100 new trees and shrubs above the Tennis Courts and in other areas to help assure our Park’s continued vitality.

There will be tasks for all ages and all levels of agility and gardening skill. This is an especially great opportunity for younger kids with adult supervision. It’s a chance to see old friends, meet new neighbors, Rec/Park Staff, and other Buena Vista Park supporters.

If you can’t help us plant, we hope that you’ll still stop by anytime during the morning at the Children’s Playground, to say “hello,” to show your support for Buena Vista Park, and to enjoy some refreshments.

This traditional annual neighborhood event is co-sponsored by the S.F. Recreation & Park Department and BVNA, which is a San Francisco Parks Trust Park Partner.