The Golden Gate Spectator/A Bridge Too Far
Ferguson, Andrew
THE GOLDEN GATE SPECTATOR A BRIDGE TOO FAR America's most photogenic city celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its most photogenic landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge, on Memorial Day weekend, and...
...Except for a few idiots...
...On that recommendation I called on a woman named Monique, who lived in a rundown Victorian house in the Haight Ashbury district...
...The issue of AIDS and "safety" is now almost thoroughly politicized...
...She flopped herself down across from me, next to an enormous hookah, and assumed the lotus position...
...Since I left town several years ago, AIDS has of course struck with a vengeance...
...I didn't get the apartment...
...a local printer minted a currency of the Emperor's design, which was widely accepted as legal tender...
...After he overreached himself in the rice market, however, the sudden and unaccustomed poverty drove him rather quickly nuts...
...The scene's changed—totally," one Castro businessman assured me...
...She shot me a stony look from beneath her black bangs...
...What's San Francisco for...
...My desperate search for an apartment eventually took me to a roommate referral service, which for a modest fee would put an applicant in touch with San Franciscans who were looking for someone to share the rent...
...San Franciscans will tell you that a straight line runs from Norton the Emperor to Monique the Witch, from the hospitality given a "harmless madman" to that accorded the community for which San Francisco is nowadays most famous...
...Several homosexual rights groups are mobilizing to protest the Pope's visit this fall, when he plans to minister to AIDS patients in the Castro and thereby perpetuate what one man told me was "his immoral war on our lifestyles...
...In one tourist gift shop I saw them set up by the cash register in a special display case, from which they're sold individually, at six cents a pop...
...Not too many, of course, which is why the legend is fostered and encouraged to this day...
...As she took a drag off a long, dark cigarette, her kimono fell open, revealing her left breast...
...when they arrest someone from the city's gay districts, along with a pamphlet about safe sex...
...The vistas are famously stunning, but in the foreground at any given moment you were likely to confront, say, a tie-dyed dog on roller skates, or a pet chameleon on a string, dragging itself slowly over the shaved head of its snoozing owner, or a punk rocker on a step ladder heaving into a dumpster (without spilling his beer), or a couple in estrus on the trunk of an antique car...
...After greeting me wearing only panties and a loosely tied kimono, she immediately inquired into my interest in witchcraft, which I had to confess was non-existent...
...Not only did the city's best tailors prepare his elaborate uniforms at no charge, but the Emperor also ate free in its finest restaurants, borrowed modestly from the city's banks without interest, and rode its public transportation as he desired...
...Obviously put off by my uninterest in her vocation, she nevertheless asked me to sit on a pillow on the floor so we could talk...
...At the Opera House he shared the Royal Box with his two mongrel dogs...
...today, because it's almost limitless, tolerance is—well, weird...
...San Francisco is very stylish," she said, in an interview last year, "but what's it for...
...There's something about it I find absent...
...At the marina, I surveyed the chaos with a reporter from a local news service...
...In San Francisco, the hospitality afforded Emperor Norton is taken as emblematic, giving the weirdness that characterizes the town the imprimatur of tradition...
...As it happens, the idea of building a bridge across the Golden Gate was first given voice by an exemplar of San Francisco weirdness, Joshua Norton, a British-born speculator who made a handsome fortune in the years following the 1849 gold rush...
...I'm not thinking about culture either—just a sense of purpose...
...In May one homosexual organization demanded that police be required to pass out a condom (why only one...
...Such a complaint naturally strikes the contemporary San Franciscan as the worst sort of fuddy-duddyism...
...On the Friday before the bridge celebration I took a long walk through the Castro district, the heart of the city's homosexual population...
...Besides, condoms are everywhere...
...What San Francisco is for, now, is tolerance...
...Everybody with whom I broached the subject knew someone who had recently died, but I noticed too that on this Friday afternoon the bars—with names like the Manhole, the White Swallow, and Does Your Mother Know?—were full to overflowing...
...San Francisco originally found its purpose as a financial center and a great seaport, but in the last twenty years much of the financial business has moved south, to Los Angeles, and the Embarcadero has been given -over to crowded fern bars and tawdry waterfront shopping malls catering to the tourist trade...
...It's a good question, if not entirely fair: with the decline of industry and the dispersal of the immigrant communities, it could be asked of any number of American cities...
...It's not hard to imagine what those old tailors, good-naturedly embroidering Joshua Norton's imperial garb, would say about their kids walking to school past the 1808 Club on Market Street, for example, which advertises "Jack Off Parties, Mondays and Thursdays, 8 p.m...
...If anything happens in these bars, you can be sure it's safe...
...I'm always driving across here in a car," he explained, "hearing that traffic is moving at a crawl...
...She had painted her windows in rainbows and half-moons, and throughout the apartment each doorway was strung with a curtain of multi-colored beads...
...AF THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 49...
...From that year until his death in 1880, his small eccentricities carried the force of custom...
...This," he shouted, over the din rising from the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, "is San Francisco weirdness at its very best...
...And, as always happens when "rights" are at issue, the demands multiply exponentially...
...I quickly looked at my hands...
...Jan Morris, surely the most intelligent journalistic observer of cities, is less than taken by Everyone's Favorite City...
...1 a.m...
...But a, city needs fuddy-duddies...
...On the bridge itself, "Ranger" Rick Kaufman, a "caretaker turned herbologist," was crawling all the way from San Francisco to Marin County, wearing only two pairs of pants...
...In the 1870s tolerance was charming...
...Well," I said, shakily, "I'm sort of a tit...
...Just what sort of person are you...
...The sheriff has responded that not only is sex in jail—safe or otherwise—illegal, but the condoms might also be used to smuggle in drugs, which of course may require a needle to use, and we all know what sharing needles leads to...
...Next to the condoms was a "Memorial Day Weekend Special" for large tubes of Probe lubricating jelly...
...Tell me about yourself," she said deeply...
...I remember thinking that she looked exactly like Morticia from "The Addams Family...
...Incense smoke curled thickly from thuribles spaced about the living room...
...The town's historical reluctance to pass judgment—to say enough is enough—has been raised to the preeminent, indeed only, civic virtue (until, of course, the conversation bumps up against the evil buffoon Reagan or the slimy Falwell, at which point tolerance becomes bad taste...
...In 1859 he declared himself "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico and China," and with characteristic generosity San Francisco obliged him...
...My own introduction to it came eight or nine years ago, when, as a young and extremely callow midwesterner, I first moved to what the local newspapers annoyingly call "Everyone's Favorite City...
...Like most other visitors to San Francisco, Robert Louis Stevenson was charmed by the Emperor's legend: "In what other city would a harmless madman who thought himself emperor of the two Americas have been so fostered and encouraged...
...the newspapers published his imperial pronouncements with solemn dispatch...
...I just wanted to know what it felt like...
...And standing by the Golden Gate on Memorial Day, watching the boats on the bay and the headlands of Marin meeting the sea beyond, I was strongly tempted to volunteer...
...THE GOLDEN GATE SPECTATOR A BRIDGE TOO FAR America's most photogenic city celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its most photogenic landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge, on Memorial Day weekend, and for one accustomed to the jowly sobriety of federal Washington a walk through the festivities, which stretched for two miles along the bay, was an invitation to sensory overload...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
