Author: sanfranchrisko

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Another Final Goodbye

D. just called, a few days after sending me a note telling me how he had “FINALLY closed the chapter” on us…

which was sent a few months after sending me a note telling me that he had “FINALLY closed the door” on us…

which was sent a few months after sending me a note telling me that he could “NO LONGER be a part of” my life…

which was sent a few months after sending me a note assuring me that it was his “LAST e-mail” to me (and that I was a liar and a sociopath)…

which was sent the day after sending me an e-mail with the subject “Keeping Communication Open…”

etc… etc…

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Wine Country, my Bartender at the Pit

Wine country with Barb and Vick today. We drove up the Sonoma Coast, through Guerneville for some quick cruising and a stop at Armstrong Woods, “It was only a moment for you..,” then on to West Side Drive, and the Dry Creek Valley, blah blah blah. There’s a beautiful new winery on the West Side Drive–called Roshambo. Really. The wines were fairly good–light, but with lots of complexity and fragrance, and the architecture was stunning, a departure from the Sonoma County vernacular combining sleek contemporary lines and curves with beautiful warm wood planked ceilings and large glass windows framing spectacular views. Joe Bob says check it out.

Did I mention cruising in Guerneville? Well (now close your ears, tulip), while munching our sandwiches at what’s-the-name-of-that-cafe-on-Armstrong-Woods-Road? an employee in way tight shorts and an even tighter tank top that rode 3 inches above the top of his shorts, exposing a cute little furry belly, made frequent trips to the front counter for no apparent reason other than to jiggle that 3 inch section of flesh my way. My lunch companions were oblivious to the heated non-verbal dialogue that I was engaged in.

Do you remember The Pit? It was a dance club downstairs from Cocktails, on Howard at 9th, where AsiaSF is now. I often went there after Manny died, just to watch the bartender. He was a black haired fur-ball whose pudgy tank of a body was frequently poured into an outfit similar to the one described above. As he leaned over the stainless steel counter to give patrons their drinks, that same 3 inch section of belly made contact with the counter-top for an instant or two. Imagining the sensation of that live hot belly, on those hot nights, pressed against the cold steel sent shivers down to my prostate…

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Too Many Martini, Pancakes and my Fireman

So I drank too much last night. Again. You’d think that ONE martini wouldn’t be too much. Well, actually, it was served in a martini glass the size that is usually neon with a blinking olive. My cousin Vicki is visiting with her friend Barb, so we went to eat at Nirvana, on Castro. Nirvana is always filled with cute twenty-somethings of unnatural hair color and at least one visible piercing each. Vicki chatted engagingly about vivisection (Vicki is a lab technician working with rats and Alzheimer drugs) and her boyfriend. Vicki is dating this hunk of mid-western farm boy. He says he’ll never marry her, that he just wants a lifelong girlfriend. And he cooks, too. She wants a ring, so she’s signed up for a dating service that’s kind of like musical chairs, where 40 men and women gather in a room and conduct 3-minute interviews with each other. Potential lifemates are matched and e-mails exchanged. I say keep a side of farmboy and his homemade pancakes. They just left, Vicki and Barb, for a day at the Alemany flea market. The last time I was at the flea market, in 1997(?), I saw my fireman, sans shirt–a big balding hairy slice of chocolate cake. I had seen him around town for several years, and never had the guts to introduce myself, or at that time, the excuse of wanting to photograph him. Well, several weeks later, he showed up at the LAB auction, and was the winning bidder of MY photograph! I buzzed right over to my sweet fuzzy 220 pound flower and introduced myself as the creator of the image that he just bought, and, thinking fast, asked if he’d let me photograph him. He actually said yes, and I thought, “This is what I’m going to do for a living.” I came up with an idea about photographing every inch of his body, as a way of getting access to it without violating my marriage vows, and with no idea of what I was going to do with the images. Unfortunately, he bailed out after the first session, unfortunate also because we had started at the top and didn’t get down too far. I placed an ad on the internet and met Jacek, my next obsession, and created a whole installation about my obsession with him, The Night of the Hunter, and then made my first photographic construction, Every Inch of Jacek (above).

Who knows what Vick and Barb will find at the flea market.