Another Hot Night
There’s nothing like a stroll down Columbus on a hot night -- crowded pavements, men in shirtsleeves and t-shirts, women in sundresses, people arguing in English, Italian, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, every window thrown open, the diners inside talking to strangers on the sidewalks, music and light spilling out. Il Pollaio is one of those long-lived North Beach restaurants too often overlooked, a modest joint with a limited menu. But damn, what they do serve is good. We had plates of roasted, moist, perfectly seasoned half-chicken, spicy fennel sausage, and fresh combo salads. We talked politics a bit, M and our houseguest, K reminisced about college life in Champaign, and while they talked sports I counted the number of times I heard either “Hillary” and “Obama” in the conversations at other tables. (Eleven. One slight anomaly – the name “Con-do-leez-a” pronounced with emphatic precision by an older, sharp-faced man leaning across his table and gazing fiercely into the eyes of his dinner companions, a couple of slightly younger guys in baseball caps. I couldn’t hear the rest.)



On such a night, after such a meal, gelato is vital. We crossed the street a block down to a packed gelato shop, typical rectangular joint with white fluorescent lighting, no tables and a long glass and metal counter and freezer displaying mounds of different colored gelato with flavors like Green Tea, Raspberry, Orange Chocolate, Madagascar Vanilla, and some white and dark streaked gelatos with long Italian names that I tried but failed to commit to memory. There was no pretense of a line, just a layer of people milling about in front of the counter, which was manned by a round twenty-something guy with a goatee and great self-assurance and a slender, silent girl with glasses who seemed slightly overwhelmed by the crowd and confined herself to serving and nodding.

“We don’t do lines,” the round guy said in response to a murmured comment from one of the customers. His method seemed to be to stride down the counter, see a customer whose appearance he liked, and point at him or her saying simply, “you.” When a woman in a sundress hesitated, suddenly looking at the gelatos as if she’d only just arrived instead of standing there chatting with her neighbor for several minutes he said severely, “you’re not ready,” and went on to someone else. (I liked the man’s style.) He leaned forward to take another order, a combo. Strawberry and something else. “That’s not right,” he said, shaking his head, but he served it up anyway. M waited patiently, but when he was at last chosen he was so crazed with success that he forgot to order the gelato (Orange Chocolate with Madagascar Vanilla) with a cone. So he ended up bringing me a little plastic dish of gelato with a cone stuck on top like a dunce cap, which we ate separately.

We strolled down Columbus sharing this, edging around the husky female barker trying to get us into a strip club, pausing at City Lights to window shop and admire the coolest coffee table books ever – among others, The Mutter Musuem, The Education of Hopey Glass, and a compilation of what looked like Civil Rights era activist mugshots. The sound of music and a crowd gathered outside some joint on Vallejo Street attracted our attention, and we wandered over to watch. A jazz band trying to cool off had set up outside a club and were playing on the sidewalk, with a large black female singer in a tiger-striped halter dress effortlessly belting out “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulez.” Our neighbor Andie the Crossword Puzzle Queen, blonde, grinning and in her element, was working the crowd, brandishing the band’s tip jar in the form of a glass water pitcher filled almost to the top with dollar bills.

The band played a couple more numbers then went back into the club. We strolled down Jack Kerouac Alley and came out into the deserted streets of Chinatown, walked off the gelato on the upwards slope back to the apartment.

Past the Chinatown housing project, a concrete apartment block that would be ugly if it weren’t for the Asian touches added, the elaborately decorated metal gate, the scrolled tile roof, the Chinese characters on the outside walls. Windows were propped open, curtains drawn back, offering brightly lit glimpses of other people’s lives, the most memorable being a room that seemed to be furnished entirely with piles of untidy clothing, with a picture on the wall opposite the window of three handsome young Chinese men in black tie. As we passed, the inhabitant, visible only as a slightly hunched, gray-haired silhouette, came to the window and leaned out of it, talking on her cell-phone as she breathed in great draughts of fresh air.

Where else but San Francisco do you see a street like Jackson, almost vertical and nubbled overhead with bay windows? A crowded car overtook us and Andie shouted our names, hanging out a window and waving as they whooshed by. Half a moon hung over the rooftops.

A rare and beautiful weekday night.