2007-03-05 - 5:24 a.m.
The icy cold late winter San Francisco wind lapped my ankles and cut into my face as I stepped out of the isolated BART train station. I gaped in horror: I was in the middle of nowhere! To the left of me, a freeway on-ramp stretched into the darkness. To the right, a line of fluorescent street lamps illuminated a concrete road that seemed to lead into the endless distance. Far, far away, the skyscrapers of urban San Francisco glittered. But I was far away from all that. In fact, I was stuck, in the middle of nowhere, having taken the wrong train home from the Castro.
It was my own fault, of course. Before I had left LA, I had printed out the BART schedule as offered by the “plan your trip” feature on the website. However, I had neglected to specify that I was traveling at one in the morning, and the computer had mistakenly thought that I was traveling at one in the afternoon. The BART, of course, closes at midnight, which was just when I was finishing up my nice ham and cheese omelette at the all night Castro diner.
Behind me, the young, but obese train station attendant pulled down the grate door, closing off the entrance to the train station. “No mo’ trains!” the attendant told me when I asked him about a train back to the city. I asked him how I could get back to Berkeley, and he just whistled.
“Dang. You gonna have to take the 15 back to Mission and then the all night 16 to the South Bay and then the 22 to the Goofadora. Oh wait, the 22 don’t run this late. But then you gotta get to the 18 and the 26 to Berkeley. You gonna be on the road all night!” I gaped in dismay and inquired as to whether a cab might work.
“Dang!” he whistled again. “I ain’t never taken a cab ‘cross the bay. Gonna be expensive!” He shook his head and turned back into the darkened lair of the station, muttering to himself. The nearby bus stop was bathed in an orange-y neon glow from a street light. Huddling beneath the pool of light were several paunchy Mexican busboys, whose eyes glittered with malice as they contemplated my joining them for a long road trip.
Well, what else could I do? I whipped out my cell phone and called a cab company, but even before I could get a cab dispatcher on the line, another cab rolled by. I waved my hand madly and the cab pulled up to the kerb. The Vietnamese driver cackled merrily at me as I slid into the back seat. “You rearry rearry lost tonite, sah! You in middle of nowhere! You lucky lucky I come by now! Where you going, sah? Chang take you there! No worry, Chang get you there!”
I told him that I took the wrong train and needed to get to Berkeley, and the Vietnamese man whistled, just like the train guy did. He cursed in Vietnamese. “Aaaa-yooo! Berkeley! Tade ren shi hen ben-le! It be belly belly expensive.” He reached over and pulled out a flyer that had printed estimated rates for travel. It said that it would cost 45 bucks to cross the bridge and get back to the Berkeley Club. What else could I do? I agreed, and he confirmed that he would take a credit card if that’s what I had.
And so my trip to the Castro was ultimately quite expensive, costing about as much as a good hotel room. However, I can’t say I totally regret it. Even though the taxi ride back to Berkeley was pricey, we drove right over the Golden Gate Bridge, which, I know, won’t sound like much to you, but was something that I had never done in my whole life. I enjoyed that a great deal. I was even able to raise my eyes from perusing the taxi meter, whose numbers were spinning around and around like the windows on a Las Vegas slot machine, to peer over the side of the bridge, looking into the bay below.
And, finally, I just wound up back at the Berkeley Club. I crawled into my warm little bed in the stony walled, Victorian hotel, double resolved not to tell anyone that I had been forced to pop fifty bucks for my so-called pleasant night out. A day’s pay as far as my gig in the library is concerned.
And now I am back in Hell A, having returned from the delightful wedding trip. I am finding working at the library to be almost startlingly peaceful and pleasant. It is not what I expected, really. And more interestingly, I am also finding the folks who work there to be quite beguilingly pleasant to know. It’s not that they’re interesting – not by a long shot. But most of the people who have jobs at this public library seem to exist by different rules than those I am used to.
For one thing, I am used to the fact that one must scheme and manipulate and schmooze in order to get ahead. At the library, the goal is to entirely efface oneself. The highest compliment that one can pay someone at the library is to say that “you didn’t know he (or she) was there.” Or that “My goodness, you are nearly invisible!” The ideal is to totally fade away, only to appear briefly when some idiot comes up to you and demands to know where the books on Hitler are or something like that.
I had my first sighting of a former movie biz colleague the other day, and I expect that there will be more. It was not as horrifying nor as humiliating as I feared it would be. The person who “ambushed” me He saw me pushing my little book-filled cart towards the DVDs and came up behind me. “Well, hey!” Smarmo roared, slapping me jauntily on the shoulder. “I heard you were working here! Hey, dude, don’t kill yourself, man! It’s not that bad.” He winked in my direction, his hair plugs rustling as his forehead creased.
I smiled frostily and told him that things were difficult these days in the movie biz and I needed to make money some how. “No, really!” he continued to ooze. “This is a great gig. It must be so cool to work here! You enjoy it – I gotta run: Need to finish this two picture deal and get to the meeting with Lucas and Spielberg. See ya!” He pranced off, already making little notations in his Bluetooth or Blackberry or whatever it was. I felt like shooting myself, as I plodded into the children’s library to shelve about seventy five drool and baby vomit-covered “Baby Bug” board books.
I have been trained to be the monitor at the Computer Commons, where there are free computers for the use of the general populace. It’s a gig that’s actually more amusing than it’s not, and you see the entire cross section of Santa Monica, such as it is. Needless to say, most of the people who use the computers consist of the city’s homeless population, but there are a surprising number of yuppies and elderly people who wouldn’t know a computer from a talking pig.
Every time I have a shift in the Computer Commons, I try to remember both the Stupidest Person and the Craziest Person I saw. Surprisingly, they are rarely the same person, though it is certainly possible that they will be one day. Today, the Stupidest Person was really also the cutest. He was a cute, smallish gay man, about my age, with graying blonde hair and a sweet, boyishly round face, which at the moment was frozen in a moue of dismay as he stared into the computer monitor. He called me over and told me his tale: It turned out he was trying to apply for a job as a flight attendant, but could not figure out the job application, which needed to be submitted over the Internet.
“It says I need to have an E-mail address,” the aging bimboy murmured. “But I don’t have one! I don’t know what to do. I’m not going to be able to apply for my job!” He snuffled unhappily.
I opened an Internet Explorer window for the chap and set him up with Yahoo, which generations of people who hook up for sex know will give you a free E-mail account with no fuss or muss. I returned to my little librarian table, but before long the chap called me over again, wailing, “It says it can’t give me my E-mail account! I can’t do this. It’s awwwful!”
I noticed that the Yahoo account had simply sent him a message noting that his handle “JohninLA” was being used by someone else. I helped him come up with another handle and returned to my desk – but soon the bimboy was wailing again, this time because the flight attendant job application refused to accept the new E-mail address as being legitimate. I kindly and calmly noted that he needed to make sure that “@yahoo.com” was included when he typed out his E-mail address somewhere. And he nodded somberly, the lesson learned. “Oh, and you should check that E-mail account from time to time. You never know who might send you an E-mail!” I winked at him, and he simpered pleasantly.
As for the Craziest Patron of the day, that award would go to the rotund, freaky African American homeless woman who wheeled in her shopping cart full of garbage and started yelling at me for some reason I could not even figure out. What did she say? Well, it’s funny you should ask. And I shall tell you next time, if you like. Be patient!
