NOPA (North of the Panhadle)

No one called it that in the early 90s, or if they did I never heard it while living those two or three years at Hayes and Broderick. Strangely the Napa earthquake this week brought me back to that big Victorian Hayes Street flat, which must have been built atop an old stream bed or sand dune the way that it shook and groaned with the terrifying sound of twisting wood that night while I was home alone more than twenty years ago. Though the house was a square-bay Italianate, dating it to around 1890, and thus forever defined as a survivor of the “Big One,” the large steel beams in the basement should have been a clue that it may have survived—just barely. That quake in 92 or 93 had no name, and very little press, but was for me the scariest one I’ve lived through—it was the noise. Perhaps it was still too soon after 1989. I was probably still constantly aware of what was over head, nervous walking under wires and elevated highways. I learned that night that it really is all about exactly where you are in the city, what material you are standing on. Like its weather microclimates and distinct neighborhoods, a map of earthquake danger zones in SF is discontiguous.

There was no pricey Bi-Rite back then; it was just a rough liquor store. NOPA the restaurant was my Laundromat (though in a somewhat grand former bank building). There was no street farmers market and no planted median down Divisadero. In other words it was a cool neighborhood; edgy, unpretentious and racially diverse, and there was The Box—DJ Page Hodel’s club (now the Independent) the most unpretentious and truly fun dance club ever. I moved from the wonderful but roommate-tense penthouse near Delores Park into the flat on Hayes with a friend from the office and an ex-boyfriend from Eugene, and for the next couple of years it was like a gay version of “Friends.” We had looked a long time for a place that was big enough for three with room to breathe. We saw some truly bazaar places, mostly chopped up formerly grand mansions in sketchy neighborhoods of The Mission and The Haight—but we were OK with funky and kept looking—internet and cell phone free. When we finally found it in NOPA we were thrilled but panicked that the landlord might not be willing to tear out all that brown shag, but this was a post Loma Prieta economy and vacancies were up—for SF that is.

Three bedroom apartments with three actual bedrooms are very rare in San Francisco and in fact as big as the one we finally found was, one of the “bedrooms” was actually what is known in Victorian-speak as a fainting room. Located over the stairs, only upper story flats have them and they are aptly named as that’s just about all there’s room to do in one. Luckily one of us made less money and was happy to pay less rent. That left the large double parlor, dining room and huge kitchen as communal space, and we took great care to decorate with the kind of drama the house seemed to deserve with its giant sliding pocket doors, elaborate ceiling medallions and plaster cherubs smiling down from above the towering windows. Victorian houses trick you with scale, like St. Pater’s in Rome everything on the façade is in proportion only to itself and judging actual size is difficult. Only when you’re standing next to those giant columns at the Vatican do you grasp their true size, and only when you see a Victorian house standing next to a later Edwardian do you get how big those windows really are. So important are those proportions that the façade often extends many feet above the roof to complete the illusion. As soon as we moved in I became fascinated by how these houses were supposed to function when they were built because the layout of the one we now occupied didn’t make much sense, so I bought a book about San Francisco Victorians. While the book suggested that each room had a very specific function, I could never figure out exactly what rooms would have been used for sleeping. Our flat had only one room that appeared to have been an actual bedroom in the sense we would use the term today, though it had seven rooms in all plus two baths. This would have been a working class house in 1890, presumably for a large family, and did not appear to have been a single family house converted into flats. So while that one remains a mystery, I did learn other things about the era and its modern amenities. For one, these 19th century tract houses were carpeted, wall to wall. That explains why the floors are typically soft woods like fir or pine. They also had all the modern utilities like chandeliers and sconces that have both gas and electricity (any wonder half the city burned in 1906?). I learned about the pattern of corner mansions and why few of them remain, having been replaced by large multi-unit buildings as early as the teens and twenties.

We froze in winter to avoid outrageous gas bills and would huddle instead by the wood-burning fireplace. Eleven foot ceilings look amazing but are ridiculously impractical. We pooled our money to buy the biggest Christmas trees we could find, you just had to. We decorated the flat in the trend of the early 90s, distressed antiques and found art. This was lucky as none of us had much money then and Don was a very good scavenger. Our “look” was epitomized by a trendy shop in the newly trendy Hayes Valley called Zonal—rusty old bed frames and peeling paint. I used to envy the owner who seemed to always be sitting outside his store with his Jack Russell Terriers as I passed by every day on the 21 bus. His name is also Russell incidentally, and one night at Steamworks I learned there was yet another reason for envy. A crazy Spanish Gypsy and her family moved into the mirror image house next door that shared a kitchen wall with ours. She threw Paella parties and made Sangria for our little neighborhood of six flats, and she would tell our fortunes. We gave her white roses for Christmas, which she thanked us for and informed us that they had been delicious. We rushed home and threw open the dining room curtains to look directly into her identical dining room window—just 6 feet away—where we saw that indeed bare stems stood in the vase where a dozen long stem white roses had been.

We used to climb on Jeff’s bed at night to watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns, and in 1992 while I was at a Sarah McLachlan concert at Bimbos, Jeff and Don were getting mugged after demonstrating with rioters in support of Rodney King and against the cops who beat him in LA. Sarah started her set by saying how weird it was to be there performing knowing that LA was rioting, and when the show let out, helicopters and cops were everywhere telling the crowd in North Beach to go home. Later Rikk and I would see a very young Rufus Wainwright for the first time at Bimbo’s. I wanted the screeching and jolting to stop and Toni Childs to come on—Rikk on the other hand loved him—still not sure who was right. I saw Rufus years later in a London hotel looking old, hung over and haggard, but taller than I thought. I wanted to ask him for my money back from the last performance I had seen, his “mourning the loss of his mother” show where the audience was requested not to applaud—which was not a problem. I saw a lot more live music back then. I ushered at the Warfield a few times just so I could see The Cocteau Twins for free, a near religious experience, especially Elizabeth’s pre-concert warm up, and Jeff and I were by far the oldest in the crowd there for Deee-Lite.

Jeff had been living with his boyfriend in Palo Alto and taking the train to the city every day, but as anyone can tell you, a gay couple who moves to SF together from the Midwest is very unlikely to stay together once they’re here. It worked for me, he was a great roommate and friend, but alas, gay men are shallow, and in spite of the cheating they got back together—the boyfriend was after all super cute. That worked for me too, because a few months earlier I had met Rikk at the YMCA (I know) and started getting serious. He moved in when Jeff moved out and we carried on as a little family, me, my ex Don and my new love (it’s a gay thing). We made Don stay in the fainting room. He still wasn’t paying much rent, he was messy, and Jeff’s room had an outside door and a balcony that we all used. Though officially in the fog zone, it seemed that balcony was always sunny, and from there we could see down into the neighbor’s pool, which they actually used, a very rare thing in San Francisco. It was also well outside the gay “safe” zone. I took a City College night class once with a friend called “Queer Anthropologies” where I mapped queer space based entirely on where I felt safe walking the sidewalk holding hands with a date—without thinking twice about it or looking over my shoulder. Rikk and I briefly challenged that safe zone when we first started dating, as most new couples do, holding hands everywhere, but it gets tiring and we soon went back to the old boundaries; that people is the definition of ghetto. Now we’re married, but the safe zone seems the same or perhaps shrinking. In those early activist years a few of my friends and I launched a campaign we called Queer Space and posted “rules” around The Castro for appropriate straight behavior, like curbing their public displays of affection that were after all clearly intended to shout “I’m straight!.” We thought it was funny, but we had our share of haters inside the community—they were probably the first gays to start the adoption epidemic.

Rikk gave me what I thought was a very odd Christmas present the year before he moved in. It was a TV, something I hadn’t owned in years, which went with the vegie thing and living in Eugene for four years. I didn’t realize the extent to which it was a precursor to my new immersion into pop culture through Rikk’s love of the tube. He had passed the litmus test though on our first date, answering my two questions correctly in the negative: Do you believe in God? Do you believe in monogamy? We bought a new Isuzu Trooper that we loved and that took us all over the western US. We discovered backpacking and slot canyons, a reaction to Rikk’s deathly fear of heights. Peria Canyon became our favorite hike, 70 miles in four days. Three times Rona the Shuttle Lady drove us to the trailhead and then parked our car in Marble Canyon, sometimes after a long shopping trip detour to Page AZ with her hairy dog who would leave plenty of evidence in the back seat—we didn’t care. She was amazing with her stories of climbing in Tibet, and her little house in the desert at the base of towering vermilion cliffs was a dream mini-farm. It seems wrong somehow that I can now find her little secret house on Google Earth.

We too had a dream of a simpler rural life back then that we called simply the “chicken farm.” It didn’t mean we loved chickens, it was a metaphor. Now that we had a car we spent most weekends outside the city. We tended toward funky earthy (cheap) destinations especially with camping. Hot Springs were a favorite as well as the Russian River where we ultimately achieved the “chicken farm” for a time. In fact saving money for that dream was ultimately the reason for leaving the Victorian in favor of the tiny apartment Rikk and I still share today, but that’s two entire posts yet to be written.

I was travelling to Portland a fair amount in the early and mid-90s because of the Eastbank Esplanade project and I tried to reestablish contact with my first love Dale. I called several times to arrange to see him on one of my trips. I had seen him only once since moving to SF but I still considered him a dear friend. We were no longer a couple when I left Portland for school in Eugene in 1986, but still close and even lived in the same big house with four roommates in Ladd’s Addition. I was finally able to reach him and I started right in on when and how we could meet up when I was next in PDX. His voice was odd and it soon became clear that he was attempting a brush-off. When I asked outright if he didn’t want to see me, his two word answer entered my chest like a knife, “I’m blind.” I knew he had AIDS, but back then it just moved so damn fast. Funny, I made that call from the fainting room. I did get to see him one more time to say goodbye.

We had great fun one Sunday afternoon after a big garage sale purge, with Don playing at master salesman, and decided that not only did we not want to lug hundreds of vinyl albums back up all those stairs but that we would probably never listen to them again. So we made the tough choice then and there  to purge all our vinyl and left the boxes on the sidewalk with a sign saying “free.” For the rest of the afternoon we watched from the window above as people happened by, pausing, flipping through and taking only the records they wanted. Occasionally a round of laughter or an exited gasp of “I can’t believe they have that…” by sundown they were all gone. We had no way of knowing this was a cycle that would repeat itself with CDs, except that by then no one would want them.

These were mostly good times in the Victorian at Hayes and Broderick. We celebrated Bill Clinton’s election, headed to Washington to “march,” watched Pedro Zamora die on The Real World, discovered Ab Fab and a certain domestic bliss hung in the air of that big big flat.