You might wonder at New Year's in San Francisco.
To stare down the length of the BART car on New Year's at two AM is to look into the depth of the Matrix. Everyone is dressed in black, they all have ear rings, and tatoos, and green skin, and ruby or cyano green lipstick, and leather pants, glistening a metalic silver in the neon light, against the ice tiles from hell. And I, a tourist, drunk on Chivas Regal and other things, staggering and still centered on some imaginary nothing that doesn't exist, talking about Machiavelli and Erasmus to a rightwing guy on the train between San Francisco Embarcadero Center and Oakland MacAuthur Station---he is my age in nylon running sweats, looking through those eye glasses from Breaking Down. Is there really a Tech Nine in his shorts? Meanwhile, I am crusing and swimming drunk on the idea that the Japanese sales girls from Tokyo are my comrades because my step mother knows their district of Tokyo, and my leering stepfather, older than God, has seen the light glisten off those magic fur triangles they all carry, while I pretend he really wants to talk about Guadalajara, Los Tres Grandes, and the infinitude of oil paint and wine, and memory. Orozco is as clear as my circumcision while I stumble from one plateform to another waving my transit pass like a badge of courage and hoping that nobody, but nobody is looking or cares. Luckily they don't.
Sure, whatever, the guard says.
The return to Berkeley, on Bart is something of a mystery. And you think I am making it up. I write more when drunk, and lucky Lbo, that I am rarely this drunk. This is the state that every writer wants to live while writing. Believe me, I come from a long list of writers and drinkers and they all agree on this one and only this one point.
Chuck Grimes