A stranger in my own city

After work on Saturday I went to the Marina for a party. That might not sound weird to those of you not in San Francisco, but I haven’t been to the Marina at night since I suddenly needed to find a motel room once about 8 years ago. The best way to describe the Marina on a Saturday night is to picture wandering through frat row at a university with a large "Greek" system. There were a lot of loud, beefy guys "dude"-ing each other and a fair amount of women with clickety-clackety heels fake screaming then breaking into laughter.

Why was I there? Well, slipkid* was having a party. Plus I’ve been trying to make a point of leaving the neighborhood more often. I even went to the Beast** the night before for brisket, latkes and mixed performances of student theater. Anyways, as soon as jactitation and I got off the bus, it was clear that we had gone to the heart of enemy territory. The 22 dropped us off next to that Getty kid’s café and across the street from the mayor-elect’s wine shop. We turned the corner and there was a "Newsom for Mayor" sign the size of my living room on the first house we passed.

Stay clam. Don’t call attention to myself. Don’t make eye contact, it may provoke a hostile reaction.

Thankfully, Slip Kid lives a block from the 22. When I arrived at the party I was glad I had taken the time to change out of my stinky cheese clothes. I had a flashback of being underage, hanging out with the Ithaca punks and sneaking into frat parties to drink free beer. Since this usually ended up in being thrown out or giving one of the townies an excuse to get into a fight with a college kid, I felt my paranoia continue to rise, especially when I couldn’t find Slip Kid.

Luckily, we ran into decadentscholar and socialretard and tensions lowered. They were the only other Central/Eastside-looking folks in this land of Dockers and moussed Gavin haircuts. Finding friends let the social anxiety tension in my head start to ebb and soon after that, Slip Kid made an appearance. Slip Kid is an incredibly sweet and friendly person in real life, by the way. After the initial culture shock, most of his friends turned out to be also. Plus he’d gone to the expense of hiring a bartender and the free booze, known generically as "martinis", was flowing.

Still, it was a strange feeling. If I looked one direction from the back porch, it looked just like the Mission. Victorian buildings subdivided into apartments. Clothes lines. Cheap, industrial paint from the landlord supply stores. The other direction however was motels, condos and Mel’s Diner. It was like I was on vacation in a city where I didn’t know anyone and got a room for a night on the Miracle Mile. Familiar, but not home.

We hung out with DS and SR for most of the evening, eating chicken skewers and drinking. I did unexpectedly get my ass slapped with a baguette by the best dressed woman there, but she was doing that to everyone. She did say to me, "I bet you like that." To which I responded, "You don’t know the half of it," but she was already moving on to the next ass.

But it was time to go back outside and brave the street partiers. As we waited for the 22, a crappy, dented Toyota pulled up in the bus stop blasting that "Holleration/Hateration in this Dancerie" song which is now still rattling around in my otherwise empty head 36 hours later. The 22 goes very fast through the rich hilly neighborhoods at that time of night, and it was just Jacco, Me and some guy who had just gotten off his restaurant job and was sneaking a beer out of a paper bag for most of the trip. Does any city other than SF send its public transit up such crazy hills?


*Whoops. For those of you who read this right away, it's slipkid not slip_kid.
**Beast is East Bay translated back from the Pig Latin.