I came into Blondie’s, out of the sunlight and the cold. It was another one of those days that looked warm, but chilled anyone foolish enough to believe their eyes.
For a moment, Blondie’s looked crowded, but that’s just because, for a moment, every member of the biggest group there was actively crowded around the bar, paying for drinks. When their work was done they returned to their booth, and suddenly the interior was revealed to be wide open, with plenty of seats.
No one was sitting at the plentiful tables outside. It was not that kind of night.
The drink list at Blondie’s isn’t actually all that extensive, not compared to the beer list at the Monk’s Kettle or the rum drinks at Smuggler’s Cove or the gin lists at White Chapel. But something about Blondie’s selection, which is written up on a large wooden placard behind the bar, seems extensive — even intimidatingly so.
I think that’s because Blondie’s specializes in martini-type drinks, and the distinction between drinks is often so narrow (gin or vodka? An olive or an onion?) that it makes every decision seem more significant. I used to know this menu pretty well, but it had been a long time since I’d come back, and it all seemed both familiar and strange at once.
Blondie’s is on Valencia Street between 16th and 17th streets. It has two TVs (one is enormous) and a stage, and no one except the bartender was masked. When he was finished with the other customers, the bartender asked to see my vaccine card but not my ID, then reminded me that the bar is cash-only, which I had forgotten. I ordered a Kumamoto (Kikori Japanese whiskey, yuzu citrus liqueur, ginger bitters, and citrus bitters), wondering to myself why I wasn’t ordering a martini. Why go so far afield in a place whose specialty I like so much?
But the drink was tasty and plentiful — and I had also forgotten just how big their drinks are.
More and more, bars in San Francisco have felt like bars in San Francisco. If you believe your eyes, you’ll miss the pandemic that’s still happening. Almost 2,000 people would die from the coronavirus in America that day. But if you blink, we’re back to normal.
My whole night was powered by the illusion that we are back to normal.
A few minutes later, “Danielle” came in. We hugged before she sat down next to me. She’s been out of town for a month.
“You know,” she said, looking around, “I realize now that I’ve been here before, a long time ago. I think maybe eight years ago, something like that, and I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s changed much.”
“Good!” she said. “There are some things you want to change, but a lot of things — especially now — that you don’t want to see changed.”
“Absolutely right.” Bars are so much better this way.
Danielle and I met at an East Bay sex party between the times of Delta and Omicron. We didn’t touch each other except for a hug goodbye, but the connection was instant and we both wanted to have a conversation that was bigger than the party. We’ve made it a point to get together most months since, and she helped me out on some of my art projects. Now we had a lot of catching up to do, beginning with the big party I’d been to the weekend before.
An estimated 1,500 people had all gotten tested within two days of the event, and shown up masked. It was indoors, it was loud and music was playing over a mass of people trying to talk through masks. As the hours went by, it grew increasingly uncomfortable. Since there is no longer a mask mandate, people began to take their masks off. And off. And off, until the whole character of the party had shifted, and it was like it used to be.
It was fun. But it turned out, I told her, that I wasn’t looking for the same thing from art parties that I had been three years ago.
“I mean, I’ll do more of these parties,” I said, “but I think, for my art experiences, I want to go smaller, not bigger, really focus on creating intense, boundary exploring, psychomagical experiences for myself and a few collaborators.”
“That sounds amazing!” she said.
I grinned. “I figured you might want to be part of that.”
“I do! But … probably not for a while. Because in April, I’m going back to the Middle East. Oh, not permanently! But, you know, I lived there for a year before the pandemic and I had to get out when the borders were sealed, and I left all my paintings there, and I need to go back there before I can really settle down here. So … I’ll be gone for a while.`
I nodded. “Sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward.”
“Exactly. Unfinished business.”
She asked if she could show me pictures of the paintings she left behind, and I realized that, somehow, in all the months we’ve known each other and talked about art, I have never seen images of her work. How did that happen?
I scrolled through her phone’s gallery while she ordered a dirty martini. She’d been working on collage paintings with religious imagery over abstract backgrounds. “Do you know what I think of when I think about life in the Middle East?” she said. “Immediacy. Living in the present moment. They’ve been living for so long with the idea that everything could suddenly end, and it’s horrible but it also makes it clear what’s important in the present moment. When everything seems secure and that it can go on forever, we get caught up in trivial things. We lose sight of what really matters to us. But when you have to live in the present moment because that might be all you get, you realize what you really care about.”
“When you know that you’ll lose something, it can become beautiful in a whole new way,” I said. “Or maybe that’s when you see its true beauty.”
I ordered a Mai Tai. She ordered a Dagwood, which is to a martini what an everything bagel is to a bagel, and we dove deep into a conversation about art and love and loss. A conversation it seems like we’ve been having since we first met. Suddenly, I don’t quite know how, we were touching each other, stroking each other, as we never had before. And I completely lost track of what was happening in the bar.
“May I kiss you?” I asked as she stroked my hair.
“Yes,” she said. And time passed. We drank. We communed. We make tentative plans ahead of her leaving.
Behind us, a band set up on the Blondie’s stage. Drums and a trumpet and a keyboard and a bass … Latin music. They sang in Spanish, and they were great. The music shook us out of our reverie. Three and a half hours had passed. The bar was now crowded. Nobody was masked. We moved to the rhythm. Everyone was having a great time.
It was the way it used to be. If you believe your eyes and ears.
But our night was over. We left Blondie’s. We held each other outside. We acknowledged that this is what life is for, and then we walked our separate ways into the dark and cold, thinking about what is possible.
