My Only Friend La Croix - Chapter 8
The line at Four Barrel would have made you think they were giving away gold. It was a Saturday, and all of the Mission was on Valencia for coffee. Dee and I stood in line, watching the two paths of baristas running their espresso assembly lines, coated in the warm glow of a soft vinyl playing jazzy rock. A large money tree sat in the back under a skylight. The ceiling was high so they were able to post art high up on the walls; their latest exhibit reminded me of the art they used to display at Einstein Bagels—lots of hard lines and contrast, displaying contorted figures and animals. Perhaps inspired by Picasso. A large piece of a man in a hat with a Dalmatian stood in the center of the walls.
Dee and I made it to the front. I ordered us two lattes and a ginger-lime donut as Dee went to wait at the counter by the window to claim two seats. I watched the short barista with long hair pour cups full of milk and stage them atop his machine. Initially I stood and waited for the coffees, but I decided it didn’t make much sense to just stand there so I went back to wait with Dee. She had pulled out her Colleen Hoover book and was reading.
I had felt bad to make fun of it, but it was an odd novel that was raunchy and I knew it to have been praised on social media. The only pages of it which I had read made me roll my eyes—the writing was illustrative of the trope about how women can’t understand that when they ask men what they’re thinking about, when they reply “nothing,” they truly mean “nothing.” The book was full of over-developed internal monologues made external. I know best the feeling of a sparse internal monologue, and to prescribe words to it would make it simultaneously too simple and too complex. The few pages that I read had made an attempt to externalize attraction and flirtation in a way that I found unrealistic, but much like a novel that is written like television, episodic and discrete, it had to be done to fit the audience.
I heard us called so I went to collect the donut. They served it on a warm terracotta plate.
“Oh, plate is hot,” Dee said about the donut. She smiled. She split it in half and gave me the larger piece.
“Actually, I don’t want it,” she said. “We’re going to have bread at the ferry.” She gave me both pieces.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s pretty good.” I took two bites.
“Yes,” she said.
“Oat and almond milk lattes,” they called from the front. I was still chewing but made my way up to the counter.
“Thank you,” Dee said to me as I handed her the latte.
The ferry lumbered in to the port of San Francisco to greet us as we stood double-file on the dock. Dee and I had our Clipper cards at the ready. We gave a polite “hello” to the dock attendant and scanned our cards then made our way to the top deck. We sat far behind the front of the boat where we could catch some shade within the nearly opaque glass windows. Dee was wearing a simple white hat and a grey long sleeve shirt. She was particularly vigilant about sun exposure. I liked this habit about her; she had the highest standards for herself and I often mused about the potential that we had together—we had the common goal of self-improvement.
Our views of the city grew hazier. The boat turned and our line of sight became obstructed by the sea-film-covered glass as we puttered toward Sausalito. Dee and I sat silently in each other’s arms to warm each other from the cold wind moving across the Bay. I watched the neighborhoods on the north end of the city as they reached toward the sky, straight out from the ocean. San Francisco seems an improbable place to settle: how would one even begin to build a building on a 45 degree angle?
There is a magical charm in traveling to Sausalito by ferry. No matter how many times you might have visited, it feels as if this arrival is the first of its kind. Sailors already out for the day glide around Alcatraz or Belvedere, soaking up the sun that San Francisco has to spend, exercising nimble feats with nowhere to go in particular. The sailboats and yachts still in for the morning greet you as they sit idle, almost motionless, buttressed by the bay. Boats still sleeping bob gently, poised with sails upward, pointing to the houses comprising the hillside. Homes in Sausalito each take on their own character but as a whole form a multicolor set of stairs from the waters to the heavens.
The combination of sleepiness and fresh buzz of passengers departing the ferry transported us to a place seemingly foreign—how could such a place exist here, so close? How have we been so fortunate to get here? Thus we stepped down the dark and weathered gangway, over the grated metal dock, to soak it all in.
Dee and I stood for a moment and navigated between the palm trees toward a bright clay fountain.
“It’s like Portofino,” she said.
“Yes. I’ve never been, but it looks so much like the photos,” I replied.
We spent a good length of time at the café in Sausalito before we decided to pack up and make our way to the bridge. We walked along the side of the slow street and the air was thick from the fog. I could barely make out Salesforce tower from across the Bay so I pointed it out to Dee. There was a long way to walk back to San Francisco. We contemplated taking a ride at least to the bridge but we both wanted to walk in spite of the grand hill which we needed to climb.
We approached a curve in the highway. There wasn’t much of a sidewalk. Dee and I came to a disagreement on how to proceed. I wanted to walk against traffic and Dee called to me.
“I don’t like this,” she said.
“Do you want to get a ride?” I asked.
“Umm,” she pondered the question without deciding. I knew that she wanted to walk, and I looked at her some more and then made the decision that we should cross the street where we saw a bus stopping earlier.
We made it across and she suggested that we walk on the right side of the street. I started to argue but ultimately I wasn’t the one who felt uncomfortable about the thin path so I deferred to her and we pressed on.
Golden Gate Bridge came upon us more suddenly than I had realized. Cars rushed towards us and turned toward the Marin Headlands as they came off the bridge. It was tough to claim exactly where the bridge ended and the highway began. We had been walking alongside a two-lane highway for some time so this new volume of vehicles felt like a stampede, traveling faster and further than before. We were up on the walkway which was partitioned for cyclists and for pedestrians. I looked at the low handrail that separates the walkers from the fallers.
Far below the bridge was a scene from The Lighthouse of lapping waves against a jagged rock, only muted in color due to fog which shrouded it from our view. The day was warm and clear otherwise-- the calming clay-rust color of the bridge called to us to press onward.
Dee and I were in a good mood after first sight of the bridge and we took some photos making funny faces into the camera. There were other people walking, some even with large bags that looked as if they had just been to the grocer to pick fresh apples and choose their carton of eggs and snuff out the ripest avocados. We wondered where they would go, as we had come from that side and there was nothing but highway for another mile. Were they headed to the imaginary or invisible town that we had somehow missed on the north side of the bridge? Perhaps this was their everyday commute.
I inspected the rivets of the first tall red tower and marveled to myself how much of an accomplishment the construction of the bridge must have felt at the time. The higher half of the bridge was masked by fog—or perhaps cloud—and by the time that we had crossed it, I could thoroughly feel the change of the air. I looked to Dee and saw the mist on her cheeks and her eyebrows and she laughed at me and I knew that my mustache was coated and wet as well. Dee was concerned that she was all wet but I thought she looked great in her dew and I was happy to be walking with her and cross the expanse.
“This scene reminds me of some sort of fantasy,” I said, “where the characters can neither go forward nor back and not up or down either. They’re just suspended in a cloud, without any awareness of what’s around them. You can’t even tell that there’s water beneath us.”
A deep, bellowing horn sounded from below. There was no way to tell from where it originated. “It’s something of a limbo where everything is unknown around you, so you just remain in your place. You’d be isolated but pure.”
The thought of La Croix came to me. His absence of limbs and ability to press onward. Perhaps the isolation was not pure; we can’t just stay in the fog forever.