This past week in San Francisco I completed two new pieces about gentrification in the city and you can check them both out here.

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, I wrote a celebration of the life’s work of San Francisco noir novelist Peter Plate that can be found online here.

http://www.sfbg.com/2010/10/12/lost-city

Due to what I will generously term “the vagaries and difficulties of publishing a newspaper in a world where papers are dying”, the Guardian ran in print the wrong draft of the story I wrote but the online version is the corrected draft.

For my appearance at the annual Lit Crawl event for Lit Quake on Saturday, October 9th, I wrote a brand new piece in which I proposed noir and other genre fiction scenarios for a completely gentrified San Francisco. You can read below the piece I read out loud at the event…

Scenario 1:

A self-satisfied young biotech exec comes home to his Townsend Street condo late at night only to find the electronic key fob that allows him entry to his building doesn’t work.  He is unable to enter his building and remembers his cell phone battery died at the party. He realizes too late he has also  left his wallet in the cab, and now he is out on the streets at night with no money or ID, as suddenly stripped of identity as the city around him.  The everyman-for-himself ethos of the new San Francisco is put to the test as the newly homeless exec battles cops, garbage men, graffiti artists, and donut shop employees in a series of humiliating defeats that leave him close to insanity.  Near dawn, he finds himself at a trash can fire near the CalTrain tracks, huddling up for warmth with the homeless he so despises… until he realizes too late that the homeless men are preparing a dinner, and he is the main course!

2. Title: No Strings Attached, straight Mission noir ala Charles Willeford…

The year is 1999. A young, attractive and upwardly mobile husband and wife from the Silicon Valley buy a house in the Mission, seeking closer proximity to the area’s gritty and exciting urban vibe.  The husband develops a persistent fascination with the young punk rock stripper girl who they evicted when they moved into the house.  He sits at home, reading about her band, online, and starts going to their shows, lurking in the back of Mission Records in a ratty leather jacket he bought in front of the Armory.  After a show, he approaches her and asks her to get him some heroin.  He starts using, working from home while high, programming code and obsessively stalking the evicted girl. In his search for her, he soon goes into the streets to buy his own drugs and starts hanging out with dealers at the plaza who fascinate him with stories about the people who used to live on his block but have now been displaced. Telling himself he is writing a novel, he starts obsessively scouring craigslist casual encounter ads, arranging meetings with prostitutes. He finds the girl he once evicted who he now pays to enact more and more elaborate sexual fantasy scenarios. As the novel ends, he answers a craigslist ad only to meet his own wife, herself now hooked on drugs, too. In a last desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives, they broadcast their own ritual murder suicide on the internet via webcam.

3. (Science Fiction proposal) AMNESIA: THE NOVEL

A genetically modified virus developed at the new Mission Bay biotech labs is accidently released into the city. The virus instantly spreads a disease that causes every single person in San Francisco to forget everything they know all at once.  The residents of the city wander the streets helplessly past the once trendy new chain stores and yuppie eateries, trying to remember who they are and where they live and doing clueless things like eating their cell phones. For some reason, Schlitz malt liquor is an antidote to the virus and a gang of crusty punks from Market Street have remained immune.  They roam the city, gleefully and drunkenly convincing straight citizens to dress in drag and take apart jails and do massive art projects on condos. This utopia is threatened however when a group of citizens discover the internet. They call the internet “God” and treat it as a bible.  They convince an ever growing group of followers that the citizens of what was once San Francisco can only reclaim their identity by recreating all of recorded history – from wars and famine to Madonna and the Cosby Show – all over again from the very beginning from the information found online.

4. (Young Adult) AMNESIA: THE NOVEL pt2

Tony, a 19 year old white hipster new to the Mission, wrecks on his track bike while unable to stop at a traffic light at 24^th and Mission. In the wreck, he bumps his head and loses his identity. He wanders into El Farolito seeking clues about who he really is. A taqueria worker, Jose, takes pity on Tony and brings him home to live and recuperate in the tiny flat he shares ­with 15 members of his extended family on 26^th Street. Jose’s family raises Tony as if he was one of their own children. Jose even gets Tony a job at El Farolito. At first, customers are shocked and appalled at Tony’s appearance behind the counter with his scraggly beard, stick and poke tattoos, and askew Giants cap. But within a year he has won everyone over with his flawless Spanish and his marvelous dancing in the parade at Carnival.

Meanwhile, Tony’s father, the governor of Indiana, is running for president. He loves Tony, too, and misses him a great deal. He is accidently reunited with Tony at a campaign stop in the Mission. In a heartwarming finale, Tony is forced to choose between his loving new family in La Mision and his rightful inheritance — the power to lead the free world.

5. Surrealist Roman Noir, Proustian in scope but experimental in style…

The year is 1992. The setting is a sex toy shop in the Mission. As the novel opens, two dildos fall in love.  They are young and excited. They read each other poetry and plan for their future together, day in and day out on their shelf in the fluorescent lit netherworld of the shop.  Without explanation, the dildos are transported to a rocky, foggy beach where they smoke and stare at the cold surf. They talk to each other in mumbled French about the ultimate impossibility of their union.  The beach recedes and they are at a bus stop on Mission Street, saying goodbye. Time passes.  On a cold August day in 2010, the dildos are at last reunited on a grubby blanket at a sidewalk sale at 16^th and Mission BART. After a silence that lasts for centuries, one dildo says to the other at last, “Is it really you?”

6. Borges in SF

A construction worker building a luxury condo at the site of the demolition of the Transbay Terminal finds in the haunted area where the waiting room once stood, a magic turd.  Lifting the petrified turd and looking into it, he realizes that in the turd he sees as if looking through a portal a vision of the lost skid row Greyhound waiting room.  He sees the late night bus rides to nowhere, the men arriving to the city, out of the military, out of San Quentin, men drinking short dogs, men looking for work, bathroom blowjobs and shellgames. He turns the turd over and the vision shifts to another skidrow scene, hobos shivering at dawn in the old SP train yards South of Market, men on the nod in SRO hotel rooms of old third street. As he stares, he suddenly understands that in its fecal dust the turd contains the preserved DNA of all skidrows everywhere throughout recorded history. In quick succession he sees the Bowery soup lines, a newsreel of Depression era farmhands, a plasma center in Baltimore in 1975.  He sees at once West Lake Street in Nelson Algren’s Chicago under the El tracks, and a man smoking crack in front of the Pyramids in Egypt.

But also the skidrows of the future: A man in a massage parlor in Saigon in 2040, a spaceship full of methadone addicts going nowhere, a procuress in a bad neighborhood on the moon. The man stares into the turd for only a minute or so but he is blinded by the vision of man’s infinite seediness and he goes completely insane. The construction worker remains, homeless and insane, wandering forever in front of the building down an endless skidrow in time and space in his mind. The turd, however, is lost for the time being, hermetically sealed up in the wall of the luxury condo to be found someday by unsuspecting future generations…

7.  A Confederacy of Turds

One Sunday morning Juanita Teresa Herrera, age 72, is comes home from church to her flat on San Carlos Street. When she approaches her garage door, she drops to her knees, praying and genuflecting at what she sees there: The face of the virgin Mary has appeared in a splattered turd on the door.  By the next morning, news of the fecal miracle has spread and devout worshippers from around California have flocked to the Mission, lining up around the block to pay their respects and ask the Turd Virgin for blessings.  Within a week, news has spread worldwide and to the Vatican. Religious and political leaders debate the significance of the Virgin’s appearance in the alley. The pope visits the turd and after an audience with the virgin, claims the turd has come out against gay marriage.  Mayor Gavin Newsom, on the other hand, insists the turd, like San Francisco, is a beacon of tolerance and love to the entire planet Earth.  The SF Bay Guardian maintains that the turd proves the necessity of public power.

Meanwhile, a curator at the DeYoung Museum insists that the turd is actually the master work of an unknown street artist. The curator sites similar turd paintings all up and down San Carlos Street. An art critic from the New York Times hails the turd as the latest bold statement from “The Mission School” of artists and the turd appears on the cover of an expensive art book about Mission murals. A frequently homeless man with a heavy black beard who haunts the area around 20^th and San Carlos is identified as the artists and brought to the DeYoung where he executes several more powerful works in quick succession, all of which are instantly bought for the museums permanent collection.

Ironically, the presence of the original art work on the old Victorian causes the house’s value to skyrocket and Jaunita is evicted. The house’s new owner, a builder of green, sustainable buildings from San Jose, announces plans to renovate the house, turning the garage door where the turd appeared into a scruffy patch of native weeds.  The community is outraged and protests for months.  A protester appears on the front page of the New York Times, kryptonite locked to the turd.  A group calling itself “Yoga for Mary” demonstrates daily at dawn in front of the turd. But the owner is unmoved. “I thought this was America!” he says., “where you can do whatever you want with your own property.”

The proposed destruction of the turd becomes a symbol for the battle over the direction of the city’s future. Progressives are emboldened when the turd places a strong third in a write-in candidacy for mayor.  The book’s nihilistic conclusion takes place on Halloween in the Castro, with a phalanx of riot cops firing tear gas canisters into a crowd of hundreds of angry queers, all dressed up as the Virgin Turd.

8. ordinary police thriller…

In this, the final installment of a popular crime thriller series, we once again meet hardboiled and hard drinking, ace SFPD detective, Jack Brick. Haunted by the wreckage of his marriage, Brick loses himself in drink and in his voracious appetite for police work in the seedy streets of the Mission District. In this episode, Brick is sent to spy on a curious radical commune who are attracting hordes of young followers to their compound in an old Victorian mansion on South Van Ness.  Members of the commune worship spiritual deities who they claim live inside of Bernal Hill. The group gives away meals everyday in Dolores Park. They believe all property is theft and, practicing a radical philosophy they call “Forced Sharing”, they establish a series of Free Stores throughout the neighborhood where they freely distribute necessary items they have simply removed from the shelves at other stores.  As the cop infiltrates the group, he learns of the group’s latest sinister plot: they are trying to develop a spiritual ray gun that will turn policemen into flowers.

As he works alongside the group in his role as a spy, he finds that he has, against his will, developed a powerful attraction for the group’s charismatic female leader. Despite falling in love, Brick arranges for a raid on a free store, but when he sees his estranged hippy daughter working at there, he is forced to choose sides. The novel ends with Jack Brick on his knees, weeping before her, begging her to turn him into a flower.

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