Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for the American Dream was required reading for modern bohemians. I had always hated him for saying what he said and dooming me and my whole generation to a dreamless workaday life because he was on a few hits of cheap acid when all he had been asked to do was to report about a motorcycle race. But instead he chose to condemn us all to a slow death in a boring world. Had I really hoped that it was still alive? Had I really thought that I would come to San Fran, drop my bags down, and pick up on the ancient powerful feelings which drove my heros mad? Well it wasn’t there.
A breeze was coming off the bay and reminding me of the War in its own special and peculiar way. The only place I had ever felt an ocean breeze was in that camp over the sea. I had come to resent those breezes and all of Poseidon’s whispers of freedom. The ocean mocks us. “Come back” it calls out to us always… and if it weren’t for these things we have to do.
All I could see through my glasses was people with money. Skinny and beautiful bodies draped gaudily in thousands of dollars in accessories. Fake people as far as the eye can see. I breathed in dismay. This would be just another city.
I stayed in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel near Union Square. The room was a surreal Victorian setup with bands of green alternating between light and dark on the walls. After establishing my weekends emo nest and smoking a joint in the bed I went out into “It”.
The mythological charm of San Francisco that I had carried with me was suffering assault. Cars and vapid pedestrians bustled every way and if you weren’t walking up a calf shredding hill there would be nothing to visually distinguish it from any other American city. Busy. Loud. Hectic with commerce. Dappled with homeless ghosts haunting dirty streets. Nothing new.
I walked. I had money for a change, but by now I am familiarized with non-financial participation and I’ve gotten comfortable with walking around cities to see what they have to say about themselves. It isn’t until you have walked down all a cities streets with your head strung out around ten thousand hard to explain ideas and your eyes taking in the story written in the shimmering sidewalk. That is how you learn a city. So I walked.
I walked in the Mission and I found there that Hipsters are Hipsters everywhere just like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. If you’ve known one you’ve known them all. Bodega’s and impossibly small Chinese restaurants where small women yell at everyone and liquor stores and gated doors, shady street people and wide eyed bench mystics. The same stories. I kept walking.
Had a sharp thing in my head. Still pissed off about the lies. Still wondering why the fuck I was in San Francisco. Still hated myself for whining about the same old shit. Still sad our species is as fucked up as it is. Still sick of feeling tired and old and mourning the death of the dream I once had about this place. This too had been a lie told to me. About the spirit of this place. And that lie had been as fundamental in my decision making process as all the lies that we’d been told about the terrorists of Camps one, two, three and four. I had believed in Jack Kerouac’s San Francisco and I wanted to go to that place but it is gone now and that too caused me a great deal of sadness.
I walked by City Lights with my head hung low and deep in anxious thought, a cigarette burned out at my knuckles. How had this come to be? Is the only thing left this tomb of the dream? Is our only last true occupation to be to succumb to domination and then death? Should I just get a job? Is the poetry dead? What more could be said?
The next morning I was in front of cameras again. The professor who was conducting the interview told me that his project was aimed at future generations. He told me that for now people don’t want to know about what has happened and that they probably couldn’t process it if they did because their brains would defend themselves. This was for the future. So they could see what we did.
So I told them what I did.
And when I left another room in smoldering rubble and the fumes of my psychosis are being extinguished by my better judgement the professor’s wife turned to me and told me that I take what happened in Guantanamo Bay harder than any of the detainees and any of the guards and that I blame myself more than anyone else. I looked her in the eyes and told her that that was my job. Somebody has to feel that past. For all of us. And I do. I feel it always. And I do hate myself for it and I do think that I deserve it.
I went for a longer walk then. I walked along the pier stoned just like everybody else. I felt so angry. I felt so alien. Why do I have to be this forever? I wasted all that beautiful pier swallowed in self loathing.
That night I saw Eddy Falcone. We talked about the memories we had and the death of our cult. His anarchist house was having a big discussion about these French men who wrote some book about destroying things and then a train was destroyed and they said that they had done it. Then they were put in jail. The anarchists called them martyrs and I made a martyr out of myself for my own stupid cause by explaining that these were white people problems. There were thousands of Muslims locked up for far less than that, experiencing far worst than that. I have no pity for these idiots who ruined a perfectly good train. I thought trains were good… right? Anyway. Fuck them.
The next day I met with Stephen Funk. We sat in my hotel while I smoked cigarettes and talked about art and how we intended to use it and who our group of artists really was.
Later I walked with Justine and told her how my life had been since our interview. I poked a few jokes about her book and how she had ratted me out for being a whore and I think she took them seriously. At a bar later with her friends I suddenly felt like I could not be around people anymore so I went back to the hotel.
On the bed, naked and stoned again, the TV said BREAKING NEWS. For the rest of the night I laughed as I watched our psychotic nation again waving its flags in the same way they had after 9/11. I heard them say that Guantanamo had been a success even though the information had been “extracted” over six years ago. I heard them praise all of our efforts in making this multi-billion dollar assassination attempt FINALLY come to a close. Fuck this.
But where was the body? After they killed Saddam we watched that fuckers body hang for days. The clip was played every two minutes on every news channel in the media fleet. Now, for the most wanted man in the world they won’t even produce a photograph?
I hate this place. I hate these people. I will never try to change anyones mind again. Let them wave their polyester flags and I will wave mine and we’ll see who’s American Dream is dead.
Love,
Otis
The Paper Trail 