Emilie

On Haight Street
Upper Haight
Friday afternoon

***

San Francisco is a town that can take tragedy.  It can handle rebellion, the break-down of families, and broken, frightened people – in short, it is a place that can deal with social hemorrhage.  It was when I officially broke with the Pentecostal church that I learned this about San Francisco, only I didn’t come here from anywhere – I grew up here.

My parents came to San Francisco in 1978, the year before I was born, from Northern Virginia.  My father came first.  His older brother was here and got my father (just out of jail) a job as a mechanic, in a shop still open at 26th and Shotwell.  My father asked my mother to join him, promising to marry her if she did.  He came to San Francisco for a fresh start; she came for love.

After having me, terrified at the prospect of motherhood and vowing that her (eventual brood of five) children would not turn out like their parents (both users and drinkers), my mother turned to the Pentecostal church to get sober.  I was to spend a large portion of the first 15 years of my life at the Voice of Pentecost (“VOP”), which is on Ocean Avenue housed in what used to be the El Rey, a theater (where the Mitchell Brothers apparently screened Autobiography of a Flea and served guests champagne and blotter acid) designed by Timothy Pflueger, an architect (himself a native of San Francisco) known for his skyscraper and theater design work.

It’s funny, right?  People come to San Francisco to escape the things that fundamentalist Christianity spawns:  narrow-mindedness, judgment, and the loss of self-respect that results from a system of belief that will not let people be themselves.  Yet here I was, soon to be deeply steeped in the tenets of the Pentecostal church, in San Francisco – a place denounced by Pentecostals as the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah chronicled in Genesis chapter 19.

Although this is a story about San Francisco, a brief primer on the Pentecostals seems appropriate.  Pentecostalism is a fundamentalist branch of Protestantism.  Fundamentalism in the United States was an early 20th century reaction to Modernism that stresses the infallibility of the Bible in matters of faith, morals, and as a literal historical record.  Pentecostal women mustn’t cut their hair, wear pants, pierce their ears, wear any jewelry save a promise ring (you know, a ring signaling commitment to complete chastity before marriage) or a wedding ring, or question their husbands.  In general, Pentecostals mustn’t drink, smoke, use, fuck (outside of marriage), swear, or question the Lord (or their pastor). These rules were drilled into my head during the three church services we attended each week, and everyday at school.  I spent most of my childhood attending Voice of Pentecost Christian School (still in existence as Voice of Pentecost Academy), the parochial extension of VOP, learning more about the power of prayer and how to please people in power than anything else.

At 15, my family started to crack.  My mother could no longer do sobriety, and she began to use and drink again with my father, who had never stopped.  Although she hid her use initially, I think I sensed her falter, and this caused my life to shift, too.  15 turned out to be a watershed year for me.  I was angry about my family and tired of the Pentecostal rules.  So I rebelled – I left VOP.  I chopped off my waist-length locks.  I drank. I smoked. I swore. I fucked. I pierced my ears. I wore pants.  And my mother continued to use.  The more she used, the more it became clear that we’d lost the family linchpin.  As we all started to drift, I turned to San Francisco, who it turns out had been waiting for me all along.

San Francisco dealt well with my tragedy.  San Francisco made it easy to be whatever I wanted or needed by not judging or chiding – San Francisco simply accepted me.  It watched me patiently, like a loving parent, and allowed me my anger, rebellion, sadness and confusion about who I was.  San Francisco introduced me to people who would become my new family. San Francisco let me be myself in a way I never could at VOP or with my family.  It satisfied my need to explore.  It’s easy to move around in this town.  After high school, I left Lakeview, the hood I grew up in, and moved to Noe Valley, then Bernal Heights, then back to Lakeview, then to the Excelsior, finally settling in the Castro for five years with the girlfriend (yes, the kind you have sex with) I’d picked up along the way.  I got a BA in English at SF State, a JD at USF, and moved again, this time to the Mission, Hayes Valley and finally the Haight, where I’ve been for almost five years.

As I found my new home in San Francisco, my family continued to disintegrate.  We no longer have a family home. But it’s remarkable how seamless San Francisco made my transition from one home to the next.  It’s part of the magic of this place – in its willingness to welcome tragedy, San Francisco creates space for things to come.