Connections

It was three in the morning and the only sign of life was light showing through the transom window above the door. The house was an ancient bay-windowed Italianate on the Mission edge of San Francisco's Bernal Heights, with a darkened store on the ground floor and the upper stories covered in stucco. Behind the door a narrow stair went up to the third floor, half blocked by empty milk crates and dust-covered speakers piled with industrial tripods. The stair made a full turn near the top. At the turn, a railing towered overhead lined with bicycles, and people milling about in outlandish costumes vaguely recalling the Edward Gorey theme of the Ball that had shut down at two. The high walls were covered with offbeat local art. At the top of the stair a man in a one-piece Edwardian swimsuit and clown facepaint greeted people and made general conversation. His head was shaven but for a green-tinted clump of hair on the crown the size of a tennis ball. Later I learned he worked for Google. He told me that “the twenty-something geniuses from Harvard and Princeton we keep hiring just don't know how to handle a fifty-year-old with hair like this!”

I pushed my way through to the kitchen with the bag we'd brought and unloaded the remains of our after-party pre-party: Most of a liter of ginger ale, most of a pint of Maker's Mark, most of a bag of tortilla chips, most of a jar of salsa, most of a box of chocolate chip cookies, and a few canned beers still cold from the liquor store. I took a beer and wandered through the various rooms, trying to find someone to talk to or a place to be. The crowd I'd come with was doing likewise, and some, being more socially forthright than me, were already finding places and conversations.

For a couple of hours, until the morning light snuck in under the blinds, we sat and stood, met and mingled, shared whip-its and whiskey bottles, cuddled in puddles, and generally enjoyed the inexplicably warm atmosphere people of this culture share. There's something amazing about the common experiences of Burning Man, low-risk drugs, open relationships, gypsy art careers, and dressing flamboyantly in public. Few of these things apply to all. But everyone has a foot in some part of it, and it opens them to trust and cheerfulness and a broadly diffused but dependable form of love. The outside stresses of one-upmanship and competition and inappropriate boundary-crossing expressions of desire from the unawakened are, by and large, missing. It's sweet.

We were dressed, as everyone, in our Gorey-Edwardian best, except our hostess Raven, the green-haired clown’s fiancée, who had changed into something more comfortable. She was a young mother whom I know vaguely, her face wonderfully overdone with glitter and dots and her body in nothing but a green kimono that opened as she moved and flowed behind her. She was such a vision, the sides of her head shaved, her remaining hair cascading in brunette dreadlocks, the rest of her all tattoos and nakedness and Japanese silk. She was completely bad-ass but when she heard about our night, she deferred all bad-assery to Sunya, for we had a different tale to tell.

We started the evening with a small crew, arriving at our hotel on Sutter St. about an hour before the event began. But as we arrived, before we could get dressed, Sunya got a phone call. One of her children was in terrific pain and needed her. She quickly arranged for medical assistance and struggled with what to do next while I parked the car. There really was no struggle. We took possession of the room and began preparations, but by the time I was retrieving the car from overnight parking, I had decided to forget about attending the Ball too and go with her. I was very inappropriate and used my phone while negotiating San Francisco and Bay Bridge traffic to arrange for the sale of our tickets. We drove back to Sacramento as fast as we could. In a hospital across the street from Sutter's Fort, I sat in the emergency room waiting area while she took care of her child. After a few hours of that, everything was stable and well, and we hit the road and went back down to the City. We may have missed the Ball, but still we had a hotel room we had paid for.

We hit the road again, and got back to the City about one-thirty. I got into a local liquor store a minute before they closed for supplies. Our friends came staggering down from Van Ness after the Ball closed down at two. The crew spent an hour in various inebriated permutations of dress, undress, and general hedonism before a message came through informing us of the after-party described above, and so there we went.

When our hostess heard that Sunya had abandoned the ball to be with her child and then, in the middle of the night, come back again, she was touched and impressed and basically said Sunya completely kicked her ass. She does kick ass, but so does Raven, as this image of this coming summer's newlyweds attests, as indeed do most of the people I know through these amazing connections.