Cowboy Confessional

The pride parade sign read “Prostitutes, a San Francisco Tradition,” a statement slightly more obvious than a Powell Street panhandler’s cardboard claim of “I won’t lie, I’m going to buy booze with your dollar.”

Hustle is heartbeat in San Francisco, and sex workers are only one manifestation.  From missionaries to social media millionaires, The City attracts people who aren’t afraid to make a mark, make a buck or both, and who are not entirely picky about the process.  Those that fail on the first try are often later elected.

Franciscan friars were San Francisco’s original grifters, trespassing on Yelamu Indian land and ‘domesticating’ natives through religious conversion and cultural eradication.  Gold-seeking soldiers and sailors – competent hustlers in their own right – with whom these priests traveled had equally impure motives, but benefited from blessings and the financial backing of a monarchy.  Father Serra merely had fervor and a penchant for hitchhiking on galleons.  Only a zealot monk could possess such chutzpa.

Despite their great success in forcibly indoctrinating the indigenous, Spanish missionaries had no game compared to San Francisco’s hustling horde who came for gold and brought in tow the afore mentioned prostitutes along with booze slingers, opium den dealers, and everybody who saw Frisco as a place to make a fast fortune.  Today’s soft skinned sharpies have nothing on the cabal of con artists and crafty crooks who knew how to snort gold dust off of San Francisco’s breast.

Hustle is the essence of San Francisco.  It has driven every generation after the natives, though the mode and measure of their methods changes from decade to decade –goals remain the same though plot details diverge.  Missionaries sought to convert the locals and killed off most of them.  More than one hundred years later Reverend Jim Jones converted locals to Marxism before finishing most of his follows.  Brewers, distillers and vintners come and go though their clientele remain intoxicatedly unchanged, balanced precariously on barstools from Marina to Mission.  Aspiring San Francisco Mayor Isaac Kalloch was hustled by a bullet in the 1870s as was Mayor Moscone in the 1970s.  Throughout San Francisco’s 161 years the most profitable and persistent cash grab has been graft – public pillage.  “They were a wonderful set of burglars, the people who were running San Francisco when I first came to town in 1923” said a well heeled whore.

San Francisco’s prostitutes, elected and otherwise, are always game.

Money bought San Francisco pretence, but its underbelly remains wonderfully scaly.  One can hike from San Francisco’s glitziest shopping Mecca to its seamiest streets without breaking a sweat.  Take a left turn from a Tenderloin temptresses and you will find yourself in San Francisco’s Silicon Alleys where new media start-ups pan for dot-com gold in electron streams.  Nothing significant separates a Gold Rush era miner and a kid with a pocket full of e-commerce stock options, aside from hygiene and the reduced odds of being Shanghaied.

Whether hiking up Snob Hill, hiking up the corporate ladder, or hiking up their skirts, San Francisco citizens are all about the hustle.  From the morning’s first double espresso to ‘last call’ shots at The Saloon, San Francisco’s waking hours are invested in game.  Who is doing what, who is doing whom, and what is everybody’s exit strategy.  From cops with “supplemental incomes”, to cocaine exporters in police crime labs, to carney barkers roustabouting bystanders near North Beach strip clubs, The City pulses with the possibility of the moment, with expectations of finding the fast payoff.  Work ethic is for the East Bay.

San Francisco’s prostitutes are always game.

Like the lamp posts they lean against, San Francisco’s street walkers are fixtures.  Get rich dreams and institutionalized forms of theft fluctuate, but San Francisco’s original service providers stand like night watchmen arrayed down O’Farrell.  From the first gold miner through the last gold digger, they create and echo the throbbing pulse of a city built on bustle.

Prostitutes, the San Francisco Tradition.

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One of San Francisco’s endearing aspects is its unregulated goofiness.  Just have a look at our Board of Supervisors.

Ignoring such institutionalized imbeciles, The City is rife with good natured fun.  Granted, much of it involves naked people doing very personal things to one another, but often San Francisco silliness borders on Middle American.  Such is the case with our annual mass pillow fight, or as we locals like to call it, the San Francisco Valentine’s Day Massacres.

As the Ferry Building clock strikes six chimes, a thousand or so strangers armed with feather pillows from their own beds commence to flail upon one another in post-adolescent adolescence.  There is no practical age barrier for this battle.  Children who can barley lift their bedding box octogenarians (granted, they only hit the geezers in the knee caps, but it is the sport that counts).  Cushion armed prototypical middle-incomers pummel punks while teenage girls scream, which as best as I can tell is the one unifying tribal trait of teenage girls around the globe.

The rules of engagement are pretty simple:  Feather pillows only, no loading your pillow case with anything but pillow, unarmed people or those with cameras are considered non-combatants and are to be left unscathed.

This year an ample number of unusual looking San Francisco denizens participated, but perhaps the best of the breed was an elderly fellow dressed in rather splendid pajamas and a quilted smoking jacket.  Looking like a badly aged Hugh Hefner (is that redundant?) he was a favorite with the smaller set.  Without being in the least creepy, he would let a kid wallop him, then say “I love you” before returning fire.  Kids exploded … figuratively … with joy and returned both the assault and the exclamation.

For all its seamier sides, San Francisco keeps one thing always in focus:  having fun, even if only reviving and grossly amplifying a childhood staple.

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To the victor go the spoils, until such time as spoiled children set fire to the booty.

Like dysfunction siblings, San Francisco cannot be fully understood without occasionally examining near-by Berkeley, or as we locals commonly refer to the joint, Bizerkley. A volcanic center of free speech and psychedelic dissension in the 1960s, Berkeley has never since been normal. Like San Francisco, its abnormality is part of its charm.

Berkeley is also home to a branch of the University of California. Ever left leaning (despite College Republicans being the largest campus organization aside from Fabulous Frank’s Friday Beer Bash), students there will protest everything from war to the color of split pea soup served at the cafeteria (they wanted purple). In recent years a small horde of them perched like featherless fowl in some trees which they preferred the University not topple.

Being of the socialists metal caste (or is the proper spelling in this instance cast?), when anyone dares insist that Berkeley students pay for their education, another protest is certain. This week has seen any number of 1960’s style takeovers of public property, triggered by having tuition and fees hiked. Semi-violent altercations occurred between students too busy protesting to study, and other undergrads trying to get to class. Cops handcuffed a few to end their adverse occupation of campus buildings. Health Services sophomores, too stoned from experimenting with pharmaceuticals, left on their own and haven’t been seen since.

Others firebombed the chancellor’s house.

Near midnight about 75 suspects students surrounded the chancellor’s chambers, which is quite appropriately referred to as a mansion. Recycling, being mandatory in Berkeley, caused these obstreperous offspring to regurgitate decades old slogans such as “No justice, no peace” as their broke windows, smashed planters and attempted to torch the joint. Evidentially nobody from the campus ROTC or engineering department participated, otherwise the building would have fallen. See kids, stay in class and learn the proper way to destroy structures.

Berkeley kiddies went kooky due to perceived inequities. Because California is enduring a financial meltdown (primarily from overly generous and routinely gamed public employee compensation), the University system budget was cut and the number of new enrollees was reduced. To compensate, the regents (a word whose root is the same as regency) decided not only to increase student tuition and fees, but also their salaries along with as those of upper echelon managers and faculty.

The lords grew fat and the peasants decided to eat them.

In California and Washington D.C., the same play is performed with nausea-inducing regularity and perpetually bad reviews. People in power explain-away why their salaries should inflate after bankrupting their respective governments and agencies. Doing so in times of prosperity goes largely unnoticed because voters are too busy conspicuously consuming. In tough times, when paychecks have vanished, unemployment insurance is depleted, and homes foreclose, such action incites mobs. Berkley students are a little misguided, angry at having to pay a fuller portion of the full cost of their education. But as they exit their experimental drug haze, they realize that the true problem is that the game is rigged – that those making the rules do so in their own interest. Indeed Berkeley students may be leading a trend in aggressive management of the managers of public (mis)trust.

Welcome to libertarianism kids. It is quite enjoyable once the throbbing in your head dissipates.

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After 144 years you would think it odd for a black man to be publicly roped and whipped in America.

Unless it is downtown San Francisco and the one wielding the whips is a lanky blonde in a leather body suit, wearing little else aside from a maniacal grin.

San Francisco is a city where fetishes are topics of discussion at PTA meetings and where even the nuns are kinky (and the pseudo nuns are odder than the authentic variety). It is a town where you are likely to meet your neighbors at a sex club. When common debauchery is nearly communal, the truly twisted are not far beneath the surface and occasionally escape.

Such is San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Faire, an event where the interesting and somewhat scary people come to exhibit themselves and their hardware. The Faire attracts whips and chain, BDSM and all manner of leather clad folk from around the globe, as well as a stack of innocent watchers who want only to sneak a toe into the wild side.

The rest of the attendees are happily disturbed.

Which brings us back to the whipee – a well built man (in all manner of speaking) who was roped in a spread-eagle hang, under a sign for an online fetish pornographer and before a mixed audience of the similarly situated and the utterly stunned. With each stroke of her nine tails, short whip or jolt from a miniature cattle prod, he thanked her for inflicting injury (she did stop once to get an alcohol swab for his welted rump).

The scene was almost Romanesque. With a one-handed shocking device, she jolted his back, arms, chest and then headed south to his naked nether regions. She asked the crowd which part of his genital and surrounding territories she should electrocute next. Each audience member shouted their request in an orgy of borderline blood lust. I’m sure the Coliseum saw more action than the Folsom showcases, but maybe not by much.

Shameless is our city, and more so the people who tour these event in the nude. I’m no prude and a good looking and equally naked woman always grabs my attention. Sadly most of the public nudists at the Folsom Fair are exactly he kind of people you want to keep clothed, with the majority being pale, old, fat white men. Seriously, either keep your clothing on or drop a few pounds and shave your back.

And women thought saving their legs was tricky.

In the mix are the committed and the comical. The former are those who have made their particular peccadillo an utter lifestyle. Swarms of identically clad men stand in the intersections watching for soul mates and bedmates to gravitationally attract. Women both tied to Saint Andrew’s crosses and switching the bound, the latter stopping only long enough to ponder the selection of straps with which to whip the former. Men looking particularly breathless in their corsets, women looking particularly excited about chains, and the straights looking particularly perplexed.

They contrasted sharply with the wannabes – those who may some day be devotees but for now sport dime store dog collars. As with musicians, you could tell the experienced from the amateurs by the quality of their gear. The fellow who strode mightily toward the entrance in a leather vest thinner than a politician’s promise was obviously a newcomer. The more mellow man had a think harness, double knitted chains, accessorized nipple clamps and a crotch pocket that appear to have been custom molded to his member.

And then there were the drive-by tourists who collided with one another while rubbernecking the entrance line.

Every city has an essence and San Francisco’s is merely unabashed. Local constabulary willingly allow anything (aside from smoking in public) that doesn’t result in non-consensual violence. What other Americans do in private and feel guilty about in public, San Franciscans do on street corners to exorcize their exhibitionism. The lunatics are running the asylum … and are doing a pretty good job of it.

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Nancy Pelosi represents San Francisco – the small subsegment thereof still in psilocybin rehab overdoes from their last Grateful Dead concert.

During her weekly press parade Nancy showed an expression other than perpetual surprise, her mug permanently frozen in that latter state once she discovered that proposed health insurance legislation would not cover Botox. In response to a question concerning popular backlash against Uncle Sugar meddling further in the insurance industry, Nancy had a flashback to the San Francisco of the 1970s, managing to mentally connect intense debate over insurance with a homicidal ex-cop named Dan White.

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place.”

Nancy should visit nearby Oakland if she wants the pure picture of violence. More Oaktown residents are killed off each day over nothing in particular than were done by all Dixicrats combined.

The reason Pelosi does not represent San Francisco is that, by and large, San Francisco’s population is sane. Goofy, perhaps, Colorful, no doubt. Outside of mainstream America, demonstrably. Yet The City’s average non-Tenderloin resident has the ability to compartmentalize drug-addled-post-Viet-Nam San Francisco from recent, animated town hall meetings. Or maybe Pelosi was reacting to the harsh words of her cohort Representative Pete Stark’s who last week commented to a constituent “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg. It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.”

San Franciscans love raucous debate. This town is like a never ending Monty Python sketch where we collectively demand an argument. Being such a feisty bunch, we know from personal experience that humans can voice an opinion passionately and with enough volume to drown out Blue Angel fly-overs or Chris Daly tirades, and still not come to blows. Despite several months of town hall meetings, tea parties and televised tantrums, no bloodshed has come to pass (well, there was a MoveOn.org supporter who bit the finger off an old man down in Ventura County, but we’ll assume his dose of psilocybin had not yet worn off).

Yet Pelosi frets. She assumes language is a reliable leading indicator of action. This may be true when an overweight Powel Street pan handlers can’t think up anything more original than “I haven’t eaten all week” and wonders why his paper cup remains empty.

Yes, other left of Mao activist have recently started to play the race card in a connotative slur campaign to quell dissent, using white guilt as a noose. That didn’t work. Rhetorical pitch remains high and American behavior remains amazing shy of slugfests. Odds are more bloody noses will erupt in SoMo bars tonight over bad juke box selections than in an entire summer of health insurance debate.

Therein is the disconnect between Pelosi and San Franciscans having second thoughts about electing her. They are sane enough to understand that this is an important debate, but a debate nonetheless. Nancy sees it as looming warfare. The extra residents in her mental attic have convinced her of things that are not while the balance of The City knows better.

Best take your meds Nancy … and I don’t mean the Botox.

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