But I was a passive bystander for both of those events. The only thing I did, besides driving, was to find her a place to rest. You see, her stripper friend had insisted on taking Leanne's bed. I didn't want to be crossing the bridge at 5am. So I suggested we head across the water at 2:30am and drive down the coast south of the City. Because the only place close enough to SFO that I knew to go was the beach by the Taco Bell, formerly A&W, in Kim's part of Pacifica, that's where we went. My friend dozed on the sand. I watched the waves and felt strangely anxious.
When I finally got back to my anarchist household on 57th Street, sometime between 8 and 9am, I learned that I was more psychic than I'd previously realized. All that time when I'd been killing time along the coast -- I also drove my friend across Devil's Slide and down to Montara and back -- something had been gravely amiss back home. I felt terrible, realizing that my absence -- this was the era before my demographic had mobile phones, obviously -- had placed a tremendous burden on my housemate. It wasn't my fault, but I was still plagued with guilt. By the time I arrived in Vallejo, it was clear just how prescient my decision to stop in Pacifica had been. I learned that night to trust my instincts, reason be damned. And I'm learning again, as I write this, that the words "good time" will always be in shadow for me. Something died in me that night back in 1990, but it wasn't Postmodernism.
