It was too cold out. We were shivering, even though it was early July and it was supposed to be warm and in a warm state with friends while drinking alcohol, free alcohol, the red wine poured into those large red plastic disposable cups that are passed out at post-Church Sunday picnics, the kind families used to hold in Mile Square before it became a place known more for raps than joging, before Fountain Valley cleaned it up and kicked all of the rapists and murderers back to Echo Park, back up north along the interstate, back to where they were expected to be.
Those red plastic cups, the wine poured in for us free, and the Belgian beer – the large amounts of Stella Artois that Sebastin and I bought from the Safeway, the closest grocery store to where we stayed – walking down the hill of Lower Fort Mason, about half a mile along where the 101 turns into Embarcadaro Blvd, in that short space between where the toll lanes for the bright red bridge end and before the faux-facades that lined the street began when it wrapped around Nob Hill and Coit Tower just before it joined the annex road for the Bay Bridge, to drop people off at Treasure Island and Oakland.
We walked back up from the Safeway, which oddly enough had the biggest parking lot that we ever saw along the Marina District, and back up to the Battery that overlooked Alcatraz. We all assembled atop the Battery, next to the World War II-error cannons and bunkers, behind the hostel that used to be used as an infantry for soldiers. We gathered more wine and more burgers from the loading dock in the back, from where the ambulances used to load and unload bodies from.
I was angry at my own stupidity. I had decided to do laundry that night, and my own sweatshirt, my Jack’s Surfboards Sweatshirt that I had acquired not two weeks before in Huntington Beach, was in the wash. I was in a t-shirt and jeans, and the fog had encamped on us this night – not enough fog to cancel the July 4th Fireworks show that we were all gathered for, en masse and hudling together on this Battery, but enough to make the air damp and damn cold.
Sabastain offered me his sweater that was still in his room. He had a much smaller frame than I, so I was confused.
“It’ll fit me?”
“I like them baggy.” Sebastian than proceeded to tell me that it was very much like the purple-and-black-stripped sweater that he was wearing now; that his grandmother in Bolivia hand-knitted these huge sweaters. His sweater didn’t look warm, but I was cold and anything would do. I kept company with Simon from Brighton and Lucas from France; Lucas who pretended not to know English because he hated the Americans, but we all soon grow hatred for him, as the foreigners and I overheard him order his Starbucks in perfect English at the Wharf three days before – whilst Sebastian ran back up one flight of stairs into the hostel kitchen then back down three flights inside to our room in the basement, and returned, with a red-and-white-stripped sweater. I put it on. It was warm. It was the warmest sweater I had ever worn. I remarked to him about what a good knitter his grandmother was. He, in typical European hospitable matter, quickly found a pen and paper from the mass of people and wrote down his grandmother’s name and address in Boliva, and told me if I sent 20 U.S. Dollars (much more to the Bolivians) that his grandmother would knit and send me a similiar sweater. I meant to send away for it, but I lost the address somewhere around Seattle three days later. Sammy from Israel looked at me and remarked that, in my red-and-white get-up and my black hat, and in this large crowd, I looked like Waldo. I had to agree.
We watched the fireworks and drank more wine, than rode the cable cars to Chinatown, and wandered through the alleyways at night, and ate Jasemine rice, then gathered in a circle hours later in Golden Gate Park and smoked. Three more times, strangers compared me to Waldo. Three more times, I had to agree.
