Me: a middle-aged white guy taking a stroll through the Castro district. My route: up Market from Noe then left on Castro; round the loop by walking down to 19th, crossing the street then returning back on the other side of Castro; return along Market to Noe, then home. My purpose: light exercise, window shopping, people watching, buying a box of kleenex.
When I walk on the south side of Market up towards Castro I often feel like a salmon swimming upstream. Hordes bear down the sidewalk towards me, and I never know whether to dodge or just plow right ahead and dare them to walk right through me. The challenge becomes downright daredevil if the oncoming is a hand-holding couple: will they unlock for a moment and let me through? Often I lunge for safety towards the storefronts: Gold’s Gym and its attached vitamin store, the soon-to-be-closing knickknack & lamp shop, the ultra-gay Blue restaurant, the bizarre florist that never seems to have any flowers, just logs and twigs and branches.
Behind me a ridiculously loud couple, possibly lubricated by late-brunch cocktails. I’m long past the point of being shocked by foul language (if, indeed, I ever was) but the speaker’s inarticulateness is nonetheless impressive. English offers so many colorful insults, I think, must you remain stuck on ‘fucking bitch’?
Wending downstream directly towards me comes a sturdy boyish lesbian with lemon-yellow close-cropped hair and vaguely Asiatic features. We make brief eye contact and the unthinkable happens: she smiles at me, and I am momentarily unhinged. I do manage to smile back before she has swept on past.
Somebody in City Hall actually had a good idea one morning (guy must have been new at the job) and cooked up a tiny urban park at the corner of Castro & Market. In its present form yet embryonic, it is nonetheless a neighborhood feature to be preserved. I note with some dismay that a scummy vagrant type has taken up residence at one of the little metal tables that dot the beige-painted asphalt. The mini-park will fail miserably should it become a roadside rest for druggies, a very real possibility in a city that has proven itself hopelessly incompetent at managing street vagrancy. Nevertheless, I have hardly ever seen a bum in the mini-park, although the Castro is never without at least a few verminous hobos croaking for spare change. So somebody must be giving the junkies the heave-ho, but who?
An earnest young man with a clipboard stationed on the corner of 17th and Market, in front of the Twin Peaks bar. Oh, my…I wonder. Which one will this be? It turns out to be Amnesty International, but it might have been Greenpeace or gay marriage or HIV or nuclear proliferation or Alaskan fishing rights or whatever. I cannot remember ever seeing anyone over the age of 30, clipboard in hand, stopping people and asking them “excuse me, sir, do you have a moment for…?” It’s very much a 20-something occupation, given its combined requirements of idealism, energy, and gullibility. As usual, I smile and move on — this particular naïf isn’t cute enough to warrant stopping, and years ago I decided never to bother the little dears by pointing out that they’re being exploited as unpaid labor by high-salaried and unscrupulous political lobbyists. They’ll figure that out for themselves soon enough.
I never thought I would support legislation banning smoking in all public places, including sidewalks, but now I’m not so sure. I spend part of the next few minutes trying to position myself so as not to be downwind from a smoker as he strolls along ahead of me. How far I’ve come since my Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights days; the acrid stench is absolutely revolting. I’m distracted by a zippy twink who dodges about the strollers, me included; backpack jouncing above a first-rate bubblebutt, he darts about with the agility of a chipmunk, but for what reason? He feints briefly towards the fabric-and-shower-curtains entrance to Cliff’s Hardware, realizes his mistake, and then scrambles quickly into the door of the main entrance.
Mr. Chipmunk-Twink was cute but other rusher-abouts aren’t. They just move quickly, as though walking is for them a contact sport. Their faces are hard, intent, oblivious of the people around them, fixated on whatever purpose they have. It’s not uncommon to be jostled or downright shoved by such folk, but at least today, and at least so far, I’ve avoided getting in anybody’s way.
Having escaped asphyxiation from the smoker and bodily injury from sidewalk linebackers, I am assaulted from behind by a young woman and her cell phone. I am unwilling audience to her life and her blatantly adolescent speech. Yeah, it was like, you know I said…she bleats stridently, not only into her phone but also directly into my right ear. One has several options under such circumstances, one of which is to whirl around, rip the phone from her hand, and toss it into the middle of Castro Street where traffic is sure to squash it into a gazillion bits. Another is to dawdle by a storefront for a moment until she has moved on. I take the latter, more civilized, less confrontational approach.
Dogs. An adorable fluffpot, either a bichon frisée or closely related, on a leash, subject to an almost endless stream of admiring/adoring looks, kitchy-kitchy-koos, and the like. Being a cute dog on Castro is even better than being a cute twink. I flash on that delectable scene in As Good As It Gets when pooch-smitten Jack Nicholson sings “My Buddy” to Greg Kinnear’s little frou-frou dog. A ways down the street a nondescript skinny mutt wrapped in a red doggie sweater, being fed a milkbone by mommy, the two oblivious to the constant swirl and crush of people around them.
Storefronts. I know I’ve lived in San Francisco too long when I find myself at Herth Realty, thinking that $894,000 for a two-bedroom house on Collingswood seems reasonable. Too many touristy fast-food joints these days, but Sausage Factory and Anchor Oyster Bar remain even if The Patio is now but a memory. The gay-themed bookstore; why bother? I still miss the big Crown Books of yore. Somebody actually buying something in the trendy shop that was once Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera.
Having turned the loop at 19th Street and headed back, I dawdle past the edgier stores that line Castro’s west side; sex toys, comic books, porn, interwoven with optometrists, restaurants, antiques, vitamin stores, even an Occitane looking weirdly out of place but strangely appropriate given this neighborhood’s resolute eclecticism. But reality intrudes as an unobservant idiot in an SUV barely stops at the corner of Castro & 18th, coming very close to hitting people in the crosswalk. I join in the general chorus of glares, but he doesn’t seem to notice — or care.
So I make my way up Castro heading homewards. While crossing Castro at Market, I am treated to the most endearing, and funniest, sight in town: a straight guy clutching his girlfriend as though she were a life preserver in the midst of a shipwreck. Oh you schmuck, I think for about the thousandth time: nobody around here gives a shit, but you just don’t have a clue, do you? Yep, you’re in the Castro…so hang on, little boy, hang on.