San Francisco: Heaven’s gate

I always stick up for L.A., but when I muster my argument, which usually hinges on the weather, she cuts me off: "And don't start with the weather."

The following morning, my friend Amy Tan, the writer, picks me up in her Prius and heads for Golden Gate Park, where we are to meet her husband, Lou DeMattei, and Segway together through the thousand-acre oasis. We rendezvous behind the Spreckels Temple of Music and unload the electric-powered scooters. Amy gives me a quick tutorial in riding the gyroscopic vehicle. And off we go along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, past the AIDS Memorial Grove, with its sun-dappled paths wending through cypress, bay, and eucalyptus trees, and down past beds of camellias and dahlias to the carousel.

The scooters roll forward if you shift your weight onto your toes; stopping and backing up are just as intuitive, as is turning left or right. They are ideal for touring, noiselessly traveling at up to 12 miles an hour and open to the elements so that you feel you are doing more than just passing through. Amy first rode a Segway during a tour of Paris two years ago, and she and Lou have been using them to run errands around their home in Sausalito ever since.

"It's amazing — you sometimes have people riding by in cars saying, "Are you too lazy to walk?'" Amy says, "and they're in a car! They don't realize we're riding a Segway instead of driving, not instead of walking."

I have wandered Golden Gate Park before, but never have I experienced the length and breadth of it, all from a sleek vehicle that conforms to my childhood notions of the future. This was what tomorrow was supposed to bring: a silent ride through a perfect setting, in a city that would seem to be leading us into that better future.

I am sold. How, I wonder, can I come up with a new Web application that will enable me to live in one of those hillside town houses, ride off to the coffeehouse on a Segway, and sift at my leisure through the best and brightest of each successive wave of immigrants? For it sometimes seems that without that killer app, or at least the cocksure belief that you will soon cook one up, the days of rolling into town like Herb Gold, Mark Twain, or any of a dozen other young writers and earning a living with your pen are as quaintly anachronistic as Friendster.

Yet here it is, the undeniable wealth of possibilities. More millionaires have been minted here than in any other city — more billionaires. Those modern dream factories are thriving just down the coast, their founders and staffers seduced by the same promise that lured the forty-niners. Myth trumps reality. When has it not? And when I am back in San Francisco, I can't help but feel the urge to buy in.

I am driving down Market Street, a movie producer sitting in my passenger seat. He optioned my first book awhile ago, paying not that much more than it would have cost to buy a copy on Amazon.com. We haven't talked in months, but he lives in town and when he turns up at my hotel we decide to take a ride down to the Mission District, to one of the coffeehouses that are reviving a little of that old beatnik spirit. He tells me that he's raised money from a Taiwanese PC maker, from a Japanese production company, and from a Silicon Valley software firm, and that with just one more deal here, a script tweak there, he will be ready to go into production this year. He mentions possible directors, an actor he believes is interested. It's just talk, of course; no more real than my visions of conjuring a killer app. But in this city of literary dreams and social-networking schemes, of "Go Ask Alice" and Long Strange Trips, why can't I indulge in a few flights of fancy? Who knows, maybe this producer, with barely an independent film to his credit, can devise a way to make his movie and we'll all get rich ...

I hear a siren.

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Behind me is a police car with lights flashing. I pull over and park dutifully by the side of Market Street, in front of a Bank of America and down the block from the turnoff to the Castro.

"Sir, do you realize you were in a bus lane?" the short, stout policeman asks me after I hand him my license.

"I was daydreaming," I tell him. "I'm from out of town."

He looks at my license, then writes me a ticket. "Welcome to San Francisco."

Later, at a bar in the Mission, a lovely girl from Colorado who is working her way through Cal State serves me saketinis. Her upper arms are thick and muscular yet feminine and freckled; they are sexy and she knows this, showing them off as she does with a halter top. She came, she says, because of Cal State's track-and-field program (she's a decathlete). But she'll stay, she declares, because she likes the sense of possibility here, the freedom — "no one judging me."

I ask her how much I owe.

"It's on the house," she says, smiling. "Welcome to San Francisco."

The next day, I swim for half an hour in the hotel pool and then head over to the Museum of Modern Art. I've always liked the photography collection — the current show is the strangely erotic work of San Francisco's own Henry Wessel — as well as its fine and eclectic collection of Mexican and California painters, including Diego Rivera and Richard Diebenkorn. Later, I walk up to Union Square for dim sum at the venerable Yank Sing and then, as the morning haze gives way to sunshine, decide to wander through downtown, past the Asian Art Museum and the War Memorial, all the way up the tidy little streets with their clapboard town houses to the Haight.

I gambol along Buena Vista Park, its green hill rising beside me till it dips out of sight behind big bushy oaks. In the afternoon light, boys on skateboards slalom down the sidewalk before stopping to take turns grinding a bench. Strolling past the tony boutiques that long ago replaced the head shops which lined Haight Street when I was a kid are pretty, impeccably dressed women, a few of whom — I'm not kidding — actually wear flowers in their hair.

I could have lived here, I think to myself. And perhaps I should have. Those decisions made nearly a decade ago still haunt me. Because San Francisco beckons. It always does.

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