A letter from San francisco....X

Last night I went across the city of San Francisco with one aim in mind, to finish these letters from San Francisco with that most problematic of the alphabet, X.

Did you know that if you measure the frequency of letters at the beginning of words in the English language X comes last!

Of course it would be fine if I could accept X for extra, then I could write about all the things that missed out in this extended letter, like The Onion Newspaper, the free weekly with news that isn’t true but could or should be.

Some of the headlines that entertained me during these two months were; Man running aimlessly with Olympic Torch For Past 3 Years, Revised Patriot Act Will Make It Illegal To Read Patriot Act, Sea Claims Flip-Flop, EPA Warns Human Beings No Longer Biodegradable and Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not.

To be honest I was hoping that somewhere between its pages I would find a headline or name starting with an X but though I scoured each week’s edition I came up with nothing.

I considered drawing parallels between the rugged beauty of San Francisco, that never fails to make me stop and sigh whenever it surprises me, and Xanadu so I might get away with using the first few lines of the Coleridge poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

There is a “pleasure-dome” aspect to the city sometimes but then I never found an equivalent of the Alph that wasn’t the ocean.So last night I set out with a mission, but also a secret. The secret being that I had long, long ago decided exactly what X would be.

I took the bus from the corner of Fillmore and Turk, took a transfer ticket and settled down with my book. Dusk was creeping in and as the bus followed Fillmore towards the bay I became lost in the narrative unfolding on the pages in front of me. Looking up I realised I had no idea where in the city I was so instinctively I descended at the next stop. Looking around I saw that this was a premature act, crossed the road and waited for another bus which when it arrived would not accept my transfer. Things were beginning to fall apart. The dusk had become night and that had not been the plan.

I walked a couple of blocks and found a cross town bus to take me to North Beach and I got off at Washington Square Park, a small neighbourhood corner where normally people walk, sit, sleep, talk, play, wait and where tonight there was an open air screening of Fellini’s Eight and a Half.

Perfect, North Beach is the original Italian part of town and here one of the country's greatest directors and the original Italian dialogue filled the night air. Looming behind the park were the skyscrapers of downtown, ablaze with their own light, to one side a couple stood and kissed and above everything hung the almost full moon.

Perfect but no X’s here, so I continued past the Italian Restaurants and the seductive smell of cooked tomato and struggled up Rob’s hill for one last try to connect. He was out but his neighbour was in; I invited her to join me but her dinner had just finished cooking, so alone I crossed the glare of Broadway and the strip shows to the legendary bar Vesuvio.

I had been saving this, and took a seat in the window upstairs on the gallery.

Vesuvio, as you may remember from earlier in all this, is a bar across the alley next to the City Lights Bookstore. Inside it feels like a bar in the red light district of Paris, it is small, cramped, noisy and insistent. The ceiling is low and yellow, stained from years of tobacco smoke, though today smokers go outside to cough. The walls are crowded with newspaper clippings, prints, photos, posters and book covers - behind the bar are two large, engraved mirrors and in the corner is a wooden framed screen with sepia slides of 1920 bathing belles being shown.

Vesuvio is a bar first and foremost but also a visual record of the Beat Generation years and with time much could be learnt from the walls. Once someone left a note pinned up offering; “I Will Drive Your Car East”, someone had added, “No you won’t”.

It still attracts an interesting clientele, I met an apple engineer from Los Gatos further south who had just come back from Tokyo but unfortunately not even her name began with an X.

I like the upstairs part of this bar the best, up the narrow stairs at the end of the bar and you are on the gallery where you can look either down on the bar or better from the window seats onto the street below, edge of Broadway and its nightlife. In the corner you can even opt for the marquee-like booth and watch everything.

I sat down and looked out the window, a 1950’s Cadillac cruised past. Seconds later another, open topped and spitting flames from its twin exhausts. Honest. The waitress approached and excitedly I placed my order, two months of planning coming to a vibrant finale.

But.

They didn’t stock it, only Corona.

Disappointed I ordered a glass of red wine.

Ok I was very disappointed, but more so I was now hungry, in the excitement of finishing these letters I had forgotten to eat and now the memory of those Italian restaurants rumbled in my stomach. I drank up and left, re-crossed the neon of Broadway and climbed the slope into North Beach and followed the giant neon lit hand pointing to the Golden Gate Pizza.

The surroundings couldn’t have been a harsher contrast to Vesuvio, walls and ceiling made of shiny corrugated iron but the pizza smelled heavenly and a I waited, leaning on the counter my eyes drifted to the glass fronted fridge, and there it was, an ice-cold bottle of Dos Equis, Mexican Beer.

Perfect.
End of story.

Well, almost.

I had ordered Pizza to go and go was what I was going to do, but city, state or federal law dictates that they couldn’t sell me a bottle to go, only to consume within the corrugated iron Pizza Shed.

I tried to get them to sell it to me unopened in a brown paper bag, something that usually seems to work and allows many people to drink alcohol on the street, but not this time. They can be very strict, all the bars are strictly over 21 only and I know someone in their late forties who was refused admission without I.D.

So, did I compromise this series of letters and walk out with out drinking it or did I stick to my principles and eat my pizza at the table?

You will never know.

XX, Dos Equis, Mexican Beer.