33
By Jim Nawrocki • From Instant City Issue 4, The Castro
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 determinism of the 24 Divisadero; the strange, rare improbability of the 44 O’Shaughnessy; the lumbering, miasmic weirdness of the 22 Fillmore. But the 33 seems to carry itself with
a uniquely satisfying sense of the possible. Maybe it’s the odd paradox of that uneven number, strangely doubled, those two numeral threes looking like two sets of empty arms, spread out in a gesture of longing, emblematic of a sense of wanting but not quite getting. I’ve often stood for eternities hoping for the 33’s arrival, so associating it with a quality of existential suspense is more than appropriate.
I used to catch the 33 bus out at Portrero Hill, right in front of the big ugly mall that squats over a parking garage and offers streams of shoppers huge quantities of product:piles of cheap clothes; pallet-fulls of paper, plastic pens, desk accessories and other office supplies; and aisle upon aisle of light-bathed produce and processed food. There’s a ringing falseness to the place that makes one want to leave, and fortunately the 33 stops nearby. From there it moves down 16th Street, cuts over to 18th and then rolls on through the Mission on its way to the Castro and points beyond.
For all its faults, I have invariably found the 33 to be worth the wait. It seems to traverse extremes of the city that few bus lines come close to. Sure, there are the Geary St. 38s. Now there’s a street that cuts across a
pretty big swath of San Francisco. William Vollman once wrote a lovingly-rendered essay about the stretch of Geary Street. But what’s all that romantic, after all, about a straight line, no matter how varied the
territory it covers? The 33 has its own cockeyed agenda, zig-zagging from Portrero, through the Mission, and to parts of the city – moods even – beyond and above that. Once it twists through its route in the Mission, the 33 rolls faithfully along 18th toward the Castro. On a warm day, you can look out and see the sunbathers at “Speedo Ridge” in Dolores Park. The joggers. The dog walkers. The tennis court duos. The shirts-and-skins basketballers. At Church Street the 33 crosses paths with the J Church line, the train that snakes its way up over Dolores and on toward Noe Valley. Once the 33 crosses that boundary and edges into the Castro, the atmosphere starts to shift.
Stopping at the iconic intersection between Walgreen’s on the right of 18th and the picture windows of Harvey’s on the left, the 33 waits long enough to let its typically large crowd of passengers either get on or get off, and the interval provides a good view of the Castro’s always lively foot traffic. Once, as I stood in front of a laundry on 18th, I watched an irate man run from that corner bus stop and catch up with a 33 that had sailed on by without stopping. At the Stop sign, he jumped up onto the bus’s front bumper, somehow anchoring himself on the outside of the windshield, eye to eye with the driver, and screamed shrill obscenities and protests, refusing to move until the driver let him on. The standoff continued until the
raging, jilted passenger tired of the struggle and walked away. Yes, the 33 can play hard to get. Passing through the Castro from inside that bus on any given day or night one feels a bit like Dante in the Purgatorio, glimpsing some goofy circle of bedlam before moving on to other things.
For years I lived not far from that stretch of 18th that runs from Castro toward Upper Market. Each time I ride the 33 up that hill it’s a climb into memory. I scan, like the text of a story, the buildings and storefronts that have changed innumerable times since I moved to the city ten years ago: the old corner store where a curmudgeonly white-haired man presided over a mysterious inventory of mostly empty shelves before he closed up shop and it became a yoga studio; the little house with a sandstone brick front that used to be home to an old Irish woman who displayed ceramic leprechauns and miniature Irish flags in her front window; the little leafy lane of Clover St. that leads to a nearby cottage, a stopping off point for me that turned into a six-year residence. As the 33 climbs the steady hill of 18th you can look back and see the street falling off into the distance – at night the view is jeweled with the expanse of yellow-gold street lights and the red and white lights of cars moving in both directions. It’s as if the bus were rising to a gradual take off from the earth.
Once the 33 reaches the terminus of 18th, it stops, almost to catch its breath, and then turns and rolls up toward the intersection of Clayton and Upper Market, and it’s here that the 33 affords one of the most exceptional views of the city that you can find. At this point it becomes necessary for the driver to negotiate an almost impossibly tight turn up onto Clayton. As he or she does so, passengers get treated to a vantage of the city that sweeps from Corona Heights to the Bay Bridge and the South of Market basin. The whole of it looks like a kind of moving painting, a cinema of life framed by the generous canvas of the bus windows. If you’re lucky enough to be riding that route on a sunny day, it’s a view dominated by bright blues of Bay and sky. Late in the day, the windows of the buildings in Oakland can throw back orange hues of the late sunlight they’re reflecting from the West, as if fires were blooming in the hills again. At night it’s a view
that’s nothing short of magical: the city lights of San Francisco, the Bay itself. If you’re sitting in the right place, you can look through your own reflection in the window and see the spread of the starry, illuminated city transposed over it.
There are moments in your ongoing experience of a place that come unbidden but that provide a sudden, sure and unforgettable assurance that you have found the place that’s truly your home, the kind of home you can only really find after you’ve left the place where you grew up, the home that you claim for yourself. I had lived in San Francisco for years before I rode the 33 and saw the way San Francisco looks, in all of its varying light, from the 33’s turn onto Clayton. I can’t remember much, if anything, about the people who were randomly thrown together with me on the bus that day, but it was clear, and sunny, and we were in the middle of the turn’s arc when I looked over and caught the fullness what you can see from no other place but there. I knew that the streets and the hills were cradling the lives of thousands of people right at that moment, and that we were all moving in separate circles around a place that could only be this, and only now.
The top of Cole Valley is a foggy and strangely quiet little pocket of the city. When I lived on Carmel St., I’d ride the 33 whenever I was lucky enough to catch it and let it take me up and over the hill. The wind and fog come late in the day, blowing around the northside of the tree-covered hill that comes down against the houses of Stanyan like some medieval forest out of Tolkein. The 33 would drop me at the top of Carmel St., right at the traffic light at Clayton, and I’d walk home down the steep slope. It always arrived and departed from that stop with a soft little whiff of its motor, almost like a sigh, and it would echo in my ears, a little meditation, as I walked home.
