HELLO WEST COAST!...AGAIN; or, THERE...AND BACK...(AGAIN)

it wasn't the same, but i knew going into it that the weekend wouldn't be the same if it turned out to be (the same, that is). and from the very beginning: i'd only ever arrived in the city by car, and i'd only ever ridden bart from the airport once before, long before, when the car was dead in berkeley and we'd had to ride the train out to the airport because we'd made a promise to her mother that we'd ask after her wallet at one of the airport hotels. so even that first ride was something new, and even if only because this time i wasn't making the trip at night and could see -- and could see that i was back on the west coast. i didn't, however, opt for the entirely unprecedented experience of stepping off for whatever adventure i might not find in south san francisco or in daly city, and i left them behind with almost nothing more than the terse regard i'd given them for the reminder that they'd given me of where i was. but i'd been reminded of something else as well, because the reminder of where i was -- or, more correctly, of where i was approaching -- had caught me off guard with an early suggestion of the diffuse melancholy with which i'm always left by (or that i seem to always feel when i'm leaving) san francisco. not a feeling of loss, exactly, but a certain feeling of losing out; and this weekend wasn't, it seemed, going to be different in that respect, although it wasn't going to be the same.

and it had already started out differently, and not only because i'd flown in or because i'd ridden bart from the airport to the city, but because i got off the train at the same stop that i always had whenever i'd ridden from downtown or the east bay, and the difference wasn't that i walked up the stairs to 16th and mission alone, but that the people i wasn't with in that moment weren't the same. then i walked up mission to taqueria cancún, the same place i had always stopped before walking over to ritual on valencia, and the people who weren't with me there again weren't either the ones who were my sense of losing out since the last time. i definitely needed a burrito.

and then i can't say that i needed another coffee, but i had one, because how else was i going to be able to steal another mug from ritual? the one i'd gotten the last time had made it to spain from portland and then to portugal from spain, but it stayed, chipped, with a friend in montenegro because it was already all of the weight of its journey and had, as i realized only in the moment that i hefted it and decided not to add more contraband to another border crossing, gone as far as its story needed it to go. so it stayed as the beginning of someone else's, and then, in the story that i had been telling, i flew across the country to steal myself another one. it turned out in the meantime, however, that i was going to need two (which is another different story), and i'll say here that the difficulty i foresaw in getting back to ritual in that same particular weekend for the second was what kept me from taking the first. all or nothing. in the moment, though, i might have admitted that i just hadn't positioned myself appropriately to be successful without raising suspicion (especially with the cupping going on), and i was going to need to execute a perfectly clean operation if i wanted to make sure that i could pull of another one later. as i took a photograph of the mug i'd been given for my coffee in order to send to the friend to whom i had gifted the one i remembered having taken the last time with much less deliberation (although, admittedly, aided also by a now absent accomplice), i regretted not having the foresight just to pay for a pair and lie about their origin. insult to injury that i'd ended up simply paying for a featured coffee that i didn't consider to be very good.

to taqueria cancún and to ritual, but not to dolores park, not even alone, because this weekend was going to be different, and the park would be full of ghosts, smartly accessorized underemployment enviable repartee, especially on a sunny friday afternoon, a foggy picture of the fag, the lesbians, the trans man and the pansexual beauty queen. but this weekend's photo shoot was at a different location, and besides, the park was still on the meh list, at least until sunday. i did, however, brave truck. i'd had a coffee after all, and anyway the bar was in the opposite direction of the park on a more straightforwardly sentimental path toward the hotel, the foggy picture of an after party and a too late first date. one of the ladies had texted to say that they were on their way there, and i wasn't half done with my beer when i got a second message to say that they had arrived. so i said goodbye to the bartender, who hadn't worked at the bar long enough for my ever to have met him before, and to the only other two o'clock customer (or friend of whomever), having at least had the time to be told what was going to be happening at the bar for the rest of the weekend. then it was quickly down past the banners on folsom (because i'd taken an extra moment to finish my drink), a zag onto 10th and another onto market before recognizing the civic center for the very first time in however many visits and crossing into the tenderloin, on the back end of which i found the ladies and dropped my bags where they would be staying in that second floor room at the intersection of taylor and o'farrell.

and i don't think that i was very successfully communicative of the extent to which that certain sense of losing out, that melancholy, had absolutely -- and already -- diffused to solidly permeate the three hours i'd spent without them. of course, they hadn't been there, with me at that after party or in the picture at the park, and that might have been the real barrier to my conveying the strangeness of knowing that...i didn't know, actually, but what i can tell you i know now is that i was sweaty and i smelled and i was all of a sudden self-conscious. apparently, that certain sense of whatever i was finding difficult to articulate was randomly conducive to excitability, and that, apparently, was confusing. i needed to shower. then the picture gets foggy.

maybe it was only because the two of us had been recounting the part of the christmas saga that we'd shared in madrid, but when our long way back from unbelievably bland mexican and from the coffee place next to the corset place on linden being closed took me back through the civic center with the ladies in the dark, city hall was unmistakably spanish. the one who could see it agreed. we hadn't noticed or remarked on cool super discount at the southeast corner of taylor and eddy streets when we'd passed it earlier because she (the one who had agreed) had been telling us about how when she'd gone down to pick up her wig that stefan had been on the phone and on top of that busy with everything else and just hadn't been having it but had helped her with what grace you could imagine he could have mustered nonetheless. and on that earlier walk down taylor we'd agreed that that interaction should be a portent. then just before that, although i'd feared that the rest of my first attempt at this story had just left them confused while i showered, the other one had told me that my account of finding the leather pride flag flying over the mission armory had had the verve of a patriot's description of his love for his country. so i supposed that here, in some sense, and nonetheless concurrent with that lingering sense of losing out, i had a sense of home, however diffuse and melancholic.

i was, however, still afraid of being called out as the poseur as i followed the ladies around to the events. i was on solicited hire, yes, but unquestionably inexperienced. eagerness was, well, to be taken aside. luckily though, it got me company back to truck that night and then later the party invitation that i'd been hoping to elicit all day. for a glass of whiskey with him and his cat. luckily too, he had experience (and tea), and he told me that most everyone at the street fair would be posing, so i would fit right in if i wanted to, although it wouldn't matter to him either way because he wasn't going. (it would turn out that he had other plans.) was it that, then? on what, exactly, was i already afraid of having lost out? i didn't know -- exactly -- and hence the general nature of the problem...although he didn't ask. he'd lost out once in italy, but had he been to lisbon? that city had always reminded me of here. no, he said, he hadn't been, but he was definitely interested. and with that, it began again, that feeling that, later, the memory forgetting that in the moment it was somewhere else, levels stupid accusations of infatuation. but in fact no, just more of the same, only going forward with the stories, happily alone in the arms of the city, although like new and, like always, this time different.