Seven

(Note: Lately, I've been wanting to write about the past. I think it might be going somewhere. I've decided to post it here to see if I get any feedback. If you read this, please comment!)


I met Seven at the bus stop on the corner of 19th and Lincoln.

“Seven?” I thought I’d misunderstood. I was 23 and living in a tiny fourth floor walkup in the Mission District. My high school friends had names like Shannon and Laurie and Peggy. My roommates since graduation had been Nancy, Susan, Linda, and Terri – a name rendered exotic by a simple “i” where a “y” should have been. My life had really just begun.

“Yeah,” she said, with a pop to her gum. She coiled one of her long dreadlocks around her finger and stared down Lincoln, wistfully. She wore a shapeless sundress the color of dry grass, some sandals that I think were made of grass, and a colorful, inky tattoo on her right arm. “My parents were, um, these hippies? And they tried and tried and tried for a really long time to conceive? And they’d, um, given up, and so they were like so surprised when my mom got pregnant and, you know, felt lucky, so…” gum-pop-hair-twist for emphasis: “they named me Seven.”

It wasn’t my usual bus stop. Ordinarily, I rode the L or the M home from San Francisco State, but ever since the earthquake I’d been avoiding undergrounds. Not that I’d been stuck on one in the aftermath. I'd just been at school. I don’t think I even knew I was afraid afterwards. My life just plodded along as mundane as ever and I quietly avoided subways.

“Where is that bus?” Seven said. She looked at her wrist, where there was no watch. “If it doesn’t come in the next 30 seconds, I’m thumbing a ride.”

I’d been waiting at the stop for 20 minutes when she strolled up. This was after riding one bus already, down the traffic-ridden and stoplight-laden 19th Ave. If this bus ever did come, I’d be getting off at Haight and Fillmore to wait for a third bus that would take me to within a seven-block-walk of my apartment. I was doing the math in my head - I’d already be nestled inside my sunny yellow apartment if I’d just taken the L-Taravel - but as it was, it’d be dark before I walked past the projects even if the bus came in the next 30 seconds - when a blue panel van pulled over.

“Are you going anywhere near Dolores Park?” Seven demanded.

“Sure,” the driver said. He leaned across the passenger seat and yanked on the handle. The door fell open. “Hop in.”

Seven looked back at me as if we hadn’t just met a minute and 30 seconds ago and said, “Are you coming?” I looked at the driver. He was old - at least 35. Messy hair of no particular color, like the sand on Ocean Beach. Unshaven, t-shirt full of holes. He smoked a cigarette that looked hand-rolled, smelled like herbs but wasn’t marijuana. I’d recently lost several nights’ sleep over Mark Harmon’s made-for-TV portrayal of a serial killer who preyed on college girls and still I climbed in the van.

I had to crawl over the passenger seat (“That side door don’t work,” Ted Bundy explained with a sinister grin) to get in the back, where I sat on the floor amidst drop cloths and 5-gallon buckets. The empty Corona bottles clanked and rolled as we pulled away from the curb. “Where you girls from?”

I never got to answer. When you have a name like Seven, there’s no off switch. Her life story gushed out of her. The hippie parents, the infertility, growing up at Mt. Madonna. It was the first time I’d heard the words “home schooled,” “vegan,” and “ashram.” I had recently dropped the yoga class I was taking as an elective because I couldn’t stand to sit still that long. But I tried to work my way into the conversation anyway. “I’m a vegetarian.”

Seven whipped her head around. “Do you eat chicken?” Her tone was accusatory. “I can’t stand people who call themselves vegetarian but still eat fish. I have never in my life tasted an egg. I would rather freeze to death than wear leather.”

Luckily, Seven didn’t wait for my answer, so I focused on how all the likes and ums went away when she was being self-righteous.

Ted Bundy - whose real name was Steve - turned out to be a house painter. “Will you roll me a cigarette?” Seven asked him at the stoplight. It occurred to me that she was flirting. He whipped out the papers and the tobacco. He was sprinkling in a little of a grayish looking leaf when the light turned green and somebody behind us laid on the horn. “Is that sage?” Steve rolled and licked and nodded simultaneously. “I love the taste of sage in a cigarette.” She was batting her eyes! Steve flipped open his Zippo with one hand and flipped the bird out the window with the other. Seven inhaled deeply and gestured toward me. “Want one?”

I shook my head, more embarrassed about that than I’d been about being a chicken-eating vegetarian. She’d said she was 17 - an emancipated minor - so I was the elder and yet, there’d never been any question that it would be me squatting in the back of a panel van getting smacked around by empty Coronas.

When this potentially-lethal-yet-ultimately-uneventful van ride ended at 16th and Dolores, I realized something: This was my life story. Find yourself in social situations where you compare yourself to the nearest female and always, always, come up short. She was an only child - I was an only child. She was a native Californian - I was a native Californian. Our parents, I knew from Seven’s epic version of herself, were exactly the same age - the older father, the younger mother, transplants from another state. How was it that hers migrated from Montana to follow the yogi Baba Hari Dass when mine moved from the Colorado Rockies to buy a tract home in suburbia and raise me to be a singularly uncool, flesh-eating, leather-wearing nonsmoker?

Oh, how I longed to have a different kind of life story. But the coolest thing I’d done so far was move to San Francisco, and all around me were examples of how that just wasn’t going to be interesting enough.