As soon as I turned fifteen, I copied her and got hired at a Baskin-Robbins on Geary. Her employment there seemed impossibly mature and with it, even if Eddy Street scared me.
This section of Market is the southern edge of the Tenderloin, where a friend of mine, older than the rest of us, was the first to get a job, at age fifteen, working at a KFC on Eddy Street. In the daytime, cutting school to flip through poster displays in head shops, and at night going to the Strand, a theatre where grownups shared their Ripple wine and their joints. Whatever else that means, it fits this eerie film.Ĭivic Center was where we kids went looking for trouble. It’s fancier, with all this electric glitz. This view of Market is before my time and not quite the street I recall. The film begins near Ninth and Market and moves northeast through Civic Center, past multiple bright signs and theatre marquees against the night sky, their neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog. I’ve been replaying film footage I found on YouTube that was shot in 1966 or 1967 from a car slowly moving along Market Street, at night, in downtown San Francisco, the city where I grew up. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but it continues to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you’ll never see again. You turn reflective, interior you examine and sort and tally. It, too, is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, is mostly over. This “dying” doesn’t have to be negative. Here, “being born” is an open and existential category: you are gaining experience, living intensely in the present, before the period of life when you are finished with the new. You are busy being born for the whole long ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying-that’s the logic of the line, as I interpret it. I was seven and could not have understood what Carter meant, what Dylan meant. I liked Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who wore denim separates on the campaign trail and was approved by my anti-establishment family. For Carter, a lifelong Christian, surely the idea of being born had an undertone of religious conversion, of being brought closer to God, not just born but reborn: in a state of constant renewal, rejuvenation, renovation, change. I watched it on television with my grandparents, in their bed, as the three of us ate bowls of ice milk from Carvel, whose packaging, like everything that year, was bicentennial-themed, in red, white, and blue. This was in his acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, in Madison Square Garden. Jimmy Carter used a famous line from the same Dylan song-“he not busy being born is busy dying”-to make a point about patriotism: America was busy being born, Carter said, not busy dying.
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