The trip starts with rotten chicken and a pungent odor in Jenny's car that follows us throughout the weekend like a lazy ghost. Ignore that.
Jenny's beautiful. I'm wired off a morning shift of espresso shots. We listen to Washed Out and Pearl Jam from the netbook. We share idiosyncrasies, stories from our past. Subway sandwiches and peppermint candy. The weather is perfect. The drive, sans traffic. The City, as glorious as ever. We find overnight parking and it's early enough to wander around, find the venue, find a bar, find shopping, find another bar, another bar, another bar, get in touch with Jenny's friend and make plans to meet up later, fake New York accents, fake New York attitudes and mingle with the locals. We soak in the sights, the tourist traps, the endless stream of strangers, the street performers, chess players, homeless people selling newspapers, crack-heads hanging out by liquor markets, the colorful graffiti, the boldness of a place that proclaims its uniqueness with an intensity that outshines Sacramento ten-fold while also reminding us that it's dangerous and rough and not an escape from reality, but a glimpse of reality. Usually I love San Francisco. This time, it's a little intense, like half the people woke up on the wrong side of the bed and the other half slept on the street. Still, it's an exhilarating place and the adventure goes smoothly and we're nice and buzzed by the time the venue starts letting in the ticket-holders to this sold-out show.
The Chain Gang of 1974 opened, followed by Class Actress. Chain Gang we saw back when they opened for Foster The People, so it was neat to see them in a bigger venue with another band. We're not stalking them, but maybe we should because they're pretty good. At this point we still had energy enough to stay with the crowd on the bottom floor and dance, but the alcohol and day of walking started catching up to us when the second band took the stage. Class Actress sounds like Glass Candy. We head upstairs and watch the rest of the show from the dark balcony. The Great American Music Hall is a gorgeous little building that looks like the lobby from The Titanic. Great sound. Good crowd.
Washed Out comes out and the audience goes wild. They play a handful of their popular "chillwave" tracks, plus a few that will be on the album, and my only critique of their performance is the fact that they played "Feel It All Around" in a way that sounded different than the single they released (and sold to Portlandia), and I simply didn't like this rendition at all. For being their most-played hit, I can understand why they'd want to try something different, but it sucked. Other than that it was a great show.
After the show ended around 12:30, it was time to find a place to sleep for the night. Plan A was to drive down to my dad's house in Redwood City, but Jenny had gotten in touch with her friend, Nicole, who lived in Haight in a relatively well-known house that we simply couldn't miss the chance to stay in. So we got directions and found our way to the subway and somehow figured out the system, catching the last N train of the night, crowded, though probably no more than normal for a City that hardly sleeps. This drops us off above-ground a few blocks from Nicole's house.
Barefoot Nicole meets us on the street-corner with her mangy dog, drinking a Pabst and dropping her pack of cigarettes as she leads us back to the house. I'm immediately reminded of a night I spent in Berkeley during my college years. There's LSD-inspired artwork everywhere. Loud music. Beer, drugs and strangers all over the messy, barely-standing apartment, which has too many disheveled bedrooms to count, with a patio that connects to five other surrounding apartments and access to the roof. It's a hub of young adults on Haight and it's madness. At first it's terribly appealing. I take a puff from a hookah and drink a beer with Jenny on the steps as we listen to this group of guys play "Wagon Wheel" and a bunch of other songs with an assortment of instruments and everyone seems to love each other and I am nearly swept away by the fuck-all freedom billowing out of this moment thicker than the smell of rolled cigarettes. This is what happens when you don't have a full-time job, when you live off welfare, when hallucinogenics are part of your food pyramid, when you drop out of art school. This is what you don't tell your parents about. This is what you do when your goal is to say, "Fuck goals." This is chaos and it cannot last, but that's for tomorrow's hangover to deal with, and for tonight the people are lovely, the music is intoxicating, the drugs are sweet and the wine will never stop flowing. Tonight we bathe in red light. Tonight we forget to worry.
Tonight is it.
Jenny and I sleep on the floor in the livingroom while the party continues around us. Well, Jenny hardly sleeps at all, but somehow I manage to sneak in an hour or two. The music is loud. The people are loud. No one else seems to sleep except for the two guys in armchairs tripping through the universe on deep acid trips. When the sun finally comes out, we're trying to sleep through the endless woe-is-me ranting of some young girl doing coke with her friends and blaring music from shitty laptop speakers, and the love-all vibe of the night before has morphed into the bitter hangover that makes waking up with these strangers feel like waking up after a night in jail. Jenny and I gather our things and leave immediately. I'm in a daze, still riding the enchantment of the night before, and poor Jenny is grumpy and angry with the rudeness of the people who felt the need to be as boisterous as possible while we'd been trying to sleep. We have nothing really nice to say about any of those people. She tells me to slap her if she ever suggests we stay with Nicole again.
It's a bus ride and long walk down O'Farrell before we find the parking garage and leave the City.
Forty minutes later, we're at my dad's house. Turns out it's a family barbecue day, so our original plans to head over to Half Moon Bay are postponed. No bother. Can't argue with a barbecue. Plus some of my cousins are coming over and I haven't seen them in years. So Jenny takes a shower to wash off some of that Haight nightmare and I catch up with my dad and grandma. We all head over to Breakers for breakfast and do some shopping for the dinner and when we get back to the house, Jenny and I take a quick refresher nap in my dad's room and it helps bring us back to a somewhat-normal sociable level. By this time, my cousin Johnny is there, two years older than me and tattooed and bulky, but otherwise the same cousin I remember from my childhood. Turns out he spent some time at culinary school, so he's in charge of the steaks. Then there's fluffy-footed Toby, the cocker spaniel, and my dad's lazy cat, Booger. Out front, my uncle Matt and my dad and his girlfriend, Blair, are out digging up the yard to make way for a new brick path and future flowers. Jenny and I pitch in. Dad's blaring classic rock through the window. It feels good to be outside, with my family, offering unexpected free labor. Everyone's in a good mood. After a while, Jenny and I leave to take a walk through my old neighborhood. We spend some time in the field of an elementary school. We get back to the house and then there's a barbecue and the steak is amazing and we get full and eat dessert and by then it's 7:30, so Jenny and I pack up and say goodbye and leave. We're home by 10:00 and exhausted from our San Francisco adventure and asleep soon after.
I'm like really stoned dude but I could tell that this was a really gnarly couple of days that were actually pretty cool, man.
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