what keeps us where?
recollections from a summer spent mostly being unemployed, going to Barry's bootcamp, cooking, touring apartments, and being exhausted
One morning last summer I toured an apartment in the Castro because it was rear-facing and seemed promisingly quiet from the Craigslist post. It was beautiful, overlooking a garden with a tree growing stone fruit in clusters of two or three. I could not identify the type of fruit, but I did identify that it was a varietal that does not make much noise. The fruit was certainly quieter than the cars roaring outside the windows in the apartment I was currently living in.
When I arrived to the apartment, a line of people (people that happened to be mostly men, mostly white, mostly muscled, and mostly twenty-eight years old) stood waiting on 17th Street to view it. Inside, there were even more people: the living room was a wall-to-wall crush of twinks, basically indistinguishable from the interior of the nightclub Beaux, except with the competition for a desirable partner replaced by the competition for hot real estate. There was the same telltale atmosphere of tension, scarcity, ambient conflict. I needed a whiskey and Campari.
I made conversation with one of the other men touring the apartment. He was wearing thin athletic shorts with five-inch inseams, chunky white low-top sneakers with tall white socks that hugged his calves. His backpack was branded with the primary colors of the logo of a software company. I guessed at his likely credit score and the percent of his income this rent would take up. I estimated very high and very low, respectively. The man inspected the knobs on the five-burner stainless steel range. I asked if he cooks much. This was my Summer of Vaccinated Unemployment, and I had a lot of free time, which I mainly spent cooking and touring apartments that no landlord would rent to me, given my nonexistent pay stubs.
“I don’t really cook,” he replied. “There are just so many wonderful restaurants in San Francisco.”
“Oh absolutely. Are the restaurants in this area any good? I haven’t tried too many of them over here.”
“Me neither. I used to live in the Mission but I left the Bay during Covid. I just came back. Staying with a friend right now.”
I could not help but feel like people who left during the pandemic should not be able to take apartments from people whose hearts and bodies stayed in San Francisco through the past unrewarding year of the pandemic. I stubbornly felt that my suffering-in-place ought to have earned me something. I wanted to believe that commitment translated to solidity and that those roots could not be so easily shredded by the shudders of the market.
“Nice. This is a beautiful apartment.” I smiled beneath my mask and wandered to the bedroom. Sunlight filtered through the tree, then through the window, where it landed quietly on the hard wood floor. The next day I found out I did not get the apartment.
On the back patio of a pizzeria on Telegraph Avenue, I complained to a friend about all of the things I have disliked about San Francisco since moving back from Oakland. You can probably guess at the contours of that conversation, since the unfortunately bitchy tone has also seeped into the piece you are currently reading.
“Why are you still touring apartments there?” she asked. “You obviously hate it.” Behind her there was a beige brick building and a dusty window with a tattered white curtain half-drawn. Beyond the curtain was a dusty brown haze of a room that looked like it hadn’t been entered in years. I wondered if it was an apartment or the back of a shop. I didn’t much care, and considered breaking and entering and squatting for a bit. It looked lovely. I didn’t have an answer for my friend on what kept me looking at apartment in San Francisco. The pandemic made all our old answers to “why are you living here instead of there?” seem silly and contrived when everything was on Zoom anyway. The pandemic made most of our old answers and most of our old questions seem silly and contrived and completely beside the point.
Over the next week I decided to find, or at least make up, an answer to my friend’s question by making the most of San Francisco while I was still stuck there in my miserable grad student studio apartment. I brainstormed a list of the things the city does better than other places I was familiar with. I arrived at a list filled mostly with the trappings of a certain expensively hyper-optimized lifestyle. Since moving here I had met many offensively functional and adjusted product managers with permanently clean, straightened hair and coherent life goals. They tracked their progress on these goals in spreadsheets with columns for Objectives and Key Results. I wish I had this sense of a top-down narrative of my life and the sense of it occurring in the discrete, manageable chunks of business quarters. The goals and movements of my own life have always felt more liquid, as if they would seep and bleed between the cells of a spreadsheet in an instant if I were ever presumptuous enough to try to put them there. Even now, I’m throwing these words on this page like logs into a river, trying to dam and direct and give structure to the ceaseless senseless flow of things in my life.
The product managers all seemed to love Barry’s Bootcamp, so it made the list. All I knew about it is that it is a group fitness class where a fifty-minute workout costs thirty-six dollars, and I saw a lot of Barry’s branded cutoff tanks on bodies pounding down Market. I bought a new member pack of three discounted classes.
The classes I took place at a studio in the Castro called the Red Room, which gets its name from the dim red light that illuminates it. It has an energy somewhere between what I imagine about Mapplethorpe’s photography darkroom and Amsterdam’s red-light district. Lots of flesh and bodies with hard edges where one might expect softness. The room is lined with treadmills on three sides, facing mirrored walls. In the center, there are tightly-packed rows of weight benches. The mirrors ensure that everyone has a view of everyone else, able to patrol each other’s levels of energy expenditure. I’ve read my share of critiques of the panopticon, but I still found my eyes drifting to the mph on my neighbors’ treadmills, and placing some level of worth based on how much higher or lower my own pace was.
I was reminded of a passage from Jenny Offil’s novel Weather:
“Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism?
A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on.
‘You can’t outrun a bear,’ the other whispers.
‘I just have to outrun you,’ he says.”
It’s only part exaggeration to say that I was in a room full of some of the world’s most ambitious, driven professionals. Each of them was pulled to this busy northern part of this state whose most enduring symbols are the California grizzly bear and ruthless technocapitalism. It is only part exaggeration to say we were all running for our lives. I turn up the pace of my own treadmill until my legs stop feeling like my own and instead like an extension of the machine.
After class, we exited the dim red room to the harshness of the sun in the lobby. There is a juice bar serving smoothies with names like “Basically Air” (water, blueberries, protein powder). The name seemed vaguely menacing, reminding us to not be fat as well as reminding us that we live in a city where your small patch of stable ground will eventually be destabilized by either the creative destruction of the free market, or, if you’re lucky, an earthquake, so you better learn to basically subsist on just air because nothing solid will hold.
I walked home and my body was sore and exhausted. For once, my muscles and bones had been spinning just as ferociously as the world around me. I felt like I had reached some equilibrium between my inner world and the outer one. If I couldn’t still the world, maybe I could wring myself with a pace that was just as relentless. I walked across Duboce Park, loud with barking dogs and shouting frisbee players and an N train screeching to a stop, and my body was too exhausted to register anything but peace.
A few weeks later I toured another apartment across the bridge on the hill I used to live on. As a Covid precaution, this tour was self-guided. There was no crowd of prospective tenants or real estate agents, just a lockbox on the door. The privacy gave me plenty of time and quiet to assess the noise levels. The apartment was on the top floor, with grand windows that overlooked Lake Merritt and spires of palm trees and a ribbon of the freeway. The sun glittered off the blue surface of the lake and off the metal of cars on 580. On my phone I opened a decibel meter app and then texted my friend a picture of the view.
“It’s 55 dB with the windows closed and almost 70 with them open.”
“How loud is that?”
“Loud. My current apartment averages around 35. But this is a constant roar from the freeway rather than the jarring stop-and-go of the traffic outside my window right now. So it’s basically a free white noise machine.”
A pause. “It’s a beautiful view.”
“Yeah. Do you think I’ll get used to the noise?”
“Not really, love.”
“I was afraid of that. The place is perfect. It has an in-unit washer and dryer and and garbage disposal and parking. I love it.”
“You won’t after a week of living right next to the freeway.”
I closed the windows and headed to the kitchen. My friend was right. I was looking for an apartment in which to escape the world and its noise. In San Francisco the hustle is deafening. The main commandment of the place, in addition to “move fast and break things” may as well be “make something and make something of yourself.” All that moving and making and breaking was becoming unbearably loud and exhausting. I wanted to find a quiet place. I wanted to rest.