This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home
Where do you call home? That’s the existential question that many of us are feeling these days. Maybe you’re recently retired and short on savings. Maybe you just graduated and can’t afford to live in the city where you grew up. Maybe your city has become a ghost town during the pandemic, or because its big factory shut down. Maybe your hometown no longer feels safe or familiar or yours. Maybe you’re just restless and you want to hit the road, see what else is out there.
I know a married couple in their late 50s whose dream house near California’s wine country, surrounded by an olive tree orchard like in Tuscany, was burned to the ground in one of the state’s recent wildfires. They barely escaped alive in the middle of the night with their dog. They decided to keep driving because home was suddenly seasonal tinder, their neighborhood reduced to ash and black sticks of once green trees.
They drove first to Southern California, and then visited Texas, Florida, New England, Wisconsin, Montana, Colorado, the Pacific Northwest. Everywhere had its attractions and everywhere had its demons. Freak storms or more wildfires. People who insist that Covid-19 is make-believe and public officials who feed their delusions. Finally, after about a year on the road, they returned home to California. But life now feels transient in Sonoma County. They crash where they can, in friends’ houses or in Airbnb’s, waiting for the next fire season to sweep through California, when they’ll again hit the highway. The new Nomads, the Flying Dutchmen.
As David Byrne sang, “I'm just an animal looking for a home/ Share the same space for a minute or two.”
The Grateful Dead play a Haight Street concert
As we get older, we’re supposed to get more rooted, to know where we belong. Lawrence Ferlinghettii -- the poet, publisher and fixture of San Francisco bohemia – just passed away at the heroic age of 101, dying in the same rent-controlled North Beach apartment that he called home for nearly 50 years. But Ferlinghetti knew that he was a ghost long before he died. There has not been a San Francisco bohemia since the 1980s, the last time that struggling artists could afford to live in the city. The last time that San Francisco produced art – books, music, films – of any great note or quality.
Grace Slick nose-to-nose with Janis Joplin
Of course, there have been a few exceptions in recent years. The Last Black Man in San Francisco was a little masterpiece of a movie that was willed into life by two natives – my son Joe Talbot and his childhood friend Jimmie Fails. But neither of these talented young men lives in the city anymore. They can’t afford it. And there is no creative community left here anymore.
Nevertheless, San Francisco still feels like my city, my family home. My father Lyle came up from Los Angeles with Bette Davis to star in Fog Over Frisco, and left his heart here. I married Camille, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, whose father came from Sicilian and Genovese heritage and whose mother was of Irish and Greek descent. Joe and Alice Peri felt like the best of old San Francisco to me – up from the immigrant working class, true-blue liberals, and stylish urbanites who made their martini generation seem cool. Camille’s dream was to also live in The City, and she began to as an ingenue, in a Nob Hill apartment ($140 a month). She took the cable car to her downtown job in the book buyer’s office at Macy’s (when the department store sold books) and later walked to her job as a cocktail waitress in the top-floor Crown Room of the Fairmont Hotel, where she served drinks to Tony Bennett between shows in the hotel’s legendary Venetian Room and to tourists who asked what time the famous fog would be rolling in.
Lyle Talbot and Bette Davis in Fog Over Frisco
Camille and I have San Francisco memories that go back through multiple lives and generations. Drunken nights and dead ancestors and dear friends who died far too young in an earlier plague. Whenever they return, our sons Joe and Nat still think of our old ramshackle house in Bernal Heights as home. And so, Camille and I hang on, scribbling away and dreaming of turning our earthquake shack “estate” (bought in the mid-1990s for $285,000, 10% down and borrowed from parents, the last time that people like us could afford to buy a home in San Francisco) into an artist colony. Maybe my sister and her husband – also writers – can build a small in-law house in our backyard. Maybe we can convert the basement into a work/live space for a young filmmaker.
Joe Peri in his World War II Navy uniform
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 40 of my 69 years. I know it’s my home – which feels like a blessing and sometimes a curse. The tech invasion made the city seem alien. Now that much of the digital work force has abandoned the city, after dislodging thousands of longtime residents, San Francisco feels hollowed out by the pandemic. But the emptiness and strangeness that hangs over the city also feels like an opportunity.
We have to think tribally these days. I was fascinated by the recent film Nomadland because that’s what the aging men and women roaming the highways of the American West have been forced to do. It’s not an ecstatic convergence like Burning Man, but there’s something even more uplifting about these transient desert communities of van people. Yes, and tragic too, because there is usually economic or psychic trauma behind these people’s nomadic wanderings.
Alice, before she married Joe
I also want to get off the grid these days – but I want to do it in the city that I call home. I want to embrace my tribal network – the family, friends and fellow activists/artists who are my kin – and make it a bulwark against the relentless assaults of what will always assail us. Corporate greed, ecological disasters, pandemics – along with the unavoidable decline and fall of the human body.
If we drop away from the herd, they will surely pick us off. Fire us, evict us, steal our savings, force us to wrestle with social problems as if they’re our personal failings. But if we stick together, we’re an army that can’t be displaced.
Recently, I completed a book, By the Light of Burning Dreams – working with my sister Margaret and brother-in-law Art. Like my book Season of the Witch, which told the story of San Francisco’s liberation in the 1960s and ‘70s, our new book recounts the dramatic tales of those who tried to liberate the entire country during this “second American Revolution.” I wrote a chapter about the brave stand taken by the American Indian Movement (AIM) and their fellow warriors at Wounded Knee in 1973. For 71 days, this community of resisters – including women, men and children -- was surrounded by the heavily militarized and violent forces of the Nixon administration. And yet on the final night of the siege, Dennis Banks and other AIM leaders were able to slip through the iron ring around them. Instead of being caught and killed like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, these warriors lived to fight another day. Because it was their land and they weren’t going to be chased off it or killed.
Figure out where you belong and take your stand. There is power in numbers, and in the certainty of home.