A Pennsylvania Mother’s Path to Insurrection

 A Pennsylvania Mother’s Path to Insurrection

How claims by Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones spurred a parent of eight to become one of the Capitol riot’s biggest mysteries, and a fugitive from the F.B.I.

 

By Ronan Farrow The New Yorker

Before the pandemic, Rachel Powell, a forty-year-old mother of eight from western Pennsylvania, sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games. But, last year, Powell began to post more frequently, embracing more extreme political views. Her interests grew to include conspiracy theories about covid-19 and the results of the Presidential election, filtered through such figures as Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the Infowars founder Alex Jones. On May 3, 2020, Powell wrote on Facebook, “One good thing about this whole CV crisis is that I suddenly feel very patriotic.” Expressing outrage at the restrictions that accompanied the pandemic, she wrote, “It isn’t to late to wake up, say no, and restore freedoms.” Several days later, she posted a distraught seven-minute video, shot outside a local gym that had been closed. “Police need to see there’s people that are citizens that are not afraid of you guys showing up in your masks. We’re going to be here banded together, and we’re not afraid of you,” she said. “Maybe they should be a little bit afraid.”

On January 6th, during the storming of the United States Capitol, Powell made good on that threat. Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders. “People should probably coordinate together if you’re going to take this building,” she called out, leaning through a shattered window and addressing a group of rioters already inside. “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”

In recent weeks, as journalists and law-enforcement officials tried to identify participants in the assault, she came to be known as “Bullhorn Lady” and “Pink Hat Lady.” She appeared on an F.B.I. “Wanted” poster, was featured in cable-television news segments, and became an obsessive focus of crowdsourced investigative efforts by laypeople and experts. Forrest Rogers, a German-American business consultant who is part of a Twitter group called the Deep State Dogs, recently identified Powell and reported her name to the F.B.I. She is now being sought by law enforcement.

In her first public comments since the riot, Powell acknowledged her role in the events at the Capitol. During a two-hour telephone interview, she claimed that her conduct had been spontaneous, contrary to widespread speculation that she had acted in coördination with an organized group. “I was not part of a plot—organized, whatever,” Powell, who was speaking from an undisclosed location, told me. “I have no military background. . . . I’m a mom with eight kids. That’s it. I work. And I garden. And raise chickens. And sell cheese at a farmers’ market.” During the interview, she reviewed photographs and videos of the Bullhorn Lady, acknowledging that many of the images showed her, and offered detailed descriptions of the skirmishes they depicted. She declined to comment on some of her conduct—including smashing windows and shouting orders to fellow-rioters—that could carry criminal charges. “Listen, if somebody doesn’t help and direct people, then do more people die?” she said. “That’s all I’m going to say about that. I can’t say anymore. I need to talk to an attorney.”

Powell was born in Anaheim, California, and grew up on what she described as “the really bad side” of Fresno. She was raised by her mother, who worked at a local shop, and by her stepfather, a plumber. “It was rough, but she didn’t do without anything,” her mother, Deborah Lemons, who has had a strained relationship with Powell for the past several years, said. “She always had clothes. She always had food.” Lemons said that, when Powell was a child, she and her stepfather were the victims of a carjacking. Powell was held at gunpoint and her stepfather was kidnapped for several hours by their assailant. “Knowing what that feels like, I am just absolutely amazed that she would participate in something like this and not consider or have a lot of compassion for the people who were inside that building,” Lemons said, referring to the riot. “She well knows what it’s like to wonder if she’s gonna lose her life.”

When Powell was fifteen, her family moved to West Sunbury, in western Pennsylvania, to care for an ailing relative of her stepfather’s. The town was typical of declining Rust Belt communities. “There were a lot of steel mills that closed even since I lived there,” Powell told me. She told me that she had married young, and her mother said that Powell had her first child at sixteen. After graduating from high school, she remained in Pennsylvania. Three years ago, Powell separated from her husband. Since then, she has worked various part-time jobs to support her children, who range in age from four to their mid-twenties. She told me that she has a certification as a group fitness instructor, and has taken a course in alternative medicine. “She’s very granola, very crunchy,” a friend, who asked not to be identified, told me. “Does yoga, eats vegetarian, homeschools all their kids.”

Powell said that, before the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, she held a wide range of political opinions. “My views kind of fall all over the place,” she said. “I guess you could say that I’m more libertarian at heart.” Though her county supported Trump by wide margins in both 2016 and 2020, Powell told me that she didn’t vote for him in his first run, and her social-media posts during that time include sharp criticism of him. “Trump makes me uncomfortable as a presidential candidate,” she wrote in a Facebook post that linked to a piece about Trump’s lack of civility. “What disturbs me is that so many people support this type of person.” She also told me that she took issue with his environmental policies. During his tenure in the White House, however, she embraced Trump and, eventually, the misinformation that he nurtured about the coronavirus and election fraud.

Those political views began to have various impacts on her life after the pandemic hit. Paula Keswick, who co-owns a local creamery that sold Powell cheese and yogurt, said that Powell was barred from working at some events after she refused to obey pandemic restrictions. “She was just adamant she was not going to wear a mask,” Keswick said. (Powell said that she now works part time at a local bookstore.) Last summer and fall, Powell said, she attended various protests, including anti-mask rallies. “If there was a protest in Harrisburg, I was there for almost all of them,” she told me. On July 4th, she drove for four hours to join members of several far-right groups, some of them armed, who gathered at the Gettysburg National Military Park, purportedly to protect Civil War monuments from desecration. At the rally, a man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt was surrounded and aggressively questioned by about fifty demonstrators. In a video posted online, Powell is among the group, holding an iPhone with the same Kate Spade Hollyhock Floral case that she was later photographed carrying at the Capitol. Powell also told me that she attended rallies in Washington, D.C., on dates she could not recall, including one attended by members of the far-right group the Proud Boys, where Alex Jones, who has falsely alleged that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was faked, spoke. (Powell said that Jones is not her “favorite person,” but that she considers him to be “another journalist to listen to—he has interesting things to say.”) She told me that she did not share the racist views espoused by some on the far right. (In 2013, she tweeted, “what’s up, my niggas?” Powell defended the use of the N-word, saying, “My favorite book is ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and it uses that term freely.”)

Last November, Powell voted for Trump. “It was a little bit of a hard decision for me, and I didn’t make that decision to vote for him till two months before the election,” she said. “I appreciate his business mind. Economy-wise, he has it going on. He loves America.” Ultimately, she concluded, she “couldn’t vote for the other person. I really don’t think Biden or Harris will be good for the country.”

Concerns about mask requirements, which she called a “liberty issue,” were instrumental in her decision. She claimed that the risks of the coronavirus had been overstated by public-health officials, saying that she had not seen many deaths in her county. On November 5th, 2020, she wrote in a Facebook comment directed at a friend, “I won’t get a vaccine either. I hear what you’re saying about the whole world being in on the conspiracy as far as the corona virus goes.” On December 27th, she posted, “I’m unashamedly a ‘super spreader,’ ” attaching photographs of crowded, mask-free holiday and birthday parties. That day, she uploaded a video of a large maskless meal, during which several children said, “No masks,” and Powell could be heard saying, “The masks are total bullcrap. You guys just need to get out there and live. Get arrested—it’s fine.”

Powell connected her beliefs about the coronavirus to claims promoted by Trump and his allies that he had won the election. The day after the election, she shared a screenshot of a graphic claiming that several states had more votes recorded than they did registered voters, information that Facebook flagged as “partly false.” In the accompanying text, Powell wrote, “I’m sitting here thinking about how everyone has been so complacent during COVID.” She went on, “The government knows exactly how far you can be pushed because the population has been successfully tested.”

That post, like others reflecting Powell’s increasingly extreme views, was met with positive reinforcement online. “The dumbing down and fattening up of America has been very successful,” one person wrote in response to the election-fraud conspiracy theory. “It may be too late if ever they wake up.” Earlier posts protesting mask-wearing prompted comments such as “Truth!!!” and “Wake up people!!!!”

Powell said that she derived her beliefs “a little bit from everywhere,” and that she was not a follower of any mainstream news source. “You can go online, go on Facebook now, and dig up a thousand different links about it,” she said, of the election-fraud conspiracy theories. She said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, had been a significant source of information, and that she had watched remarks he gave in Gettysburg, on November 25th, during a widely discredited state-senate committee hearing in which he and several witnesses made baseless claims of voter fraud. “That was pretty moving to me,” she said. “I learned a lot from Giuliani and people’s testimonies.”

Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation and extremism, who serves as the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, told me that Powell’s process of radicalization was increasingly common. “You don’t have to go to the dark corners of the Web to find this anymore,” she said. “Through these influencers, through these political propagandists, it’s all brought in through your news feed, through your home page.” Donovan said that friends’ comments often provide an echo chamber for misinformation, and that every click on extremist content can prompt social-media algorithms to produce more of the same. Giuliani, in particular, has proved to be a popular entry point into the world of misinformation. “There were a lot of people like her in that crowd,” Donovan told me, referring to Powell’s participation in the Capitol riot. “They’re going to figure out ways to get back online and to keep communicating with each other. And, if Trump does figure out a way back on platforms where he can build power in the way he did before, this group of people is going to continue to be dangerous and menacing.”

At the July 4th demonstration in Gettysburg, Powell met Kevin Lynn, the founder of a group that advocates for the hiring of American workers in the U.S. technology industry. Last August, after Lynn’s group placed ads pressing Trump to restrict the outsourcing of jobs overseas, Lynn met with Trump at the White House. Lynn told me that he had attended the Gettysburg protest to document the event, and that he interviewed several participants, including Powell. Afterward, the two stayed in touch. “I would say we’re friends,” he said. Before Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., Powell told Lynn that she planned to attend, and they agreed to go together. On January 5th, Powell and Lynn met near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and drove to Washington in his car. At least two other friends, the owners of the bookstore where Powell works, drove in another car. (The bookstore owners did not respond to a request for comment.) At the rally, on the morning of January 6th, Powell helped Lynn operate his camera. Trump urged attendees to “fight like hell.” He added, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. . . . Let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Powell said that Trump’s words weighed “partially” in her decisions that day. “It’s good he did ask the American people to come and let their voices be heard for what they believe in,” she told me, “but it was definitely not the sole reason that I came.”

Both Powell and Lynn said that, as they marched to the Capitol, they were separated. Lynn told me that he did not enter the Capitol and that he was “shocked” by the footage of Powell in the thick of the violence.

Source: FBI

At the Capitol, Powell said that she found herself in an increasingly violent confrontation between rioters and Capitol police. Powell appeared to be wearing a jacket designed specifically for the concealed carrying of a gun, but said she did not carry one, “unless you count a Lärabar and bottle of water as a weapon.” In one video, her pink hat is briefly visible in a crush of bodies during a skirmish near an entrance on the west front of the Capitol which is reserved for members of Congress and staffers. “That’s where the pileup was,” she told me, after reviewing the video. “The people were wedged so tight.” She said that she heard a woman’s cries growing gradually quieter beneath the crowd and claimed ultimately to have seen her dead body. (The New Yorker was unable to confirm whether a woman died there.) Powell added, “I was beaten with a baton, and sprayed and gassed.”

In another video, Powell and other rioters are seen using a makeshift battering ram to shatter one of the Capitol’s windows. She pulls the heavy, pipe-shaped object back and throws her weight forward against it repeatedly. (“That’s one of those things I can neither confirm nor deny,” she said. “I just need to talk to an attorney. If you look at that video, people are just going to make their own assumptions.”) In yet another video, she stands outside a broken window, shouting instructions through the bullhorn to rioters inside. Powell says, “I’ve been in the other room,” and appears to outline a plan involving breaking a pane of glass to get into another part of the Capitol. Powell said, regarding her knowledge of the building’s layout, “Anything that was said was figured out as time went on. It wasn’t like there was a map or anything.”

After the riot, Powell said, “I was by myself—I didn’t rendezvous with a bunch of people . . . I didn’t meet militias.” Lynn said that Powell did not join him for the drive home. Powell declined to answer questions about how she returned to Pennsylvania, or with whom.

Forrest Rogers, who reported Powell’s name to the F.B.I., at first thought he had identified a ringleader in a premeditated campaign to invade the Capitol. “The initial footage showed a woman, an apparent insider with an understanding of the Capitol layout, shouting commands to a bunch of unknowns through a bullhorn,” Rogers said. “This created a perception that she was one of the conspirators with an extensive network.” John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who has been involved in crowdsourced efforts to identify participants in the riot, said that he also independently confirmed Powell’s identity: “It became clearer over time that her actual role might be different, but still important to understanding what brought a person like that to the Capitol.”

Lemons, Powell’s mother, expressed astonishment at her daughter’s conduct and said that she condemned the violence during the riot. “The whole family is, in a way, just devastated,” she said. “It’s a thing you never expect, that your child is going to be on some F.B.I. ‘Wanted’ poster.” Powell said that her only regrets were the possible repercussions for her children. Asked whether she would have acted differently, given the chance, she said, “I try not to think about that. There are some things that are just worth blocking out.”

 The Wind

By Lauren Groff The New Yorker

Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.

So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road.

When they stopped by the mailbox, the younger brother said in a very small voice, Is she dead?

The older boy hissed, Shut up, you’ll wake him, and all three looked at the house hunched up on the hill in the chilly dark, the green siding half installed last summer, the broken front window covered with cardboard.

The sister touched the little one’s head and said, whispering, No, no, don’t worry, she’s alive. I heard her go out to feed the sheep, and then she left for work. The boy leaned like a cat into her hand.

He was six, his brother was nine, and the girl was twelve. These were my uncles and my mother as children.

Much later, she would tell me the story of this day at those times when it seemed as if her limbs were too heavy to move and she stood staring into the refrigerator for long spells, unable to decide what to make for dinner. Or when the sun would cycle into one window and out the other and she would sit on her bed unable to do anything other than breathe. Then I would sit quietly beside her, and she would tell the story the same way every time, as if ripping out something that had worked its roots deep inside her.

It was bitterly cold that day and the wind was supposed to rise, but for now all was airless, waiting. After some time, the older brother said, Kids are going to make fun of you, your face all mashed up like that.

My mother touched her eye and winced at the pain there, then shrugged.

They were so far out in the country, the bus came for them first, and the ride to town was long. At last it showed itself, yellow as sunrise at the end of the road. Its slowness as it pulled up was agonizing. My mother’s heart began to beat fast. She let her brothers get on before her and told them to sit in the front seats. Mrs. Palmer, the driver, was a stout lady who played the organ at church, and whose voice when she shouted at the naughty boys in the back was high like soprano singing. She looked at my mother as she shut the bus door, then said in her singsong voice, You got yourself a shiner there, Michelle.

The bus hissed up from its crouch and lumbered off.

I know, my mother said. Listen, we need your help.

And when Mrs. Palmer considered her, then nodded, my mother asked quickly if she could please drop the three of them off when she picked up the Yoder kids. Their mother would be waiting there for them. Please, she said quietly.

The boys’ faces were startled, they hadn’t known, then an awful acceptance moved across them.

There was a silence before Mrs. Palmer said, Oh, honey, of course, and she shuffled her eyes back to the road. And I won’t mark on the sheet that you were missing, neither. So they won’t get it together to call your house until second period or so, give you a little time. She looked into the mirror at the boys and said cheerfully, I got a blueberry muffin. Anyone want a blueberry muffin?

We’re O.K., thanks, my mother said, and sat beside her younger brother, who rested his head on her arm. The fields spun by, lightening to gray, the faintest of gold at the tops of the trees. Just before the bus slowed to meet the cluster of little Yoders, yawning, shifting from foot to foot, my mother saw the old Dodge tucked into a shallow ditch, headlights off.

Thank you, she said to Mrs. Palmer, as they got off, and Mrs. Palmer said, No thanks needed, only decent thing to do. I’ll pray for you, honey. I’ll pray for all of you; we’re all sinners who yearn for salvation. For the first time since she rose that morning, my mother was glad, because a person as full of music as the bus driver surely had the ear of God.

The three children ran through the exhaust from the bus as it rose and roared off.

They slid into the warm car where their mother clutched the steering wheel. She was very pale, but her hair was in its familiar small bouffant. My mother thought of the pain it must have cost my grandmother to do up her hair in the mirror so early in the morning, and felt ill.

You did good, babies, my grandmother said as well as she could, her mouth as smashed as it was. She turned the car. A calf galloped beside them for a few steps in the paddock by the road, and my younger uncle laughed and pressed his hand to the glass.

This is not the time for laughing, my uncle Joseph said sternly. He would grow up to be a grave man, living in an obsessively clean, bare efficiency, teaching mathematics at a community college.

Leave him be, Joey, my mother said. She said in a lower voice to her mother, Poor Ralphie thought you were dead.

Not dead yet, my grandmother said. By the skin of my teeth. She tried to smile at the boys in the mirror.

Where we going? Ralphie said. I didn’t know we were going anywhere.

To see my friend in the city, my grandmother said. We’ll call when we find a phone out of town. She put a cigarette in her mouth but fumbled with the lighter in her shaky hands until my mother took it and struck the flame for her.

They were going the long way so they wouldn’t have to drive past the house again, and my mother watched the minute hand of the clock on the dash, feeling each second pulling her tighter inside.

Faster, Mama, she said quietly, and her mother said without looking at her, Last thing we need’s being stopped by one of his buddies. I got to pick up my pay first.

The hospital loomed on the hill beside the river, elegant in its stone façade, and my grandmother parked around back, by the dumpster. Can’t risk leaving you, she said. Come with, and bring your stuff. But when she began to walk, she could only mince a little at a time, and my mother moved close, so she could lean on her, and together they went faster.

They went up the steps through the back door into the kitchen. A man in a ridiculous hairnet, like a green mush-room, was carrying a basin of peeled potatoes in a bath of water. Without looking he barked, You’re late, Ruby. But then the children caught his eye, and he saw the state of them, and put the potatoes down and reached out and touched my mother’s face gently with his hot rough hand. Lord. She get it, too? he said. She’s just a kid.

My mother told herself not to cry; she always cried when strangers were tender with her.

Put herself between us. She is a good girl, my grandmother said.

I’ll kill the bastard myself, the man said. I’ll strangle him if you want me to. Just say the word.

No need, my grandmother said. We are going. But I got to have my check, Dougie. All we got is four dollars and half a tank of gas, and I don’t know what I’m going to do if that’s all we got to live on.

Can’t. No way, Dougie said. Check gets sent to the house; you know this. You filled the form. You checked the box.

My grandmother looked him directly in the face, perhaps for the first time, because she was a timid woman whose voice was low, who made herself a shadow in the world. He sighed and said, See what I can manage, then he disappeared into the office.

Now through the door of the cafeteria there came two women moving fast. One was a plump pretty teen-ager chewing gum, the cashier, and the other was Doris, my grandmother’s friend, freckled and squat and blunt. For extra money, she made exquisite cakes, with flowers like irises and delphiniums in frosting. It was hard to believe a woman as tough as she was could hold such delicacy inside her.

Oh, Ruby, Doris said. It got even worse, huh. Jesus, look at you.

Shoved his gun in my mouth this time, my grandmother said. She didn’t bother to whisper, because the kids had been there, they had seen it. Thought I was going to be shot. But, no, he just knocked out a few teeth. My grandmother gingerly lifted her lip with a finger to show her swollen bloodied gums. When Doris stepped forward to hug her, my grandmother winced away from her touch, and Doris took the helm of her shirt and lifted it, and said, Oh, shit, when she saw the bruises marbling my grandmother’s stomach and ribs.

Better go up and get looked at by a doctor, the cashier said, her damp pink mouth hanging open. That looks really ugly.

No time, my grandmother said. It’s already too dangerous to show up here.

In silence, Doris took her cracked leather purse from the hook and put all the cash in her wallet in my mother’s hand. The cashier blew a bubble, considering, then sighed and pulled down her own purse and did the same.

Bless you, ladies, my grandmother said. Then she took a shuddering breath and said, In a way, it was my fault. I thought I would stay until we finished the shearing. You know he’s rough with the sheep. I wanted to save them some blood.

Mama? my younger uncle said by the door.

No, don’t you do that nonsense, you know that’s not right, Doris said, fiercely. It’s his fault. Nobody else but his.

Mama? Ralphie said again, louder. It’s him, he’s here. He pointed out the window, where they could see just the nose of the cruiser coming to a stop behind my grandmother’s Dodge.

Get down, Doris said, and they all crouched on the tile. They heard a car door slam. Doris, moving faster than seemed possible, went to the door and locked it. Half a second later the knob was rattled, and then there was a pounding, and then my mother could not hear for the blood rushing in her ears.

Doris picked up the pan of potatoes and came to the window wearing a furious face. What in hell you want? she shouted. Dare to show your face here.

There was a murmuring, then Doris shouted down through the glass, not here, up in the E.R. getting looked at. Quite a number you have done on her. Could not hardly walk. She said this nastily, glowering. Then she turned her back on the window and went to the stainless-steel table in the middle of the room, where the cashier watched out the window over Doris’s shoulder.

They heard an engine starting up, and at last the cashier said in a thick voice, O.K., he got in and now he’s driving around. But, like, when he figures out, you’re not up in the E.R. he’s gonna just come into the kitchen through the cafeteria, you know. Like, there’s no lock on that door and we can’t stop him.

Doris called for Dougie in a sharp voice, and Dougie hurried out of the office with an envelope, looking flushed, a little shamefaced. He had been hiding in there, my mother understood.

I won’t forget your kindness, all of you, my grandmother said, but my mother had to take the paycheck because my grandmother’s hands were shaking too much.

Send us a postcard when you make it, Doris said. Get a move on.

My grandmother leaned on my mother again and they went out to the car as fast as they could, and it started, and slid the back way, down by the green bridge over the river. When they had twisted out of sight of the hospital, my grandmother stopped the car, opened her door, and vomited on the road.

She shut the door. All right, she said, wiping her mouth gingerly with a finger, and started the car up again.

My mother saw on the dashboard clock that it was just past eight. The teachers were doing roll call right now. Soon a girl would collect the sheets and take them to the office, where someone, thinking they were doing the right thing, would notice that all three of the kids were gone, and call their absence in, first to the house, where the phone would ring and ring. But then, getting hold of nobody, they would call it in to the station, and it would be radioed out immediately to him. And he would know that not only was his wife gone but his kids were gone with her. They had an hour, maybe a little more, my mother calculated. An hour could maybe take them out of his jurisdiction. She told her mother this, pressing her foot on an imaginary accelerator. My grandmother did drive faster now through the back roads. Gusts of sharp wind pressed the car.

For some time, they were strung into their separate thoughts. My mother counted the cash. A hundred and twenty-three, she said with surprise.

Doris’s grocery money, I bet, my grandmother said. Bless her.

Ralphie said sadly, I wish we could’ve brought Butch.

Yeah, just what we need, your stinky old dog, Joey said.

Can we go back someday to get him? Ralphie said, but my grandmother was silent.

My mother turned around to look at her brothers and said, bitterly, We’re never going back. I hope it all burns down with him inside.

Hey, the little boy said weakly. That’s not nice. He’s my dad.

Mine, too, but I’d be happy if he eats rat poison, Uncle Joseph said. Then he bent forward and looked at the floor, then at the seat beside him, and said, Oh, jeez. Oh, no. Where’s your knapsack, Ralphie?

Uncle Ralphie looked all around and said at last, with his eyes wide, I took it into the kitchen but I think I left it.

There was a long moment before this blow hit them all, at once.

Oh, this is bad, my mother said.

I’m so sorry, Ralphie said, starting to cry. Mama, I gotta go pee.

Surely Doris will hide it, my grandmother said.

Hold your bladder, Ralphie. But what if she doesn’t find it in time? my mother said. What if she doesn’t see it before he does? And he knows that you took us. And he gets on the radio for them all to keep an eye out for us. They could be looking for us now.

My grandmother cursed softly and looked at the rearview mirror. They were whipping terribly fast on the country curves now. The boys, in the back, were clutching the door handles.

My uncle Joey, in a display of self-control that made him seem like a tiny ancient man, said, It’s O.K., Ralphie, you didn’t mean to leave your bag.

My younger uncle reached out his little hand, and Joseph, who hated all show of affection, held it. Ralphie had a fishing accident when I was a teen-ager, and my cold, dry uncle Joseph fell apart at the funeral, sobbing and letting snot run down his face, all twisted grotesquely in pain.

Mama, we got to get out of the state, my mother said. We’ll be safer across state lines.

Shush now, I need to think, my grandmother said. Her hands had gone white on the wheel.

No, what we got to do is ditch the car, my uncle Joseph said, they’ll be looking for it. Probably already are. We got to find a parking lot that’s full of cars already, like a grocery store or something.

Then what do we do? my grandmother said in a strangled voice. We walk to Vermont? She laughed, a sharp sound.

No, then we take a bus, Joseph said in his hard, rational voice. We get on a bus and they can’t find us then.

O.K., my mother said. O.K., yeah, Joey’s right, that’s a good plan. Good thinking. We’re fifteen minutes out from Albany, they got a bus station, I know where it is.

It was her father who had once driven her there in his cruiser, because her middle-school choir was taking a bus down to New York City for a competition. He had stopped on the way for strawberry milkshakes. This was a good memory she had of him.

Fine, my grandmother said. Yes. I can’t think of nothing else. I guess this will be our change of plans. But, for the first time since the night before, tears welled up in her eyes and began dripping down her bruised cheeks and she had to slow the car to see through them.

And then she started breathing crazily, and leaned forward until her forehead rested on the wheel, and the car stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. The wind howled around it.

Mama, we need to drive, my mother said. We need to drive now. We need to go.

I really, really have to pee, Ralphie said.

It’s O.K., it’s O.K., it’s O.K., my grandmother whispered. It’s just that my body is not really listening to me. I can’t move anything right now. I can’t move my feet. Oh, God.

It’s fine, my mother said softly. Don’t worry. You’re fine. You can take the time you need to calm down.

And at this moment my mother saw with terrible clarity that everything depended upon her. The knowledge was heavy on the nape of her neck, like a hand pressing down hard. And what came to her was the trail of bread crumbs from the fairy tale her mother used to tell her in the dark when she was tiny, and it was just the two of them in the bedroom, no brothers in this life, not yet, and the soft, kind moon was shining in the window and her father was downstairs, worlds away. So my mother said, in a soothing voice, So what we’re going to do is, Mama’s going to take a deep breath and we’re going to drive down into Albany, over the tracks, take a right at the feed place, go down by the big brick church, and park in that lot behind it. It’s only a block or two from the station. We’re going to get out and walk as fast as we can and I’ll go in and buy the tickets on the first bus out to wherever, and if we have time I can get us some food to eat on the bus. And we’ll get on the bus, and it will slide us out of here so fast. It’ll go wherever it’s going, but eventually we’ll get to the city. And the city is so enormous we can just hide there. And there are museums and parks and movie theatres and subways and everything in the city. And Mama will get a job and we’ll go to school and we’ll get an apartment and there’ll be no more stupid sheep to take care of and it’ll be safe. No more having to run out to the barn to sleep. Nobody can hurt us in the city, O.K., boys? We’re going to have a life that will be so boring, every day it will be the same, and it is going to be wonderful. O.K.?

By now my mother had pried my grandmother’s hands off the steering wheel and was chafing the blood back into them. O.K.? All we need is for you to take a deep breath.

You can do it, Mama, Joseph said. Ralphie covered his face with both hands. The grasses outside danced under the heavy wind, brushed flat, ruffled against the fur of the fields.

Then my mother prayed with her eyes open, her hands spread on the dash, willing the car forward, and my grandmother slowly put the car back into gear and, panting, began to drive.

This was the way my mother later told the story, down to the smallest detail, as though dreaming it into life: the forsythia budding gold on the tips of the bushes, the last snow rotten in the ditches, the faces of the houses still depressed by winter, the gray clouds that hung down heavily as her mother drove into the valley of the town, the wind picking up so that the flag’s rivets on the pole snapped crisply outside the bus station, where they waited on a metal bench that seared their bottoms and they shuddered from more than the cold. The bus roaring to life, wreathed in smoke, carrying them away. She told it almost as though she believed this happier version, but behind her words I see the true story, the sudden wail and my grandmother’s blanched cheeks shining in red and blue and the acrid smell of piss. How just before the door opened and she was grabbed by the hair and dragged backward, my grandmother turned to her children and tried to smile, to give them this last glimpse of her.

The three children survived. Eventually they would save themselves, struggling into lives and loves far from this place and this moment, each finding a kind of safe harbor, jobs and people and houses empty of violence. But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me how to move as a woman in the world. She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within. ♦

 

Socialism for the Rich. Capitalism for the Rest.

 

Made in the U.S.A.: Socialism for the Rich. Capitalism for the Rest.

Once we take care of the pandemic, we need to sort this out.

 By Thomas L. Friedman New York Times

Opinion Columnist 

I understand why Democrats are fuming.

Donald Trump ran up budget deficits in his first three years to levels seen in our history only during major wars and financial crises — thanks to tax cuts, military spending and little fiscal discipline. And he did so prepandemic, when the economy was already expanding and unemployment was low. But now that Joe Biden wants to spend more on pandemic relief and prevent the economy from tanking further, many Republicans — on cue — are rediscovering their deficit hawk wings.

What frauds.

We need to do whatever it takes to help the most vulnerable Americans who have lost jobs, homes or businesses to Covid-19 — and to buttress cities overwhelmed by the virus. So, put me down for a double dose of generosity.

But, but, but … when this virus clears, we ALL need to have a talk.

There has been so much focus in recent years on the downsides of rapid globalization and “neoliberal free-market groupthink” — influencing both Democrats and Republicans — that we’ve ignored another, more powerful consensus that has taken hold on both parties: That we are in a new era of permanently low interest rates, so deficits don’t matter as long as you can service them, and so the role of government in developed countries can keep expanding — which it has with steadily larger bailouts, persistent deficit spending, mounting government debts and increasingly easy money out of Central Banks to finance it all.

This new consensus has a name: “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest,” argues Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, author of “The Ten Rules of Successful Nations” and one of my favorite contrarian economic thinkers. 

“Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest” — a variation on a theme popularized in the 1960s — happens, Sharma explained in a phone interview, when government intervention does more to stimulate the financial markets than the real economy. So, America’s richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of U.S. stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains. Meanwhile, mediocre productivity in the real economy has limited opportunity, choice and income gains for the poor and middle class alike.

The best evidence is the last year: We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has crushed jobs and small businesses — but the stock market is soaring. That’s not right. That’s elephants flying. I always get worried watching elephants fly. It usually doesn’t end well. 

we raise taxes on the rich and direct more relief to the poor, which I favor, when you keep relying on this much stimulus, argues Sharma, you’re going to get lots of unintended consequences. And we are.

For instance, Sharma wrote in July in a Wall Street Journal essay titled “The Rescues Ruining Capitalism,” that easy money and increasingly generous bailouts fuel the rise of monopolies and keep “alive heavily indebted ‘zombie’ firms, at the expense of start-ups, which drive innovation.” And all of that is contributing to lower productivity, which means slower economic growth and “a shrinking of the pie for everyone.”

As such, no one should be surprised “that millennials and Gen Z are growing disillusioned with this distorted form of capitalism and say that they prefer socialism.”

In the 1980s, “only 2 percent of publicly traded companies in the U.S. were considered ‘zombies,’ a term used by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) for companies that, over the previous three years, had not earned enough profit to make even the interest payments on their debt,” Sharma wrote. “The zombie minority started to grow rapidly in the early 2000s, and by the eve of the pandemic, accounted for 19 percent of U.S.-listed companies.” It’s happening in Europe, China and Japan, too.

And it’s all logical. Prolonged and increasingly generous bailouts, where governments are willing to buy even corporate junk bonds to prevent foreclosures, added Sharma, “distort the efficient allocation of capital needed to raise productivity.”

The past few years should have been an era of huge creative destruction. With so many new cheap digital tools of innovation, so much access to cheap high-powered computing and so much easy money, start-ups should have been exploding. They were not.

“Before the pandemic, the U.S. was generating start-ups — and shutting down established companies — at the slowest rates since at least the 1970s,” wrote Sharma. “The number of publicly traded U.S. companies had fallen by nearly half, to around 4,400, since the peak in 1996.” (The number of start-ups has increased in the pandemic, but that may be because so many businesses closed.)

Alas, though, big companies are becoming huge and more monopolistic in this easy money, low interest rate era. It is not only because the internet created global winner-take-all markets, which have enabled companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple to amass cash piles bigger than the reserves of many nation-states. It’s also because they can so easily use their inflated stock prices or cash hordes to buy up budding competitors and suck up all the talent and resources “crowding out the little guys,” Sharma said.

Meanwhile, he added, as governments keep stepping in to eliminate recessions, downturns no longer play their role of purging the economy of inefficient companies, and recoveries have grown weaker and weaker, with lower productivity growth. So it takes more and more stimulus each time to prop up growth.

This is all actually making our system more fragile.

Now that so many countries, led by the U.S., have massively increased their debt loads, if we got even a small burst of inflation that drove interest on the 10-year Treasury to 3 percent from 1 percent, the amount of money the U.S. would have to devote to debt servicing would be so enormous that little money might be left for discretionary spending on research, infrastructure or education — or another rainy day. 

Sure, we could then just print even more money, but that could threaten the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and raise our borrowing costs even more.

So, yes, yes, yes — we must, right now, help our fellow citizens, who are hurting, through this pandemic. But instead of more cash handouts, maybe we should do it the way the Koreans, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Chinese and other East Asians have been doing it — cash assistance to only the most vulnerable and more investments in infrastructure that improve productivity and create good jobs. The East Asians also focus on making their governments smarter, particularly around delivering things like health care, rather than bigger — one reason they have gotten through this pandemic with less pain.

Biden plans a big infrastructure package soon. He totally gets it. I just hope that Congress, and the markets, don’t have debt fatigue by the time we get to the most productive medicine: infrastructure.

Going forward, how about more inclusive capitalism for everyone and less knee-jerk socialism for rich people. Economies grow from more people inventing and starting stuff. “Without entrepreneurial risk and creative destruction, capitalism doesn’t work,” wrote Sharma. “Disruption and regeneration, the heart of the system, grind to a halt. The deadwood never falls from the tree. The green shoots are nipped in the bud.”

 

 

The Hard Crowd

Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco.

By Rachel Kushner The New Yorker 

“It’s alright, Ma, I’m only bleeding.”

You live your life alone but tethered to the deed of a mother. You live your life naked to the world and what it will pile upon you. And, no, you will not avoid death. You won’t survive it. And by “you” I mean not just Jesus, who is invoked in this Bob Dylan song, whether intentionally or not, but you as in you, the person reading this. Someone loves you. That’s not small. You suffer and she watches, living or dead. She can’t protect you, but it’s alright, Ma, I can make it.

Jimmy Carter used a famous line from the same Dylan song—“he not busy being born is busy dying”—to make a point about patriotism: America was busy being born, Carter said, not busy dying. Italics mine. This was in his acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, in Madison Square Garden. I watched it on television with my grandparents, in their bed, as the three of us ate bowls of ice milk from Carvel, whose packaging, like everything that year, was bicentennial-themed, in red, white, and blue. For Carter, a lifelong Christian, surely the idea of being born had an undertone of religious conversion, of being brought closer to God, not just born but reborn: in a state of constant renewal, rejuvenation, renovation, change. I liked Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who wore denim separates on the campaign trail and was approved by my anti-establishment family. I was seven and could not have understood what Carter meant, what Dylan meant.

You are busy being born for the whole long ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying—that’s the logic of the line, as I interpret it. Here, “being born” is an open and existential category: you are gaining experience, living intensely in the present, before the period of life when you are finished with the new. This “dying” doesn’t have to be negative. It, too, is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, is mostly over. You turn reflective, interior; you examine and sort and tally. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but it continues to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you’ll never see again. None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers.

I’ve been replaying film footage I found on YouTube that was shot in 1966 or 1967 from a car slowly moving along Market Street, at night, in downtown San Francisco, the city where I grew up. The film begins near Ninth and Market and moves northeast through Civic Center, past multiple bright signs and theatre marquees against the night sky, their neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog. This view of Market is before my time and not quite the street I recall. It’s fancier, with all this electric glitz. Neon is a “noble” gas. Whatever else that means, it fits this eerie film.

Civic Center was where we kids went looking for trouble. In the daytime, cutting school to flip through poster displays in head shops, and at night going to the Strand, a theatre where grownups shared their Ripple wine and their joints. This section of Market is the southern edge of the Tenderloin, where a friend of mine, older than the rest of us, was the first to get a job, at age fifteen, working at a KFC on Eddy Street. Her employment there seemed impossibly mature and with it, even if Eddy Street scared me. As soon as I turned fifteen, I copied her and got hired at a Baskin-Robbins on Geary. Spent my after-school days huffing nitrous for kicks while earning $2.85 an hour. At sixteen, I graduated to retail sales at American Rag, a large vintage-clothing store on Bush Street that later, suspiciously, burned down. Business was slow. I straightened racks of dead men’s gabardine, slacks and jackets that were shiny with wear, and joked around with my co-worker Alvin Gibbs, a bass player from a semi-famous punk band, the UK Subs. On my break, I wandered Polk Street, past the rent boys who came and went from the infamous Leland Hotel. It, too, later burned.

The Baskin-Robbins where I worked is gone. You might think personal memories can’t be stored in the generic features of a global franchise, and so what does it matter. I also figured as much, until my mother talked me into having breakfast at an ihop where I’d been a waitress, for the purpose of a trip down memory lane. “Why bother?” I’d said to her. “Every ihop is identical.” I was certain that nothing of me could linger in a place of corporate sameness, but she insisted. We sat down in a booth for two, and I was plunged into sense memory. The syrup caddies on each table, which I’d had to refill and clean after every shift; the large iced-tea cannisters, sweet and unsweetened; the blue vinyl of the banquettes; the clatter from the kitchen, with its rhythmic metal-on-metal scraping of grease from the fry surface; the murmur of the TV from the break room where girls watched their soaps. A residue was on everything, specific and personal. My mother sat across from me, watching me reëncounter myself.

The YouTube footage of Market Street in 1966 is professional-grade cinematography, perhaps shot to insert in a dramatic feature. I want to imagine that it was an outtake from Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt,” but I have no evidence except that it’s around the right time. The camera pauses at an intersection just beyond a glowing pink arrow pointing south. Above this bright arrow is “Greyhound” in the same bubble-gum neon, and “BUS” in luminous white. This is how I know that we are near the intersection of Seventh and Market.

The Greyhound station was still there when I moved to San Francisco, in 1979, at age ten. I don’t remember the pink neon sign, but the station, now gone, remains vivid. It had an edge to it that was starkly different from the drab, sterile, and foggy Sunset District, where we lived. I remember a large poster just inside the entrance that featured an illustration of a young person in bell-bottoms, and a phone number: “Runaways, call for help.” And I can still summon the rangy feel of the place, of people who were not arriving or departing but lurking, native inhabitants of an underground world that flourished inside the bus station.

Next to Greyhound, up a steep staircase, was Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor, where my oldest friend from San Francisco, Emily, a fellow Sunset girl, got her first tattoo, when we were sixteen. This was the eighties, and tattoos were not conventional and ubiquitous, as they are now. There were people in the Sunset who had them, but they were outlaw people. Like the girl in a house on Noriega where we hung out when I was twelve or thirteen, whose tattoo, on the inside of her thigh, was a cherry on a stem and, in script, the words “Not no more.” I remember walking up the steep steps to Lyle Tuttle’s with Emily, entering a cramped room where a shirtless man was leaning on a counter as Tuttle worked on his back. “You guys are drunk,” Tuttle said. “Come back in two hours.” If anyone cared that Emily was under eighteen, I have no memory of it, and neither does she.

Later, I briefly shared a flat on Oak Street with a tattoo artist named Freddy Corbin, who was becoming a local celebrity. Freddy was charming and charismatic, with glowing blue eyes. He and his tattoo-world friends lived like rock stars. They were paid in cash. I’d never seen money like that, casual piles of hundred-dollar bills lying around. Freddy drove a black ’66 Malibu with custom plates. He had a diamond winking from one of his teeth. Women fawned over him. Our shared answering machine was full of messages from girls hoping Freddy would return their calls, but he became mostly dedicated to dope, along with his younger brother, Larry, and a girl named Noodles, who both lived upstairs. Larry and Noodles came down only once every few days, to answer the door and receive drugs, then went back upstairs. Later, I heard they’d both died. Freddy lived, got clean, is still famous.

The shadow over that Oak Street house is only one part of why I never wanted a tattoo. I find extreme steps toward permanence frightening. I prefer memories that stay fragile, vulnerable to erasure, like the soft feel of the velvet couches in Freddy’s living room. Plush, elegant furniture bought by someone living a perilous high life.

After the light changes on Seventh, the camera continues down Market, passing the Regal, a second-run movie house showing “The Bellboy,” starring Jerry Lewis, according to the marquee. When I knew the Regal, it was a peepshow; instead of Jerry Lewis, its marquee featured a revolving “Double in the Bubble,” its daily show starring two girls. On the other side of the street, out of view, is Fascination, a gambling parlor that my friend Sandy and I went to the year we were in eighth grade, because Sandy had a crush on the money changer there. We wasted a lot of time at Fascination, watching gaming addicts throw rubber balls up numbered wooden lanes, smoke curling from ashtrays next to each station. It was quiet in there, like a church—just the sound of rolling rubber balls. Those hours at Fascination, and many other corners of my history, made it into a novel of mine, “The Mars Room,” after I decided that the real-world places and people I knew would never be in books unless I wrote the books. So I appointed myself the world’s leading expert on ten square blocks of the Sunset District, the north section of the Great Highway, a stretch of Market, a few blocks in the Tenderloin.

The camera pans past the Warfield and, next to it, a theatre called the Crest. By the time I worked as a bartender at the Warfield, the Crest had become the Crazy Horse, a strip joint where a high-school friend, Jon Hirst, worked the door in between prison stints. The last time I ever saw Jon, we were drinking at the Charleston, around the corner on Sixth Street. I was with a new boyfriend. Jon was prison-cut and looking handsome in white jeans and a black leather jacket. He was in a nostalgic mood about our shared youth in the avenues. He leaned toward me so my boyfriend could not hear, and said, “If anyone ever fucks with you, I mean anyone, I will hurt that person.” I hadn’t asked for this service. It was part of Jon’s tragic chivalry, his reactive aggression. His prison life continued after he pleaded guilty to stabbing someone outside the 500 Club, on Seventeenth and Guerrero. A dispute had erupted over an interaction between the guy and a woman Jon and his friends were with, concerning the jukebox.

Farther down Sixth Street was the Rendezvous, where hardcore legends Agnostic Front played one New Year’s, along with a band whose female singer was named Pearl Harbor and looked Hawaiian. The show ended early, because Agnostic Front’s vocalist got into a fistfight with a fan, right there in front of the stage. Pearl Harbor, who was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, stayed pure of the whole affair, standing to one side in her short white dress, white stockings, and starched white nurse’s hat, as these brutes rolled around on the beer-covered floor.

The camera moves on. It gets to the Woolworth’s at Powell and Market, where we used to steal makeup. On the other side of the street, out of view, is the enormous Emporium-Capwell, the emporium of our plunder, Guess and Calvin Klein, until, at least for me, I was caught, and formally arrested in the department store’s subbasement, which featured, to my surprise, police ready to book us and interrogation rooms, where they handcuffed you to a metal pole, there in the bowels of the store. I remember a female officer with a Polaroid camera. I would be banned from the store for life, she said. This was the least of my worries, and I found it funny. She took a photo to put in my file. I gave her a big smile. I remember the moment, me chained to the pole and her standing over me. As she waved the photo dry, I caught a glimpse and vainly thought that, for once, I looked pretty good. It’s always like that. You get full access to the bad and embarrassing photos, while the flattering one is out of reach. Who knows what happened to the photo, and my whole “dossier.” Banned for life. But the Emporium-Capwell is gone. I have outlived it! 

The camera swings south as it travels closer to Montgomery, down Market. It passes Thom McAn, where we went to buy black suède boots with slouchy tops. Every Sunset girl had a pair, delicate boots that got wrecked at rainy keggers in the Grove, despite the aerosol protectant we sprayed on them.

So many of my hours are spent like this, but with me as the camera, panning backward into scenes that are not retrievable. I am no longer busy being born. But it’s all right. The memories, the “material,” it starts to answer questions. It gives testimony. It talks.

Years after passing the young hustlers in front of the Leland Hotel while on break from my job straightening dead men’s suits, I became friends with one of those Polk Street boys. His name was Tommy. He was a regular during my shifts at the Blue Lamp, my first bartending gig, on Geary and Jones, at the top of the Tenderloin. This was the early nineties, and all the girls I knew were bartenders or waitresses or strippers and most of the boys were bike messengers at Western or Lightning Express, or they drove taxicabs for Luxor.

Tommy’s face was classically beautiful. It could have sold products, maybe cereal, or vitamins for growing boys. And he was blank like an advertisement, but his blankness was not artifice. It was a kind of refusal. He was perversely and resolutely blank, like a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, except with no money or class status. He wore the iconic hustler uniform—tight jeans, white tennies, aviator glasses, Walkman. He would come into the Blue Lamp and keep me company on slow afternoons. I found his blankness poignant; he was obviously so wounded that he had to void himself by any means he could. I knew him as Tommy or sometimes Thomas and learned his full name—Thomas Wenger—only when his face looked up at me one morning from a newspaper. Someone collecting bottles and cans had found Tommy’s head in a dumpster three short blocks from the Blue Lamp. I don’t know if the case was ever solved. It’s been twenty-six years, but I can see Tommy now. He’s wearing those aviator glasses and looking at me as I type these words, the two of us still in the old geometry, him seated at the bar, me behind it, the room afternoon-empty, the day sagging to its slowest hour.

There were times, working at the Blue Lamp, when I felt sure that people who had come and gone on my shifts had committed grievous acts of violence. And, in fact, I may have seen Tommy with the person who killed him, unless that’s merely my active imagination, though I never would have imagined that someone I knew would be decapitated, his head ending up in a dumpster. There are experiences that stay stubbornly resistant to knowledge or synthesis. I have never wanted to treat Tommy’s death as material for fiction. It’s not subtle. It evades comprehension. In any case, people would think I was making it up.

The owner of the Blue Lamp was named Bobby. I remember his golf cap and his white boat shoes and the purple broken capillaries on his face, the gallery of sad young women who tolerated him in exchange for money and a place to crash. Bobby lived out in the Excelsior, but he and his brother had built an apartment upstairs from the Blue Lamp, for especially wild nights. I never once went up there. It wasn’t a place I wanted to see. Sometimes the swamper—Jer, we all called him—slept up there when he knew Bobby wasn’t coming around, but mostly Jer slept in the bar’s basement, on an old couch next to the syrup tanks. Jer’s life philosophy was “Will work for beer.” He restocked the coolers, fetched buckets of ice, mopped up after hours. Drank forty bottles of Budweiser a day, and resorted to harder stuff only on his periodic Greyhound trips to Sparks, to play the slots. (That Jer was a “Sparks type” and not a Reno type was one of the few things about himself that he vocalized.)

Whole parts of Jer, I suspected, were missing, or in some kind of permanent dormancy. I wondered who he had been before he lived this repetitive existence of buckets of ice and Budweiser, day after day after day. He owned nothing. He slept in his clothes, slept even in his mesh baseball hat. He lived at the bar and never went out of character. He was a drinker and a swamper. He said little, but it was him and me, bartender and barback, night after night. And Jer had my back literally. After 2 a.m. closings, he would come outside and watch me start my motorcycle, an orange Moto Guzzi I parked on its center stand on the sidewalk. He insisted that I call the bar when I got home. I always did.

There was another bar up the street from the Blue Lamp that had a double bed in the back where a man lay all day, as if it were his hospice. You’d be playing pool and drinking with your friends and there was this man, in bed, behind a rubber curtain. Even the names of these establishments, all part of an informal Tenderloin circuit, evoke for me that half-lit world: Cinnabar, the Driftwood, Jonell’s. I remember a man, youngish and well dressed, who would come into the Blue Lamp and act crazy on my shifts. Once, he came in threatening to kill himself. I said, “Go ahead, but not in here.” Did I really say that? I can’t remember what I said.

There was a girl who started cocktail-waitressing at the Blue Lamp on busy nights when we had live bands. She told me that her name was Johnny but also that it wasn’t her real name. She was a recovering drug addict who missed heroin so much she started using it again in the months that she worked at the Blue Lamp. She bought a rock from one of the Sunday blues jammers and that was literally what he sold her. A pebble. He ripped her off, and why not. If Johnny is still alive, which may not be the case, do I really want to know the long and likely typical story of her recovery and humility and day-to-day hopes, very small hopes that, for her, are everything? The glamour of death, or the banality of survival: which is it going to be?

My friend Sandy, whose real name I have redacted from this story, came into the Blue Lamp asking me to hawk her engagement ring for her. We had grown up together and she’d even lived with my family for a while. My parents loved Sandy and love her still. They did their best. By the time she was looking to sell her ring, she had been living a hard life in the Tenderloin for a decade, working as a prostitute, and had become engaged to one of her johns. Who knows what happened to him. Maybe he bought a wife somewhere else.

I didn’t pawn Sandy’s ring. I can’t remember why. I did a lot of other things for Sandy. Tried to keep her safe. Took my down comforter to her flophouse in Polk Gulch, the very blanket she’d slept under when she shared my room in junior high. Kept a box of baking soda in a kitchen cabinet of every house I lived in, so that she could cook her drugs. She had a dealer who liked to eat cocaine instead of smoke it or shoot it. He would slice pieces off a large rock and nibble on them, like powdery peanut brittle. Sandy giggled about this idiosyncrasy as if it were cute. Anything she described became charming instead of horrible. That was her gift. She was blond and blue-eyed and too pretty for makeup, other than a little pot of opalescent gloss that she kept in her jacket pocket and which gave her lips a fuchsia sheen. She’d say to my parents in her sweet singsong, “Hi, Peter! Hi, Pinky!” Even when my dad went to visit her in jail. Hi, Peter!

I don’t know where Sandy is now. Under the radar. I’ve Googled. It’s all court records. Bench warrants, failures to appear. I wrote to an ex-husband of hers through Facebook. He’s brought up their children by himself. No response. I don’t blame him. Probably he just wants a normal life.

I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. The bar is gone. The main characters have died. Perhaps I feared that if I transformed them into fiction I’d lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has evaporated. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography: the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn. And yet still defined by the actions she took, even if she now distances herself from them. In all a writer’s supposed self-exposure, her claim to authentic experience, the thing she leaves out is the galling idea that her life might become a subject put to paper. Might fill the pages of a book.

When I got my job at the Blue Lamp, I was living on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Oliver Stone was making a movie about the Doors and attempting to reconstitute the Summer of Love for his film shoot. I disliked hippies and didn’t even want to see fake ones, in costume. I suspect now that this animosity may have been partly due to the outsized influence of my parents’ beatnik culture and their investment in jazz, in Blackness, in vernacular American forms as the true elevated art, even as my early childhood, in Eugene, Oregon, was loaded with hippies. By my twenties, they had begun to seem like an ahistorical performance: middle-class white kids who had stripped down to Jesus-like austerity, a penance I considered indulgent and lame.

Oliver Stone filmed on our corner, under our windows. Probably he had made a deal with our landlord, paid him. We got nothing. So we entered and exited all day long. My look then was all black, with purple-dyed hair. My downstairs neighbor was in a band called Touch Me Hooker; their look was something like a glam-rock version of Motörhead. The film crew had to call “Cut!” every time someone from our building stepped out of the security gate. The next day, the film crew was back. We put speakers in our windows and played the Dead Boys. I’m not sure why we were so hostile. There was one Doors song I always liked, called “Peace Frog.”

In her eponymous “White Album” essay, Joan Didion insists that Jim Morrison’s pants are “black vinyl,” not black leather. Did you notice? She does this at least three times, refers to Jim Morrison’s pants as vinyl.

Dear Joan:

Record albums are made out of vinyl. Jim Morrison’s pants were leather, and even a Sacramento débutante, a Berkeley Tri-Delt, should know the difference.

Sincerely,

Rachel

As a sixteen-year-old freshman at Didion’s alma mater, Berkeley, I was befriended by a Hare Krishna who sold vegetarian cookbooks on Sproul Plaza. He didn’t seem like your typical Hare Krishna. He had a low and smoky voice with a downtown New York inflection and he was covered with tattoos—I could see them under his saffron robes. He had a grit, a gleam. A neck like a wrestler. He’d be out there selling his cookbooks and we’d talk. I wouldn’t see him for a while. Then he’d be back. This went on for all four years of my college experience. Much later, I figured out, through my friend Alex Brown, that this tough-guy Hare Krishna was likely Harley Flanagan, the singer of the Cro-Mags, a New York City hardcore band that toured with Alex’s band, Gorilla Biscuits. The Krishnas were apparently Harley’s vacation from his Lower East Side life, or the Cro-Mags were his vacation from his Krishna gig. Or there was no conflict and he simply did both.

Terence McKenna, the eating-magic-mushrooms-made-us-human guy, was way beyond the hippies. I once saw him give an eerily convincing lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts, in San Francisco. He made a lot of prophecies with charts, but I forgot to check if any of them came true. The industrial-noise and visual impresario Naut Humon was sitting in the row in front of me. He had dyed-black hair, wore steel-toed boots and a “boilersuit,” as it’s called. Remember Naut Humon? I believe he had a compound near a former Green Tortoise bus yard down in Hunters Point. Only a human would come up with a name like that.

This was in the era of Operation Green Sweep, when Bush—I mean H.W.—orchestrated D.E.A. raids of marijuana growers north of the city, in Humboldt County. My friend Sandy, whom I mentioned earlier, got in on that. Profited. Sandy knew these guys who rented a helicopter and hired a pilot. They swooped low over growers and scared people into fleeing and abandoning their crops. Then they went in dressed like Feds and bagged all the plants. Pot is now big business if you want to get rich the legal way. If I knew what was good for me, I’d be day-trading marijuana stocks right now, instead of writing this essay.

When Sandy and I wandered Haight Street as kids, the vibe was not good feelings and free love. It was sleazier, darker. We hung out at a head shop called the White Rabbit. People huffed ether in the back. I first heard “White Room” by Cream there, a song that ripples like a stone thrown into cold, still water. “At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.” It’s a good line. Or is it that she was kindest in the hard crowd? Like, that was when she was virtuous? Either way, the key is that hard crowd. The White Rabbit was the hard crowd. The kids who went there. The kids I knew. Was I hard? Not compared with the world around me. I tell myself that it isn’t a moral failing to be the soft one, but I’m actually not sure.

Later, skinheads ruined the Haight-Ashbury for me and a lot of other people. They crashed a party at my place. They fought someone at the party and threw him over the bannister at the top of the stairs. He landed on his head two floors down. I remember that this ended the party but not how badly hurt the person was. The skinheads had a Nazi march down Haight Street. The leader was someone I knew from Herbert Hoover Middle School, a kid who’d “had trouble fitting in,” as the platitudes tell us and the record confirms. He was a nerd, he was New Wave, he tried to be a skater, a peace punk, a skinhead, and eventually he went on “Geraldo” wearing a tie, talking Aryan pride. Before all that, he was a kid who invited us to his apartment to drink his dad’s liquor. People started vandalizing the place, for kicks. Someone lit the living-room curtains on fire.

Touch Me Hooker, the band my neighbor on Haight Street was in, included a guy I grew up with, Tony Guerrero. He and his brother Tommy lived around the corner from me in the Sunset. My brother skateboarded with them, was part of their crew until he broke his femur bombing the Ninth Avenue hill. Later, Tommy went pro. When we were kids, Tommy and Tony started a punk band called Free Beer: add that to a gig flyer and you’ll get a crowd.

When I see people waxing romantic about the golden days of skateboarding, I am ambivalent. Caught up in the uglier parts. I think of people who were widely considered jackasses and who died in stupid ways suddenly being declared “legends.” I can’t let go of the bad memories. The constant belittling of us girls. The slurs and disrespect, even though we were their friends and part of their circle. Can’t let it go, and yet those people, that circle, come first for me, in a cosmic order, on account of what we share.

As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape San Francisco, by which I mean desperate to leave a specific world inside that city, one I suspected I was too good for and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I had models that many of my friends did not have: educated parents who made me aware of, hungry for, the bigger world. But another part of my parents’ influence was the bohemian idea that real meaning lay with the most brightly alive people, those who were free to wreck themselves. Not free in that way, I was the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, not to dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And then I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me, as it has them.

Forty-three was our magic number, in the way someone’s might be seven or thirteen. I see the number forty-three everywhere and remember that I’m in a cult for life, as a girl from the Sunset. I scan Facebook for the Sunset Irish boys, known for violence and beauty and scandal. They are posed “peckerwood style” in Kangol caps and wifebeaters in front of Harleys and custom cars. Many have been forced out of the city. They live in Rohnert Park or Santa Rosa or Stockton. But they have SF tattoos. Niners tattoos. Sunset tattoos. An image of the Cliff House with the foaming waves below, rolling into Kelly’s Cove.

Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fading. The first time I took Ambien, a drug that makes some people sleep-fix sandwiches and sleepwalk on broken glass, I felt as if everyone I’d ever known were gathered around, not unpleasantly. It was a party and had a warm reunion feel to it. We were all there.

But sometimes the million stories I’ve got and the million people I’ve known pelt the roof of my internal world like a hailstorm.

The Rendezvous, where Pearl Harbor performed in her white stockings and her starched nurse’s hat, was down the street from the hotel where R. Crumb’s brother Max lived. We knew Max because he sat out on the sidewalk all day bumming change and performing his lost mind for sidewalk traffic. We didn’t know he was R. Crumb’s brother. We knew that only after the movie “Crumb” came out. I’m not sure if I’ll ever watch that movie again. Too sad.

Harley from the Cro-Mags is a fixed memory from Berkeley, but whatever he wanted never registered. Maybe he just wanted to sell me vegetarian cookbooks. This was a few years after he almost held up the artist Richard Prince, who lived in Harley’s East Village building. Richard said, “Hey, pal, I’m your neighbor. Rob someone else.” (Harley denies that this happened.)

Richard Prince got his start at the same gallery where Alex Brown showed his work, Feature. There was another artist at Feature who supposedly painted on sleeping bags once upon a time. I actually never saw the Sleeping Bag Paintings. I heard about them and that was enough. There’d be a moment in a late-night conversation when someone would inevitably mention them. We’d all nod. “Yeah, the Sleeping Bag Paintings.” Robert Rauschenberg made a painting on a quilted blanket. That’s pretty close and way earlier: 1955. The blanket belonged to Dorothea Rockburne. I guess he borrowed it. A quilt is more traditional and American, while sleeping bags are for hippies, for transients with no respect.

I thought, as I wrote the previous paragraph, that I could be making this stuff up, that no one had painted on sleeping bags, the fabric was too slippery. But last night I ran into the guy who had. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. He confirmed. Not just the paintings but himself and also me. We exist.

The things I’ve seen and the people I’ve known: maybe it just can’t matter to you. That’s what Jimmy Stewart says to Kim Novak in “Vertigo.” He wants Novak’s character, Judy, to wear her hair like the fictitious and unreachable Madeleine did. He wants Judy to be a Pacific Heights class act and not a downtown department-store tramp.

“Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.”

Outrageous. He’s talking about a woman’s own hair. Of course, it matters to her.

I’m talking about my own life. Which not only can’t matter to you—it might bore you.

So: Get your own gig. Make your litany, as I have just done. Keep your tally. Mind your dead, and your living, and you can bore me. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 18, 2021,