Three weeks before I graduated from Auburn
University in Auburn, Alabama, I planned to live in San Francisco for two
months; get a job as a waitress, even though I had no experience in the
business; and then move onto adulthood somewhere else. I lived with Andrew, one of the two
friends I had in the city, during my first week there. He lived a neighborhood
called Noe Valley, pronounced “No-ee.” It was full of fog, steep hills, cooing babies
in strollers and not much else except the lingering expectation that at any
minute zombies would emerge from the fog and I’d never be able to survive
unless I practiced running up the hills twice a day.
Andrew lived in a backyard studio at the top of
a steep hill we would help push each other up after long days of walking around
the city. While he was at work, I wrote resumes and cover letters to every
craigslist job I could find to the sound of chickens I could hear outside
but couldn’t see. The eerie quiet of the neighborhood, and the barnyard noises
made me wonder if I was actually in the city of San Francisco.
On the second day of my visit, Andrew stopped
walking beside me when we explored the city. Instead, he walked five feet in
front of me with his head down, staring at his phone. I could sense his
unhappiness with me, and began to quietly loathe him for it, even though he had
been one of my best friends in college. I had a week before I could move into the room I was going to
sublet from Ben, my other friend in the city, but I didn't know how much longer I could watch the back of Andrew’s blond head bob back and forth as we
walked around. I wanted to throw pebbles at it. Though, there weren’t many loose
rocks on the streets of San Francisco, so I would have needed to throw something
else, like pigeons or empty cans. I was frustrated with him, but months
later I understood; I had invaded his life, living with him in the small
apartment I complained smelled of natural gas. And I didn’t know it, but I would soon invade his church, his friends and his work place- only adding to the
angst he was building against me.
One afternoon, Andrew and I sat in Dolores Park
in the mild, August sunshine. Dolores Park is a square park joining the Mission
neighborhood and the hipsters living in it with the Castro, San Francisco’s
LGBT neighborhood. It has its own microclimate: happiness and sunny weather
hovering around 64 degrees.
Andrew wore a pair of non-prescription, thick,
black-rimmed glasses I couldn’t stop laughing at. As he lay in the grass ignoring
me and talking on his phone, I drank rum and Coke and took pictures of
everything around us: the toddler dancing to music flowing from the other side
of the park; the herd of dogs running around, chasing a tennis ball thrown by
whomever it landed nearest to; the 30-year-olds having three-legged races while
picnicking for their friend’s birthday; the couple laying across each other,
petting each others’ arms and hands; the group walking on a slack line between
to palm trees; and blankets of beautiful gay men in their underwear,
sunbathing.
After we’d been there for an hour of rum, Andrew stood up and told
me we were leaving. I followed him to Rosemunde’s sausage bar in the Mission
where we met with Claudia, the HR Manager at the company Andrew had been
interning at. She sat hunched over at a table, and despite having been through
a year of chemotherapy, she smiled as though she had everything in the world to
be happy about. She wore a purple knitted beanie to cover her baldhead. She
fidgeted with the sides of it as she spoke, grabbing it with her fingers and
tugging down, then pushing it back up again to it’s original spot.
She was in remission from multiple myeloma for a
few months when I met her that day. I immediately noticed she spoke with
passion. She gushed about the food in the neighborhood she lived in, the
mountains she climbed, the people she met, the friends she kept, the simple
parties she hosted and the extravagant events she attended. In all the time I
knew Claudia from that moment on, she never gave up the right she had to enjoy
life. No disease could take that from her.
She spoke passionately about the people she
despised and the people she loved. “That piece-of-shit,” or, “She's lovely. I
love, love, love her,” were common phrases she used when mentioning people. As
Claudia spoke, I worked extra hard to focus on the stories she told and I
realized I was drunker than I thought. I sat next to her asking questions and
reacting to her stories in matched emotions and facial expressions. Andrew sat
across from us on the other side of the table, quietly sipping his beer. After
half an hour of talking with her, she asked me to work for her for two months on
a new project at Penguin Computing, the company she and Andrew worked for. In my
mind I thought I could get a job doing something else, something a bit less
corporate. So I told her I would think about it.
Before the week ended, I left Andrew’s apartment to prevent
a homicide and started living in Ben's living room in the Haight-Ashbury. I still had a few
days before my sublease for his room started and after two days of living out
of my suitcases and sleeping on the couch, Ben left and I took his room,
his furniture and his dirty sheets to claim as my own for the two months he would
be gone.
After three days of wandering the city with my
printed resumes then going back to my apartment to make “unemployment
margaritas,” with the neighbors, I called Claudia to say I would be happy to
work for her. And suddenly, I had a life in San Francisco.
