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That year, I was on the Forensics Team at San Francisco State. It sounded like a big deal, but wasn’t. You signed up for the class and were automatically on the team. They made you try every kind of speechmaking, and I was terrible at most of them. I don’t like to argue (there is a long line of exes who will dispute this), so I didn’t fare well with debate. I choked at impromptu and didn’t care enough about current events to speak persuasively, so extemporaneous was out. The only thing I could do - the only thing I wanted to do - was read literature with gusto.

Which made me a natural for Dramatic Interpretation. Through the month of September I culled what I thought were the most confrontational monologues. By the middle of October, I’d won a 3rd place medal for my Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But I’d also met enough seasoned Speech People to realize that everybody does Maggie. Like anyone who does anything habitually, they were hard to impress. I needed to find a truly “out there” piece of writing if I were going to wow my peers and my judges. In Feminist Lit class, some of the most controversial writing I’d ever laid eyes on became fodder for my burgeoning career as a public speaker.

And so I was eager to try out a piece I’d been polishing for the upcoming meet in Santa Rosa. I met with my teammates at 5:00 on that fateful day. By 5:04, I was reveling in their undivided attention as I delivered Margaret Atwood’s scintillating short story “Rape Fantasies.” I prattled on even as their expressions turned to fear. I believed I’d finally found a story that shocked them. Then something weird happened. The people in the back of the room were lifted up, as if on an oceanic wave. The floor beneath them was rolling. I kept delivering my speech, thinking it was just nerves that made the room look like that.

The earthquake was practically over before I realized that what was going on had nothing to do with me and Margaret Atwood. Good Californians, we each tried first to duck and cover under those impossibly tiny desks. I remember window blinds banging and the lights going out, and all of us trying to crowd in the doorway.

Then I followed a line of people to the end of the hall, down the stairs, and outside. I looked at the redwood trees towering overhead and didn’t feel safe anywhere. In a sea of 30,000 people, my boyfriend and I found each other in five minutes. (He’d been in the campus library when the books started flying off the shelves.) We stood at the bus stop with virtually everyone else in the world as the cloud of smoke went up over Diamond Heights, the hill that separated us from Downtown.

One guy with a Walkman radio shouted reports: “They think it might have been a bomb!”

“The entire Marina District is in flames!”

“The Bay Bridge has fallen into the ocean!”

BART and MUNI were out of commission. We got on a bus that that ran on fuel instead of electric wires. It took three hours to go five miles. Back at our apartment building, we felt our way along the walls in the dark as we crept up four flights of stairs. The piano was in the middle of the room and the orchids were on the floor. The cat hid under the futon couch and nothing fragile was broken.

It was weird, how quiet the city was with the power off.

We’d lived in the apartment for 20 months and hadn’t met any of our neighbors. The guy across the hall stood with a candle as he knocked on our door, asked us over for martinis and spaghetti. Everybody in the building was crowded into Nathan’s apartment, where the small rooms glowed in yellow candlelight and where his gas stove was covered in bubbling pots. (He’d started his sauce before the cause of the Marina’s fiery explosion was announced. This turned out to be a blessing for us all.) The martinis flowed from a huge, chilly pitcher and there was a never-ending supply of olives. We were endlessly fascinated with each other’s earthquake stories, which we told until 3:00 in the morning and which were, in fact, better than any dramatic interpretation of literature I’d ever heard.

I would never do better than 3rd in Forensics. I would quit the team at the end of semester.

It was the best dinner party I ever attended.

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.