2. City of Doom

Pavel Sterin

Intercultural Writing

Writing Exercise #2

1.18.11

                                                City of Doom

            San Francisco is a historical city which dates back all the way to 3000 BC. But what does San Francisco mean to me? Other than it being where Ron Silliman wrote his first book of course, what other significance does it have? Is it the home of Alcatraz?  Where the Golden Gate Bridge is located? Home to lots of gay people?  Or the 12^th most populated city in the United States? As anyone could tell, I have done my research.

            Ron Silliman attended San Francisco State University, but later transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. Did he transfer because of his hate for San Francisco, or because he was in need of a better education? Ron Silliman lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years and then moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania. Why he moved to Pennsylvania, is a whole different story, but how he spent 40 years living in San Francisco is the real question.

            I have many friends who come from the Bay Area. I hate it when they refer to their home as the Bay Area rather than San Francisco. It’s as if they’re trying to make their boring city sound cooler. When I was in high school the rumor was, if you are associated with San Francisco, you are most likely a gay individual. Of course, there are many straight people who live there, and there is nothing wrong with being gay, but for some reason San Francisco and gay people became a synonym for me. Whenever I hear my friends claiming there from the Bay Area, I tell them to stop lying and admit that they’re really from San Francisco.

            From a modern point of view this is my only association with the city. But when I think about my childhood I realize that San Francisco is more significant to me than I could ever imagine. My family and I immigrated to the United States in 1990. The fist city we came to was Cleveland, Ohio. The weather was very cold, and finding work was very hard for my parents so they decided to travel to the West Coast. For 7 days my father, his father and my uncle, switched off driving as they made their way to the city of San Francisco. When we got situated in this new city, my parents were able to find work and it seemed like everything was going uphill. Then all of a sudden after a couple of months I started having breathing problems. My mother said there were times when I wouldn’t be able to catch my breath and she thought I was going to die.

            After a couple visits to the doctor, I was diagnosed with Asthma. My mother blamed the San Francisco air for giving me this problem. Another thing that started to happen to me is my baby teeth were falling out. The dentist put many gold and silver teeth in my mouth to replace the ones that fell out. There are many things that I don’t remember from my childhood, but one thing I do remember were the painful visits to the dentist. My asthma wouldn’t get better and my mother decided it was time to move from this god-forsaken city.  Some of her friends were living in Los Angeles at the time so we decided to give the big city of LA a try. 

            Even though LA probably has twice the amount of smog as San Francisco, for some reason my breathing problems started to clear up. We still had family friends who lived in San Francisco and at the age of 14 or 15 we went back to visit. I found the city very boring, with nothing amusing except for the trolleys moving through the streets, that almost ran me over.  I didn’t understand why people lived in San Francisco when they could live in Los Angeles. Nowadays I don’t find many people who take pride in living in San Francisco, as many wont even call it by it’s original name and choose to refer to it as the Bay Area. I mean for goodness sake, the city doesn’t even have a pro basketball team. What would I do there, root for the Niners, or the S.F. Giants? The way I see it, it’s a lose, lose situation. So yes, I have been to the city where Ron Silliman wrote his first book. No wonder he wrote it, with all that peace and quiet and no sports teams to root for, he must have had all the time in the world to write. There will always be a little piece of room for San Francisco in my heart, but would I plan a return trip, probably not.