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Home | Archives & Cast | Shop | Contact Kel | The Story So Far | |||||
01/13/2017 Sinking Let’s begin the new year with a story about my cousin Wreck, née Rick, who’d love this: Millennium Tower, fifty-eight stories of swanky Frisco hubris on Mission Street, near Natoma. A Xanadu of Grand Residences, the tower’s a glassy gray dream of Nebuchadnezzar raised expressly and exclusively for the warehousing of autocrats, moguls, magnates, personages, potentates, glitterati and fat cats. The only way you and I’d ever get into the place would be to run the floor polisher in the lobby. As of this writing the erection's website posits that Millennium Tower’s ‘more than a place to live, this is the way to live. Rare and precious, shimmering on the skyline like crystal, Millennium Tower is one of Worth Magazine’s Top Ten Residential Buildings in the World.' Anyway, three decades before Millennium Tower was a gleam in Frisco’s eye, in that dazzling month on the cusp of summer when The City is scoured clean by wind and sun, cousin Wreck bombed across the Oakland Bay Bridge in style. He’d come into possession of an ever-so-slightly beat-to-shite 1960 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz ragtop painted blizzard white with blistering red tuck and roll upholstery. And Wreck’s aspect? Pure jack-o'-lantern. Sorry, cousin. Wreck and GG - pronounced Gigi - the first woman I ever met featuring skin art, had zigzagged that finny boat west from coal country. Wreck made sure she got to see everything on her punch list, like Vegas for instance… but then only by way of a prolonged swing north through the Goblin Valley in Utah. Scheduled to be in San Francisco for just five days, right out of the box she was hot to see Chinatown. She and Wreck shared an enthusiastic and encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s Hong Kong chopsocky films. They knew it all, the principals, their fighting styles, who’d beat who in any matchup. They were invested. However, on day one Wreck was up for Cuz - he called me Cuz - to show off something from the real San Francisco. Now, the thing about San Francisco’s South of Market Area and Natoma Street in particular is that its specific geological makeup, being the shore of a marshland that only became viable after Frisco shoveled some nearby sand dunes on top, makes it an infamous wonderland of liquefaction and subsidence. More interestingly, another pertinent item the builders left out are the steel end-bearing piles that would had to have been sunk 300 feet through the underlying muck to bedrock, choosing instead to balance the tower on a concrete base and ninety-foot concrete friction piles, a decision that in the opinions of many has led to the tower sinking sixteen inches into the ground during its first year as a going concern instead of the total of eight as forecasted over the entire life of the thing. And yes, it’s tilting too, leaning northwest as of this writing, two inches at its base, six inches at its top. Thirty years earlier it was all laughs and munchies on that brisk sunny day when cousin Wreck, GG and I hit SOMA in the Caddie and headed breezily toward Market on Fourth Street, which was thought-provoking really because Fourth trends one-way in precisely the opposite direction we were travelling. Soon enough, Wreck did get us to Natoma Street, where among similar things I showed him this: Which after all that lead-up it isn’t much to look at, is it. Four days later Wreck and GG left The City, taking the Golden Gate Bridge out of town in sunset light, coring their way home through the southland and clean through Florida, only turning the Caddie north when they finally hit the sea. Lately I can’t help but think of Rick, aka Wreck. Especially with the Millennium Tower glowering out there somewhere, drunkenly. Kel |
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Pepperpot Piper is written & illustrated by Joseph Kelly All content copyright © Joseph Kelly All rights reserved |