Day tripper

This all happened in early November, and I managed to forget about the post until now.


Rather than spend another Saturday dissolving into a gelatinous puddle of goo in front of the TV, absorbing such delights as "Made" marathons, I decided to take a trip to San Francisco. I imagined myself a younger, yellower, and immeasurably less eloquent Bill Bryson, whose books I've been enjoying lately (my favorite so far has been "In a Sunburned Country").

True to form, I missed the train I meant to take, so I wound up waiting around for an hour at the local Amtrak station for the next one. I took the opportunity to observe my fellow travellers.

There was a young Asian couple, deliriously taking pictures of each other in front of everything that moved. When they shot me a speculative glance, they didn't even have to speak; I stood up and held out my hand, taking the camera from them and immortalized the image of the giddy pair in front of some particularly lively piece of lint blowing past on the breeze.

There was an African-American man with the most stunning set of upper incisors, which were capped with shining gold. He was carrying on a more-than-lively conversation on his cell phone at full volume, the kind that happily includes the words "I," "will," "fucking," "kill," and "you," not necessarily in that order. Every other person at the station was pointedly pretending he didn't exist, which was possibly the kind of thing that was upsetting him in the first place.

There was a middle-aged white couple off in one corner, the wife clutching a department store shopping bag, and the husband with several strewn about his feet. The small explosion of bags, along with his full, white beard and a vaguely stunned expression, made it look as if the Air Force had finally tired of Santa gallivanting about in their air space.

After a few gleeful minutes imagining what might have become of the reindeer, I stood as the train pulled up to the platform. We all hustled aboard, and I found my way to a choice seat on the upper level. The afromentioned (har har) guy came up to me and gave me a questioning look, and I waved him into the seat opposite me.

Turns out, he'd missed his stop on the way in, and had had to buy a ticket to go one stop west. I didn't ask about certain things -- impending homicides, for example -- but his mood seemed to have lightened considerably. We chatted happily for a few minutes until I nodded off, and when I awoke, he was gone. I even forgot to compliment him on his teeth.

The scenery was largely monotonous, being mostly observed on my part through closed eyelids. When, on a few occasions, I managed to lever open one bloodshot eye and press it to the window, I was treated to a lovely and wide-ranging set of views.

Fishermen were casting lines into a wide lake, the sunlight gleaming off its surface in a blinding flare. A bare-chested, white-haired paraplegic leaned back in his wheelchair, one hand holding a can of beer, the other raised in a cheerfully lazy wave as we hammered past his al fresco tanning salon. Grey industrial towns, farmland lying fallow, rocky beaches, and soaring bridges over water all populated the trek west -- with which, now that I think about it, I should have been more impressed. There's no helping some people, I guess.

After a transfer to a bus and an hour or so slumped in a seat that smelled vaguely of old sweat and puke, I stepped off the train into a brisk, sunny day in what I was told was Union Square. In all honesty, I was disappointed.

Looking around, the place was largely populated by department stores and brand-name retailers; in short, this was a glorified shopping mall. The only local color that I could see were some street performers dressed up as tin men, doing "The Robot" to some spastic tune coming from their boombox.

I looked in on the tram turntable, which seemed to be a big deal for the kind of people who walk around with fanny packs, prescription sunglasses, and twenty-pound cameras strapped to their necks. It must have been mating season or something, because they were fucking everywhere.

I got into line for the tram, but gave up when an empty car pulled in, was immediately jam-packed with people, bellied out of the station with the groan of steel at breaking point... and the line hadn't budged an inch.

I decided I'd just walk down to Fisherman's Wharf, a straight shot down the street for about 4 miles or so. It was a pleasant stroll, and I recommend it to anyone and everyone. It'll take you through what I can only assume was Chinatown, which I cleverly deduced from all the Chinese people walking around, and the most fantastic store names in existence anywhere, like "Long Wang Drugs," "Fu King Chinese Restaurant," and so on.

After being treated to a few glares by passing Chinese as they spotted me for the race traitor I am, I spotted a cool-looking tower in the distance, obviously part of a church. It was just a little north of where I was heading, so I took a little detour and ended up at Sts. Peter and Paul Church, which I assume is very nice. I didn't actually get to see much of the inside of the place, since there was a wedding going on. That didn't stop a determined pair of tourists, who bulled through the front doors unabashed, but I decided not to crash the party and poked around a side door, in true ninja fashion. The interior was dim but warm, with the sense of slight pressure against your eardrums. The kind of feeling you get in old buildings with lots of stained glass and untold years' worth of people talking in whispers and padding around in soft-soled shoes.

Feeling a little like I was going to be attacked by a flock of cherubim at any minute, I found a flight of stairs and started climbing, with the vague hope that they ended at the top of one of the towers I'd seen. Alas, I would never know. After three flights, the stairs ended in a locked plexiglass door, which apparently led into a school on the church grounds.

"Ah, shi- uh... shingles," I thought, proving that even an optimistic agnostic like myself can be guilted into proper behavior through the Catholic tendency towards gold leaf and colored glass.

The odd thing about walking out of a church, I've found, is that all the sounds on the street suddenly seem magnified slightly, and lights and colors seem a little brighter. It's like your senses all twisted the knob left a notch as you stepped in the door, and now they're turning it all the way up to 11.

From the church, I made my way down to the wharf. I had a chance to spend far too much time poking around Pier 39 on a previous visit to San Francisco, and I had found out that in all honesty, there is little to do there but walk around in constant bewilderment that a cup of clam chowder can actually cost six dollars.

So I took a look around at the other piers, and was fortunate enough to find a place called Musee Mecanique at Pier 45. This place is, in the parlance of haute couture, totally tits.

Let me give you an idea.

Stepping through the entrance, I am greeted by a display detailing the history of San Francisco, or some other crap. It was very nice, and also not terribly interesting.

Already developing a mild case of tetchiness, I wander past the display and into the rows of wood and metal cabinets that populate the rest of the museum. Stopping in front of an unmarked machine at random, I notice that below a glass window, it has a coin slot. I dig in my pocket for a quarter, and drop it into the slot. There is a whirring, clicking sound, and a curtain behind the window rises.

Behind it is a scene from late 18th century France in miniature, little plaster and metal figurines arrayed around a stage. On the stage, there are a few more little figurines, standing around a device that largely characterizes that period in France's history -- a guillotine. Strapped to the guillotine is... yes, that's right... another little figurine. Keeping pace with my jaw, the blade of the guillotine drops, and the little plaster head falls into a basket.

Vive le France!

And the curtain rolls back down.

Perhaps you can imagine the situation: I'm expecting a dancing Howdy Doody, maybe, or a kid rolling a hoop down a dusty road. Instead, I'm treated to an intricate reconstruction of a gory public killing, presented with the same warm fondness with which your grandma might give you a cookie. I'm sure you can guess my reaction.

I burst out, "Holy crap!" and ran to find a change machine.

For the next hour or two, I browsed through a collection of antique mechanical amusements that boggled the mind.

The public-execution-peep-show theme was surprisingly prominent; I recommend the museum to any of the lawyers foaming at the mouth to sue the video game industry for promoting violence. They might just learn that violence has been around for a while, and it's been entertaining people almost as long.

Almost as common were peep shows of a less bloody kind. Seeing as these machines generally came from an era where the sight of an exposed ankle was likely to send any well-respected man into conniptions, I expect the teenagers lined up at them with fistfuls of quarters probably went home disappointed.

There were mechanical baseball games, rock 'em sock 'em robots, love testers, and a couple of machines where the object seemed to be to drop money into them and watch nothing happen. I cheerfully watched a few people use these, then replaced the "Out of Order" signs and went on my merry way. Not really. But that would have been fun.

They even had a few machines that were the spitting image of Zoltar from the movie "Big."

Yeah... they didn't work.