What do we remember about this place?

Those of us who can remember being children here remember the feeling of cold, the smell of eucalyptus, and hunger. Not serious African hunger; hunger from never being home, having no pocket money, no one telling us to eat, no packed lunches.

We would go to the Chinese restaurant and sit over an order of French fries for hours. The fries cost a dollar. They were the kind with a yellow, rippled skin, and insides the consistency of damp powder.

Sometimes we had just enough for the fifty-cent coffee. Sometimes we got high and bought Twinkies. Twinkies were a dollar.

We all got high, mostly on pot that was stolen from someone’s parents. We got high on anything we could.

Sometimes we would spare change on Mission. If we got enough we’d go to Haight Street to look for drugs. There was usually someone with a dirty beard to help us buy acid. Most dealers would not sell directly to us, but there was always someone below a dealer who, like us, did not believe in children.

Another place we could go was Valencia Gardens for nickel bags. That was the old Valencia Gardens—concrete block buildings surrounding a cement courtyard. They were painted a grimy, pinkish color. In the courtyard we were hidden from the street. It was its own world.

The pot we bought there was kind of brown and rusty flavored and supposedly not strong but any pot at all made me leave my body back then.

To get drunk, we would hang around outside a liquor store alert to the slight, pedophiliac impulse of the people that bought us alcohol. We had an instinct for those people, men who opened dangerous doors for the pleasure of watching our little bodies pass through.

I don’t remember ever having fun then. Maybe some of us did, but I recall that there was a grim seriousness to everything. We plotted and planned each digression as if it were for our survival. In fact, there was little to digress from. School had a “work at your own pace” policy, and everybody’s parents were a mess: separating, in trouble, or not there. It was like a Charlie Brown cartoon, the parents just a distorted, plaintive noise in the background.

I remember taking acid and listening to Black Sabbath in the dark. Someone told me that the song N.I.B. was written by the devil to win the love of a witch. There was beauty in that beseeching wail.

We used to steal liquor and go to the Exploratorium. I suppose it was pretty there, even beautiful, those Greek figures in poured cement weeping everywhere, and the pond, but there was always the smell of eucalyptus.

I hate the smell of eucalyptus.

Taking drugs was different than it had been for our parents. They had all read the Carlos Castaneda books. These books were understood to be full of meaning. They taught that reality was just a cage to bang against and another place was just beyond the cage, a colorful, deep and wild place where a person could dissolve into spirit, or something. Our parents’ gift to us was the permission to go there. Or was it that they took us there and dropped us off? I only know that for us drugs were different. We got high but it didn’t make life more indeterminate or strange. There was no law left to bend.

We would wander around the city for hours. It was frightening. The J Church was the only place that was familiar. Riding it, I knew where I was going. We used to sit on the steps, never the seats. I don’t know why people got annoyed stepping over us.

Once we went to The Church of Jimi Hendrix. I wonder if it’s still there. I don’t know what I expected. Secretly I didn’t care about Jimi Hendrix, or any of those things that were supposed to be so important to us. I suppose we were looking for dangerous men who would somehow put an end to the limbo we were stuck in, but all we found were old black guys smoking pot and watching a Hendrix video on TV. It was disappointing.

San Francisco really was colder back then. The sun shines all the time now, but in that time we were always hunched and huddled, lighting stolen cigarettes against the whipping wind and taking rides in strange cars where there might be heat.

We were underdressed, but I don’t think it occurred to us to wear warmer clothes. We wore jeans, little jackets, T-shirts. Sometimes I wore short skirts in the summer when it was especially cold. My legs were white and freezing, covered in goose-bumps.

What were we looking for, riding buses all over the city, winding up in places where homeless people convened? It had something to do with romance or, as we thought of it, sex. And yet, I had not even felt the beginning of that desire. Maybe some of us did. It’s possible. We had the need to go where we were not allowed, but not in order to grow up. I recall no hopes for the future. We didn’t talk about what we would do when we were older. We never thought, we never said, that we were children. My body was full of fear and I didn’t understand anything, but I didn’t know that that was as it should be.

We were often, maybe always, in danger but we didn’t see things that way. I, for one, thought that the threat I sensed was of something from the inside of me.

We were delinquent, but in no way rebellious. We were not against anything more than a vague idea of “suburban” or “preppy”. We were not for anything either. I try to remember what was important then and I guess it was to be together, in groups, to belong somewhere. It’s a cliché about children, but there it is. We passed pinkeye back and forth like stray puppies. We pooled our money for pot, for potato chips, for bus fare. We shared clothes. We drew the symbol for anarchy on everything without knowing where it came from or what it meant.

Cynthia Mitchell grew up in San Francisco and has recently returned here from New York. She currently has a play going into production in France and is collaborating on two films that she wrote for Anjali Sundaram and Robert Arnold. She is a founding member of I, Daughter of Kong, a long term, open collaborative art project with a core collective of five members.

Photograph by Mitche Manitou

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