March 2008
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First, second and even third impressions can be wrong, as Will Self discovered on a recent visit to Frisco
I first visited San Francisco in 1993. I was on a magazine assignment to write a piece about cryonicists, those strange worshippers at the cult of pseudo-science who believe that if people are frozen at absolute zero at the very moment of death, some time in the distant future it will be possible to revive them. I’d flown in from Los Angeles, which seemed a sunny, sybaritic kind of a town. San Francisco felt radically different.
The area around Market Street was thronged with streetwalkers and drug addicts. Homeless people were sleeping in doorways. I was staying at the Prescott on Post Street, then, as now, a small oasis of character in the soulless ocean of corporate hotels; but if I turned out of the front door and walked a couple of blocks, I found myself in scary streets devoid of tourists. I walked up Nob Hill to Grace Cathedral, and inside found murals depicting the 1906 earthquake in distinctly Biblical imagery: fire and brimstone and people getting smitten by the Lord.
I met up with some people who worked on a satirical ’zine, and we went out late, drinking in the bars around Columbus Avenue, including Vesuvio, once patronised by Jack Kerouac and the rest of the Beats. In the small hours we went on to an apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The pastel-painted clapboard houses were charming, but the slopes they clung to were so vertiginous that I worried lest I tumble down them; and there were also the shattered freeway flyovers that lay on the waste ground, still not tidied away after the big quake four years before. My hostess wore a red rubber minidress, which seemed rather louche and terribly appropriate. I remember little more until I awoke in my hotel room, looking at a bottle of mineral water reflected in the mirror. It was the first time I realised that Evian backwards spells ‘naive’.
Throughout my stay, Raymond Chandler’s exchange in The Long Goodbye between an LA cabbie and Philip Marlowe kept running through my mind:
‘I been down and out myself. In Frisco… There’s one stony-hearted town,’ said the cabbie.
‘San Francisco,’ Marlowe said mechanically.
‘I call it Frisco,’ the cabbie said. ‘The hell with them minority groups.’
On the same trip I went out to Berkeley to visit radical-chic friends. Here there were mobs of beggars along Shattuck Avenue, some of whom actually pursued our cab. The bookshops selling left-leaning literature were whites only – except for the staff. On the way back across the Bay Bridge, I could see Alcatraz. The penitentiary had recently been closed down, and it looked small, dirty and disused – far less threatening than the looming towers of the city itself.
Later, I drove south on Route 1 through windswept seafront towns to Marina, where I interviewed a man with terminal cancer who was convinced he was immortal. It was a fitting ending to a gloomy introduction to the city of peace and love.
I returned to the city often, but it wasn’t until this year that I was finally able to correct my initial impressions, which were founded on an exaggerated dichotomy: it doesn’t seem full of love, QED it must be hateful.
This year I took the bus in from the airport instead of a cab – it sounds like a small thing, but it wasn’t. When you get in a cab, you just don’t make the effort to understand where you’re going. Rumbling in on the highway, past the big slogan ‘City of Industry’, then getting down from the bus and walking from First and Mission to the Prescott on Post Street, made me feel the shape of San Francisco. I’d never really grasped what a peninsular conurbation it was.
That night, on my way to the symphony, I walked past the great floodlit bulk of City Hall. It was a revelation: I’d been coming to this town for years without realising it contained anything that big.
Inside the Davies Symphony Hall, the upholstered haute bourgeoisie of northern California were settling down in their upholstered seats to hear Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. The very building itself seemed, to me, to be compressing a different view of San Francisco into my mind: this was a big, confident, swaggering metropolis. The Beats and the Hippies were just troublesome flies on its moneyed back.
The following day I walked up Nob Hill again, but this time I kept going down the other side, and then going some more, down to Bay Street, along freight piers, across Crissy Field, over Golden Gate Bridge, until I reached Sausalito. It was a 12-mile stomp. I ate some oysters on the waterfront, looking back at the city across the bay. Then, as dusk was gathering, I took the ferry home.
I say ‘home’ advisedly, because, finally, I felt I’d taken possession of Frisco, squeezing it between my thighs. In the past I’d known it only as San Francisco, but now I say: to hell with that particular minority grouping.
Will Self’s latest novel, The Butt (£14.99, Bloomsbury), is out now.
