Night on the town

My roommates were out or being treated by boyfriends to lavish dinners, so I was feeling a bit sorry for myself.

So I took a notebook and launched down 22nd street with the intention of launging at the friendly warm tables of the Revolution Café, hoping for, at best, a dreary evening of writing serious meditations on the spirit and so expurgating my soul from its wretched self-pity.

But alas, the Revolution has been taken over by well-dressed yuppies, and the homeless people playing chess had cleared out several months ago, taking the novelists and drummers with them, ever since the owner (an installation artist) sold the café and moved to LA earlier this year. The Revolution is dead, long live the Revolution.

There was really nothing to do about it, so I trotted round the corner to that one last reserve of the serious and the decadent, beloved hidden reserve of straight men in the city where they’re hard to find, Bar Amnesia.

Arriving at Amnesia, I took the one free stool, and found myself talking to Bob, a Peace Corps veteran (from Malawi in the 60s) who recently biked across America (the Southern route, by way of Katrina devastation). Someone came round with birthday cake as the Gaucho Gypsy Jazz band started winding down.

As the sound engineers got going for the Mitch Marcus Sessions, I started conversing with Mark, a personal life coach who owns a small chain of automated photobooths. He spends his life telling people who love beaches that they should reorganize their lives to spend more time on beaches.

I was seriously feeling the Amelie moment by now. We were deep into our Delerium Tremens (most delicate of neo-Belgian beers) by the time his friend arrived, by skateboard, with five Japanese girls fresh from Tokyo in tow. They’d met that afternoon on the subway and immediately gone back to his place for a costume party.

San Francisco, God bless you in your varied madness. A fine town indeed. Just the thing to cheer a girl up.


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