San Francisco

Would Herb Caen have been as good a journalist if he was assigned to write about say, Sacramento or Duluth or Knoxville? There is a spirit to "The City" that inspires one to observe, reflect and report in a way that no other city I have ever been in can. It does take patience and time. Certainly thousands of people, residents and visitors alike, simply pass through or go about their daily business without pausing to absorb the goings on in San Francisco. It is a nice city to drive around, but to really see it, you have to be on foot. Being stationary is even better.

I had the chance on Monday to sit in one of the weirdest spots in SF for a good 30 minutes, and just being there inspires me to make one of my infrequent blog entries. I was leaving the SF Countrywide branch at Van Ness and McAllister, and I decided it was time for a long overdue haircut. Things are picking up for me in my new career, but right now, I am on a rather austere budget. I remembered a hair cut I had back when I was in a similarly tight financial circumstance while living in SF in the late 90's. There was this little Chinese lady who had a barber shop on Market Street who charged a remarkably frugal $5 for a trim. The problem was I couldn't remember where on Market it was. I trudged down to Van Ness and Market to pull $20 out of the ATM I knew was there. Standing there idly "guarding" the B of A was one of SF's Finest.

"Excuse me," I asked the beat cop, "Do you know Market Street pretty well?"

He looked at me mildly scornfully which seemed to communicate something like I was stupid for asking such a question, and grunted a "yeah..."

I related the story of the Chinese lady barber. I refrained from adding the details about how I asked her to give me a haircut like George Clooney (it was the late 90's), and she looked at me in bewilderment and answered "Gaj Crooney? Who he?". The cop had no recollection of a cheap Chinese barber on Market.

He pointed to the east and said, "Now, if you go down to Sixth Street, there's this place..." he paused and looked me up and down. I was wearing my usual worn-out-from-too-many-years-working-in-a-department-store business attire and continued, "...but you don't want to go down Sixth Street." Apparently, the cop had judged my streetwiseness on the conservative side and decided 6th was too dangerous for me. I know the SoMa area can be little rough, but I lived for two years in the Tenderloin. I know how to handle the streets of San Francisco just as well as Michael Douglas. I found it a little amusing that there were areas of Downtown that even the cops won't send people. I think the 6th Street merchants might be a little peeved by that. "There is this Fillipino lady on 7th Street," the cop continued, "right there next to the check cashing place, she's got a little shop. That might be what you were thinking of." I thanked him and wandered the four blocks down market to 7th.

Check cashing places, which also offer things like Payday loans and money orders, thirve in the ghetto. Naturally, folks in and around such places are folks who aren't likely to have a bank account. I weaved my way through the small crowd of inner city dwellers surrounding the check cashing establishment and entered the barber shop. It was 5:30. Thousands of guys in a half mile radius were getting off work. I thought for sure I'd have to wait, but no, I was the only guy in the place other than the little Filipino grandma who looked like she could have cut hair at Corregidor in 1942. It was much like any other barber shop on the inside. Magazines, cyllindrical containers of blue liquid with combs inside, and the faint smell of hair clipper oil. On one wall, an apparently hand made collage of magazine pictures of hairstyles like I had seen many times before in other barber shops. How they could all be handmade and still be so similar is beyond me. All of the hair styles in the pictures would have been all the mode in 1983. Deciding I didn't want to look like Ralph Macchio, I flopped down in the barber chair, and said, "I need a haircut."

I felt so sorry for the ancient barber lady as she kept having to lift her arms to a level even with her head as she cut my hair. Couldn't she have lowered the chair or something like that? Another thing that was weird is that it was the first "dry" haricut I had had in 10 years at least. She didn't do the spraying of the hair with water that seems to be the standard operating procedure of all other barbers. Instead, she cut my hair dry, with what to me seemed like rather dull scissors.

Oddest of all were all the strange people walking by, some even sticking their heads in the otherwise empty barber shop. The traffic noise was loud, so it makes sense that people talking on the street would need to speak up to be heard. The majority of people who were talking loudly as they passed by the 7th Street barbers were not talking to someone else, but to themselves. If you're talking to yourself, is it really that hard to hear even on the busiest of streets? I surmised that although most of the individuals were not talking to anyone else, they still wanted to be heard.

7th and Market has quite a bit of irregular commerce going on. One guy walked into the shop with a plastic bag and asked if anyone (I guess he meant me or the barber lady) wanted to buy a set of computer speakers. Another lady politely asked if the proprietor or myself would be willing to exchange her five dollars in quarters for a single bill (as I write this, I am in dire need of quarters to do my laundry, so I wish now I'd taken her up on her offer). A big argument broke out in front of the barber shop between a guy selling packs of Marlboros loose out of a sack and another man with a peculiar accent. The latter simply would not accept the idea that although he could buy two packs for $5, that one pack would cost him $3, not $2.50. He seemed mildly enraged that this street hawk would be seemingly cheating people that way. Last I checked, I think a pack of Marlboro's will run $4.50 or so in a regular store.

If I seem derisive of the economically challenged San Franciscans, I don't mean to be harsh. I could spend another blog entry making sarcastic observations about the lawyers, executives and other professionals found in the Financial District just a few blocks away. Before I got this current job and was late for a meeting, I never understood why the majority of these folks would always briskly climb an upward moving escalator. I mean, the point of an escalaltor is to save labor, not time.

I suppose if you take the time to notice, we all seem foolish in one way or another; San Francisco inspires me to notice.