Civilization Party

It’s Friday night on Labor Day weekend, and  San Francisco is now utterly emptied of interesting people with social lives and disposable income who either went to Burning Man or some place of natural beauty to barbecue meat products with their myriad attractive friends.

 

One wanders the deserted streets; one is filled with existential dread; one channels Peter Lorre flinching into his trenchcoat lapels in billows of nocturnal port-city fog; one’s quest for amusement begins to lean towards the bizarre, the venal, the stupid.  One develops strange cravings for being in a multiplex shopping center on the outskirts of Detroit, drinking pitchers of beer, gnawing buffalo wings served to you by plasticky-looking sorority chicks with their knockers and cheekage jiggling out of their uniforms, and screaming with others at a Berlin Wall of outsized HDTV screens, with no particular sense of remorse or wondering if there could be anything more to life than this.

 

One finds herself alone at Hooters in Fisherman’s Wharf.

 

“In God’s name, WHY?” a friend texted me.

 

“I just feel like having a bizarre experience,” I texted back.  And really, I was in the mood for some fried food and beer, and perhaps the shrill mortification of a lonely engineer dude chatting me up.  It would be slightly better than boredom.

 

It took an hour by MUNI to get to Fisherman’s Wharf — and the bus ride more than anything else was what made me deeply question my grip on reality.  Fisherman’s Wharf is an area that strikes dread into the heart of every San Franciscan – more than The Loin, more than The Point, more than the Marina, fer God’s sakes.  When we’re forced at gunpoint to take our relatives there, drag them through the herds of porcine picture-snappers lapping up traffic-cone-sized ice creams, to shrink from 140 decibels of Sheryl Crow screaming IF IT MAKES YOU HAPPYYYYYYY out of the waiting room of Salty Sam’s Seafood Barn, to try to talk our loved ones out of getting their own images emblazoned onto XXXL hoodies with the words Alcatraz Psycho Ward underneath it, all we can think is:  This is what I moved here to get away from!

 

And yet, the heart has its own reasons.  I found myself at Hooters, checking out the scene that I hoped would be as jarring and alien to my San Franciscan psyche as a naked safari through outer Chad.

 

“Hi-eeeeeee!” cheered the hostess from behind a 25-foot bank of Hooters merchandise, flipping her black hair around to reveal the Hooters merch that wasn’t technically on sale.  “You kin sit ennywhere you like!”  I got the feeling she’d been told to talk as much as possible like text messages.

 

I took a seat at the counter a few places down from a Lonely Engineer Dude and started flipping through the menu.  The place was about one-quarter full and business didn’t seem to pick up as the evening progressed.  You know it’s a shitty economy when not even jiggling collegiate cleavage can entice gainfully employed men to spring for some fried mozzerella and pitchers of Pabst.

 

Strangely, my taste for fried bar snacks and brew had waned after the bus ride, so I went with road food instead.  I can highly recommend the Hooters key lime pie ($5.95 or so) which has an inch or so of divine citrusy cream cheese on top that goes down really well with freshly brewed coffee and the nine or so different basketball games you never knew were happening simultaneously on parallel planets.

 

I took a look around.  The scattered Lonely Engineer Dudes numbered about three; there were about four Gangs from the Office (that included several women).  There were two couples there who, it was obvious from the coy french-fry-picking and awkward eye contact going on, were on first dates.  Way to go, brah!  Those dating tips from Maxim are so, so solid!

 

The oddest sight was an Indian man, his sari-wrapped wife, and their young daughter, fixing their gazes with great concentration on their plates of curly fries.  At what point had the gentleman realized the mistake he’d made?  Something told me the concierge at the Holiday Inn would have hell to pay.

 

I fixed my formidable female-sizing-up skills on my waitress, whom I felt obliged not to oggle in the name of sisterhood.  (The truth was — though I am not that way inclined – I wanted to oggle all of them.  The surroundings and the premise of Hooters, maybe by extension our whole culture, beg you to oggle.  Offered-up breasts are the currency of fashion magazines and reality TV, not key lime pie and basketball games.  The whole Hooters situation is so odd you just want to stare, if not from attraction, from twisted fascination.  I mean — sheesh — there they are.  And it’s not like a strip joint where the whole point is to stare.  Ostensibly you’re just here to eat barbecue burgers and watch the game, you’re conducting a legitimate business transaction.  So how much are you really, morally allowed to stare?  Sometimes I’m so glad I’m not a guy.)  The Evil Queen in me wondered:  will she still be cute at 35?  Still cute after she’s had a few kids, a few years of life on her feet?

 

No, of course not, I assured myself cattily, then stopped:  How do I know who she really is?  Maybe she’s fascinating.  Maybe she grew up in a war zone.  You don’t know.

 

Hooters must be so much like high school.  You put on a face, and everyone puts on the face, so there’s this whole “fronting” culture that everyone’s scared to violate — only here, crack the wrong smile and it’s not just the uncool side of the cafeteria for you.   You could lose your job, or get moved to a crappy shift, or whatever.

 

Jesus, what a nightmare.

 

Misty of the Key Lime Pie could very well be cool, accomplished, and self-aware once past her maidenhood, but not as who she’s allowed to be here.  The hair-tossing and leaning on the last syllable of her sentences probably rake in the tips, but they will only take her so far.  I just hope she realizes it.

 

Which got me wondering:  at what age do they “retire” a Hooters waitress?  A Google search on this didn’t reveal much except Flickr pages of (rather unsavory) ex-Hooter girl parties.

 

I wish I had some outrageous incident to report from going there, but the truth is, Hooters is disappointingly wholesome — at least the watered-down, live-and-let-live SF version.

 

While every other restaurateur in this town now sees fit to wallpaper his eating establishment with retina-scorching wide-screens (”Hey honey, let’s go out and further lower our IQs tonight!”), SF Hooters only has the little analog boxes.  How are we supposed to drool?

 

The Hooters menu is cute, with self-effacing jokes about what loveable, we-can’t-help-it lech-bag characters the entrepreneurs are.  And — what is this world coming to?! — you can now order “healthy dining” options approved by a board of dieticians.  The healthy-dining feature is promoted by the cartoon Hooters owl dressed as an MD and giving you a sidelong “Say, let’s play doctor!” glance at the bottom of the menu.

 

No merry bands of knuckle-dragging apeshits tackled me to the floor.  The Lonely Engineer Dude kept his polite distance.  The women at the office workers’ tables seemed to be having a fine old ironic, post-feminist, what-the-hell kind of time.  Everyone treated the girls with respect and the male management just seemed bored and understandably itchy about all the empty seats.

 

I left the girls to their Labor-Day doldrums and wandered through the empty wharf again.  I’ve always been somewhat grateful that Hooters has kept a presence in our gay little town; it acts as flypaper for the kinds of guys who go to Hooters, keeping them safely out of my clubs and bars.

 

But the dickwads I’d come to gawp at, and perhaps taunt cruelly, just weren’t there.  There were only genteel fleece-vesters having a playful laugh.  My quest for a big, smelly pile of hypocritical mainstream sleaze had come a cropper.

 

But now at least I know where to take Mom and Dad for some really good key lime pie.

Boys!  Girls!  Be sure to pick up the hot September issue of Harper’s Bazaar, where you’ll find Gigi Levangie Grazer’s “Dating After 40,”a first-person dating article so typical of its kind the Smithsonian should frame it for posterity.

Then grab your bottle o’ Bailey’s Irish (or hooch of choice) and join me for…

The Dating-Scene Trend Article Drinking Game!!

(And remember, you can play this game with the thick September issue of just about any major fashion magazine since all these articles are virtually interchangeable.)

Are you ready?   Cheers!  Take a drink every time the author…

Talks about “the rules.”

Talks about “playing the game.”

Compares dating to an election, a horse race, a going-out-of-business sale, or the process of natural selection on the Galapagos Islands.

Likens single women  to “snakes in the grass,” “wolves,” “hungry,” “hungry wolves,” “hungry like the wolf,” rabid badgers or other predatory creatures of the wild.

Says there are “no men.”

Proceeds to complain the men are all either gay or married.

Mentions a particular metropolitan area (LA, New York, Houston, SF) where there are really, really “no men.”  (Bonus swigs if you can find an article in another magazine claiming this exact same city is a “dating hot spot” crawling with eligible bachelors.)

Assumes that you, like her, are a money-grubbing, gold-digging tramp who won’t speak to any poor chump who makes less than six figures.

Uses the premise of the article to drop incidental tidbits about her hot, happening lifestyle that you don’t have:  Hollywood premieres, attractive friends in glamour industries, dates with entertainment moguls and Texas real estate entrepreneurs.

Mentions yoga classes.  (Extra swigs if she mentions a particular pose or type of yoga, like vinyasa or bikram.)

Implores you to never, ever, under any circumstances, actually call, text, or email a man, especially if he’s been a complete shit and is begging to be asked what the fuck his problem is.

Imparts such headfucking mindgames-in-the-making as, “He who cares least wins.”

…Drunk yet?  Hopefully you would be anyway before actually consulting this type of commonly purveyed toilet paper…

“Boys and girls, can you tell me what reverence means?”

I can’t remember the name of the deacon’s wife who taught the bible class for the 4-to-6-year-olds, but she was a very nice lady who smelled like unbaked pie crust.  She also enjoyed doubling herself over in her child-sized chair and addressing us as though doing a poor imitation of a severely mentally retarded person.

I raised my hand.  I was always raising my hand.

“Um, reverence?  Means that you, um, be quiet?  Because Jesus is there?”

Her face mimed orgasmic revelation.  “Yes!” she mouthed.  “It means we be quiet, because Jesus is there!”

Even as I was learning to spout the rote answers I knew adults wanted to hear, I was lost in confusion and “backsliding” (the church term for engaging in normal critical thought) into the firy furnaces of dark doubt.

For one thing, if we were supposed to be quiet in the church because Jesus was there, but we were also being told that Jesus was everywhere, wouldn’t that mean we were supposed to be quiet and reverent everywhere?  How could school be taught?

More pressingly, would I be sent to hell for watching the Monkees do “Last Train to Clarksville” with the sound up?

These things went through my brain, but I couldn’t articulate them to myself.  People in my world didn’t voice such thoughts, which made the thoughts seem to emerge from some horrible shadow side of me.  I decided in the end I had better be reverent because, well, Satan sounded like a pretty scary guy; hell had been so vividly and repeatedly described to me that I could imagine it much more easily than, say, our nation’s capital; and I wanted the grown-ups to love me.

So I was reverent in the house of God, not really getting what the big deal was, but hoping I would at some point in the future.

Flash forward to 2002 and the dark, delicate months in which we were all still reeling from 9/11.  A shock-jock station in New York broadcast a couple having sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the resulting public outrage did not just come from the usual musty corners of old ladies and Moral Majority firebrands.  People who regularly tuned in for their daily dose of fart jokes and political incorrectness were switching off their radios for good.

Suddenly, in the wake of incredible violence, chaos, and grief, reverence in the house of God was no longer a throwback to empty authoritarianism.  New Yorkers had memorialized friends, spouses, co-workers, sons, and daughters in special buildings that were meant to invoke the sense of another world, of awe and mystery, a sense that even if we didn’t understand everything that was going on in our lives, there was still some great (if often cruel) design at work.

Modern people have an uneasy relationship with reverence.  Holding certain things sacred, or believing certain physical places are special, are seen as signs of intellectual weakness.  To me, it’s clear why.

Despite the supposed free-thinking amorality of the age, plenty of us are still introduced to reverence via some “because I said so” apparatus such as the church.  Once you grow up and spot The Man Behind the Curtain, you see reverence as just another crowd control tactic to keep you scared and unquestioning.

Those of us raised nonreligiously are introduced to reverence, if at all, via images of square, pious 1950s types kneeling and praying in cheesy clip art.  The modern, free-willed person pays no heed to such primitive ideas as honoring a set-aside space in which he or she has to – gets to – relinquish control over self-importance and authoring one’s fate.  This may explain why contemporary church architects create places of worship about as otherworldly and awe-inspiring as an In-N-Out Burger parking lot.

“Irreverent” is now synonymous with I-shouldn’t-be-laughing-at-this hilarity.  If a cringy-funny film like Borat is irreverent, then its polar opposite must be humorless misery, right?  (And I say that as a fan of Borat.)

The last time I really needed some peace, quiet, and change of perspective, I got off the 5 Fulton bus line at St. Ignatius Cathedral on Fulton Street here in San Francisco.  (By the way, I don’t recommend this mid-day during the week, when the maintenance crew is doing their thing.  If you think hammers, power drills, and shouting workmen are annoying in your ’hood on Sunday morning, try them in a vaulted stone airplane hangar designed to echo straight up to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.)

But maintenance racket is small potatoes compared to what happened last time.  Just as I was reaching a quiet sense of comfort about my problems, candles flickering all around me, the side doors banged open and a chirpy admissions volunteer from the University of San Francisco (the Jesuit school whose cathedral it is) trundled a band of about 20 prospective students through the place.

As the volunteer swung her index fingers around like an air traffic controller, yellingly explaining this grotto and that chapel and this altar and that station of the cross, five students were having phone conversations, five more were checking texts or surfing the web, two had iPods, five were having surly exchanges with their parents (who themselves were multitasking, conducting a few important, gum-snapping phone calls whilst in the House of God) and about two were actually listening to the tour and deeply impressed with the place.

By the time this pageant of oblivion had crossed through to the other side and was proceeding on to the library across the quad, I felt like a child whose sandcastle had been trashed by the big kids.  Was I the only dupe left in the world who noticed that a cathedral is meant to shut you the fuck up?

After the irritation of the event had died down I ended up feeling sorry for those kids.  What would they do when one more barf-o-rama kegger party somehow wasn’t enough to relieve the strain of their lives?  Reverence and contemplation wasn’t part of their repertoire; nobody had given it to them.  Young people generally are not reverent (that’s why we love them), but that doesn’t mean they don’t need it every now and again.

If the grand heights and depths and kaleidoscopic colors of St. Ignatius weren’t enough to command it in them—or their parents—then what would be?

Whether you believe in God or not is beside the point.  If you lose the ability to receive messages from your surroundings, the quality of your life will be compromised.  Everywhere will be the same, because you will always be the same in it.

My name is Jen Burke Anderson.  I’m a writer in San Francisco.  I’ve been planning this blog for a long time and finally, I’ve got my launch pad for commentary on everything from pop to politics.  Watch this space — the idea is for me never to post more often than once a week, because I don’t think anything of quality can be written in less than a week.  That’s just a full-time proofreader’s opinion.

I’m glad you’ve come to visit.  Please come back!