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By Root 663 0

with hustlers, junkies, the desperate, and the insane. I haven’t seen junkies in such great numbers since the bad old days of Alphabet City – and in such bad shape. They’re everywhere – dirty, diabetic, their limbs swollen, chalky, covered with suppurating tracks and infections. West Coast skells make my old crew from the methadone clinic look like the Osmond family. San Francisco’s main employment sectors, at a cursory glance, are the countless whorehouses, massage parlors, clip joints, live sex shows, and crummy-looking strip joints you see everywhere downtown. A great number of women in San Francisco seem to be sex workers, and while perfectly OK as a ‘lifestyle choice’ in my book, there are so many of them, and so disproportionately Asian, it feels more like Cambodia then any American city. As rents are so high, there’s nowhere to live – and the dotcoms ain’t hiring like they used to.

With all their kind hearts and good intentions, San Franciscans, living in postcard-pretty houses atop high hills, seem to be sending a message: ‘It’s OK to come here. If you are prepared to lap dance for us . . . and then sleep on our sidewalks.’

Just don’t smoke. That would be wrong.

I don’t want you to think I don’t like San Francisco. I do. It’s a relief from Los Angeles. And some of my favorite movies were filmed there: The Asphalt Jungle, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. When I was a kid, reading Life magazine on a beach in France, all I wanted to do with my life was run away to the Haight and live in a house with the Jefferson Airplane, drop acid and draw underground comix. I grew up on R. Crumb’s incredible line drawings of San Francisco, dreamed feverishly of all that free love I’d be enjoying with hippie chicks – if I ever turned thirteen. When it became clear that living in a commune, or sharing a crash pad, meant arguing over whom the last yogurt belonged to, when I realized, finally, that I’d been right all along, that the Grateful Dead really did suck, regardless of what my brainy friends said, and that ‘the revolution’ would never, ever, ever happen – and that that was probably not a bad thing – that particular dream died. The putative leaders of that revolution probably wouldn’t let me smoke now, either. And of course, by 1975, when I first saw the Ramones, all thoughts of ever living in a city other than New York evaporated.

My first few days in San Francisco were fine. I ate oysters and Dungeness crab at the Swan Oyster Depot – exactly the kind of eating establishment I dearly love. I had durian ice cream at Polly Anne’s out by the beach. I had a superb meal at Gary Danko – a too-precious dining room but very, very fine food, and a very likable group of hooligans in the kitchen. I visited a few New York transplants now working in the area, most lured by the town’s reputation for good food and innovative restaurants and its selection of readily available fresh ingredients. I had a gluey, cornstarchy, dinosaur Cantonese meal at Sam Wo’s in Chinatown, a throwback to my childhood forays to upper Broadway or Mott Street in New York. A cranky waitress hauled each course up a hand-pulled dumbwaiter. I purposefully ordered chop suey, wonton soup, and chow mein, not even having heard those words since 1963 – and thoroughly enjoyed myself – a little nostalgia for the old folks. I hung out with cooks a lot, as there are plenty of cooks in San Francisco. And one thing about cooks: Whether you’re talking about New York, Philadelphia, Glasgow, Melbourne, London, or San Francisco, we’re the same everywhere. (Though I don’t fully understand the Fernet Branca shot and ginger ale chaser thing.)

I was staying in a rock and roll motel around the corner from the O’Farrell Theater. There was a bar/nightclub set off from the pool deck and music pounded all night long; bearded metalhead band members sat in deck chairs while their roadies brought them drinks. I whuffed down a few cigarettes and then wandered into the bar for a drink. ‘Are you Anthony Bourdain?’ asked a security guy by the door. Knowing of no outstanding warrants or unsettled grudges