It was the last hours of 1999. Lots of people who should know better had predicted that the world would end at midnight. The computers that run industrial civilization wouldn’t be able to make the millennial leap, and from there it would be roving gangs and warlords.
I’d set out from Haight Street for a night’s walkabout in high anticipation of end-of-the-world spectacles. It was also New Year’s Eve, combining the last night of high tech bliss with the prosperity of American ingenuity which gifted two thirds of its citizens.
Up at home base, the Anderson Valley, and the remote ridges of the rest of Mendocino County, hill muffins were hunkered down, counting down the hours to gawd knew what. They had a year’s worth of rice and beans buried out by the pot patch in waterproof containers, their generators gassed up and their AK-47s on lock and load.
At the more excitable venues like KZYX and the Mendocino Environment Center, the libs were positively giddy at the prospect of world’s end as they swapped tips on where to get the best deals on bulk toilet paper.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the world myself and, like most old commies, great respect for the resilience of capitalism. I knew in my bones that the boys with the booty weren’t about to let the counting house fall down just because a gaggle of techno-nerds had forgotten to adjust the computer clocks.
Just in case the four horsemen rode in on January One, what better place to watch them do their thing than San Francisco?
But nothing happened.
I’ve never seen The City emptier or quieter. It was so quiet it was eerie. I started out from Haight and Ashbury, these days a fashion center for young people, with stores selling two hundred dollar pairs of rubber shoes with two-foot heels.
I’ve lived long enough to watch the Haight do eight sociological flip-flops — immigrant Russians and respectable blue collar, partial integration as black families moved west up from the Fillmore, hippies, up-market commercial, transient grunge, up market commercial again and single family wealth.
I footed it all the way up Ashbury, down 17th Street, through a deserted Castro, down Market to the Embarcadero where a sedate crowd had gathered to listen to singers I’d never heard of and watch fireworks.
There were cops all the way down Market posted at each intersection. The Critical Mass bike group pedaled sedately up Market about a thousand strong. A phalanx of motorcycle cops followed them while a police helicopter rotor-whipped the night air above.
At Van Ness and Market, Critical Mass stopped for the red light waiting for the police to escort them through to the other side of that wide intersection as if they were grandmas on three-wheelers.
At 9th and Market a couple of cops confiscated two cans of beer from two hat-backwards dudes. (It’s one thing to be a moron, but why try to look like one? Kids these days…) “But bro…” one of the hat-backwards complained as the cop plucked the beer from his hand. “Sorry,” the cop said, “This is a no alcohol night.”
At the Embarcadero a group of Chinese kids stood laughing and taking pictures of each other as they posed from behind a pair of oversized glasses. Of the dozen of them, about half wore their hair short and dyed in day-glo colors. An old guy said to another old guy, “Al, did you ever think you’d see a Jap with green hair?” Al replied, “Maybe, but I never thought I’d see two of ‘em.”
I seemed to be the third oldest guy in the throng. Huge speakers pounded out blunt rhythms with ya-ya lyrics. Young people danced as cops plucked beers out of startled but unresisting hands.
There was no point — celebratory or otherwise — standing around listening to music played so loud I couldn’t hear the conversations I tried to spy on, so I walked back up Market, then up Taylor for a bolito bowl at the original Original Joe’s, since relocated to North Beach after being driven out of the Tenderloin by the street chaos outside its doors. People were staying away out of fear. The counterman at Joe’s said business was slow. “"The no drinking rule, all the bullshit about how the cops were going to crack down on people. The Y2K bullshit from the hippies. That’s why nobody’s out there.”
Lots of stores on Market were boarded up in anticipation of looters who never arrived, lots weren’t. Old Navy and the Gap store windows were covered with three-quarter plywood. Between the cracks, I could see fat guys in rent-a-cop uniforms standing round. Some of them wore sidearms. Would they die for minimum wage when the wealth redistributors hurled themselves through the plywood?
I walked on up to Union Square where some kind of mega-millennial ecumenical prayer and music event was supposed to come off at $10 a pop. The believers had stayed away in droves. Union Square is a lot more crowded on Christmas day than it was on End Of The World Night.
There was nothing else to do so I stopped to listen to an unaffiliated evangelical do his thing at the corner of Geary and Stockton. He was a stocky guy about 40 who resembled a squat Elvis Presley, black hair swept back like fenders on a ‘55 Buick, and dressed in a black leather-like, head-to-toe zippered jump suit with an American flag sewn into its chest. God Guy wore a ten gallon cowboy hat festooned with flag medallions and alternating “Praise God!” decals. Nike running shoes rounded out his millennial attire. He said we had two hours to get right with God..
The preacher was bellowing his apocalyptic warnings through a small bullhorn. He put on a lot better show than anything happening down at the Embarcadero.
“God is not pleased with the Pope,” preacher man hollered at me as I settled in for the show. “Pope rhymes with dope. There’s no hope with the Pope.” That vein of alliterative gold quickly exhausted, the preacher brought his bullhorn inches from my face. “You ask me how I was brought up?” as if I’d asked. “Doesn’t really matter; it’s where I’m going that counts.” With that do-it-yourself exchange completed, he pivoted from me to shout anti-Clinton insults skyward. “Bill Clinton is a filthy, stinking sinner. Will I pray for this stinking, rotten, evil man? Why should I? He’s pro-queer, pro-abortion.”
It wasn’t hard to understand why the preacher was reduced to an open air pulpit. His wasn’t exactly a Frisco-friendly message, although he did toss out a few sops to the libs, whether out of concern for Frisco sensibilities or out of mental illness is never clear with street acts. “All weapons should be buried. They are evil. Praise God.” He got chuckles from me and fish eyes from the few passersby who even seemed aware of him.
A young Chinese guy soon appeared, a mischievous grin on his face and a violin case under his arm. I got the feeling the preacher and the violinist were old antagonists. The kid took out a small amplifier and plugged an electric string instrument into it and began sawing unmusically away a few feet from the rambunctious representative of the Prince of Peace.
“The devil won’t drive me out!” the preacher shouted at the kid, who promptly turned up the volume on his violin for a round of Waltzing Matilda. As I walked up Post the preacher and the electrified violinist were a foot apart, the kid laughing and hacking away at his amplified strings, the preacher screaming, “The devil hisself is knocking at my door, but he sure is wrong if he thinks God will let him in!”
At the rear door of the St. Francis hotel a bunch of cops were assembled to launch a mini-motorcade. The very sight of big black cars and motorcades makes me yearn for hand grenades, but I lingered, joining 50 or so other gawkers. I wanted to see who gets tax-funded escorts these days. A guy asked me, “Who’s here?” Al Gore, I replied. The guy turned to the lady with him and said authoritatively, “Al Gore? Wonder what he’s doing here? Let’s stick around.”
“Al Gore Al Gore Al Gores” rippled through the crowd, passed from one person to the next like a beer at a ball game. The crowd waiting for Al Gore grew larger. I regretted my little treachery until I reminded myself that anybody who’d wait outside a hotel door for a glimpse of Al Gore deserves whatever disappointment eventually emerged.
At the Civic Center another music festival was tuning up, but it also seemed lightly attended, probably because it was sponsored by The City. I walked on up a deserted Polk Street until I got to Sacramento where I hopped a free bus.
The Muni is never entirely free considering the emotional toll it often takes on its customers, but it was free to riders on this, The Last Night.
The bus was empty except for four Mexicans getting off work. Early in the morning, late at night, the Muni is a mobile Third World, ferrying the legions of underpaid people who do the real work of our latest economic miracle, the SUV-Dot Com decade where the dollars go up but fewer and fewer come down.
I got off at California and Masonic to catch the 33 back to the Haight. Two middle-aged women, one black, one white, and nicely done up, joined me at the bus stop. The area was deserted. “Do you mind if we stand near you?” one asks. “It’s creepy out here.” Yes, I’m the only one, I reply. They laughed. I don’t know if I should have been insulted at their menace-free assumption or flattered that they thought I was capable of serving as armor against the urban night.
The 33 eventually appears. My wards and I are the only passengers until Hayes Street where an odd guy in white bucks trips and sprawls onto the bus, lying on the steps like he’s dead drunk or has just dropped truly dead from the exertion of climbing onto the 33. But he’s neither, just clumsy.
“Are you going to ask me if I’m alright, driver?” the patient asks. No, the driver says without even looking at the guy as he pulls out into a uniquely vehicle-free Masonic Avenue. “How about you folks? Are you going to ask me if I’m alright?” Mr. Pratfall asks us. “Are you alright?, I and my two wards chorus. “Yes, I am, thank you,” the man says and, apparently gratified at our mannerly concern, sits down without saying another word.
The Muni is endlessly fascinating. San Francisco is endlessly fascinating. The libs are lamenting The City’s alleged loss of its “diversity,” but I’ve never seen it more diverse, and I’ve been living there off and on for 80 years, having arrived as a three-year-old refugee from Hawaii.
At Haight and Masonic I alight. One of the two ladies I was selflessly accompanying point to point, or at least until a visible threat materialized, wished me happy new year as the other said, “Thank you for guarding us.”
Shucks, ma’am, happy to put your mind to ease.
Haight Street was deserted. Ben and Jerry’s was the only place open. Even the bums and the dopers had disappeared. Nobody was out anywhere in San Francisco. Only a few thousand suburbanites massed at the Embarcadero for the most chaste New Year’s Eve in the history of the Golden Gate.
The next day the Chronicle said that there were fewer police and fire calls on New Year’s Eve than there are on any Friday night of the year. People stayed home for the end of the world, but it didn’t end anywhere, even in Mendocino County where everyone was fully prepared.
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