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Killer Joe and I celebrated a somewhat arbitrary one year anniversary, since neither of us can remember when we actually started dating.

He wanted to take me to Jack London Square, which he knew an enormous amount about, having written a deep research piece on London for one of the editions of his excellent subculture history/interview magazine, Specious Species. I like this about Joe: point him in virtually any historical direction, and he will spend 50 minutes expertly explaining it to you in a monologue (“He’s just like our Dad,” my sister said to me, her eyes visibly rolling.) I suppose I like a good lecture. Can’t sit through a symphony for all the teeth in China, though.

I’m always calling Joe “Aspy,” which is fair — his poker face never changes no matter what he’s feeling — but in fairness, I must acknowledge my own multiple tics. I have what I call “galloping ADHD,” which has been a severe struggle my entire life, because FUCK THIS SYMPHONY I’M CRAWLING OUT OF MY SKIN AND I AM GOING TO GO SMOKE IN THE PARKING GARAGE. I’m also an empath, which makes things so emotionally challenging I take a very potent psychopharmacologist-prescribed cocktail to stave off the Black Dog (Winston Churchill’s nickname for depression), which has a history of attacking one branch of my family like a squeaky rubber hamburger. I believe it’s genetic.

So, I spent the earlier part of our date being incredibly bitchy, because we’d been fighting lately and I was bracing for another tangle, so I came out on the offense. Joe remained infuriatingly sanguine, like an Easter Island head. Finally I saw that he wasn’t taking the bait, I apologized, and the rest of the evening went quite dreamily, for the most part.

Joe took me to Heinholds First and Last Chance Saloon, one of the oldest bars in America, where there is a picture of London sitting and reading the dictionary when he was a child laborer. Joe launched into an expert history of Jack London, explaining all the brown and dusty framed photographs on the walls, protected behind a wall of chicken wire.

One of the pictures on the wall is of Jack Johnson, the nattiest, handsomest, most flairing Black Dandy ever — the first Black Heavyweight Champion of the World, in his tailored waistcoat and vest. It’s an absolutely brilliant bar - as tilted and dusty and slovenly as it ever was, since the 1890’s. Caked with the priceless patina of an undisturbed funk.

It has been occurring to me more and more lately that it is exactly things like this that America should be expending funds to preserve: small businesses with talent and charm, unique beauty, utility, and history. America doesn’t acknowledge civilization. It doesn’t get that art is culture, or why culture is necessary. Too many paradises become parking lots in service to a need to cultivate American citizens as insects. Beauty is not a priority to capitalism, and apparently not allowed to be a human need. The hives can be seen just South of the San Francisco Bay Area below San Jose, in the form of endlessly duplicated tract housing on dry brown hills, presumably inhabited by the industrial workers of Silicon Valley and nearby agricultural towns.

The bearded and tattooed bartender intuited exactly what shot I needed to pour one out (well, down anyway) for Jack London: Amaro and Mezcal, which you’d think would taste like burning shoe polish, but actually went down like an over-sweet bottle of black tea.

“This is probably the last time in California history a writer will ever be revered like this,” I said, noticing the multiple brass plaques, Jack London’s authentic Yukon log cabin and the bronze wolf installed to honor the native son of letters by the city of Oakland. (I have no problem with Jack London, but where the hell is my bronze wolf, San Francisco? Alas, these honors are reserved for bestsellers.)

I’m just beginning to comprehend the greatness of Oaktown. There are sensational views and it is terrifically diverse. The stunt drivers can be a menace on the freeways, and the sprawling tent cities and shantytowns of unhoused persons in broken down campers under freeways are a chilling monument to our completely rotten social fabric, and the economic rape we’ve been enduring for the last 40 years. Hoovervilles never had to absorb such pollution; that fine, sooty bus-grit. That black micro-dust that emanates from freeways and collects under them, onto moneyless people that disappear from society under that silt.

I was wondering where the Buppies (black yuppies) hang out. There was a dazzling selection of them in line to see Kenny Lattimore at Yoshi’s. The sisters were blazing to the nines in strappy little shoes and curvaceous pantsuits and tasteful bling. It was a jazz crowd.

“Someday, we’re going to be just like them,” one Amazonian woman with long black Farrah-extensions said to her friends, pointing a long blue nail at Joe and I as we walked by on the sidewalk, holding hands. I thought maybe she was talking aspirationally about a man she was dating. It took me half a day to realize she’d said that because Killer and I look old and therefore endearing together. Maybe it was the fact that we’re such Gen X Goth holdovers. I suppose it’s a bit like being Amish, but anti-social.

It was not the first time Joe has lost the car. He lost it so bad in North Beach one night he filed a police report, then found it a block away from where he thought he parked it the next day. Anyway, he walked us to the wrong parking garage, and we spent the next 30-plus minutes walking around trying to find the right one, wherein I stomped around growling “Arrrgh, I HATE THIS MORE THAN ANYTHING.” The only thing I hate more than finding a lost car is aimlessly walking around a city trying to find a restaurant with more than five people. Joe “drove cab” for 15 years and refuses to use any form of GPS on his phone while driving. It’s a man thing. He goes to great lengths to use paper maps. He can remember most anything in history, but not where his car is.

That’s OK. He remembers more things than I do. In an officially criminal society, he is a jewel of many virtues. I may not have the key to the city, but at least I can still find my keys, most of the time.

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Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Victor,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2022

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