The Solace of Memory

On Rachel Kushner's New Yorker Personal History Essay

"I prefer memories that stay fragile, vulnerable to erasure, like the soft feel of the velvet couches in Freddy's living room."

Rachel Kushner wrote that line in a New Yorker essay, “The Hard Crowd: Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco” (January 18, 2021 issue). I don’t have many photographs from my time in San Francisco in the late ’80s, for the same reason. We were living, not memorializing. It’s strange, then, that I’m doing exactly that now: memorializing anyway, a few paragraphs at a time, thirty-some years late.

My time in San Francisco, like Kushner’s, led to writing books. Mine are about a young woman who worked at a bakery and lived near Swensen’s Ice Cream at Union and Hyde. She gets caught up in a murder investigation. It’s a mystery, but it’s also a book about growing up and about what it was like to be nineteen in a city that was created around the Gold Rush, that rose from the ashes after the 1906 earthquake and the three-day fire that followed, burning something like five hundred blocks. Buildings were often destroyed, sometimes suspiciously, by fire in those days. Kushner writes about fire too. Maybe it’s just what this city does to memory.

For Kushner, growing up in the Sunset District was a mixed bag. She ran with a rough crowd and some of them didn’t make it to full adulthood. Reading her, I realized how rose-colored my own memories are. I push aside the seedy and the painful without even noticing I’m doing it.

Case in point: Johnny. In the late ’80s I had a one-legged boyfriend named Johnny who lived in a residence hotel at the end of North Beach and sold heroin. He’d lost the leg trying to hop a train on his way to see Evel Knievel in Oakland. He fell onto the track, and the hospital stay afterward introduced him to the drug that would define the rest of his life. You can’t put a detail like that in fiction because it reads as too far-fetched. Kushner says the same thing about her own material. The closest I’ve come is a homage: in my book Free For All, Johnny becomes a punk rocker named Wicked Smith. Wicked is safer, sanitized, a version I can live with.

Once, when I was out of town, he let a mercenary stay in my apartment; I came home to black scorch marks on the kitchen table where someone had been cooking drugs, and a bathtub filmed with black soot. Another night, visiting his room, I found an old, battered Gregory Corso sitting in a rickety chair while Johnny gave him a shot. That was the room. That was the decade.

There was a feralness to that time, an unparented quality, that I’ve come to associate with a certain kind of San Francisco comic, like Aisha Tyler, Ali Wong, Margaret Cho. I’d put Sam Rockwell in the same category. They have an edge that never tips into harshness, the kind of performer you can’t look away from. Jewels buried in dirt. You have to dig for them, and you always know when you’ve found one. I don’t know their stories. I just recognize the city in them.

Kushner’s essay pulled up memories I’d filed away as unimportant, like watching Mort Sahl at a North Beach nightclub, so drunk on sugary cocktails I had to step outside to be sick in the gutter halfway through his set, while the barkers outside the strip joints didn’t even look up. There was a thriving punk scene in the city then too, kept alive by paint-splattered, Doc Marten wearing musicians who paid rent working at Tower Records.

We were living, not memorializing. And then eventually you leave, or the city changes, or enough people die, and living turns into the only kind of memorializing you have left. Thank you, Rachel Kushner, for handing mine back to me, strung together like a pearl necklace traded for cash at a pawnshop on Polk Street.

It was a time. Now it’s fiction.