Friday night San Franciso

The title is also the name of one of my dessert island albums by guitarists Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía. The B sides' Egberto Gismonti piece - Frevo Rasgado recorded in the year of my birth gave me rushes long before I ever heard of MDMA and still does.

I caught a ride up from Glendales to San Fran with Megan and Genevieve, friends I had made whilst waiting out the tropic storms in the Cook Islands. After a late start, frustrated further by incomplete directions that did not account for the one way system, meant we arrived later than planned. So far on this whole adventure I had not booked accommodation in advance, preferring to be spontaneous and having trust that it will work out. So far I have only had to sleep in city parks twice, and even then it was dry and I had my thermarest and a green bivibag to hide amongst the bushes in.

Friday night at eleven pm in the summer was pushing it a bit, but after wandering a few miles in the familiar city I found a cramped but friendly place in Chinatown – the biggest one in the US.

My Mum was very concerned that I had called my last blog entry “Swansea, do I judge thee to harshly”, somehow missing out the extra “o”, insisting I correct the mistake ASAP. I remembered while enthroned in the hostel restroom, I hate to sit down without something to read, at a push, I will read the ingredients of shampoo bottles. I had kept this compact laptop in my daysac along with other things of value, and attempted to correct the error.

The latch did not align properly with the door, and I was surprised by a girl who burst in. I heard her giggling up the hall - “He was sat there typing on his computer..” I cannot be the only one who gets inspired to creativity in these private moments. Fear not dear readers I am now typing from more salubrious surroundings.

The last time I was in San Fran, eighteen months ago I had stayed in a hostel between Union Square and the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin got its name for the cut of steak given at the end of a shift to police officers who were prepared to patrol this notorious downtown area. Here it is not in the least bit unusual to see a seventy year old transvestite arguing with a one legged prostitute, blatant drug deals or an old black man passed out in an alley wearing a full Father Christmas costume.

I called in to the same hostel and was warmly recognized by Nicola, the receptionist who had greated me on my last visit in mock sarcastic cockney “I suppose you want a room do ya?”

“How wonderful to hear some good British surliness” I replied, and asked where she was from. It transpired that we not only been at a party at the Center for Alternative Technology at the same time, but had mutual friends recently moved to the city. She had been the third person to suggest I visited Arcata in Northern California, a magically little town amongst the great redwoods where I left a large part of my heart.

By now you will not be surprised to hear it was that night I met two girls and a guy driving back to their homes there, who kindly gave me a ride, and put me up on their respective sofas. There began a whole other story, I could not help dwelling over, as I lay in the same bed I coincidentally been assigned on my last visit. Spooky huh!

On this occasion, Nicola had that previous night been at the same party as our mutual friends Jon and Amanda from the “Crusty Quarry” as CAT is affectionately called. Being part of the largest MSc course in the UK has its advantages, one being a network of hippy friends all over.

Since I saw them last John and Amanda had married and set up home in the Mission, or the Gaybourhood as it is known, in a recent survey 30 percent of its inhabitants had identified themselves as gay, bi or transgender, compared with 13 percent in San Fran as a whole.

I learned this little factoid on a walking tour the three of us joined, learning how to date the various architectural styles of the area and visiting sites connected with Harvey Milk, the free speech movement, and labour rights demonstrations. This being Sunday we passed a church whose largely male congregation walked hand in had to the stirring voices of Thomas Tallis motet Spem in Aelium - (Sing and Glorify)

I continued my walk to Haight Ashbury, the epicenter of the sixties counterculture, past the house where the Grateful Dead lived communally. Called into the Anarchist bookstore to pick up some zines and to ask after further references from the owner I had met on my previous visit. It was the occasion of the Haight Street fair, the atmosphere was electric, previously the staff and I were the only ones in the shop, drinking tea in the rain. He directed me to the next bookshop for titles I love, right on 1970's counterculture how to books. He warned me that the owner was a weirdo - too right! I sign inside read "no cameras - you will be asked to leave", and beneath in equally angry white letter "if you ask why you will be asked to leave"!

I continued along Grand, past Union square, through China gate, pausing at Ferlinghetti's' infamous City Lights bookstore next to the street renamed Jack Kerouac, through the museum of the beats, Through Chinatown to North Beach. I committed to memory the lines from the end of Kerouac's On the road, describing Neal Cassady hoping to be able to recite it my mind, when I reach New York and look back:-

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty...."