Elderly Prison Hotel

The first apartment I inhabited in San Francisco was this freakish anomaly in the world of apartment living. It was chosen for its proximity to San Francisco State where my roommate and I were going to school, but what we didn't realize at the time was that it was essentially a hotel designed to lock away those pesky elderly folks who remind the rest of the young inhabitants of San Francisco that their time too will one day come.

Pros to the tower apartment on Font Boulevard:
1) The walls were made of concrete and the doors were metal. Tough to hang posters, but I could play my guitar in howling, feedback glory, high as a kite at 2 in the morning.
2) The apartment was ginormous by San Francisco standards.
3) There was a garbage chute in the hallway.
4) The apartment was 8 floors up, which made for many intoxicated speculations on how objects thrown from the windows, which opened wide my good people, would fare. There was even talk of jumping out on a mattress as the mattress would more than likely catch air drafts like a parachute. Of course we never did this, but we came pretty g'damn close to tossing out a broken 13" TV.

Cons to the tower apartment on Font Boulevard:
1) All of our neighbors were 75+, which would probably be fine if they didn't come calling on you to help move things. Or constantly tell you how much you reminded them of the Anthony Edwards character on ER.
2) Font Boulevard exists in the foggy area of the city. Things would tend to get a little depressing and damp.
3) Far away from everything good about living in San Francisco.
4) The constant reminder, and faint medicinal smell, of impending death.
5) Possibly haunted by former elderly resident who probably had not been discovered for some time after their death.
6) Much like a hotel, the metal front door locked itself when it closed.

This will come into play, wait for it...

My roommate and I also worked together at the time, albeit different shifts, at the Oakland International Airport. The only reason Oakland is an international airport by the way is that it had one flight to Mexico out of there every week. We handled freight. Most of you have probably heard stories of my freight handling days. If you haven't and want to, stand near an open bottle of whisky and out they'll pour.

One evening, I went to work his shift with him for a little extra cash. We also shared a car at this time, my intrepid but soon to be dead Honda Prelude. After the shift was over, Corado decided that he was going to stay late for a special plane coming in; not me, I was beat. It was decided that he would drive me down to the Coliseum BART station and drive my car home when he was done.

I remember standing on the BART platform, reading my copy of Black Spring by Henry Miller. I distinctly remember having a sudden flash of inspiration and deciding to write my idea down in the pages of the book. Something about that seemed both so sacrilegious and passionate that it sticks in my mind.

I got off at the Daly City station, and not knowing the transit system, or any other way to do so, I took the longish hike home which involved a nerve shredding few yards of walking the wrong way on a freeway off ramp. I'm sure there were a number of better ways of doing this, but honestly, when you spend more time ingesting booze and pain killers than you do food, the ol' good idea factory doesn't exactly run on greased gears.

I used the key pad to gain entry into the front door and got into the elevator to the 8th floor. It dawned on me as I was getting out of the elevator that my key, the key that would open the door to the apartment, was hanging out with a couple of other keys on a nondescript keychain - including the key to my Honda Prelude, in the pocket of my roommate in Oakland.

I was one of those kinds of tired and frustrated that you just want to cry and punch something very hard. Not knowing what else to do, I went down to the lobby and tried to sleep on a none too comfortable lobby bench and waited for my roommate to get home sometime near 3AM a scant hour and half before I had to get up and got to work and school again.

I did not sleep, and I wish I could blame it on ghosts and a howling wind blowing its way down Font Boulevard, but it was mostly trying to sleep like a vagrant. I gave my roommate a smallish guilt trip when he got home (small, as it wasn’t really his fault) and managed to get through the entirety of another day on stores of energy that you only seem to have in your early twenties.

I miss that place not at all.