NONFICTION      

Walking west on 20th Street near Dolores Park  -  -  -
                                 Photo by Mike Lambert                                   

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Ghost City  *
​by  Ed Brownson

​I am never alone in this city.
 
Walking west on 20th Street near Dolores Park, I look up at the house with the two odd-angled doors. David stands in one, beaming his winning, wicked smile, waving, beckoning me in. He is a minx of a man, all carnality and intellect, oddly angled himself. I wave back. “Another time, David,” I mumble and walk on.
 
At Dolores Park I see Paul in the corner window of a building on Church and 19th. He is watering his plants. There are so many it’s like peeking into a terrarium. He is so proud of that apartment, with its morning light and classic San Francisco view. Moving there after years of spare-rooming with friends was for him a dream come true. I wave, but Paul doesn’t see.
 
In the Castro on Noe and 18th, I pass a cute gingerbread restored to perfection by two men, happy homeowners in their corner of the gayborhood. Ricky stays with them when he’s not off wandering the globe.
 
Ricky is beautiful, with a heart and soul to match. So beautiful, he is welcome everywhere he goes, no matter that he’s a gay man from San Francisco. His stories of traveling the Sahara—the Sahara!—passing days and nights with Bedouins in the oases there, are a gay man’s Scheherazade. I don’t see him this time though. Where, I wonder, has Ricky got to now?
 
On Castro and 18th, I have a choice. If I catch the 24 Divisadero bus south to Noe Valley maybe I’ll see Allen and Alan. Allen, the one with two ‘L’s and an ‘E,’ lives between 19th and 20th. He is an older man, kind, fun, gracious, the type of person who welcomes you in, gives you whatever he has, what you didn’t know you need. Spend time with Allen and you part happier than when you arrive.

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​Up the hill at Alvarado is Alan, one ‘L’ and an ‘A.’ He is a human whirlwind. No one can keep up with him. He is always painting, meeting, reading, debating, writing, organizing. He has a job, paperwork in a downtown building, but it’s just a way to get money for food and rent so he can get on with the important work of creating art and figuring out the world. Alan introduced me to Beckett. It took me ten years to glimpse in those rare pages what Alan saw on his first reading.
 
I leave Allen and Alan for another day and take the bus north.
 
At the point where Castro becomes Divisadero, I look up at Dick’s house, a modest two- bedroom cottage on the edge of Buena Vista. Dick is out front waxing his beloved Mercedes, a rich dark-chocolate anachronism of a town car left over from the 1960s. Dick is a man more comfortable in suit and tie than jeans. The house, the car, the suit, all perfectly match the banker he is.
 
On Divisadero near Hayes, I see another David outside his building, sweeping the block. He moved there after two years spent caring for a partner who suffered through every hell the AIDS epidemic had to offer. He hoped the change would heal him, a new neighborhood would give him something to look forward to. It doesn’t. He doesn’t see me waving. David doesn’t see anyone, really. His pain wraps around him too thick, too tight.
 
I get off the bus at Golden Gate, walk two blocks west to Baker Street, up half a block and stop across from an old Queen Anne. John and I lived there, once upon a time. He is standing out front, critiquing his handiwork. Disapproval lines his face.
 
A single home hacked into two flats decades earlier, it was a wreck when he bought it. He restored the curved windows and classic lines of the old façade, then modernized the rest into something out of Bauhaus. It was dizzying, walking from one end of that flat to the other, a sort of time travel via interior design.
 
John doesn’t notice me standing across the street. He’s too busy figuring out how to paint the restored façade. He didn’t live long enough. The task of choosing colors, hiring a painting crew, seeing the job through, that task passed to me after he died.
 
Baker Street puts a cruel end to my wandering. Something has to. I can only take so much. I go home, my head strapped tight in blinders, refusing to look at the other ghosts I pass as I retreat. I sense them anyway. Michael, Geoff, another Alan. . . 

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​Thirty years on and I still cannot walk a neighborhood in this city, take a bus or ride a bicycle or drive a car without seeing the ghosts. A turn of a corner onto a block I haven’t been on in years and there is yet another one, reminding me of yet another loss, one I’d forgotten. Forgive me, I plead, when that happens. There are just so, so many of you.
 
The census says 815,201 people live in San Francisco today. The number of those living breathing souls I know, after living here for 44 years, is down to an unfilled handful. The rest are hardly real to me. I barely see them. I know they do not see me, an aging man preoccupied by ghosts. Why would they? I’m fast on my way to becoming one myself.
 
More than once I’ve sworn to leave the city, to run from all these ghosts who refuse to let me be, refuse to forgive my mortal sin of staying alive when they could not. I fantasize some small town where nothing is written, not for me anyway, where the local ghosts ignore me because I am a stranger, ephemeral to their histories, just passing through.
 
But you don’t avenge the dead by running. Or by giving up and joining them, for that matter. You avenge them by carrying on, living out your life. So we are told, anyway.
 
So I wave back at David when I see him on 20th Street. Pick up a rag and help Dick shine his Mercedes. Help Alan move his monstrous canvases of experimental art. I ask John if he approves of the color choices I made for his beloved Queen Anne.
 
The ghosts won’t let me be. Do I want them to? I don’t know. What would be left of me if they did?
 
I am never alone in this city.
 
I am always alone in this city.

  *  This essay first appeared in the SF Examiner on July 26, 2022. 

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​Ed Brownson’s plays have been performed in California, New York and Italy, with many developmental and staged readings along the way. His latest, Tap, Tap Tap, about a woman confronting a horrible past, was selected for production as part of the Playwright Center of San Francisco’s Fall 2021 ‘Best of…’ series. He has studied playwriting at American Conservatory Theatre, Central Works Theater Company, Theater Artists’ Conspiracy and many informal venues. Recently, he has been working on essays and long and short fiction, ‘attending’ numerous pandemic-inspired Zoom classes and groups to help him along the way.

Other works in this issue:
Fiction: 
Ms Noir and the Night Caller
Nonfiction:  
​Is That All There Is?  
In Praise of the Anthropomorph

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