charles hugh smith-A Day In The City


	A Day In The City Nikki's waiting in the hallway for us, and I figure she's heard the whole conversation even if she doesn't show it. She's dressed in tight black jeans and a loose black blouse with red buttons, and I can't take my eyes off her face. She's wearing eyeliner and red lipstick and her shades are hanging off the front of her blouse. Alex says, "I want to go to that youth hostel you told us about." Nikki is stone-faced as usual and says, "Sure. Let's go." It's a cloudless sky, nectar Pacific, the salt air on the way across the Bay Bridge is cold and fresh, and normally I'd be all excited about the day. But nobody says anything, so the shiny downtown towers and the orange spiderweb Golden Gate Bridge at the mouth of the Bay is all wasted. We pass the downtown, get off the freeway and Nikki gives Alex brief directions every once in a while. I'm thinking, fricking Alex. Why do you have to frag a strat day? We stop-and-start our way through about fifty stop lights, but the cool air coming off the Pacific takes the pressure off the choked traffic. We drop over a crest and head down toward a slice of green park on the edge of the Bay. The sight of blue water and the Golden Gate Bridge confuse me because I thought we were going toward the ocean, not the Bay, but then San Francisco's streets don't make any sense, and unless you're on a hill, you can't orient yourself. The park and the grass turn out to be Fort Mason. It's not really a fort, just a bunch of one-story white buildings scattered around a big lawn. Alex parks the Cruiser and I start to get out to go with him to the youth hostel office, but he waves me off. Nikki's in the back seat, looking out the window. I turn around, but she doesn't look at me. "Maybe you should stay with him," she says quietly. "He's just mad because I didn't ask him about staying at your house," I mumble. "It's a lot nicer over here," she says, but there's no conviction in her voice. I can't see her eyes behind the shades, but her red lips are shaking me loose inside. "I'm sure it is," I tell her. We sit silently until Alex comes out again. He just leans against the hood and spocks the Bay. We're three statues, all part of some rhomboid sculpture, until Nikki gets out and goes over to Alex. She points to some hills back in the city and says, "It's nice up there. Want to go?" Alex shrugs, like "who cares what happens today," and Nikki gets back in the car. Alex slips behind the wheel, starts the Cruiser and then eases into the traffic. The first hill is so steep that I'm worried the Lancer might not make it, but we top out and pull over next to some fancy mansions. Nikki points to a tall round monument on another hill across the city. "That's Coitus Tower," she says flatly. "No," I protest, but I'm thinking, hey, this is San Francisco. "See how it looks like a fire hose?" she asks. "It was built by a rich woman who liked to screw firemen." I'm blown flat and then she laughs, the first time ever. "Not really. The part about the fire hose is true, but she built it to honor the firemen who saved her life when she was a kid. Good old Mrs. Coit." Then she leans over the front seat and I smell her perfume for the first time. "You can climb up inside it," she says. "Want to check it out?" Alex doesn't say anything but he starts the car and heads down the hill. It's as steep as a ski run, and now I'm worried about the Lancer's brakes, which are screeching and putting off that chemical-hot smell of burning brake pads. The shoes were getting thin, but they hold up okay and the mansions disappear and we're passing small stucco apartments perched on 45-degree angles. We're almost to the bottom of the hill when Nikki suddenly shouts, "Stop!" and I freeze, like Jeez, is it the cops? She points through the windshield and yells, "That parking place! Get it!" I can't see why she's launching a mojo but Alex spins into a driveway, turns around and pulls into the spot. God, this is incredible," she says, and I notice her voice is sweet when she's excited. "A parking place near Chinatown on a weekend! I'm never this lucky." I point to Alex. "It's him. He's lucky at everything." I leave out the part about him being mostly lucky at getting us into major griff. We get out and Nikki leads us into Chinatown. The streets are jimmy-jammy with people, mostly Asians and a scattering of sunburned Mr. and Mr. Jones, freezing in their matching shorts. All the narrow little stores have bright red or yellow signs in Chinese and English and tourist crap or veggies and fruit stacked up outside, so it's even more crowded because these tables takes up most of the sidewalk and half the people have stopped to feel cantalopes or spock the cheap T-shirts and dribby souvenirs. The other half are crossing the street between the cars which are semi-permanently parked there, because when the lights change, then a mass of pedestrians pushes into the streets and the rental cars are stuck in front of the locals' Caddies and Mercedes, which are honking at them to just run over the people like they do. As soon as Mr. Jones goes loco-moco in the confusion and turns down a one-way street in his rental Taurus, then a delivery truck double-parks and scrawny guys in dirty undershirts appear out of nowhere and start unloading crates of broccoli. The Caddies and Mercedes folks lean on their horns, but then you have to think, why do these numbnut locals try to drive through Chinatown in the first place? We're walking along, spocking the scenes and the people, and I notice that a smell, a combination of exhaust, sour garbage and beef-and-tomato -over-rice, drifts through every storefront, whether it's a bakery or a hardware store or a restaurant. Nikki pulls us down a side street and into this little restaurant which is maybe ten feet wide. It's more like a stall because a long counter with warming trays and a stove only leaves about three feet for the customers. If you squeeze past everybody waiting to order, then you see one little dinette table in the back corner. A portable plastic crib takes up the whole table and a boy about ten is half-watching the baby inside wave a yellow plastic ring through the air. The two women working behind the counter look tired and they're sweating in the hot greasy air coming off the wok and the warmers. "You guys have got to try the char siu bow here," Nikki says, and she buys these rounded white buns. "Manapua," Alex tell her. She hands him one. "That's what they call these in Hawaii, right?" She smiles and for the first time I see her small white teeth. She looks expectantly up at Alex and he wolfs the bun and the sticky red pork meat inside with his usual look of concentration and then he nods grudgingly. "Good, huh?" she says, and I see the smile in her eyes and I suddenly want to choke Alex to death right here because I don't want Nikki to fall for him. She turns to give me one and her smile doesn't fade. "You like it?" she asks, and I nod. When the sun catches her eyes just right they're a deep iridescent brown that makes me dizzy. I'm thinking, I'll just go off and die if she goes for Alex, and her expression darkens. "What's wrong?" she asks me. "Nothing. It's great, " I say, faking it, and she smiles again. "Are you Chinese?" I ask, and she says, "Only for the food. Let's go to this other place." She's almost skipping she's so energetic, and I realize that she loves showing us around so much that she's forgotten about her cold tough-girl act. She leads us through the cute little Chinese girls in pink dresses with ribbons in their hair, the bent-over old Chinese women clutching plastic shopping bags and the glassy-eyed fat white people with "I'm on Mars" expressions to this narrow alley stuck between rows of old buildings. There's bright yellow and red balcony railings above some little sewing shops and a fortune cookie factory, and since the alley's not even wide enough for a car, the strip of asphalt is empty except for a middle-aged Chinese woman walking her little terrier. As we're walking underneath these balconies, I'm wishing I had our camera. There's big double doors open behind these balconies, with Chinese characters and tile decorations, and little green and yellow flags are hanging from long poles above the doors. The alley's too narrow for us to step back and look inside, so it's like there's a grimy sweatshop world on the first floor, and a tropo-electric, half-hidden color-world right above the gray, 14-hour-workday one. As we get to the end of the alley, I hear all these little hard slapping sounds coming from one of the balcony doors above us, and I ask Nikki if they're making something up there. She laughs and says, "No, it's just old women playing Mah Jongg." She can see I'm drawing blank, so she explains, "It's a game sort of like dominos. You slap your tiles down before the other players to win." "You know how to play?" I ask her. She shakes her head "no" and says, "It's boring." We turn onto a main street and Nikki guides us past a few shops to an open staircase. At first I think it's some sort of basement temple, because the first thing we see is a bright-red lacquer altar with burning incense sticks. We follow her down and come out in a small restaurant with a bar counter and about a dozen tables. There's no natural light except a dim glow from the stairwell, and the fluorescent tubes hanging off the sagging acoustic tiles make everything look like midnight. But the place is crowded and there's no tourists, so I figure the food makes up for the less-than-tropo look. Nikki sits us down at a table in the middle by a steel post, and I'm happy because there's a big mirror in front of the counter, so I can look at her without her noticing. I'm worried about the gitas but Nikki says, "This is my treat," and she orders for us. The waiter speaks Chinese to her, but she shakes her head and says, "Sorry. I only speak English." He takes this in stride, scribbles down the order, and heads into the kitchen. When he comes back out, he stops by the register to talk to the owner or manager. The guy's wearing a black long-sleeve shirt with chunky gold cufflinks that reminds me of Vegas. The owner is checking us out, and I guess it's because we're the only non-Chinese guys in the place. Either that, or he's goo-goo eyed over Nikki, because she is incredibly strat with her big-beach eyes and nectar face, and incredibly sexy in her tight black jeans. Her shades are dangling off the second red button of her black blouse because the top one is unbuttoned, and I can't help looking above her shades and noticing the lacey edge of her black bra and her smooth skin. While we're waiting for the food nobody says much, and so in between staring at Nikki in the mirror I'm spocking the other customers. Right next to us, an old Chinese lady finishes grinding and opens her purse to pay. She gets a crumpled paper bag and pulls out the biggest roll of gitas I've ever seen—even Alex's paw could barely get around it—and slips off the fat rubber band around the roll. She quickly riffs through the bills and peels off a ten from what must be at least a hundred Jacksons, with maybe a few Lincolns mixed in for flavor. Then the Chinese lady we saw walking her dog comes down the stairs, the pooch tucked under her arm, and sits down with some other ladies at a corner table. The mutt sits quietly in her lap, accepting the occasional treat from her plate, and nobody seems to notice or care. A few minutes later the waiter brings out huge platters of noodles, a kind of sizzling shrimp, and a veggie dish, and Nikki serves me first and then Alex. "This is salt-and-pepper shrimp, and this is oyster sauce noodles," she says. "It's so good." Alex seems to have forgotten about being griffed because he has that look of total concentration he gets when there's good grinds on the table. I'm relieved that he's not staring at Nikki like I am. Alex vacuums the noodles and I can tell that he's impressed. Nikki pays and then buys three incense sticks from Mr. Vegas at the front counter. She hands one to each of us and we stop at the altar on the way out. She shows us how to light them off another stick and then she kneels down, puts hers on the altar, and bows with her hands together. "You don't have to kneel," she whispers, but I try to act respectful by at least bowing a little after I light my incense and put it next to hers. Alex makes a full deep bow like he does to his kung fu master, and I hope he's not trying to impress Nikki. Then she takes us out of Chinatown and across the street into North Beach, the old Beatnik hangout. The place is gimpy with Italian delis and restaurants and bakeries, and people are groving into all of them to spend big dollars and look cool over double lattes and on-tap Anchor Steam brewkowskis. A big park next to the main drag spreads out the only grass within a couple of miles, and street people, families, and couples holding hands are sitting on the lawn watching a wedding party come out of a massively ornate Catholic Church that sits right against the park. It's an epic, like a movie wedding. The bridesmaids all have matching pink dresses and the groom's pals are all penguins. The bride is wearing this gigantia white Scarlett O'Hara dress with frills and lace, and she looks good enough to eat as she comes down the stone steps on her hubby's arm. She comes down real carefully and I realize it's because her fluffy parachute dress covers about a quarter acre and she can't see the stairs. The newlyweds finally make it to the sidewalk, and I'm blown down that people still go to all this trouble to get married. They smile and wave to everybody, climb into a waiting white stretch limo, and haul derriere. Alex and I walk alongside the park, spocking the weirdbeards throwing a frisbee and the couples making out. Nikki's about a block ahead, motioning us to hurry up. She darts inside a store, which turns out to be an Italian bakery with two grandmotherly types behind a glass counter stuffed with tropo cookies and frew-frew goodies. We vector inside and Nikki's already at the counter buying three huge fluffy pastries dusted with powdered sugar. "This is the best," she says. After she takes a big bite of hers, there's powdered sugar all around her mouth and I wish I could kiss her right then. Coitus Tower is looming right above us and we trudge up the hill to it. It costs a few gitas to get in, but the view and paintings are worth it. The whole inside is painted with murals from the '30s, in that workingman style where everybody is real muscular and heavy and dressed like they've just joined the Communist Youth Brigade to dig a hundred-mile ditch by hand. Once we reach the top we stop to cool off in the breeze, which feels like it just came off a glacier. The whole city and Bay is spread out below us. We spock the Bay Bridge, Berkeley, and downtown Ess Eff, which looks like they took all the skyscrapers in Manhattan, steam-cleaned them and then crammed into about eight square blocks. After a few minutes I'm shivering in my T-shirt and we climb down and walk back toward the car. We're waiting to cross the main drag between North Beach and Chinatown when I hear this bell ringing like crazy and one of those cutsy little cable cars rattles down heading for Fisherman's Wharf. Nikki grabs us and says, "Come on." I'm thinking, this is so hokey, forget it, but she jumps on the cable car and stands in front of the people sitting on the benches, and we take up the spots on either side of her. I'm pushed against her side by the guy standing next to me, and she doesn't try to pull away; it feels so good to touch her, even if it's just our hips. I look over at Alex and I see that he's trying not to touch Nikki, he's keeping a little space between them, and I forgive him everything in that moment, even that time he drove off and left me in that dogmeat gas station. He doesn't see me looking at him, and Nikki is oblivious, too. I'm holding the cold steel railing, but all I feel is the warmth of her body through our clothes. Excerpted from I-State Lines by Charles Hugh Smith (The Permanent Press, April 2006) I would be honored if you linked this story to your site, or printed a copy for your own use. Copyright 2008 Charles Hugh Smith all rights reserved in all media. No reproduction in any media in any format (text, audio, video/film, web) without written permission of the author. articles blog fiction/novels my hidden history books/films what's for dinner home