Milk

Me and Siobhan went to see "Milk" last night. The movie is set in San Francisco during almost exactly the years I lived there. Back then, in my twenties, I was living cheap, playing in a rock band, working a crappy job and trying to dreg up a sip of inspiration from a well that had gone dry. My band was playing occasional gigs at the Coffee Gallery, a bar in North Beach where Kerouac had once shouted poetry with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, but all that we could find of the Beats was a disheartening drunken Gregory Corso slurring obscene rhymes as the police dragged him out of City Lights Bookstore. The Grateful Dead were in the sole touring lull of their career and the Haight was a place you didn’t want to be at night. I attended The Last Waltz and was haunted by the thought that it might actually have been the last waltz.

Around the time Harvey Milk was rising in his political career my band had broken up and I’d let myself to drift out of familiar orbits, trying to figure out exactly where I might fit into San Francisco, a place I inexplicably loved, even though it didn’t seem to love me back.  But by 1978 things seemed to be opening up a little for me.  I had moved to my own studio apartment, a third floor walk-up in the Mission District, blessedly living without room mates or parents for the first time in my life.  Things jogged perceptibly in that square bay windowed room and I caught my breath.   I built a platform to put my futon on and there was light on my honeyed wooden floor.  I had joined the S.F. community choir and gotten a crush on one of the altos. I had put together my dream band, “The 80’s Band” for a choir talent show replete with ass shaking background singers and a rhythm section comprised of friends from my musical past.  I had sung with the San Francisco Opera, cast as an Ethiopian slave in Aida, In rags, dyed black, crouched at the feet of renowned soloists, daring not to look at the orchestra in the pit below or at the audience tuxedoed beyond.

I didn’t know much about Harvey Milk, even though I lived just a half a mile from his camera shop. On the day he and the George Moscone were shot I was at work not far down the street from City Hall. I vividly remember the immediacy of the moment I found out about it. Even though my link to the news was certainly someone's  T.V or radio, the shock waves from the event were so intense that word seemed to have arrived on a blast of hot wind rushing up California street, the horror of it passed breath to breath; nobody didn't know. I thought I heard sirens coming from downtown. 

When I got home that night a friend from the choir called to tell me that a candle light march was planned from Castro St to City Hall.  Each of us held a candle sheltered in a dixie cup. Many of the marchers cried as they walked.  Seeing "Milk" evoked a visceral memory of that breath-taking stretch of light.  The movie helped me put together something about that moment and about my years in San Francisco. 

After the movie Siobhan and I went to a little kosher falafel place down the street from the theater. We were about to start eating when the staff at the restaurant announced that they were going to light Hanukah candles, inviting customers to join in. We put down our plastic forks and went over to the counter where the menorah was. There was a brief delay while someone went to find me a keppah. I felt proud that I was able to sing most of the blessing along with the Orthodox staff, with Siobhan beside me to fill in occasional blanks. Lighting candles felt surprisingly familiar, like a comforting return to something I had missed since my divorce. After 15 years of trying to be a little bit Jewish I guess I’ve soaked up something after all; a bit of the sentimental education which I'd often lamented that I lacked. These things take time. It was the last night of Hanukah and all eight candles flared in the little tin menorah, a book end for the one I’d carried in a dixie cup down Market St. thirty years ago.  

The Zone

I once thought it would be cool to write a song for every kid who spent more than two weeks in the inpatient psych unit where I work. Not that I have time to do that, but there’s a crying need for some of these passionate stories to be told. These children are a force of nature and will not be denied.  Their parents or foster parents only bring them here when they explode and careen past the farthest imaginable limit of adult solutions.  The hospital oughta pay me to write songs, record them and then include the CD in the discharge packet. Right, that's gonna happen. As my dad always said, “wish in one hand and poop in the other and see which one gets full first.”

It's Christmas time on the unit and there’s a big tree all lit up in the dining/game/tv room. Even though it's a fake tree it looks cozy in there, and every time I walk by I feel the urge to go in and hang out with the kids while they're eating or cutting out snow flakes or otherwise attending to the glow. There’s a cardboard menorah too, but it pretty much gets short shrift, sitting by the fake fireplace next to the stockings.

I’m here late because this is my night to work in the ER. It’s dead, thank God; just a couple of stragglers, including one morbidly obese guy who got a psych eval. He was depressed and hungry. We gave him a box lunch and a list of local food pantries and sent him back out into the frigid night in his dungarees and orange hooded sweatshirt.

On these late night I feel a little disconnected here in China Town. When I first moved to Boston in 1980 this part of town was called “The Combat Zone”.  I remember coming here once or twice back then and it was scary enough that I steered clear. It was a hot bed of prostitution, alcohol and bad judgement. The oil and water cocktail of drunk-off-their-asses townies, college students and hard core street hustlers was always simmering, inviting each and everyone to exercise bad judgement of their own.  There’re a few old timers here who remember the regular influx of bruised and lacerated patients that used to pour through these ER doors on a Friday or Saturday night. The citizens of China Town banded together and squeezed the strip clubs and porno shops out of their neighborhood. I don't blame them because they had to live and raise families there, but I must admit I feel a twinge of regret at the loss of the wild dangerous place which used to incubate down here.

When my shift ended at midnight I rushed out into the icy cold, stepping carefully on the way to my car which was parked in the garage just over the Mass Pike. It is my custom on these nights is to catch the end of the Grateful Dead Hour on WUMB as I'm driving home.   It's all esoteric live recordings and in my predictably exhausted and dissociated state the music has direct access to the part of the brain which is best able to appreciate the tonal linguistics of the Dead. Garcia's emotive bell tones and assertive sixteenth note forays were a clarion call as  I drove up wrung-out Tremont Street, along the Roxbury line and cut up thru Jamaica Plain. A strong wind palpably buffeted my car.   More Christmas lights began to appear; a magnificent swatch of them reaching down from a church steeple, still lit even at this late hour, bouncing perilously. Blinking yellow lights and white icicles clusters swayed.  The Dead were hitting their stride in a space jam which was like a mainline infusion from a concert hall long ago. The transitive nightfall of diamonds came around as I turned left past the monument; almost home.