I'm standing on Ocean Beach, but I can't see the ocean. I hear it, tearing up its own bed. The waves salt the wind. The sea is so close. Breathing down my neck, on the other side of this giant wall.
I stare for a few hours, just trying to visualize, until the pure white surface starts to make my retinas throb. I feel like crying after a while, or maybe that's the sea air.
Roach comes up behind me and asks if I feel inspired. I almost lie, but what the fuck. So I say no, I feel totally out of my depth. Roach puts his hand on my shoulder and says he has uber faith in me.
The wall doesn't look quakeproof, but they say it is. Maybe two or three feet wide, it runs all along the Great Highway, from Golden Gate Park all the way to Sloat, and then down Skyline Boulevard to protect the fancy golf course and the Olympic Club. Just in case El Nino goes even more bug-ass and the ocean tries to swallow the Sunset. Even a few years ago, nobody would have thought it—but then again, nobody predicted the Manhattan tsunami.
"It's not like you owe me anything, you know." I don't take my eyes off the giant white space, even when I talk to Roach. "Or have anything to atone for." I try to will shapes to appear in that towering whiteness, but it resists.
"It's not like that, Julie," Roach says. "We all thought you were a great muralist, just an awesome artist in general. The whole committee agreed. There's no nepotism."
"Okay."
What would it be like to live in one of these Great Highway houses? First the horrendous construction, then this monstrosity steals away your ocean view. Then some flaky artist chick comes along and paints rainbows or something on it. I'm not painting the whole wall, just one section, a half dozen feet or so.
When I first met Roach, he was in his mid-thirties but looked both younger and older. His face looked boyish, yet ravaged by some bad decisions I don't know all the details of. Now, though, he just looks old. Whatever he was fleeing, it's overtaken him, and he seems glad: he's surrendered to life at last, and it's had its way with him.
Roach leads me to a staircase tucked away behind one big bulwark along the wall, over near Noriega. We climb, and soon we're standing on top, looking down at the waves.
"It's like a paradox," Roach says. "All the places people most want to live are built on the water. Because once upon a time, the cool people went to sea. Or traded, or fucked sea travelers. Maybe they craved a taste of danger, maybe they just wanted to get rich. Either way, we all ended up here, in worse peril than anyone ever bargained on."
I tune out Roach's holistic doomsaying and stare at the waves. They're soothing, yet inexorable, bashing against the concrete, over and over. Would people rather see nautical shit, to remind them of the view they lost? Or would that be too painful, especially with the lingering potential for destruction? Would people rather see something escapist? Heroic? Cultural? Probably they just want comfort.
I ditch Roach, head home, and start painting curios. Little one-inch pictures of horse heads in Admiral Nelson hats or ants surfing in space. It's easier to think small for some reason.
Roach's crotch sort of smelled like the ocean, back when I had sex with him. A seafaring adventure scent, like the wind from the last island in a chain. Nothing past that atoll but knots and knots of blue. Nearby, on his inner hip, there was a scar that he claimed he'd gotten in a knife fight in Albuquerque. (I heard later it was from a teledildonics accident.) His pubic hair was brown, but laced with gray.
Roach responded to my Craigslist ad, back when I still did the "casual encounters" thing. He sold himself as a "business dad" type, but in person he was more like an aging hippie crammed into a suit. He'd been doing open relationships before, but now he was married and cheating, which I didn't realize at first.
"I used to practice kind of a deep sharing," he said, running a hand under his receding light brown hair. "I wanted to be right there with my lovers ⋯ like if I could bring my center of presence to whoever I was loving that moment, it would be almost like teleportation. The more lovers I had, the more places I could be in at once. Dissolving the here and the there into just the where." So, yeah: hippie in a suit.
I didn't see Roach for a few years. The next time, I didn't recognize him at first, because he was fully clothed and I'd forgotten his face. I was on my knees, trying to capture the magnanimity of Papa Smurf in pencils on a plaster wall. I heard a noise and turned to see this middle-aged, nondescript guy wearing pajamas and a barbecue apron.
He looked all startled and greeted me with exaggerated formality, to let me know I should pretend not to know him. Since I really had no clue who he was, that was easy.
"I'm Roach," he said, slowly and with too much emphasis. "Nice to Meet You."
"I'm Julie," I said, copying his loud-casual diction. "Your Wife Hired Me. I'm Painting a Mural for Your Kid's Wall." Roach's child, Jasmine, had green curtains that matched her eyes but clashed with the deep mahogany of the rest of Roach's Edwardian row house.
"Oh yes," Roach said. "Papa Smurf and the Bosozoku Mice. Cool Combination."
"It Was Your Daughter's Idea," I said. This turned into a discussion of whether the Bosozoku Mice, those rebellious bikers, would like Papa Smurf if they actually met. At some point, I had an inkling I might have met Roach before, but I couldn't place him. Then he mentioned his name again and I finally twigged.
I went, "Oh! I Remember You Now!" in the same exaggerated tone, then covered my mouth.
A half dozen years after that, Roach got in touch, because he was on some committee to pick mural artists to paint sections of the giant seawall and he'd convinced the other members that I'd be the ideal person to turn an eyesore into a neighborhood treasure.
Can't sleep. My bedroom wall becomes The Wall and my clock radio's green flicker becomes sea light. In the half-life of my dream state, I wonder if anybody has tried asking the ocean what it wants. Maybe the ocean's demands are reasonable.
It probably wants maidens, I think. That sounds suitably mythic. Plus it's what everybody wants: maidens lashed to a stone, spray soaking their clothes before the tide even rises to swallow them. Do you still have to be a virgin to be a maiden nowadays? What's the upper age limit? Probably I'm too old.
My skin feels hot but I'm cold inside, like I'm coming down with something. I don't want to wake up my girlfriend, Lexa, by thrashing around.
I extricate myself from the bedsheets as gently as I can and walk into the kitchenette part of our little apartment. The canary yellow cabinet doors never shut properly, so they flap like bat wings at face level, over and over again.
I make tea with the whooshing electric kettle. I think about maidens in chains, at the mercy of the rising waves, or of a tentacley sea monster. This is the kind of kinky shit I used to dwell on, back when I was a slut and had a lot of spare mental capacity.
I pull out my laptop and write an email to Roach, explaining that I can't paint the seawall after all. I'm not the person he thinks I am, and there are so many great muralists in the city who deserve the commission way more. I don't have the Eros to go with the Thanatos. Years of painting Mickey Mouse murals have dulled my rawness, as surely as the deskiest desk job.
After writing a dozen rationalizations and then backspacing over each one, I decide not to send the email after all. I'll sleep on it, if I can sleep at all. I wake up sketching with one finger in midair, seven inches away from my face. Fancy swirls and shapes. Lexa offers me coffee and I wake up the rest of the way, and I can't remember what I was sketching.
"You looked like you were conducting an orchestra." Lexa leans over me with the coffee cup. I lift enough of my torso to hold a saucer without spattering the bed.
Lexa and I have been together two years, and we've lived together for six months. We have an open relationship, in theory, but we're both too busy to fool around with anyone else. We spend all our downtime together, and we only have one bed.
Lexa is shockingly beautiful, with hazel eyes, light brown skin, and bold cheekbones. Lately, her hair is rust. She dresses like a punk rock kindergarten teacher, but she works for a nonprofit battling against violence.
"It's just weird," Lexa says over breakfast. "We're finally turning San Francisco into a walled city. Like a gated community."
Only a few parts, I point out, and only to protect against the sea. It's not like poor people will have to pass through a checkpoint—and yet it does seem like more and more of our friends are being run out of town these days. Lexa says a bunch of her friends are going to tear shit up this afternoon, make the yuppies feel unwelcome. A protest? No, more like a riot, but with sprinkles of flash mob and rave. Someone sends a text with an exact time and place, and a target. Could be a person, could be a thing. Everybody swoops down at exactly 4:03 and dishevels the target as nonviolently as possible. By 4:06, everyone has dispersed.
Last week, they all converged on a private equity guy who invests in private prisons and detention centers, while he was walking along Natoma Street. They surrounded him in a whirl of natural fabrics and sweet-smelling oils and put noisy punk hop headphones on his head. Then they stole his clothes, painted slogans in body glitter across his thick chest hair, and dressed him in Roxxxie Dent's Folsom Street Fair castoffs. The whole operation took two minutes and thirty-four seconds, the exact length of DJ Smurfette's "It's Big and Thick and Doesn't Exist (So Suck It)."
I'm not sure how I feel about this, it all sounds very nonconsensual. But Lexa says late-late-late-waytoolate-stage capitalism is also very nonconsensual.
"You should come along," Lexa says. "You'll see how low-key it is. People sometimes thank us for glad-mobbing them, like now they finally know they're in San Francisco. It's all fun. Come on."
An hour later, Lexa and I are riding the N Judah, and I'm still wondering why I said yes. Oh yeah—it was because Lexa promised we could go to Lush and Old Navy while we wait for the call to go fuck shit up. It all balances out. "I love how every wedge of soap has the face of the person who made it, like they're our friends who we're paying to make soap for us," I say.