Roy

I always thought of San Francisco as the  place where miners came to discover their pots of gold.

Beautiful terrain and scenery, glorious food, mild climate and access to excess made the city attractive to everyone. An embarrassment of riches in the land of plenty. Plenty of milk and a bit of honey. Everything pretty, everyone educated, creative and hip but bored...forever craving the new.

After four days of being awake (and after I'd lost my job, my friends and my looks) it became clear that enough was enough. Bartenders saw me coming and they knew what to expect. Pretty, ugly, pretty, ugly, back and forth, over and over. No longer could I keep up appearances or press my luck.

At the time it was 'in' to be 'strung out' and a few bars in the Mission made this mandatory. Elliott Smith, Palace Brothers, American Music Club and the Red House Painters were on every playlist. The dress code was cowboy shirts and dirty Sambas while Herradura margaritas were the libations of choice.

At the psych ward at San Francisco General Hospital,  I was informed that my best friend Roy was found unconscious (naked, dirty and wet, underneath a parked car) not far from his spotless apartment in Hayes Valley. I'd fly to John Wayne Airport  in Orange County a week or so later. While life was spiralling downward when I met Roy  I wouldn't blame him for that.

Although I'd managed to keep a job at a swishy trattoria downtown I was basically homeless. Sleeping in the backseats of open cars and fishing food from trashcans in Golden Gate Park was my dingy little secret. Roy was not aware of the exact nature of my destitution. No one was. Roy had pretty things in his ground floor studio... how he afforded them was anybody's guess.

Nag Champa incense burned daily while British exotica played inaudibly from some hidden boombox in the background. Years before the silliness of feng shui he'd been a fan of all things Eastern after one of his heroes, Boy George, kicked heroin and travelled to India to find himself.

The best days in the world were thrift store shopping with Roy. Roy was thrift.

Re-purposing and refinishing something was his gift and he found beauty in things most had thrown away including people. Nursed back to health and emerging like butterflies from a chrysalis, boys stole from him or, far worse, were terrible gossips. It was Roy who discarded. I was not a butterfly, social or fluttering.
Occassionally, he'd  "entertain" and everyone welcomed an invite with rue.

Entertainment meant inviting some hapless adolescent over,  the preparation of some healthy vegetarian meal,  rancorous sex and then the dismissal of any trick who'd invaded his pristine sanctuary. No one spent the night unless you weren't sleeping. After a session, Roy spent the remainder of the week scrubbing, dusting, cleansing, atoning.

Fuelled by some unseen fear and paranoia, the apartment was dimly lit, shades drawn and kept, as they say, 'speed freak clean'. I believed him when he said he was being followed and when he shared startlingly real sleep- deprived declarations that we were being watched. Whenever Roy heard from you, even though invariably he didn't have a phone, he'd ask, in the most endearing way, "Where U been, girl? I've been a nervous wreck!" and he wasn't joking.

We used to call his apartment Shady Acres.

Roy and I fell out and I never saw or heard from him again. His one and only ex- to my knowledge said he'd been in contact with him. Was he in San Jose...San Francisco...was he doing hair...or ill...?

The details are sketchy.

So were we.

What About Bob?

"More than anything I have this sense that I'm a veteran of a war that is difficult to discuss with people who haven't been there".

          Robert Downey Jr.