'What About America Now?'
A few days after September 11th, Juliana and I were walking in Pasar Glodok, Jakarta's bustling Chinese market, and a teenager asked me where I was from. I told him America. With showy adolescent menace he said, "What about America now?" I went mute. I didn't know much about America before the attacks, let alone after it. I wanted to say I have no idea, and I wanted to say Fuck you, kid; but instead I walked away. I began telling people I was Mexican or Spanish. If instead they guessed I was German, which despite my dark features they often did, I agreed. It didn't really matter: German, Mexican -- we're all Americans over here. That's how completely we've blighted the earth's face. After the encounter with the teenager, I pretended not to know English, which was harder to do than I thought; but feigning ignorance was the only way to be left alone, except by the stares.
What about America now? To begin with, I hadn't come back to America; I'd come back to San Francisco. I happen to love it, but it isn't America. Walk around the city, as I did for weeks, and you see people absorbed in midday leisure at cafés and spas, thronging the Hayes Valley shoe stores. The sushi bars are always full and the taverns are loud with festivity and cell phones. Everyone is doing yoga, they are expensively dressed and sipping soy cappuccinos. It is both appealing -- who would not like to have the chance to do and buy whatever one fancied, whenever one fancied? -- and appalling. On the one hand, San Francisco, more than perhaps any other US city, embodies the best of the affluent American democracy. The sidewalks are relatively free of grime and drugs (just squint while you walk through the Tenderloin), the bars are smoke-free, the urban vibe is actively political, and people of all sexualities, nations, and colors can walk the streets openly and safely. It's one of the few American cities with a truly multicultural, cosmopolitan identity. There is Japantown, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Castro; there is gay and straight, industry and technology, Europe and Asia, old money and new. The pot doesn't quite melt, but it is stirring.
On the other hand, this prosperity exacts a steep price. Some neighborhoods, like the Mission, have totally lost their ethnic character, and others are suffering the same slow bleed. Formerly modest, cozy exurbs like Berkeley are now too pricey for many of the people who settled them years ago, and the great maw of development has swallowed up dozens of outlying semirural towns. In San Francisco proper, rents are outrageous, people are amiable but not open, and their smiles disappear as soon as your presence interferes with theirs. Peel off the supple mask of Northern California post-hippie ease, and you'll find a pallid neurotic who obsesses over even the smallest elements of lifestyle and friendship -- and who assuages the doubt by lavishing more money on Pilates and organic haircuts. The banknotes say we trust in God, but by now everyone knows that we really trust the cash on which it says so. And other than spoiled heirs to the thrones, retired jocks, and bored celebrities, only hopeless naïfs and cynical litigators go into politics. Our nation's religious and political identity, as far as I could tell when I got back to San Francisco, inhered in the assiduous maintenance of our own individual equilibriums. The American Self was a multibillion dollar retail enterprise, and San Francisco was the flagship store.
Which is to say that I returned to the US on November 8th, 2001, and fled again on November 13th. I couldn't stand the AMERICA: OPEN FOR BUSINESS signs. Weren't we open for anything else? I took the money reserved for my next apartment, for contingencies, for a cushion, and I traveled back to the desolation and poverty of the third world. But this time I set my sights on somewhere nearer -- an ancient and forgotten country just a day's drive from California. The Hopi Indian reservation.
Perimortem: Death Valley, Ancient Cannibals, and the Best Coffee in California
I was born there, incidentally, but I have no childhood memories of it. When I was an infant we moved to Houston, which is the opposite of San Francisco.