“I’m having kind of a meltdown,” I admitted to Hallie. “My holiday depressive episodes seem to be starting extra early this year.”
She gave me a kind but skeptical look. I didn’t seem to be having a meltdown. “What does that look like?” she finally asked.
We were sitting outside at West of Pecos, on Valencia Street between 16th and 17th streets. As has been typical in most of my bar-hopping these days, the outside was packed, but the inside was sparse-to-dead, almost a clubhouse for the staff. The crowd outside was lively, and strolling musicians kept walking by, asking if they could serenade us. Eventually we said “no, thanks” enough times that they stopped asking if we wanted music, and just asked directly for a tip instead.
“Well,” I said, “on a practical level it’s me at home, unable to function, making terrible decisions about food, and constantly watching stupid videos or playing a video game. It’s almost catatonic. But the real action is in my head, where the self-loathing is as cold as the vast and empty expanse of infinite space.”
She thought about it, and nodded. ‘Yeah,” she said. “That’s familiar. Do you like guacamole? Because the guacamole here is great.”
Hallie had recommended we go to West of Pecos on a Tuesday because they had the best puffy tacos on Taco Tuesdays. But when we got there, they seated us outside, handed us menus … and made no mention, at all, of Puffy Taco Tuesday.
We were puzzled, but immediately gravitated to other items on the menu that caught our eyes. We are not, apparently, the kind of people who insist on getting what we came for; we are the kind of people who quickly find the best options that we have available.
We ordered the guac and we ordered the cornbread skillet and we ordered the “cornflake crusted chipotle wings,” because the West of Pecos server said we really had to. There are some friends who, when you go out for drinks, you just end up ordering drinks, and there are some friends who entice each other to try the whole menu. They’re very different experiences.
I ordered off the margarita menu to start, because they have a drink called “The In-Famouse El Guapo” (tequila, blood orange, pineapple, tajin salt), which is a reference to the 1986 comedy “The Three Amigos.” I loved that movie when I was a kid and, re-watching it as an adult, I found it shockingly not-racist for a 1980s movie about three white guys going to Mexico.
Talking about holiday depression led us to talking about our families, which neither of us go see over the holidays because … why would we? Why would we ever go back to places we deliberately left, in order to conduct rituals that are empty to us, with the people we got away from, during a time when most places are shut down? There are people who have compelling answers to those questions, and they live very different lives than we do.
“My father married five times,” Hallie said. “He’s on his fifth wife. My mother was wife number three, and they only stayed together until I was four years old.”
“Wow …”
“Yeah, obviously that gave me some issues…”
There are some friends who, when you go out for drinks, you end up talking about life’s appetizers, and there are friends who, when you go out for drinks, you entice each other to talk about the whole menu.
The drinks arrived, and they were delicious. The food arrived, and was superb. Maybe it wasn’t “puffy taco” good, but we were enthusiastic — especially about the wings. Our server had done us a very good turn with that.
“I don’t usually like wings, but these are great!” Hallie said.
“So,” I asked, “did your mom ever re-marry?”
“No.”
“Did she date much?”
“Not really. She occasionally went on dates, but she didn’t really ‘date.’”
“Wow, that’s …”
“Over 30 years, yeah.”
“Wow. I can’t … I mean, I’ve had some dry periods, often self-imposed … but I can’t really imagine …”
I meant it at the time I said it, but it’s not actually true. I used to think a lot about becoming a monk, but that was when I was much younger and knew myself less well. And, of course, I’ve thought about just giving up, both because the world had seemed to give up on me and because I believed I no longer had anything to offer it.
I ordered a Rodeo Ghost (mezcal, amaro, grapefruit-infused vermouth), which is what Hallie was drinking, and which she says is one of her very favorite drinks ever.
“It’s bitter, but not deeply bitter; there are really interesting layers,” she said, and was absolutely right.
The conversation gradually shifted from the ways in which our families had affected our approach to intimacy — a conversation that always leaves me feeling like such a cliché — to the question of how San Francisco’s art scene is different from that of other cities, like New York.
This is a conversation that’s been coming up a lot recently, one I think is motivated by a post-pandemic identity crisis. We used to have a clear sense of who we were and what made us distinct. But macro-economic pressures and a global pandemic have made us feel more like every other major city. And, behind that insecurity, looms another question: If we were to leave, to go someplace easier, what exactly would we be losing?
Before we left West of Pecos, we realized that some mutual friends in the weird art scene had also snagged a table outside. We went and sat with them for a bit as they finished their meal. They had gotten puffy tacos.
“They’re here; you just have to demand to see the taco menu today for some reason,” they explained.
The couple had just come back from Maui, taking a red-eye flight that got them in at 6 in the morning. Then they’d gone straight to work.
“Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t stay in Maui,” one said to the other. Then she explained to us: “I have a job with real deadlines in a real office, but he has much more flexible creative work, so usually when we go on vacations, I end up leaving him there for a while.”
“She’s left me in Mexico, she’s left me in Bali, she’s always leaving me,” he said, grinning.
Leaving, sometimes, is easy. The art of it, the hard part, is coming back better than you were. I know so many people who, if they could, would leave this city for a year or two, just to see what happens, just to see who they’d become, with every intention of coming back and showing us what they’d learned.
To be able to leave is to have a different experience of staying. You can’t really be part of something if you’re hanging on to it for your life. Which is part of the reason I hate the holiday season with a fiery passion. It brings me nothing but suffering, but society won’t let me opt out. I can only hang on for my life. San Francisco is the inverse: It brings me so much joy, but I don’t dare to opt out. I can only hang on for my life.
Hallie and I hadn’t gotten what we’d come to West of Pecos for — our friends had, instead — but we left without regrets. After all, we’d tried new things and discovered we really liked them. It was a good night. The people who know what they want and chase it down are much more likely to get what they want. But sometimes I think the people who improvise with what they have are happier.
Sometimes.
Caveat I must say after reading your prose I always come away hungry and in need of a libation. Carry on…!
Great writing! If you’re ever craving puffy tacos without the weird secrecy, Casa de La Condensa on by mission and 23rd makes great ones
Let me just say — we go to ‘West of Pecos’ once a week for their Puffy Taco Hours and have concluded this: they do NOT want to advertise or tell you about it but it is going on at the hours and dates they say. My partner and I literally have this as a running joke because they totally go out of their way to NOT mention or have the little menus out UNTIL you ask. We thought it was a coincidence the first few times but it’s clear it’s some type of directive there. No clue why, to be honest, when all restaurants (including theirs) could absolutely use the business. Just wanted to back you up that you were not crazy — they absolutely withhold their “Puffy Hour” and look at you crazy and annoyed when you ask to see that special menu (M-F, 4-6pm).