Jenny Eighteen

Teenage sex, crashing cars, and North Beach Pizza

The only photo that I have of Jenny M. is of her leaning out the front door of North Beach Pizza on Grant Street as I arrived to pick her up from work one evening, when I was just eighteen. Slightly out of focus, her hair is swinging and she’s yelling “Hey!” in way that I would still recognize with half a smile, wearing clogs, black jeans, a server’s apron and a t-shirt.

I was always happy to see her.

I met Jenny for the first time when I crashed a party at her flat on lower Haight. She was standing there at the top of her stairs with her arms crossed, checking the crowd streaming into her apartment. She wore Capezios, black tights under a zippered leather skirt and a simple top, her dark hair chopped above her shoulders and streaked with red. She arched her eyebrows and threw me a wide, curious smile. “Well… what are you doing here?” she asked. I looked her right in the eye and replied, “I came to meet you.” She tossed back an “Aha!”, and after a quick tour of the party we found ourselves alone in her front bedroom. I had had a couple of high-school girlfriends, but Jenny was a woman. From the moment I saw her, I could see and feel her confidence—it showed in how she held her body. She had strong shoulders that she cocked a little sideways with her hips and hair, angles juxtaposed with curves and blocks of color.

We’d both been drinking enough that my memory of anything we said is long gone, but within the hour we were naked and tangled together in a mess of sweaty sheets, the air in the room close with the noise and smell of the house-full of people as the fog rolled by outside the bay windows. We laughed together at finding ourselves there, two strangers suddenly together, and I remember the sound of the party swelling as we increased our tempo, our bodies pressed together, colliding, sliding, our mouths joined in a wet, open heaving kiss—and then a crash, and the sense of gravity failing as the bed collapsed beneath us.

The room went quiet for just an instant as we held our breath. The entire house went quiet, it seemed, the guests frozen with their drinks in hand, the notes of Bowie’s Changes suspended in the air, everything motionless. I could feel the wood the the broken bed frame poking up through the mattress. The rurrrrrrurrrr of an electric trolley bus rolling by outside restarted the world, and we laughed even louder, lovers now, instantly as close as two can get, and relief washed over me—the feeling that I’d found someone to run with.

Jenny wasn’t sophisticated or even particularly intelligent, but she held her head high and looked out clearly at the world. She was confident, sexy, fun—and freely orgasmic. I had felt some freedom in my first experiences with sex, but those were overshadowed by hesitation, and then by heartbreak. With Jenny I felt free for the first time. She gave me access to a sense of aliveness and wholeness through sex that I didn’t have anywhere else in my life. Thanks to her, I got the first glimmer of what it felt like to be myself. Jenny was a gift.

Ten minutes before I took that picture of her, I was flying up Franklin in my first car, a silver diesel VW Rabbit with sheet metal devil horns stuck in the slot of the moon roof and Motley Crüe’s Girls Girls Girls in the dashboard tape deck. The band couldn’t help but seem like a joke they weren’t even in on, but I loved the sound of that one album without knowing that they really did have some Sunset strip street chops and smack-punk New York Dolls blood. I was in the far left of three parallel one-way lanes, gunning it across Post to stay in sync with the lights. My lane closed up on me in the middle of the next block, just as a BMW 318 was coming up on the right. Tight little yuppie sedan. I could have just eased off, but I was in a hurry to be there when my girl finished her shift.

Whoever was driving that tan Beemer must have thought it would be fun to box me in as he came up alongside. Looking right as my options narrowed, I caught a glimpse of University High—straight haircuts, white teeth. I bet they had coke. I was mostly unaware, mostly held it in, mostly buried it under beer and burritos, but I had enough anger boiling in my belly to look over at these clean-cut kids from Pac Heights and shout, “fuck you, dude,” as I turned the wheel hard, smashing my right front fender into the left quarter panel of their car.

In the heat of the moment, what came to mind was that I’d be able to use my SF-native knowledge to speed off and escape, leaving them scratching their rich-kid heads. Thing is, the little rig of a car my dad had passed along to me made all of 52 horsepower, no match at all for what they were driving. I stomped on the pedal with little effect, barely making it through the next light, and then threw a left onto Sutter, still thinking that I might get away. The boys in the BMW followed, and I quickly realized that an actual car chase wasn’t going to end well.

I pulled over. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went down, but somehow we agreed to part ways without getting the cops involved.

We were all young and at least a little bit high, that much was clear. I left them with my number and split, back to my mission. In a result that prefigures many other instances of good luck to come, I never heard from those car-crash kids again, and I made it to North Beach just in time to snap that photo as Jenny stepped out to the curb.

When she and I first met at that party, where she lived was the place to be at night in San Francisco. A city mile from the better-known Haight–Ashbury, the intersection of Haight and Fillmore was where hippies came down the hill to score heroin in the hood, and where white kids like us lined up our bikes in front of the Toronado saloon, just across the intersection from Discount Meats, Two Jacks Fish Market and down the block from the gunshot-pocked walls of the housing projects.

I was there all the time in those days, hanging at a place shared by a few guys that I met in my first years of high school. I spent a lot of time in the front room, watching the action on the street below. Guido’s room. Trust fund baby, or so we thought, if only because he made the effort to eat something more than cheese popcorn out of a plastic bag. Guido always had a hot pepperoni pizza. Not that I didn’t have the money for dinner. Really, I was just more interested in drinking, and didn’t want to take the time to walk four blocks up to order and wait for a slice.

My friends and I were all in deep enough already, drinking malt liquor and then, with relief, pints of the first micro-brewery beers, along with whatever else we could get our hands on. Once in a while someone would show up with a bag of pills pinched from a medicine cabinet in the Castro, but most of the time it was speed—an ideal complement to alcohol. This was before the scourge of what came to be called ‘meth.’ Speed was cheaper than cocaine, but more importantly, it was just more of the feeling that we were looking for. Harder and faster. We drank and did lines of that shit and it burned cold blue with the sound of Motörhead’s Ace of Spades as it came on, teeth grinding, white knuckles. Forget about sleep. My best friend from the shipyard where I worked in Sausalito had already moved on from this adolescent scene, drinking margaritas on Union Street in his roller skates and acid-wash jeans and, unbeknownst to me, jetting off to Club Med and Martha’s Vineyard with his blonde girlfriends—but I was still focused on finding my brothers, even if all we did together was get wasted.

That’s how I ended up at Jenny’s party—sitting there in Guido’s room, the never-washed windows giving onto a view of the overhead wires that fed the #7 electric bus line, the glare of streetlights in the rain, wet gutters and the iron scrollwork of entryway security gates. I watched the cars going by in the wet, and I noticed a line of people making their way into a house across the street. Something pulled me up and out, an impulse to leave, to go find something different.

I was younger than most of my friends, insecure, shy without drink, and—just as true—impulsive, daring, and physically confident. I smashed the last of my sixty-nine cent snack into my face, chased it with a slug of Colt 45, and tumbled down the stairs just as some others were making their way in. I shouldered past, feeling good to be in motion. Back outside, I felt the cold wind coming in from the avenues wrap itself around me. A blue plastic trash bin lay wounded in the gutter, cans spilled from its open mouth onto the damp concrete, while a squad of vending boxes stood guard on the corner. I felt a familiar strength in my legs made strong from years of skateboarding the steep hills of the city as I scanned left-right and darted across the street.

Reaching the other side, I eased my pace to match my stride with some strangers as the gate swung open, and then I was bounding up the stairs, excited to be stepping into the unknown and the heat of new bodies around me.

Jenny and I became lovers and companions for quite a time after that rainy night on Haight Street, but as I began to spend more time at college in Berkeley, I had the feeling that I was losing her attention. All we really did was drink beer and screw, whether it was at the Armadillo, the Alamo Square Saloon, or the Albion—or at her place or where I lived with my mom on Church street. It sustained us for a while, the simple joy of fucking, the visceral connection, just being together at all those bars and places in between.

The last time I saw her, I was already asleep in bed when the phone rang. It was late—early really, close to closing time—but of course I’d get up to go meet her. She’d been out on her own in the Mission and called me from a payphone in the back of a noisy bar. I was out the door in a minute and on my way down Guerrero in the pale glow of the small hours. I loved being out late like that. The city goes quiet, radiating heat in the calm midnight air that glows with the reflected light of neighborhood theater marquees and shuttered corner stores. I didn’t have far to go and drove slowly, tasting the creamy black of empty streets, the night-painted hills, and the bridges reaching across the dark water. I grew up here, and the shape of this place is the sand that forms my bones.

I felt the city in me as I drove, watching the clock on the dash and counting the late-night sequence of yellow lights flashing in slow motion. I was still dreaming, happy to have been woken up by the sound of Jenny’s voice. Coming down the hill towards the intersection at 19th, I downshifted into second, letting the tiny engine soak up some of the inertia. I suddenly felt wary, but the street was empty. The light for the cross street flashed red, off, on, off, on as I rolled across the intersection and an El Camino appeared out of the dark street to my right, ran the light and T-boned me, solid. The cars mashed together and scraped along the asphalt, coming to a halt with the front of the other car pushed into the side of mine like a hog digging for scraps. I was angry for a moment, and then resigned. I exhaled, feeling adrenaline wash though my body. Sure enough, this was my payback for what I had gotten away with months ago when I sideswiped that little tan beemer, on my way pick up the same girl.

Neither of us even got out. I just wanted to get to my girl, and the other guy was out joyriding, he wasn’t gonna hang around. I looked over at him through the crumpled door and what remained of the passenger window and I just laughed. The other driver just stared back at me, unmoving. I looked into his eyes. The traffic lights flashed again overhead, yellow one way and red the other. I waved him off, saying “Fuck it man, don’t worry about it,” just loud enough for him to hear. He backed up, and I drove away as he peeled out, heading south. The Rabbit was a mess, leaking fluids and bits of glass as I limped it two more blocks to where Jenny was waiting outside the bar.

I managed to drive the crashed-up car back home to Church Street, and Jenny spent the night with me there that one last time, but afterwards my memory fades. I imagine she must have left the City because otherwise I would have run into her in the years and decades since. The car sat across the street from my mom’s flat, crushed and unmoving for weeks until finally I gave in and called the wreckers for a tow. My picture of Jenny will always be the same though, with her sideways smile at the top of the stairs. I’ll never forget her.