Letters to San Francisco: June 2012

Francisco and father were walking out from Swensen’s, the faded corner ice cream parlor that offered one of Francisco’s favorites: Swiss orange chip. He ordered two single cake cones of the treat, so that his father could taste a dream.

“What this one called?” he asked his son with a thick Spanish accent, picking at the flavor by smacking his tongue between his wide lips. He found the concept of the flavor more remarkable than the tangy richness itself.

“Swiss orange chip, Papà.” Francisco told him three times already.

They were on some cold concrete steps heading down the hill on Filbert, eating the cones and looking up to the sky just clearing into a hazy cream of blue. Father admired it. His eyes scanned overhead wide and fearful, like a child in the most blissful state with their favorite treat and underneath a most beautiful and wordless banner—the sky didn’t need words to say anything.

“Is something, ah,” he said after finishing the cone, looking to his son. “Can you see the sky so big as this at work, Francisco?”

Francisco groaned at the mentioning of the garage. “I’m inside most of the time,” he spoke flatly.

“It is the most beautiful place if it has this sky,” father went on.

            “It’s whatever.”
            “Ah? Job is everything!”
            “It’s just work. Which would remind me,” Francisco started to stand, “we need to get back to auntie’s so I can be on time.” He stood over his father impatiently, as the elder and rough-faced gentleman too got up, but stalled to look up into the sky one more time. “In this one place,” he went on, smiling to his son, “I knew there is no place like this for my Francisco.”
His son smiled a little. Now they walked back to Filbert and down the road, where the wind was no more, and the air was still, the streets staying quiet. Francisco’s father was none of these things. Like the names of the crossing streets they were passing, he seemed out of place but somehow he felt like he’d been up and down this hill for ages.

            “Delgado,” Francisco’s father started to read as continued down, “Green. Rus-sell. Paci-fic. Green-which. How do these streets get their names, Francisco?”
            “Don’t know.”
            “They all don’t sound very American.”

“They probably weren’t. The names come from people.”
“Oh! Unique.” He stopped to look into the windows of two businesses side by side—a chandeliered plush-furnished corner restaurant and its neighbor The Missing Sock, a small but clean Laundromat. “They probably good businessmen. Made in America. You think you make me proud and get a street, my son?”

“Anything goes, Papà.” To this Francisco’s father whistled happily. He walked on, thinking over in his head of the dream, the one he wanted for his son, Caracas-born now American-bred, thanks to Francisco’s father working hard to locate his half-sister in America and getting his son out of that dried-out, dead land where dreams were seldom. Now he couldn’t help but see success everywhere in this tiny spot in such a golden city—the dreams of America all strung along this thin street with ancient cable cars running below, and lush bobbed trees above.

“Son,” he began, a block away from the bus that would take them down to Auntie Lorenza’s, “Was there that street around here? The one they say goes what? Zig-zag, eh?”
Francisco laughed at his father, looking down to pull out a fraying string that was sticking out from his name sewn into his dusty navy mechanic uniform. “We don’t have time for Lombard, Papà. It’s the opposite end of the street and I’ve really got to get back. I’ll take you another time, huh?”

His father lowered his brow. “I only just got here. First day in America, and I want to see the life and city of my only child. Want to see all now.”

“Christ, I gotta make it to my shift. It’s Wednesday, the busiest it gets is today. Maybe have auntie come show you on Friday?” But his father’s face only cared for Lombard Street—seeing Lombard Street with his only son. “Please, c’mon Papà,” he went on, “another time, please.”

The red cable car was just passing so that Francisco could give his father two in one on the spot—a ride on the city’s most prestigious and beloved transportation, to a place Francisco’s father had seen one too many times on postcards sent from his son. The world met at the crooked ends there on Lombard. German, Japanese, French, English, Southern—and Spanish. Spanish was seldom seen; Francisco had been here enough to know that. His father seemed to have known that too.

“Are we lucky, my son?” he was saying. “I hear no other Spanish. Lucky ones, us. We are representing?”

They looked out to the Bay in the distance, and the rising of tiny squares of Victorians ascending the neighboring hill in its foreground. “It’s weird here,” his son finally said. “We look like tourists.”
“Nothing wrong, Francisco,” his father said rather jolly. “We—you live—here and they, they will never come back for a long time, like me. I do not know why this is strange to you. It is a beautiful road.”

“I’ve seen all I’ve seen of it,” Francisco replied. He looked down to his name on his uniform, thinking restlessly of how much trouble he was sure to be in. “Okay, Papà, let’s go.”

Papà had fled the scene. He stood on the other side of Lombard now, waving to his son to join. Doing so, Francisco saw he had some sort of camera in his hand. In the weak loose English he shared with everyone around them, Francisco’s father had offered his services to photo-taking. The young French couple who owned the Polaroid had just posed and now was waiting for the return of their camera. “Wait, son,” Francisco’s father said to him, “I ask for a picture of us, real quick.”

“Oh, Papà, Christ!”

In the image captured on the flimsy square, just produced seconds later, Francisco looked less pleasing than his father, who was beaming with delight at this opportune moment captured. Even now, as his father held the photo to the sun, he smiled so widely that his son could see the badly crooked teeth of his father for the first time. Not only were they offset, but dull and there were two missing in a corner of the grin. Francisco wondered at how he’d manage to bring Papà to California—it didn’t really matter, not anymore. It was just a good thing to see such a smile, one that said so much without actually speaking.

“My first property of mine in America, Francisco! Look at how handsome you are. Make me proud.” His father handed him the photo. Francisco sighed at his features, lighter in skin to his father, clean shaven and tall. He looked refined, even in a mechanic’s suit—but he didn’t look half as glad as the darker and rough-faced older man at his side.

He looked around once more. It was here the world met at the crooked ends of Lombard. It was almost one in the afternoon, hours before the tourists and curious pedestrians and obnoxious traffic would recede. One in the afternoon, and his shift was at one-thirty. His father looked too, the grin beginning to diminish. “We better get you to work then,” he said.

Francisco’s father didn’t realize that his son was walking them further up the street, which would soon descend towards Fisherman’s Warf. Francisco tapped his father lightly on his bulgy jean jacket, a little more lighthearted as he spoke. “I’m feeling thirsty; let’s say you and I go get ourselves something to drink.”
“Drink right now?”

“Your first good drink, on me, in America. It’s called an Irish coffee. It’s the right thing to have coming out here, tell me if you like it.”
“But work?” His father was getting the picture now.

Francisco smiled, though nothing like his father’s. “The guys at the shop don’t know what they’re missing.”

He saw Papà’s horrible teeth again as the man broke into short-lived laugher. Francisco’s father looked down into the Polaroid he clung to ardently. Under that blue sky the world met at the crooked ends of Lombard, and at the end of the day it collapsed, filling with dreams that became the many streets of San Francisco.