san francisco
For the past week I’ve been hitting up my favorite tiki bars in SF and Oakland, one final lap through each, snagging all the commemorative mugs on my way out. On Monday I ran over to Kon-Tiki and picked up their enormous Muntiki mug, on Tuesday I ran to Pagan Idol and completed my collection with their skull and leviathan 12 ouncer, last night I hit up Smugglers Cove and got their matte brown Ku, and tonight I rode the cable car up to the Tonga Lounge to pick up the Tangaroa and green lantern mugs.
The Tonga room is… so special to me. The height of kitsch, a tiki paradise; it weirdly marries the most disparate parts of my life — my childhood love of the Tiki Room at Disneyland, my mission to Hawaii, the earliest days of falling in love with San Francisco’s weird neverland magic on work trips, John meeting my dad for the first time — it holds so many memories for me. Utah, San Francisco and Hawaii are linked in real life, a side effect of Mormons’ westward exodus and Polynesian colonial schemes, but with me, here in this colossal basement bar, the dreamy fantasy versions of all three came together. It’s a castle in the fog, a place that never quite materialized, that exists in ideals and scuttles on the rocks of grim reality.
A side effect of collecting these mugs, as they all come filled with very heavy pours of overproofed rum cocktails, is me getting pretty tanked at 5:30 in the afternoon, and having all my emotions bubble right to the top.
On my way home on the Muni, an older woman nervously tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you know which stop the big Safeway is at?” I told her it was at Church, where I was getting off, and that she could follow me out. I watched her hobble across the crosswalk with a wave and got teary real quick. This is my city! I know it like the back of my hand. I can answer any of those questions here! How long will it be before I can do that in Los Angeles?
Back in the Tonga Room I stood by myself overlooking the pool while the fake lightning flashed and “rain” gushed down, texting John. I can’t believe my time in San Francisco is over. This was the first place where I really felt like I could unfold and build the life I truly wanted. I’m so excited for this next chapter, and like John responded, I think we’ll be surprised at all LA has to offer us, but this will always be my spiritual nativity and leaving her is brutal.
This past weekend was the first Daytime Realness of the season at El Rio. Paul and I lyfted over, planning to arrive 40 minutes or so after opening, figuring we’d beat the line that inevitably forms as the day goes on. We were greeted by easily 150 people in the queue already, and we joined Tyler and Colin midway through. Once inside we were greeted by essentially every masc-of-center queer in the city, crammed shoulder to shoulder from front to back, filling the space well past capacity.
By the time we’d been there for an hour or so, I truly felt like I had run into or caught glimpses of every person I’d hooked up with, chatted with, had cruised or been cruised by in the city since moving out here in 2016. It felt like a fitting bookend to my time here, like an insipid allegory: people who I’d engaged in the briefest of dark-corner fantasies, twilight encounters, night-time rendezvous, all dragged out into the harsh midday sun at 2pm on a Sunday. Look at them! Some were people I’d hoped to meet up with again — that rarest of birds, the NSA serial hook-up — some I’d hope to become friends with, here they all were, crammed on the patio next to the realization that none of that would ever come to pass. Time is up, time to go.
I’m not trying to read too much into it, but it’s definitely informing how I want to approach trysts in Los Angeles. John laughed when I told him that, but I was being serious. More intent, less chaff… a more careful curation.
Last week Carson, a friend from Utah, was chatting me up on Grindr. He was 32 miles away in San Jose for a work thing, and wanted my advice on the best cruising spots in the city. We’d served our church missions together 15 years ago — both of us desperately horny, closeted fags, (literally and metaphorically on an island) but neither of us realizing there was a kindred spirit in the other (an archipelago!) nor brave enough to do anything had we recognized one another. After some some recommendation from my go-tos, a pause, and then “why didn’t we ever have sex?” He means when I was in town last, not on our missions, but I still don’t have a ready answer. Who knows? The attraction was there, as was the hotel room, the willingness ; nevertheless the timing hadn’t ever worked out in that precisely right, exactly correct, literally perfect way required for two friends with the metric tons of religio-societal traumas we share, separately, to relax into a sexual encounter without tainting it with the anxiety of the aftermath. And here I was, on the exact opposite side of things at El Rio: “why didn’t we become friends?” I mentally telegraph to all of them. With the same answer, and for probably the same reasons: Who knows?
Lately I’ve been wanting to draw my hookups, portraits. Not in some sort of black book way, not a score sheet — but maybe just as a… memorial? A way to say: I knew this person, however briefly, and I think I saw them, too. Boys, men, theybies, all. We were the same, we shared something, and it both was and was not enough.