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I grew up in San Francisco... and then...  

Songm8 77M
0 posts
12/21/2020 4:26 am
I grew up in San Francisco... and then...

Okay. Coming from Frisco can give you slightly unrealistic expectations of how everyone else lives. You have realize, most of my experience, pre-puberty was in a packed miniature metropolis that was full of mini-mountains; comprised of tiny enclaves of ethnic neighborhoods where every language and culture appeared. It resembled a mini-continent that shrink-wrapped and shaken vigorously, which it was. Everyone I knew traveller by bike, bus, or hoofed it. There were slums and mansions within a short walking distance. Tourists were the main income source, and the natives delighted in putting them on the Special-Ed spectrum; biting the hands that fed them. It gave folks the impression that we were snobby assholes; which was true. There's a smug classicist superiority that belied our self-concept as sophisticated citizens. But for those misfits from everywhere else, Frisco was a hotbed of literature, artists, sexual pioneers, and radicals of every stripe. Berkeley was another part of the collective, across the Bay Bridge. Anyway, though cost-of-living wasn't cheap, then, it wasn't prohibitive. My grandmother bought a Spanish house on time during the Depression, on a 30 year mortgage, though we were quite poor. The folks that followed were Greek, mainly. They were hard-working Plutocrats, who owned the beachfront properties along Ocean Beach; including the Sutro Baths, Playland Amusement Park, the Cliff House.
Okay WAY too much extraneous crap, what's the point?
I assumed that Frisco, like New York, was the norm. We were a little full of ourselves, but our attitudes toward cultural diversity, intellectual freedom, and gay lifestyles were superficially hip back then. Our place was without a refrigerator or TV, but it was cool. Our Greek neighbors let share in that sometimes. But I dug reading, and the radio. Mom worked nights at a jazz club, and days as a local editor. I had my paper route, summer Wharf jobs, helping out at an Italian butcher shop. It was cool. My mom & dad were married for a few weeks, and they split about 8 months before I popped out. He was a pilot in the Pacific arena, came back with medals, scars, and a healthy skepticism about the waste of war. He was a teacher/writer, the of a polished predatory educator... He was a guy I couldn't even pretend to like. The physical abuse of his sons, and the sexual abuses of his daughters were an unaddressed subtext of my lineage.
So the Bay Area had some shortcomings here and there. When I moved from there to the north, mom met a jazz pianist, Air Force officer, I met Suburban Marin County, military life, and experienced a personal period of physical victim-hood. He didn't drink, but he decided that I needed physical discipline. It wasn't Dickensian brutality, but I became much more a guarded at home, but a wise-ass in school. I couldn't have done any of that crap in the City. Those nuns don't . Then, in the twilight of the Eisenhower administration, we got transferred Sacramento. This time we were housed in a military housing unit, segregated by rank. That's when I learned that racism wasn't just in Dixie. They hated Blacks, especially since the military brought the first 'Negroes' into Placer County. So the railroad-town of Roseville hated the invasion of white's space by them nigger-lovin' fairies from the West (across the County line-Sacto). The military gave the Placer County bigots a shitload of dinero, so they were stuck with us. We got bussed in from about 20 miles a day to this depressing hamlet of Used Car dealerships, farmers, and Railroad-men. They had a Mexican 'hood' across the tracks. That was an embedded enmity long before we got there. , and sexual freedoms were not in evidence there either. I was proud of my City, of my Spanish heritage, of my mother's gay friends. I wasn't sure what a homosexual was, really. I knew that the un-closeted gender-bendered people I encountered treated like an individual, with kindness and respect. I missed much of their humor, but I probably thought that gay was an old synonym for happy. So, sum-: I grew in San Francisco. My world-view diminished in the Valley. Also, my assumptions of progress and time constricted. My love of reading and thirst for knowledge, history, science, literature, music, kept me from too much trauma. But it was a blow to realize that the more I learned, the less I knew about anything; I was in denial about my alienation from my immediate milieu. The zeitgeist wasn't too cool. And I was a nerd, I guess, although that word didn't exist . My grades were good, I was not tall or strong, but coordinated enough to wrestle, baseball. This didn't get girls' attention, alas. I could memorize formulas, periodic tables, vocabulary lists, so I had good eidetic skills which helped me feign short-term rote stuff. I got a scholarship a Summer Institute the OSU campus in Corvallis. It was a chance skip the last half of high school, and do college. I wasn't prepared for my dormitory classmates there. They were smart enough but very critical of a California in their midst. A familiar role. 'California faggot from the state of fruits and nuts'. Yup. I hated to fight. It was necessary to take a bit of a thrashing to keep from getting really hurt. I wasn't Gandhi, but I admired him more than most. The acting-out incident that followed, I didn't see coming. It was a Comparative Anatomy course which I'd already skimmed through. I was ready. But I was told we all had to euthanize and dissect frogs. There were a couple dozen lively amphibians being parcelled into individual jars. I stood up and demanded a virtual identification of organs from the plastic overleafs in the textbooks we had. I offered to copy another diagram to show the matches. The professor scoffed my delicate sensibility, which got a guffaw from my peers. I suppose this was inevitable, but I was inexplicably in a rage, literally seeing red, frothing syncopated slang at them all. I was especially accusatory to the 'chicken-shit' witch-doctor "catering to a bunch of boys' bloodlust. There's no good reason to waste these poor fuckers. It's barbaric and you know it, you cruel bastard!" I don't remember 5he words I spit out that Summer's day of 1962. It wasn't my finest use of decorum. I was accused of assaulting the prof and threatening bodily harm. I was appealing to the Dean to get a stay of suspension, instead of prompt expulsion. But all 110 lbs. of me made a plausible threat. I was confined to the dorm for the duration of the coursework, where I began a binge, appropriating some pseudo- moonshine mix from a lab. I had discovered that in another part of the campus, a 4H function housed a lot of teenaged girls who taught me how to french-kiss. I had a lot to learn, and still do.
But it was a let-down to take the full requisite extra years to matriculate from the Foothill fortress of yore. I hadn't seen the meltdown coming. Funny how easily we can predict the past. And how we remain the hero of our narrative through selective reconstruction of our motives. This amnesia with an editor of our own device, can insure a limitless rebooting of our Road to Ruin, enabling the same stupid craven kookiness till someone pulls the plug in the autopsy. The Medical Examiner weighs the brain, the heart, liver, scoops out the remaining viscera, sews up the cavity, zips the bag, opens the drawer, removing his gloves. He jots something down, glances at a clock, speaking to an intern.: "Probable cause of death, Reynolds?"
"Chronic Serial Stupidity, sir"
"Is that your consensus, Saran?"
"Indubitably sir. A genomic anomaly from the area of Edinburgh. This is the 7th generation"
"Well Saran, Reynolds...that's a wrap!
"You're on target sir That's a wrap and a pun!"
"Perhaps it's time to banish the pun."
"Or, working the corollary, we could punish the ban"





[/ Shut me up and talk 2 me.


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