The Tenderloin of San Francisco

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The Tenderloin of San Francisco

It began in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. It was a neighborhood that was

lost, but it knew its lostness. To a young man who had just come to San Francisco to

become a writer, it was the best kind of lostness because it was clear. There was nothing

uncertain about the man who sat on a bench on Market Street at night bouncing a tennis

ball against a wall, hanging on to its rhythm for his life. There was nothing uncertain

about a woman using a corner of the street as a bathroom in the early evening, as two

boys watched and laughed around her. There was nothing uncertain about what the

female body was in that neighborhood, at least outside the establishments that advertised

her body as a product in some way or another.

Somehow in the middle of all that, he went to a party. The party was not in the

Tenderloin, but the Tenderloin never really left him. It was there in the way that a party

seemed like a miracle coming from there. Everything seemed like a miracle coming from

there, until he remembered that he would be going back there again at the end of the

night, and then everything would lose its miraculousness, because it didn't seem like a

miracle should be so apart and over anything. And then it would almost seem like

coming back home there was a little miracle - the way that night still looked like night,

whatever it might look like below.

Somehow in the middle of all that , he met a girl. She was interested in neighborhoods

and miracles, and she had her own thoughts about them. As for himself, he wanted to do

more about the female body than what those establishments in the Tenderloin suggested.

He wanted her body to be the end of a miracle, not just its beginning by itself. He made a

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plan to meet her Sunday afternoon to walk around her neighborhood together.

The girl lived in the Mission District. It was where a young man who wanted to be a

writer was likely to go in San Francisco, and young men and women who wanted to be

artists and musicians and poets. He loved them. He loved the streets they walked down.

He loved the cafes and bars they went to. But he did not want to live among them. He

loved them, but what he was looking for was not something that had to do with

generations. It was not something that his generation knew that another generation didn't.

There were forms it took among his generation that he was acquainted with, and it was

nice to be acquainted with them, but it was more important to go deeper towards the heart

of the matter of life, which he could do among all generations, than to become better

acquainted with the particular forms of his.

I already know them, he thought. I already know myself as a member of them. I have

to know myself as a member of everyone else. Of old men and mothers and little babies.

To know them in the Tenderloin was to know them at a kind of essence. As long as there

was a Tenderloin, then the whole world was a Tenderloin, because he could go

somewhere beautiful like the Marina District, which was where a young man who wanted

to make money was likely to go in San Francisco, and he wouldn't know what to think.

Its beauty was true - its hills and its bay and its light-colored apartment buildings - but if

it came at the exception of the Tenderloin, then it was something else besides being

beautiful. He did not want to forget about that other thing. It was too easy to call the

place just beautiful, or to call it just ugly too.

It was important because San Francisco was a place that had come to him as a dream,

like nothing since the world had as a child. When he came across the parts of the city

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that seemed like nobody's dream, he could do one of two things. He could dismiss the

whole dream as false, which he could never do for too long in San Francisco, because

there would be something on the next block or the next day that would call it back. Or he

could shrink the dream down, which was how it had been with the world, having at times

shrunk it down to just himself, a few writers, his little sister, and basketball. But there

was a third option now, which he could only engage in at his desk. He could sacrifice for

the dream. He did not always know what he was writing or what he ever hoped to write,

but he knew that he was sacrificing in trying to do it at his desk each night, and it did not

seem like he was sacrificing for nothing. If nothing else, he would wake up the next

morning with pieces of the dream in him.

The dream was a dream of all of San Francisco. If it had been something that could

be dismissed or shrunk down, then it wouldn't have been a dream in the first place. He

had made that mistake once with the world; he wasn't going to make it again with San

Francisco. It was unusual to get a second chance like that, and he knew that he had to

make the most of it. He saw people in the Tenderloin who seemed like they had never

been given the first chance to dream. All he knew for certain was that his dream included

them. Anything that didn't include them wasn't a dream.

He walked out the door on Sunday afternoon with a sense of apology towards the

neighborhood. The time when he understood it the most was when it was connected to

the work he would be doing at his desk. There might be a time when he could begin to

understand the Tenderloin on his way to something of leisure, but he could not do it now.

He did not have anybody to do it with. He did not have anybody who saw the lostness of

their neighborhood as the first thing with which to greet somebody whom they might be

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sharing their leisure with, and he might never. And he didn't know how he was supposed

to ever feel any leisure without that.

There was the body, he supposed. That was what the young men he knew turned to

first when it came to leisure, and what he tried to turn to first. But the walk to her house

from the Tenderloin to the Mission District constituted a world, and he could either let

that world come out to her or he could not. He could either act like it was everything or

like it was nothing. If it was nothing, then all he had left was the body. Anyway the idea

was to talk about themselves, and he didn't know what self he had other than the self in

the world he was passing through. That was the only self where he was a writer, where

he was trying to make something out of what was before him. If they weren't going to do

that, then he didn't know what they were doing on a Sunday afternoon. If they weren't

going to make a street they walked down become something different by its end from

what it was at its beginning, then he didn't know what the point of walking down a street

was.

And it was terrible to say, but he could understand why the places in his neighborhood

went ahead and said that the female body was a beginning and an end. It was clear, and

romance, in a world that had a Tenderloin, in a world that was full of Tenderloins, was

not. There was no woman whose presence alone could make the world a romantic place,

he thought. The whole notion of romance had to be modified, with the body taking on a

much more central role. Anyway it wasn't just the places in his neighborhood that said

that the body was the thing. It was everywhere. It was in all the neighborhoods, even if

they weren't as honest about it as the places in the Tenderloin. It was in the morning

paper, which was everywhere, where it was considered advertisement for underwear.

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He could look back and feel like he had given the other thing a chance. Before he had

lived in the Tenderloin, back when a walk with a girl in the park had been poetry by

itself, rather than its own kind of lostness for being so far away from the truth of that

place, he had given romance every chance, to the exception of the body. There was a

place where they could go together, romance and the body, but he could not see it from

where he was.

He came to her house, and at first it was easy, without a question of whether she was

the girl to close out the whole world with or to let the whole world in with, or even

whether that was what he had to choose between. But once they stepped outside, it was

the same thing as always stepping outside - a feeling that there was something that he was

trying to reach in the faces of people, and something he was trying to reach with them,

and it was so big that he didn't know how to include them in it. Even if he were to say

that it was a part of San Francisco, and that he loved San Francisco, it was all just the

world. San Francisco was everything the world had not been, and it was nothing that the

world had not been either. It had still needed him, after all. It had still needed him to be

everything it was. It could have been New York, or London, or Paris, and there would be

streets to walk down with a girl. And yet somehow he was supposed to tell her

everything, or begin to, or be willing to. It was all the same thing though, because it

didn't take any dramatics for the truth of who he was to be close at hand with her. All it

took was a moment, a moment of life.

Take anybody, he thought. Take anybody on the street, if the idea is for us to share

something of our hearts. Take an artist or musician or poet, or take anybody who wants

to look like one, because it isn't really all that far away from it to look like one, all things

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considered. All things considered, everybody is trying to make some kind of art or music

or poetry out of their day, and whether or not they're making the kind that can be seen or

heard or read doesn't seem like an important distinction sometimes.

Take any one of the Latino men and women whose community it is. Take their

Sunday afternoon, buying fruits and vegetables among the artists and musicians and poets

whose presence might be raising the price of the neighborhood. Take one of them trying

to do their best in America and thinking of their home country and take them bringing

something from there with them.

I can't move as fast as my heart, he thought. I can't walk as fast as it or talk as fast as

it. The closest I can come is by myself, at the end of something beautiful. There are

places in the city with grass and trees where it feels as though I can sit and really have

something and really know something and really be something. And when I have done it,

or even when I have thought of doing it, she has felt very close and at the same time, I've

been in no hurry to find her. She's seemed like enough for the grass and trees, but I don't

know how she has to be to be enough for these streets of people.

The girl he was walking with loved San Francisco. It wasn't the same San Francisco

as the one he loved, but he figured that was all right. Amongst the three of them there

was love: he, her, and San Francisco. It seemed like the start to everything. His San

Francisco was big enough to include hers, after all. It was big enough to include a part of

a generation in San Francisco turning towards sarcasm and mockery, relying on it at least,

walking amongst it on a Sunday afternoon. There wasn't room so much for that sort of

thing in the Tenderloin. There wasn't room for sarcasm in a bread line. There was only

room for wondering how he was supposed to love a San Francisco that had bread lines.

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Well, he thought, the San Francisco that came to you through literature had had bread

lines in it. Somehow those bread lines had been part of how you had been able to love

that San Francisco.

I don't know if I have that kind of love, he thought, on my own, without a book.

When I walk past bread lines, I want to hate somebody. Nobody ever tells you who to

hate. I've wanted to hate San Francisco, because any place that's so beautiful that has

bread lines in the middle of it must be pretending. And I guess that's where part of that

sarcasm and mockery comes from. They do not want to pretend. They do not want to

pretend that San Francisco is just its hills and its bay and its light-colored apartment

buildings. I'm with them there. But throwing away that San Francisco would be

throwing away part of myself. Its beauty was supposed to be everybody's. It wouldn't be

beautiful if it wasn't. I've seen men walking in the Marina with faces browned from the

sun, carrying all their possessions on their back, and they’ve looked like they've known

that all that beauty is theirs, so it's the least I can do to keep it going. I don't know who

I'd be keeping it going for , but the writers of that literature probably didn't know who

they were keeping it going for either. They didn't know they were keeping it going for

me.

If he could just sit with her and list the names of those writers, that would be his heart

too. He could have the world they had, for a moment. It was the quickest way to it. He

could have the city they had. But he couldn't take the quick way once he had seen that

there was a slow one, because he liked the path. There was a world where the honest

truths of life came first and not last, and he could have that world with a book or with

himself, but the best way might be to have it with a book that was himself. It was a book

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that was going to have to have everyone at their simplest and barest. That was how they

were in the Tenderloin. All they were doing was admitting something that wasn't being

admitted in other places. They were admitting what everything was. They were

admitting what money was when a man sat on the street asking for some, or when a man

lay down there, giving up on even the asking. They were admitting what sex was when a

picture of a naked woman with opened legs in a storefront window was just part of a

walk in the neighborhood. And all along the way, they were admitting what love and hate

were. They were things to do with sorrows like the sorrows of money and sex.

The girl told him about things she loved and hated as they walked. It was nice to

listen to. Before he had come to the Tenderloin, it would have been everything though.

It would have been even more than everything if there were some things that were the

same as what he loved and hated. Somehow it would have been all the confirmation he

needed. But confirmation didn't change anything. And anyway, what confirmation did

he need about a man lying down in the street to sleep? There was something unreachable

with a girl as long as they were doing that, and it seemed like all that was left after that

was the body.

For a while he had thought that the thing to do was to make a brick wall inside

himself, a brick wall that stood opposed to everything that had caused a place like the

Tenderloin to become the way it was in the first place, and he had gone to the meetings of

the political organization that took that brick wall as its starting point, and he had fallen in

love with a girl there just for her being there and presumably having that brick wall inside

her too.

But he'd seen how the purpose of that brick wall was to meet the sorrow with

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something hard, with something that looked past the man standing before him and saw

the dialectically material forces that were behind his holding a cup for change. Those

forces were valid, but he wanted to meet the man with something soft. The streets were

hard enough, his duty to go home and sit at his desk was hard enough, that his only

chance for softness was in seeing the man and not seeing anything behind him other than

the night sky that he would be wondering how the man would be sleeping under. There

might be a time when he could meet the man with hardness and softness, the kind of

hardness and softness that he only felt at the end of the night, when he would put his pen

down and say good night to the street even as he could still hear its shouts and cries of

desperation, but he did not have that yet.

Anyway he had to meet the man with softness because he was coming from another

day with children, he was coming from another day of seeing who everybody once was.

It gave an awful lot of clarity to the question of what his neighborhood was, or what any

neighborhood was: It was the thing that came after a schoolyard. Every day he lived his

whole life over from the beginning, from the first day of school to the moment of lostness

in a man's eye asking him for change. It was a thing he might be doing anywhere, but a

schoolyard was a place for doing it at a soft and easy pace. Every day he saw another

way in which the thing started out right. And every day he told himself that it was where

everybody started. He didn't know what he was supposed to do with that, except that he

did know that it gave a nice circle to a day to begin with children and to end with the

feeling that all he wanted to do with writing was to write about everybody in a way that

included the softness they had as children.

You might as well not have been with children all day, he thought, if you weren't going

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to look a man who was asking for change in the eye on the way home. You might as well

believe that the world was a place for looking some people in the eye and looking away

from others. You might as well not have noticed that a child did not know how to believe

that.

Maybe he could tell her about every single child he knew. Each one was enough to

make the street into a place that was full of hope, if he could take the time to explain all

that they were. He didn't want to do it in a story, of something funny or cute that one of

them had done. There was plenty of funniness and cuteness there, but a day with children

was very far from being funny and cute by the end of it. It was truthful, and it was

truthful about children and about everybody. Anyway what a person was was just as

much of a story as what a person did. What somebody was was what they did. There

was never a time when they were doing nothing, if they were being observed by

somebody who cared about time. If they were being observed by someone who cared

about the way the light was changing behind them over the course of a day or over the

course of days. There were blocks in the Tenderloin that were full of stories where all the

men did was sit all day. Those are the blocks for me, he thought. As long as they were

going to be around, they were the ones for him. If the idea in coming to a city was to see

the worst of it, in order to understand any of it, then the Tenderloin was the place for him.

At least it knew what it was. And in the Mission he saw those from his generation who

looked like they had their most sureness about what they were not. And those from his

generation in the Marina who were making money were whom they were surest they

were not. He didn't know what any of it meant for walking around the streets of either

neighborhood, but he knew that there was something truthful in all of that walking ending

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in the Tenderloin for him. There was no place he could go where he wouldn't be seeing

everything he saw through the lens of the Tenderloin, through the lens of an absolute

hunger that had nothing and wanted everything. He wanted to want the way he'd seen

men want in the Tenderloin. He wanted to want life the way he'd seen them want food, or

alcohol, or love. It was where a man wanted wholly and unrestrainedly, because what

was there to not be whole and unrestrained about? What was there to save face about,

when there were faces there that did not expect any saving? Who was there to hide from,

when the suffering face of man was there for all to see?

It was there in the schoolyard too: the way that they did not know how to want

something indirectly. The children did not know how to want something by not wanting

something else. He was trying to learn from them too, and at the end of the night, even if

all he'd written was a word, he'd feel like he'd learned it for a day. It all made sense until

it came to the body, and then it seemed like some kind of indirectness was necessary.

There was no going to the body without going through the heart, because of something

that happened when he saw her house, when he saw her room, when he saw the pictures

on her bookshelves. He couldn't pretend that they weren't a story, that as much as he had

been thinking of her as the ending of his own story, he couldn't pretend that she wasn't a

story herself. He would be losing his own story if he did that.

And he knew that the idea was for them to make their story together, but he didn't

know how he could tell her about what he loved and hated when he felt like she could

pick out anything on the street and he could tell her about how he loved or hated it. And

he didn't even know anything about when it was which, except that on his way home

from a day with children, it was a little more likely to lean towards love.

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Moments were gone when they were gone though, and if those moments had been

trying to teach him something, he did not know what. He did not know what the

moments of love were trying to teach him or the moments of hate. He did not know if the

feeling he had in the schoolyard was a hello to something or if it was a goodbye to

something else. He didn't know if it opened something up inside him or if it closed it off,

because of how the world could not match it.

Sometimes what wasn't there felt so alive and real that it seemed more certain and full

than what was there, and he thought that maybe he could tell her about that. He could do

it pretty well, since he did have one place where it was there, where there was some kind

of final say about whether things went nicely or not, and just having that helped to make

it so that everyone's natural desire to have things go nicely could come out. But all that

was wishing, and wishing didn't seem in line with the body somehow. It made him feel

like a child himself, not that he had anything against children, but they didn't have the

question of the body the way he did. Her room and her bed and her body were all real,

and it seemed like sticking to what was real was the best chance towards that reality. It

meant caring about what street they walked down, what store they stopped in to look

around, what place they sat down in to eat. But he didn't know how to care when there

was something that followed them to whatever street or store or place to eat they went to.

There was no street or store or place to eat they could go to that signified that they were

in a world where anybody could have final say about whether things went nicely the way

they could in a schoolyard.

He thought back to the young men he knew who already knew all this about the body,

who'd known it long enough that they already knew what to do about streets and stores

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and places to eat. And he wondered if he'd been going to a schoolyard each day in order

to become a fool, in order to be made a fool of by the world on a Sunday afternoon with a

girl. But those children were real too, there was no getting around that. The sun that

shone down on the schoolyard when they came outside to eat their lunches was real, and

the way that he had not felt lonely when he had begun working there was real.

There was still foolishness there though, but it was a foolishness that didn't have to do

with how he spent his days, or how any man could ever spend his days. Being made a

fool of by the female body was part of living. It was part of living in an organized and

established way in the Tenderloin. A man was a fool either way when he walked past one

of those places with pictures of women in the window. Either he went in or he held out a

little hope that if he could only talk to those women, he could explain to them why they

didn't need to be doing that. It was just a question of what kind of fool he was going to

be. He'd decided he didn't want to be the kind who came back to his same old room after

a Sunday afternoon with a girl, stuck on a couple of things she'd said, because he knew

by now that as the night in his room wore on, the things she'd said would fade and the

thought of her body would rise.

So he didn't say anything when she asked him if he didn't hate the people who lived in

the Marina. They were sitting in a taqueria, a place that was part of the feeling of the

Mission, where she could feel pretty safe to ask him that, no matter who might be close

by. It was part of the life there, and the two of them could be part of the life there if he

were to say yes. And it could be part of who he was, and he could take it with him

wherever he went. He could be back in the Tenderloin, or on the way there, and for

anything he saw, he could say: This is the way it is because I am not in the Mission. If I

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were there, this part of life would be better.

She was smiling as she said it like it was an invitation. It was an invitation to take the

pain of his life, kept from the beauty of the Marina by money, and the pain of hers, kept

from the same by the same, and bring them together in a way that said that they didn't

deserve it necessarily. He knew that they did not deserve it. He knew that most people

did not deserve most of what they had when it came to pain. The two of them could hate

the people who lived in the Marina and it would be the same either way. The taqueria

they sat in would be the same as it was, and the Mission District would be the same as it

was. What they liked about it, like its light in the evening, would be happening in other

places too. What they liked about it most, something vague and familiar in its people that

seemed to match the light of the day, was not something they could point to and say was

not happening anywhere else.

You never knew what you were hating when you hated something, he thought. At

least not enough to say it, at least not enough to say it to a girl, and at least not enough to

say it to her on an evening that you hoped would be ending somewhere that was already

so lost and uncertain as her bed. He didn't want to account for that lostness and

uncertainty by making it a place to hide from the world, to hide from even one

neighborhood in the world. He didn't think the hate she was smiling about was real hate

because real hate did not have a smile attached. If she was asking him about that, neither

of them would be smiling. It was only because he had seen the face of hate in the

Tenderloin, not in the expressions of people, but in the conditions behind them. Those

conditions could make anything swing towards hate. They could make anything swing

towards hate in a second. What he loved about the people was the way they did not take

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so much of the opportunity to swing towards hate. They did the same thing people did

anywhere, which was to swing towards life. There was no more hate in a bread line than

there was anywhere else, at least not outwardly. It could look like any place else where

people were standing and waiting. They were saying something about hate in the way

they were standing in line. They were saying it ought to be purposeful.

The Mission District of San Francisco was the most beautiful place in the world he

could think of for of a young man and a young woman to sit together and smile as they

hated the people in the Marina. It was a book and a movie and a painting. But it was a

book and a movie and a painting that wasn't his. The other chance at art was in the

beauty of San Francisco in the Marina itself. You couldn't tell the story of a place without

its people though. He thought that maybe he wouldn't have any stories to tell. The way

the world was going, it seemed like there was one of two places he could write from, one

that valued physical beauty at the exception of something quiet, and one that valued

quietude at the exception of something brave. He didn't have anything to say from either

of those places, because he had seen a place where quietude and bravery could go

together. If the idea in coming to a city was to see the best of it, in order to understand

any of it, then the schoolyard was the place for him. But he didn't know if he could write

from there. It was the place that was before those choices, but he didn't know if anybody

wanted to read about that once they had made theirs. Reminding them of that place was

not writing, it was reminding. It was a place that was before those choices, but that didn't

mean he wasn't going to have to make them himself. He was going to have his evenings

and nights in San Francisco with a girl who hated something , and it was going to be

something she probably didn't hate as a child herself. She was going to ask him didn't he

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hate it too, and it was going to be possibly the most important thing she felt she asked

him that night.

I can either learn from those children, he wanted to tell her, or I can say that they have

nothing to teach me. I can either learn from how the world looks among them or I can

say that all of it is gone for everyone except them. But the world among them was what

it was because it had the space to be. That space was given to it by the children. They

came outside and said, this could be anything. They didn't come outside thinking of all it

couldn't be. It was beautiful when two people had the same world it couldn't be inside

them, and they saw it reflected somehow in the neighborhood where they happened to be.

But beauty didn't have to be something covered in dust, something that required two

people willing to clean its dust off in order to see it. They had it already. They had it

already, and they could come to each other with that dust already off of them somehow.

So that they knew, they knew about that dust and its effects, but they could treat it for

what it was - just dust, just something as light as dust even if it did happen to be

everywhere. Even if it did happen to receive a reflection from certain neighborhoods.

What were they going to do - think of themselves as any less in those neighborhoods

where it didn't receive a reflection? Anything that was true in the Mission was true in the

Marina, and if he was going to hate the people who lived in the Marina when he was in

the Mission, what was he going to do when he was in the Marina, hate everybody left and

right? How was he ever going to think of San Francisco as his if he did that? It was

going to take more than seeing the worst of it and the best of it. The worst and best of it

were trying to tell him something, and sitting there in the taqueria, he didn't know how he

was ever going to learn it if he was so willing to end the night in the bed of a girl who

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didn't seem to care what the worst and best of it were saying.

It was a sad meal and a sad walk afterwards and a sad city all around, and he

wondered if it wouldn't be better to just concentrate on something small - one

neighborhood or one street or one girl, one girl that he could argue with, that he could

explain why it wasn't so easy to say he hated the people in the Marina to. But that would

presume that he understood it himself, that the thing he felt was a solid thing to present

her, when the truth was he didn't know if it was a solid, liquid, or gas. And he didn't

know how he was ever supposed to expect to meet a girl to reflect what he had when it

wasn't a solid, liquid, or gas. And it seemed like the thing to do was to just go into the

sadness, it didn't preclude the body after all, and it might even include it more so, because

he would be making his own rules. He couldn't present her with anything solid, but he

could make the line between them something solid, and that might be all the solidness

that was needed. He could make a line that said that this was what was between them

that was possible and this was what was impossible, and the reason that he thought he

might still get somewhere was that he felt like he could make that line stronger than any

line she might have. He didn't think she could possibly have a line as strong as his. He

didn't think someone who could smile as she asked him if he didn't hate the people who

lived in the Marina could possibly be paying as close attention to lines as he was.

Call this sadness yours, he thought. Call it yours, and don't expect to share it with

anybody. Things this big don't fit in the rooms of girls at night. Those rooms are for

something else.

It was good to make a line inside himself, even if it did something to the sadness he

called his that seemed to lose the best part of it. Even if it didn't lead to words. Words

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were not what he was after. He had done all he could do with words. Words were best

when they were going some place that stood still, and he happened to have so many

words, that were going in so many different directions, that he needed something very

still, like a clean piece of paper. With something moving, it was best to be moving

himself, because if something wasn't going to have any stillness to it, he wanted to be

clear about that.

There was a stillness a man had with himself when he admitted that all the words and

their directions didn't have to come out to a woman in order for her body to matter to

him. He had to be clear in himself about whether what he had to say was still worth

telling, about whether he was leaving it open to come out to some body somehow. It was

easy to dismiss the way the world looked on the way to her house - like a poem he was

swimming in, a sad poem sometimes, but still a poem - or to try to get it back by going

straight home, but the real challenge was in moving towards her body and trusting that

the poem would be there for him later on, even if it wasn't there in the same way as it was

before. He would be coming back to the Tenderloin after all, which had a way of making

every other part of the city poetic.

He owed the people of the Tenderloin something, for being able to walk with a line

inside himself, between what he wanted from the world and what the world wanted from

him. He owed them something for having that line themselves, for living with it, each

day, until it could be seen even in the inanimate parts of the city. It was in the block

letters of the signs above restaurants in the Tenderloin, most of them having the name of

their proprietor. It was in the jagged metal steps of the fire escapes, which somehow had

always been connected to dreaming. That was where all those lines came from: This is

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what you can expect from the world and this is what you can't expect. A man had to

recognize those lines as his, and he had to recognize those efforts to move among those

lines as his. Once a man decided to move towards the bed of a woman who required that

line in himself, the city became his in a way that it hadn't been before.

It became the work of men who'd used the lines in the city to define the lines in

themselves, and that was understandable enough, but he wanted to make sure that he was

leaving something infinite inside him in the same way that no amount of lines in the city

could ever affect the presence of the sun in the sky. That sun was as much a part of San

Francisco as anything else, even though it shone over more than San Francisco. He didn't

know if they had wanted something to stay infinite or not, but they hadn't been able to

make enough lines for that.

The line he was making in himself was a line for the moment. It differed from the city

lines for that, but then again, maybe those lines would end up being just for a moment

too, just a longer one. They had been built with permanence in mind, but there had been

something before them and so there could be something after them.

I am of my own time though, he thought. I am of my own time and of my time's way

of being a man involving himself with the female body. There had been all kinds of ways

and all kinds of times, and in the Mission District, he had seen young men and women

who had taken other times upon themselves, in style and dress, and he thought that there

would be something clear about that: You could be a young man who'd decided that back

in a certain time in the life of the city, things moved clean and evenly, and you could take

that time upon yourself, and then one day you'd see the girl who'd taken that same time

upon herself, and at least it would be a clear place to start from. There were certainly

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times that had come to him through literature that he'd thought maybe he belonged to

more than his own. But none of those times had had any answer to the Tenderloin,

otherwise it wouldn't still be here. And he couldn't imagine that there had ever been a

way of involving himself with a woman's body other than weightily, either with a weight

in the moment or a weight that had gone into the moment. And he didn't know how he

was supposed to see everything else with eyes studying his own time and then look at the

lines in himself and what they did to the world with anything else. You've walked these

streets and loved your time beyond any possibility, he thought, beyond any rationality.

You have to walk them and struggle through your time in the same way. You can never

guess what your struggle is going to be, all you can do is stay in it when you find it. The

streets will take on your struggle, and it won't be all they'll ever be, but it's a sign of how

real it is when they do. All these little struggles are what has been making the streets

something to love in the first place. You've seen them even if you haven't known it.

Anyway, a girl can ask you if you don't hate the people of a certain neighborhood and it

doesn't mean that the poetry of the evening excludes her. It becomes different, but it does

not exclude her.

He took the poetry that was there with him up to her room, thinking it would be

enough to carry him through. But it wasn't enough for words. It was only enough to tell

himself that it was all right for this thing to be dark. He wasn't joining her side in moving

towards her body, the side that was against the Marina and for the Mission, so all he was

doing by moving towards her body was moving towards her body. He was joining the

side of the Tenderloin, but lostly, without an understanding that there was a Tenderloin he

loved and a Tenderloin he hated. He was joining that side without an understanding that

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he was trying to bring her to his side, the side that didn't know if it was love or hate, but

was willing to go into tomorrow with that not knowing. There were no words for it, just

action, and so when she stopped him and asked for words, he told himself - stay in the

moment, stay in the moment because it feels like enough.

"I am kissing you because it seems like a good thing to do," he said. I can't tell you

who we will be tomorrow because I don't know who I will be tomorrow. I don't know

who I will be tomorrow with absolute certainty.

It was enough, and the Mission District became his own in her bed, in the way that

something could become his own regretfully, and San Francisco became his own, less

regretfully because it was easier to define it for himself. The definition took in the idea

of a man who was lost, and after all that effort, he did not want to feel lost in her bed, but

a man was either lost or found, and if it was not one, then it was the other. He did not

know if he was more lost than he had been that morning waking up in the Tenderloin. He

knew that he felt more lost than in the schoolyard, but he knew that it was all the same

San Francisco. All that meant was that he shouldn't think of places as the measure of

where he was found. His definition of San Francisco had to include the idea that he was

bigger than San Francisco. It was going to have to be a San Francisco in which he was

big enough to take in a girl's hate for parts of San Francisco, for some of the same parts

that he didn't know if he hated or not. He looked out the window from her bed and he

didn't see it. He saw a gray sky, which meant that it was a gray sky over the Tenderloin,

which meant that even the little chance for hope for something that the sun offered was

not there. He didn't know if he was glad to not be there or if he was sorry to be missing

it. He could imagine how it looked. Take any one of the people on those streets, he

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thought: I am on their side. I don't know what that means for the bed of a woman in the

Mission who hates the Marina, other than lostness, other than the truth that there will be a

lostness wherever you go. And the body had a lostness all its own. You could think that

it was limited to the establishments in the Tenderloin, but it was more than that. You

could make the lines inside you as straight as you wanted, and there would always be a

curve to it. Two people together would always make a curve, because their lines

overlapped, going in and out, entering and exiting one another. You would always be

responsible for whatever curves you created. You would be responsible in whatever

neighborhood you were in. It was good to know that there was a lostness that would be

there wherever he went. He wanted to be someone who could make sense of that

lostness, and it was reassuring to know that he had to do that everywhere. And he did not

give himself over to being found in her bed, because if he did, what would happen to all

that sadness out in the street? He wanted to hold on to it because it had been his, and

because it was the best way to greet the Tenderloin when he went home.

"It's a sad world," he would say.

"I know," the Tenderloin would say sympathetically. "Why do you think I've been

trying to live with its sadness?"

He thought of the sense of apology with which he'd left the Tenderloin in the

afternoon. It was because the Tenderloin had known where he was going. It hadn't

known that she would hate something, or what she would hate, but it had known where

he was going. Go ahead, it had said, I'll be right here. And it hadn't for a second thought

of saying to him: Of course it's hate that you're going to find out there. How do you

think I would have gotten to be this way if it hadn't been for hate?

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He felt very sorry for the girl then, something he could see clearer in her nakedness:

She was only trying to hate where hate came from. It was perfectly reasonable. It was

what everyone wanted to do, probably. It was probably one of the things that made a

walk around the city something small and manageable: he could walk through whichever

neighborhoods and it was what gave everybody the size they had. Once in a while, in a

place like the Tenderloin, two people could come together and break out of that, and say

that they didn't even hate that. They would do it by saying that they were that, and if he

was one of those people, it would be the biggest part of his walk around the city.

Her bed was small and manageable, but something was supposed to be big there, and

if it was just himself, if it was just him by himself and her by herself, then it was just a

place to be between walks around the city. Circumstances might end up having more to

say about love and hate than a person did themself. The circumstance of having made a

line inside himself might determine how much love and hate was there more than

anything he said or did. It was past the time for this sort of thing, for feeling unsure

about the same thing he was after once he got there, but it was past the time for a lot of

things: childhood, lostness in the Tenderloin or anywhere else. The only thing was that

he didn't know what lay past them. If it was something that involved any kind of

discount of those things, then he did not want any part of it. He could accept that what

she felt towards the Marina was hate, but when she did it with a smile, he couldn't accept

that she had never been lost about that hate, that her hate was so small and manageable

now that she could do it with a smile. He was surprised that she couldn't see that he was

someone willing to listen to her lostness about it when it came out as lostness. It was a

perfectly fine way to talk. It was perfectly fine to say, I don't know the first thing about

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questions in a neighborhood like that? What did they think when they went past the

Tenderloin? Did they know how hard the people were trying to live? Did they think that

they were the only one moving, and the Tenderloin was standing still? Did they know

that in the Tenderloin, a man who was a writer could stand still and he would be moving,

all over the city and all over the world, to the time when he was a boy and to the time

when he would be an old man, to the eternal loneliness of everybody and to the eternal

loneliness of nobody at all, to books and to children and to girls, and to an understanding

that everything was truer in the Tenderloin, even things that were not there? A man had

to view his whole life from the Tenderloin, and if he did, he would be either sinking of

flying, or even both, but he would be moving. And there would be moments when he

would be able to see everybody's moving, set against the backdrop of the earth, when the

whole world became the Tenderloin and the Tenderloin became the whole world, and he

would be filled with respect for them for the way they would stay moving, something like

the movement of children in a schoolyard, and he would think that of course they had to

understand why a man who loved their movement so much would have to sit down and

try to catch some of it on paper each night. It was something he had to do in a

neighborhood where the people were always looking up, looking up either at the people

who were just passing through, or at the sky, in order to see the cleanest part of where

they lived. He was looking up when he wrote too. He was looking up at himself, and

with the idea of the people of the Tenderloin looking up at themselves. He would see

men lying asleep or passed-out on the sidewalk in the mornings, and even with their eyes

closed, they were looking up.

He knew that she was trying to look up at something in hating the people in the

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Marina, but looking up was such a precious thing that if he was going to do it with

somebody, it had to be right. If he was going to do it with a girl, it had to be more than

right. I am sorry, he almost wanted to say, but I have looked up at the sky with children,

and I have felt us both believe that we somehow belonged under it, that looking up was a

kind of looking across, that something was looking back down at us with an equal belief

in our belonging. He realized he'd been holding that up as a model for something, and he

thought of how it would be easier to take the Tenderloin establishments' view of her body,

but if he had done that from the beginning, he wouldn't be here now. He didn't know how

long he could keep it up: Believing at the beginning that they could look up at the sky

together like that and then deciding halfway through that how they did that wasn't so

important after all, that he'd come back to that on his own afterwards. It wasn't as though

he had a good enough sense of it that he could afford to take breaks from it. Going to bed

amidst the sounds of the Tenderloin with a belief that tomorrow his heart would grow was

enough of an achievement by itself. San Francisco was a poem that could turn into the

space where a poem used to be if he was not attentive. Every part of it depended on the

Tenderloin, because if he didn't see the Tenderloin in the right way, he would see the

other parts of the city as an escape. The Marina and the Mission and the Sunset and the

Richmond, they were all places where people were living. That was the only way he

could make sense of himself living among them. Along with being the one to write about

them. If there were stories in the Marina and there were stories in the Mission, then

literarily, they were equal. He didn't even have to know the people there to know that

there were stories among them. He could look up at the sky and it was enough.

I guess I might hate them if it weren't for that, he thought. When I've sat down to

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write a story about one person, it is an activity that involves more than one person. By

that I mean that it's an activity that involves the whole city, and probably beyond that. By

rights I shouldn’t have had one night of peace in the Tenderloin. I especially shouldn't

have had one night or peace considering that there is a Marina as well as a Tenderloin.

But if I can do something that touches the Marina, that touches the Mission, then the

Tenderloin becomes a peaceful place by necessity. That touch has to start somewhere.

And it's the easiest place to touch other places from equally, because most days there is at

least one person who looks like they've given up on places, in terms of one place being

different from any other, and who looks like they've done the same for people, and

whenever I see them, they stay with me all day long, through any writing and through any

time with children, and somehow the neighborhood seems like theirs, even as they seem

preoccupied with bigger things, like the sun and the stars and where they are going to get

their next meal. The neighborhood is theirs when they don't see any borders to it, in

terms of people or place. The whole Tenderloin stays with me all day long like that,

through any other parts of the city, because even as well as it knows it itself, still it knows

that the only border is death. It doesn't care anything about borders made of streets, of

city lines, of national demarcations. It cares about the border between a smile and a

frown, between happiness and sadness, but only in the sense that those borders are fluid,

in the sense that I have passed men sitting on the sidewalk in the Tenderloin, holding a

bottle and laughing, and I have felt sad to see them, and how any of us will feel at night,

or in a few hours, or in a few minutes, is anybody's guess, but all along it has known that

the only border is death. I can dream that one day the lines in myself will be as fluid as

those in the Tenderloin, but for now they are rigid because of how much I don't know, and

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I'll take them rigid because that seems to be the place to learn from, and learning is what

connects the street and the taqueria and the bed. If I am not doing that, then somehow the

Tenderloin is doing what it's supposed to be, and those men are sitting on the sidewalk

holding a bottle because they are supposed to be, and there may be a few people in the

world who can look at them like that and still love who they could have been - that seems

like what good writing is made of after all - but I am not one of those people just now,

and I don't know if I ever will be. I guess I have to try though because it's hard to say

where else the story is. It's hard to say where else the story is besides somewhere

between giving up on the Tenderloin and giving up on myself because the world has a

Tenderloin in it. At least it makes sense that I would have to find that space alone. It isn't

something that's easy to take around with me, and a place like this where it would be the

most useful is the hardest place to bring it to.

I'll take the half that's lost though, he thought. If I want to glide between lost and

found the way the Tenderloin has, I have to take the half that's lost.

And as he looked out her window, he could not help feeling that it was the exact same

half, it was the same half as the one he was looking for, so that it was not a matter of

halves, but a matter of a man, a man taking in everything and holding it in its right place,

making a place for that which was new, doing so because the part of him that knew how

to was not new. A man had to make a place for the boy, and his manhood was not meant

to be a replacement of his boyhood as much as an addition to it. At first it had seemed

like the Tenderloin was saying to him, "You had better forget about the boy you had been.

You had better not bring him here.", but now it seemed like it was saying, "You had better

remember that boy. You had better bring him with you wherever you go. You are going

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to need him."

There was a kind of peace then, and the girl had asked him about who he hated, but

she was more than that. The world had asked him to choose between two ways of being,

but it was more than that. The female body had asked him to choose between feeling

himself over it or under it, but it was more than that.

And then suddenly: A knock at the door, a glance at the clock, and she was

apologizing and putting on her clothes, saying that she'd forgotten that her friend was

coming, and some half-hearted pleas: 'Tell her to come back later. Tell her you're sick."

But it was no use. And that was it, he knew he wouldn't get a second chance, because all

he wanted of a second chance was to go straight back to where they were, he didn't want

to send his heart back through all the places he had just gone to again. That was too

much work, and maybe everybody would be that much work, but at least they would be a

new kind of work. Each day would be a new kind of work in the Tenderloin, even though

it was the same streets he was walking up and down, the same men lying in the street, the

same signs outside of the establishments pertaining to the female body. If he did not see

children in between that up and down, he did not know what he would do. He would see

them again tomorrow, and that would be such a new kind of work that it would not feel

like work. Maybe he could see her again if they could make a plan to see each other right

after he left the schoolyard. But it might make things worse because he could be thinking

of how much it wasn't necessary to hate the same things together in order to have a

pleasant time with children. He'd want to tell her that, and at that time of day, especially

with the fading sun helping him out a little bit, he knew he could tell her with lightness

and with love. But then he wouldn't be looking forward to seeing her if he took that

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approach. He would be looking forward to himself.

There was a place to go with that looking forward to himself, which was to his desk,

and the sadness he felt putting his clothes back on was in the thought of whether he

would ever know a girl he looked forward to as much as that, and know her body under

those premises.

She apologized again, and they both spoke of seeing each other again, and then he was

back out in the street again, and it was back to feeling big and small at the same time. It

was a feeling that increased as he got closer to the Tenderloin. A man's ability to walk

past another man sitting on the sidewalk was big and small at the same time, and back up

in his room in the Tenderloin was where he felt it the most, where he wished the world

would tell him if he was big or small, because where he lived he could never get away

from the question, he could never get away from it to such a degree that it went with him

everywhere, to taquerias in the Mission District where girls would ask him about his hate

and he wouldn't know if his hate was big or small, or to their bedrooms where he

wouldn't know if it was forgiveness or desire or both, and whether he ought to think of

that as big or small. He didn't know, but at the same time, he couldn't imagine living

somewhere where he wasn't facing that question all the time, because that question was

the world's question, and if all he had in the Tenderloin was an honesty in the

environment that everybody was facing it, whether they knew they were facing it or not,

then that was enough for now.

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The Tenderloin of San Francisco

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