I. Rose in the Foyer

The house was distinguished from its neighbors chiefly by a blue-and-orange paint job that at least one resident – an attorney who lived on the corner – called “indefensible.” This is what the landlady told Rachel and Graham as the three stood in the foyer they would all share.
Those are my [...]

The Guy With The List, mid-30s.
Guy’s ad was the first one I ever answered. Except for a one-nighter with someone I met at a conference two days after I filed my divorce papers, no one had touched me since my soon-to-be-ex-husband. I’d been window shopping for men through the Salon and Nerve personals, but as [...]

San Francisco, 1976, between earthquakes. An elevated artery of freeway towers over the Embarcadero, pulsing a steady stream of vehicles down into the narrow, slower heart of the city. Susanna walks, steadies her camera against the edge of a wall pasted with posters that advertise concerts she missed, consumer junk that she will never buy. [...]

“I have something for you,” she said as they lay together at the end of an afternoon.
“What?”
He was staring at Jihan Li’s gullet inches away. It fascinated him. They were naked, side by side, and from Penman’s view, nose to throat, it seemed her Adam’s apple was a small animal scurrying back and forth in [...]

Glossy, brown, and whiskered, blubber and bark,
I left my heart with the sea lions
who fight and snuggle on their piers,
some flipper to flank looking almost like love
while alpha males galumph and butt
their rivals from their comfy berths.
Eating crab cocktail from a plastic cup, birthday
present to myself, and watching white-sailed barks
in the bay and playing tourist, [...]

6:00 a.m.
The peeling Victorian sits on the north side of Cesar Chavez, on the south side of a Safeway lot, three lanes of non-stop traffic and no good bars to speak of. Two flats are connected by a tile staircase, an ever-present smell of wet rug and spilled soy and roommate. There’s a crayoned wall [...]

It may be a loaded question, but it’s one I have to ask: “So, what kind of work do you do?” Most clients hesitate to answer. They look back at me through suspiciously cocked eyes and choose their words carefully, as if the information I’m looking for is going to be used against them. Maybe [...]

This guy Eric, who talks so loud we used to call him Ear Ache, came to my Modern Times reading recently, just to start shit, or rather stir up 20 year old shit.
“Marie ShBoom’s coming!” he crowed.
Though Marie’s older than me, we’re both from a time when you could spend most of the night putting [...]

Is there some numerological, cabalistic lore the city consults in naming San Francisco’s bus lines? I’ve never really tried to divine whether there’s any logic to it; there probably is, and it’s no doubt disappointingly quotidian, so I prefer to think of the various bus designations as separate states of mind: there’s the stalwart, straight-line [...]

Walk across Great Highway toward the water from Noriega Street in the misnamed, terminally overcast Sunset district, peek over the sand dunes and witness the only break that ever scared the bejeezus out of me. The frigid juice of Ocean Beach on a big winter day rumbles with the roar of a felled redwood. On [...]