SoMa Literary Review - San Francisco 2002

San Francisco 2002

By Stephen Elliott

There's something more in the city tonight

Then the Transfer, one sleazy pink neon line running straight through its name

Market Street San Francisco, the fags and the homeless screaming in front of the Safeway and the Starbucks Coffee

More, more, more than a website to be built in the morning

It's Friday night

More than the Grand Cherokee parked in front of Mecca

And all of Haight Street

All of the two a.m. bars

The new junkies that migrated here on the faith of an old rumor

Or the dirty words scrawled by Kerouac on some small town library shelf

Looking for Vesuvio!

City Lights!

Hunter Thompson plowing his motorbike over the hills of Divisadero

The Summer of Love

Where are you San Francisco

There's something more in the city tonight

Even Berkeley is quiet by witching hour

Awaiting the big game against Stanford

The election is in four days

They're expecting the lowest turnout ever

And on Market Street to the Castro the pickup joints are almost full with chunky college kids fresh from the closets

And marketing interns ready for their first lesbian experience

And racks and racks full of the black leather jackets, black pants, black wool, black mid-range cars parked near Fourteenth Street

And haircuts short and tight to the sides to de-emphasize that receding hairline

Here is your revolution, a handful of twenty somethings dancing to disco at the Top everybody strung out on the same pill

Here is your revolution

A fire at the hotel on Sixteenth and Van Ness across from the all night gas station and the hooker with see-through heels and ten dollar habits

Rising rents

Parking permits

Your revolution is at the polls

The empty voting booths

Harry Britt, John Burton, left over politicians from campus riots, another time, you too will be globalized

There's something more in the city tonight

There must be

The boom is dead

And the left over wealth from the internet startups, the cashed in stocks, the ones that almost made it but still can't let go even after the crash, twenty-five cent markers pressed up against their fingers

And Stanford's not taking anymore MBAs this year

And Berkeley will not be awarding any law degrees

The city empties

The gold diggers try to navigate the highways home

The Castro tries to dance it off

Somebody put a condom on the party

And the artists were gentrified first to Oakland but Jerry Brown didn't want them and then they gave up

And North Beach has trashed its literary legacy for tourism, strip clubs, and bad Italian food

All that's left is Diamond Dave Whitaker shaking his hands out, the first man ever to smoke pot with Bob Dylan

Oh Yeah, he says at the Morning Due Coffeeshop

It's going to be a beautiful day

Stephen Elliott is the author of � A Life Without Consequences.� He is the Truman Capote Fellow in the Wallace Stenger Writing Program at Stanford University. More of his work can be found at StephenElliott.com.