The Statistics of Suicide.

I actually wrote this about a year ago in my personal blog, about something that happened on my way home from my old job.

I guess if I had to pick a day to die in San Francisco, today would have been a pretty good one.

It started with helicopters, just as it always does at the Discovery Museum. Normally, the sound of passing aircraft doesn’t elicit a response from me, but this time the motors sounded close. I figured it was just a low-flying plane; not much cause for concern. Outside the doors of the Playhouse, I could see Brian and Matt standing in the middle of the plaza, talking into their radios and looking upward.

Liz came in moments later. “You hear that?” she said as the thud-thud-thud of the helicopters stagnated above us. “Come with me,” she said. I had been out the last time this happened. We have a big field next to the museum; the nearest open area to the bridge. If someone survives, the Coast Guard lands in the field until an ambulance can get there. Sometimes they wait there as a precaution.

“Yeah, I should mention that this happens sometimes,” she said to Zoe and Justine, two new-ish girls who hadn’t yet been present for a ‘situation on the bridge’. It happens with stunning regularity, and, due to our waterfront location, we almost always end up inadvertently affected by it when it does happen.

We went to the front gate to see what stage of crisis they were in. A small CHP helicopter was parked near the edge of the grass, with a handful of emergency personnel standing near the head of it; waiting. Making smalltalk until they were needed. It was 4:15 and nearing the end of my shift, so twenty minutes later I was in my car and headed for the bridge.

Traffic didn’t seem awful until the on-ramp. Cars for miles, just short of a standstill. But at least they were moving, and moving faster than the cars on the northbound side, which weren’t moving at all. It was a tough merge, but we were still more go than stop. It didn’t seem to indicate anything more traumatic than maybe a fender-bender.

I kept an eye out. Besides the traffic, and besides the fact that it was 72 and sunny, it looked like an average Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. Joggers, cyclists, and dog-walkers ambled by. Everyone had their windows down; Top 40 songs wafted over the rumble of engines. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. On one side, the city on the edge of the world, and on the other, just the Pacific and the great, gaping horizon.

Just when I had assumed it was another mysterious traffic jam without rhyme or with very little reason, I caught the caution tape out of the corner of my left eye. It was surprising. It was pretty far down; near the toll booths — most people aim for the center.

I knew it was tacky of me and I knew it was going to hurt, but I looked anyway.

I made a quick glance and caught it all. The long-haired cop presiding over the scene, flanked by his colleagues in harnesses ready to make a quick dive if necessary. All of them an equal distance apart from one another, hands on hips, looking down. Their motorcycles leaning lazily against the railing just outside the tape.

And at their ankles, a dirty-looking man in a red windbreaker on the other side of the bars, looking down and clinging to the side of the bridge. A clear, sharp city skyline behind him.

“Oh my God,” I breathed without even really thinking about it. I got what I asked for, so I turned to face my windshield and drive away.

And just like that, the traffic was gone. In one quick motion all the rubberneckers in front of me were sliding through the toll booths and on their way home.

There was a flush of adrenaline, and my limbs went a little weak. I lifted my foot to the gas. It felt heavy.

And the whole way home, a statistic floated in front of me:

They always pick the San Francisco side.

Update: According to my stats, this entry is getting a lot of interest. For all who are interested, there is a fantastic New Yorker piece from a couple years back that gives some background to this little vignette: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/13/031013fa_fact

There used to be an accordion player in the Powell Street station.

There used to be an accordion player in Powell St. Station.

I was 22 and had taken an unpaid internship at SPIN’s San Francisco office. Which should have been a dream gig, except it left quite a bit to be desired. I knew going in that, since SPIN’s editorial offices are back in New York, there wasn’t much I could do from the San Francisco office except work in ad sales or web promotions. Three days a week, I came in at 9am, usually long before all of the salaried, contracted or otherwise compensated employees got there, and “drove traffic” to SPIN.com.

I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I trolled message boards and blogs, sometimes pretending to be a fan, sometimes being up-front about my affiliation with SPIN, leaving a breadcrumb trail of links to SPIN.com news articles all across the web. It was easy enough, but it was boring. So much that sometimes, while my fingers and eyes left links and typed “friendly” messages on boards and Facebook groups, my mind would be completely elsewhere. I once angered a bunch of Oasis fans this way, suggesting they read an article about Noel Gallagher that did not paint him in a flattering light and was openly critical of him (but when was the last time an article painted Noel Gallagher in a flattering light? When was the last time he painted himself in a flattering light?). I had read the article, but hadn’t really, you know, read it. I had just sort of looked at the words and then gone about my usual business.

The work was easy enough, and it was only a couple hours, three mornings a week, and I was getting class credit for it, which got me three units closer to my already delayed graduation. But never before had I felt so used, so taken for granted, and so expendable. I wasn’t exactly performing a necessary service. I was there because they knew they didn’t have to pay me, and yeah, it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing to have someone driving extra traffic to the site by very obviously planting links here and there around the net. Everyone was really busy, and no one really talked to me, and when they did it was sometimes in a vaguely demeaning voice, as if I hadn’t already spent a year as an intern for a trade magazine, where my editor actually put me to work doing pretty advanced and very useful, necessary stuff.

After a few weeks I was moved into “The War Room”. This was a dark, drafty room on the 2^nd floor, which contained a big table and some maps of the world on the wall. I spent my days with the other interns, who were working on a different SPIN-endorsed project called SPINEarth, a site that was supposed to be a hub for music coverage from around the world. The site was a mess, the planning and ideas where unfocused and the site itself, truth be told, wasn’t anything YouTube couldn’t accomplish. I could tell from the beginning that SPINEarth was a sinking ship. But the SPINEarth interns were all really nice, and I got along with them pretty well, which isn’t easy for me to do. The only real difference between me and them is that they were getting paid. Not much, but at least they were getting paid at all. They were all in their early 20s, some of them still in school like I was, and working in editorial. Damned if that wasn’t some serious salt in the wound. I got my ass up while it was still dark to get to my unpaid internship on time. They all rolled in between 30 minutes and 2 hours later, sometimes still stinking of the alcohol that their SPIN paychecks paid for the night before. But apparently what I did wasn’t a useful enough service to pay even a measly stipend for. Sometimes I’d sit there listening to them whine about how little they got paid, other times they’d make plans on payday to hang out after work. I know they never meant anything by it, but it still stung.

I would leave the office at 1 p.m. so I could get to class on time; usually just in the nick of time. I would walk the three or so blocks across Market and into the Powell Street Station, and wait for the next M Ocean View to take me to campus.

One day I came down the steps from street level and heard faint music. It isn’t unusual for someone to be busking in a subway station that sits right in the center of a downtown area of a major American city, but when I heard music in a BART station, I had come to expect it to be some hobo who happened upon a saxophone pretending like he knew his way around the thing to make some extra cash. As I descended into the station, the sound got louder. Not just louder, but bigger. As I walked toward the entrance to the MUNI trains, the sound started to surround me. It was a big, beastly, otherworldly sound, and with the echo of the tile walls distorting it, I couldn’t immediately identify it.

It was never very busy in the station at that time of day. There wasn’t a lot going on to distract me from the noise. But as I came around the corner I saw an old man on a little stool. Not terribly old, certainly not elderly, but a little frail. A little hunched over. He had intriguing creases in his face and an interesting color to his complexion, a color that told me he’d been a lot of places. The backs of his hands were just a little bit eroded, the same dark red of his face and neck. They were drifting up and down the keyboard of a very big accordion.

His instrument was as old as he was, maybe even older. It dwarfed him, consuming his torso and leaving only his head and legs visible. It was a battered old machine that had once been regal, its decoration shrouded by layers of dust and dirt.

And he was always there, every day. I began to look forward to it; walking down those sometimes rainy, always dirty steps, away from the car horns and footsteps and the squealing brakes of MUNI buses at street level, and wading into that big sound. After getting up so early to do nothing but hawk ultra trendy bands to ultra trendy people, bands that, for the most part, probably won’t really matter and maybe won’t even be remembered in 100 years, all I wanted to do was just hear that old man play his accordion. Just to know that he was still there. He always looked so happy. So content, and so serene. He was never looking at anybody. Always down at his instrument or maybe off to the side a little bit, with the vaguest smile on his face. It wasn’t really a smile, but it wasn’t a frown. He always sat in the middle of where the floor tiles rearranged themselves into four or five concentric circles, playing these ancient folk songs that have somehow survived. They always sounded just a little sad, sort of mournful, but they were still so alive. They had history. They had survived war and poverty and immigration and hard work.

All at once, it was baffling and thrilling to see a little old man make such big, commanding sounds. The air around him absolutely came to life. I loved knowing that, three days a week, I would hear that accordion and just for a second be in the presence of someone who was really, truly happy. And I could trust that he knew what being truly happy meant. Somehow I could just tell from the way he looked; how old he was and how old that accordion was that he was very happy.

I had always considered dropping a bill or two into the open case at his feet, but I never did. Until my last day at SPIN, when I took one of my last dollars out of my wallet. I found a piece of paper at the bottom of my purse and wrote a little note on it:

You are the best part of my day.

I wrapped it around the folded bill and dropped it in his case as I walked toward the turnstiles.

He looked up, and the music stopped for just a second. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, in an accent I couldn’t place. He looked me in the eye and smiled. Sincerely.

And then he started again, and I walked off to wait for the M-Line.

Q&A

Q: What’s the number-one search term leading traffic to this blog?

A:  “ashley lindley playboy”

Hey, as long as people are reading…

I will have something real next week.

Life and Death with Frank Turner

Hello. This is just another post to keep this blog on y’all’s radar. I have a feature for Metro coming up in about two weeks that is shaping up to be really, really good, though my editor seems to be MIA. Haven’t heard from him in about a week and a half. I hope he’s getting my e-mails. I don’t want this story to slip through the cracks.

I am very excited about going to see Frank Turner this week at the Rickshaw Stop. If you haven’t yet turned your attention toward Frank Turner, you probably should. I was introduced to him by a friend of mine a few months ago and I’ve been listening to the CD she burned me over and over and over and over (and over).

Turner has a fantastic command of language and a flair for storytelling, hovering over the mundane and everyday and also the unanswerable, like life and death and what we’re all doing here. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard in quite a while, and makes me feel a little guilty that I’m not adhering to the carpe diem lifestyle he preaches in stuff like “Photosynthesis” and “The Road“.

I’ve been trying to shop around a story on him to local blogs because I have tons of questions I am dying to ask him (and also I was hoping to get into the show for free), but no one’s picked it up. I want to talk about life, death, and women with Frank Turner. If you have nothing to do this Wednesday evening, come out to the Rickshaw Stop. It’s a cheap show. From what I understand, he’s pretty big in the UK and was signed to Epitaph last year. This might be the last time you get to see him for so little dough before all the literary hipsters get a hold of him.

One of these days, we will meet and I will ask him my thousands of questions. Listen up, Frank. I’m comin’ for ya.

I might want this song played at my funeral. I haven’t decided yet.

And if all you ever do with your life

Is just photosynthesize

Then you deserve every hour of your sleepless nights

That you waste wonderin’ when you’re gonna die…

checking in

Hello. Not much action for me lately. Had an arts feature a few weeks ago that I really liked, but I can’t find it online.

In the meantime, here is a video of my friends The Stone Foxes recording and being goofy. (Maybe ‘friends’ is jumping the gun a little. I know them, but we don’t hang out or anything. Just want to be clear on that. I don’t wanna sound all creepy or nothin’). I will be seeing them at the Independent this…Friday? Saturday? I should probably double-check that.

And here is a profile I wrote on them what seems like ages ago. My first story. I was so nervous that night.

And boys, if you are reading, I want one of your new T-shirts. The one with the sunglasses on it. And then, like all the other shirts I buy at merch tables on nothing but beer and impulse, I will end up wearing it only to bed and the gym.

guess who

Guess who lives in the South Bay?

Find out next week…

Holding Music

Haven’t had anything to post here lately. I have some stuff coming up next week that I’m awful proud of.
Here is a cool video while you wait: