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Bay to Breakers

Emil DeAndreis

    One year ago:

    I was twenty five, and I probably wouldn’t have gone were it not for my roommate, who was appalled to learn that I had been on this earth for twenty five years and had never participated in San Francisco’s Bay to Breakers. At the time, I was an employee at the Jamba Juice on ninth and Irving, which is directly next to Golden Gate Park where a significant part of the footrace passes through. On the morning of the Bay to Breakers, I was called at seven and told my shift was cancelled, as it was foggy. Since Jamba Juice’s wellbeing depends on sunny weather, almost all of their scheduling decisions are based on weather forecasts. My manager dedicated herself religiously to Google’s weather updates to determine the amount of hours she cut everyday (which pleased the higher ups and saved her job but fucked all the lower employees that actually made the company function). She did not dedicate herself nearly enough to current events, however. Consequently, what she did not know, which was something I knew and elected not to tell her as she cancelled my shift, was that Bay to Breakers was going to bring unstoppable amounts of strange business to Jamba Juice for the entire day regardless of the exposure of sun. Not only were there going to be Willie-Nelson-looking prehistoric naked men lining out the door ordering Mango-A-Go-Gos and paying from a wallet which came from no kind of cloth pocket, but there were going to be drunken obese girls bursting from their spandex, stumbling in to heist the bathroom key and spray the bathroom walls with midday chunky Gyro vomit. Not to mention dudes who were going to come in and, at the peak of their immaculate shroom high, skid into the bathroom and manage to miss the toilet entirely with their rancid mound of human dung. Then leave. If anything, my manager should have been calling in all the forces and lining the walls of Jamba Juice with employees who were prepared for an eight hour shift on one of the most hellish customer service battlefields in America: Jamba Juice on the course of a drunken footrace in San Francisco, on a fucking Sunday. But here she was, feeling quite strategic as she looked outside at the slight 7am San Francisco fog, shed my hours, and saved her franchise sixty dollars.
    “Sorry,” my manager lied. “We’ll try to get you a full day later this week.”
    “Oh alright,” I said, hung up, and laughed triumphantly. My roommate, Chase, heard this. He was already up. He only woke up before seven o’clock once a year, and that day was today—Bay to Breakers. Now it was about a quarter past seven and he was stampeding up and down the stairs spanking the walls of the house with an extra funky broom, chanting loudly the title of the race and slamming his second Sierra Nevada of the morning with his other hand. After a belch, he invited himself into my room and was unfortunately able to pry from me the news that I had just been called off of work for the day.
    “Then what are you doing in bed right now?” He then reached into his pocket and proceeded to bomb my bed with an unopened beer. “Get the hell out of your bed. Don’t even let me come back up here in five minutes and see you still here fiddling with your morning wood.”
    If I didn’t get up right then and start drinking my breakfast beer, there might have been a physical confrontation. The doorbell rang and it was Chase’s friend, who invaded the house and also commenced to marching around and chanting “BAY-TO-BREAK-ERS!” He was perhaps more amped than Chase. His name was Tom. He was drinking a tall boy, while already lamenting over the fact that he had to go to work at three, which was eight hours away, an obligation which foiled his dreams of binge drinking.
    On the way to catch the 71 Haight-Noriega, we stopped at a liquor store to re-up on beer. Chase and I split a twelve pack of Tecate. Literally while Tom was bickering about not being able to drink alcohol, he bought a flask of vodka.
    “I thought you were working later,” Chase said.
    “I am.”
    “Don’t you need to not have liquor on your breath?”
    “That’s why I bought vodka,” replied Tom. Evidently, he felt no reason to explain this theory further, as the conversation stopped there.
    When we arrived at the panhandle, at 8:00 am, we were there just in time to watch the actual racers pass through. Most of them were foreign and had come from their home countries to compete in the world-famous race. See, Bay to Breakers once served a purpose, which was to lift San Francisco’s spirits after the ruinous earthquake of 1906. People took it seriously, and eventually it became an international event. But these days, Americans took this race seriously for entirely different reasons, and now hordes of them, I guess you could call them the early birds, were staking out their territory by unfolding their lawn chairs, tapping their kegs, and applauding the Mexicans and the Kenyans for their efforts.
    About an hour of that passed. We drank beers and pissed on trees. The Panhandle was getting more and more crowded. With the coming of more people, marijuana smoke tagged the air, so did the joined smell of lawn grass and warm piss. The shriveled old naked men and women were beginning to enter the picture. I stared aggressively at their weird anatomy, wishing that college girls shared the same eagerness with their bodies as did these doughy old hags and dinosaurs that were shuffling into the mix. These people were for some reason comfortable in their bodies, and felt the whole world needed to know this.
    I was drunk by late morning. Chase too was drunk. No one was drunker than Tom, however. Shattered on the ground next to him was his empty Seagram’s vodka flask. He had moved on to some light beers. He had also moved on to a phony afro wig. He was acting like such a ding dong, a typical Bay to Breakers caveman. When people passed by him, he high-fived them and retched loudly into their faces. Then he laughed, hysterically. His shirt came off at some point, unveiling a shaved and flabby chest. The horrors of his figure were no match to those of the unclothed relics, however, who moved slowly about the race path, hand in hand, smiling and nodding under the terrific and accepting San Francisco sun.
    It was about one in the afternoon when Chase and I decided that Tom had successfully blacked out. We asked him if he thought he should still go to work. He looked at us like an infant looking into the eyes of a horrifying stranger.
    “You remember how you have work in two hours?” Chase asked him.
    “YEA!” he cried madly. “I know!”
    Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered with this matter, for his solution had already been figured out.
    “All I will need is a burrito, from that El Panchoria, up the block. Sober me up, good to go.”
    There was no restaurant called El Panchoria in existence.
    Sometime later, while Chase and I were laughing at old man balls and all the women that were demonstrating by example that it was still ok to sport a huge raunchy bush, we realized Tom was gone. The day sort of fizzled out from there. I got separated from friends and found myself walking home by myself. I stopped in Jamba Juice, which was a flourishing nightmare as I had predicted. There were soggy paper towels encrusted into the floor and walls like paper mache. Frozen fruit chunks were melting everywhere on the floor. It seemed as though juice had been sprayed into the wall on a number of occasions. The workers had flushed faces with hair matted to their cheeks from constant sweat. Their terrible Jamba Juice visors were crooked and disheveled. The line of customers was out the door. In the line was a guy with ass-less chaps, a team of fat girls with destroyed, arguably electrocuted hair, hungover and grumpy in bathing suits (with water wings), there was a dog that was bigger than most of the humans and not bashful about sticking his nose into everyone’s genitals, and about five strollers full of babies retching turbulently over the fact that they had just been forced through a day of thudding bass music, rupturing celebrations and the stench of constant evaporating urine all under a roasting sun, for no good reason.
    I got my smoothie and fucking left.
    I napped.
    I woke up when Tom arrived from work. My door was open, and when he walked by it I asked him.
    “Did you make it to work?”
    “Yea, I made it.”
    “How was that?””
    “It was alright, I guess.”
    “Were you still pretty drunk?”
    “Pretty.”
    “So I take it you didn’t get fired?”
    “No, I did.”
    I stared at him.
    “My life sucks balls,” he finalized.

    (You can’t make this stuff up.)
    For some time after that, Chase and I would remember tidbits of Tom’s sloppiness that day, and Chase would say “what a dumb turd,” or something comparable. I would agree. Bay to Breakers was for idiots.
    I went to the Bay to Breakers again, today.

***

    Exactly one year after a year ago:
    Chase let me sleep in this time. He left by himself at 7 with a case of Sierra Nevadas in a box under his arm. Tom was not in attendance. I woke up next to my girlfriend at around ten and asked if she wanted to go. Now she was the one who had never been, and I was the one telling her she needed to check it out. I was a veteran. Her name was Penelope.
    I told her about all the things to expect, like drugs, kegs, loud noises, old dingles and frat boys in sombreros.
    “It will be a human circus,” I described. “And just about all of the animals, in some way or another, will prove to be very fucking stupid.”
    “Sounds like harmless freedom of expression to me,” she said. She had a way of simplifying things.
    “You’ll see, and you can be the judge.”

    Penelope and I took the N Judah and ambitioned to get off at Stanyan to walk right into the Panhandle and meet up with Chase. When we got to our stop, we pushed the hand rail on the sliding door, which was San Francisco Public Transit’s high-tech system for opening doors. The doors didn’t open. The train continued. At the next stop, people were interested in getting off the bus; again, the doors didn’t budge. Women started hyperventilating and clawing the sliding doors, claiming the oxygen on the train was contaminated, and limited. (You can’t make this stuff up). The train lumbered through one more stop, then inserted itself into a tunnel and when it emerged on the other side, which was about a mile from where Penelope and I had hoped to get off, the doors finally slip open. People raced off and up to the front train, where they commenced to pounding on the driver’s window and flipping him off and notifying him to prepare for lawsuits. The driver did not pay them attention; in fact he seemed to have fallen asleep during their drawn out complaint. The angry civilians began walking onto the tracks to really make a statement, but then the driver rang the bell and put his train into gear. They fled.

    Penelope and I saw a couple of aspiring thugs littering trash across the street. They were smoking swishers, whistling at girls and not realizing that whistling at girls is the strongest vagina repellant there is.
    They left all their crap on their street. I wanted to say something to them, to tell them that this city didn’t need people making it uglier. But soon their crap was camouflaged with all the other crap on the street from Bay to Breakers, like glossy advertisements for gyms that no one was going to join, coupons for grand openings of creperies that would be out of business in a month, Power Bar rappers, water bottles, confetti, beer cans, foil from bacon-wrapped hot dogs, flattened party hats, and literally horse shit.
    Penelope held my hand, and it made me feel important, as if I provided a brand of security for her that nothing else could. Her hair was in pigtails, which for her meant she was feeling goofy. She had a purse full of beers: Coors light cans. Penelope liked beer, and she also liked baseball. She didn’t like to flaunt it, but she knew more about baseball than me, an ex-college pitcher, and all the other fools in the world who spent a third of their day updating their goddamned fantasy team. Unfortunately, that was what technically constituted a modern day baseball fan. She was probably the only legitimate baseball fan I knew. And she was hot. She made things simple. And she was wearing pig-tails. And she liked cheap beer. And she wanted to hold my hand.
    She held my hand all the way from Steiner street towards the race, which at this point in the morning, had ceased to be a race and had become more of a slow parade with floats and aimless rejoicing. We drank Coors lights and pissed on car tires when necessary. Penelope was a pop-squatting phenom; she could piss between two running cop cars at a red light without anyone noticing. I admired the skill. I also liked her name. Penelope.
    Taking back roads to drink beer and avoid cops, we ended up on Divisadero, which was another feeder street right into the mania. As we approached the thick grassy divider between Fell and Oak, also called The Panhandle, we began to smell pot smoke and hear the faint thumps of dubstep parties.
    The first thing we saw was a stout porpoise woman with wild black witch hair who had either stripped herself of her spandex throughout the course of her drunken day, or had outright gone to the parade wearing damn near nothing for pants. Which would not have been uncommon.
    “I’m gonna get some fresh air,” she barfed to her friends, and staggered away from them. They were so drunk and melted by drugs that they looked around, and up in to the sky, wondering if the atmosphere they were presently in was not fresh air. The witch porpoise made it about four steps in her high heels before her ankles quit and she collapsed. Not tripped, or even lost her balance, but expired right into the grass. Her chubby cheeks exhaled some agonizing “hum.” She was already snoring. Out of her skirt spilled her gross ass, and out of her gross ass spilled a tampon string, looking like a short wick sticking out the side of an enormously lopsided and blubbery candle. Some people laughed, hysterically.
    (You can’t make this stuff up.)

    Her hangover was going to be epic.
    The girl’s friends started telling everyone on earth to call 911. One of said girls used her cell phone— which was fully capable of calling paramedics— to take a picture of her passed out friend with the short skirt, no underwear, and a tampon sticking out of a sexual organ as flabby and whiskery as a manatee’s muzzle.
    It was confirmed that the girl was still breathing. Penelope and I moved on. Ahead there was a large congregation of humans cheering. It was a shindig, a gathering. Their energy attracted us. Eerie electronic music resonated around them like sound wave yellow jackets. It was a group of people simulating gladiator battles. Fighters were equipped with padded sticks. They stood on top of big wooden boxes with their shirts off and dueled until one was knocked off. There was sweat and good-natured sportsmanship in the air. There was also hatred in the air. People were riveted by the competitions.

    Little dwarf-looking men with peace signs painted on their cheeks and beers in paper bags screamed “FIGHT! FIGHT! FUCKING KILL HIM!” Then they looked around to see if their tough, alpha-male enthusiasm was attracting any drunk women, but it wasn’t, because nothing could change the fact that they were dwarfs, and even if they wanted to, they could do no physical battling themselves, so they were left to yell “FIGHT! YEA! FUCKING KILL EACH OTHER!” with their beers and peace signs. Penelope and I watched a battle. One guy got his skull rattled by the paddled mallet side of the weapon, and then he proceeded to crumble off of the platform. All the hippies roared with approval.

    (You can’t make this stuff up.)

    We continued.

    Every once in a while a sweet little dog would come up and sniff us and invite us to pamper him with light pets. The dogs squinted and had battle scars here and there, like gashes over their eyes or across their shins, and patches of hair missing. All of their eyes were bloodshot and had gook stuck to their eyelids. But they were such pretty little sweet dogs, confused by the human melee surrounding them but open to the excitement nonetheless. I loved them. That’s how I could tell that I was starting to get drunk. Beer made me love and trust animals, more than anything else. More than humans, that’s for damn sure.
    Penelope loved balloons. After more beers, she saw a nice balloon man beginning to back up his helium tanks and balloons for the day, and she could not help but to run over to his operation, and ask him kindly for two of his balloons. Penelope has a great ass, and the balloon guy seemed cordial, old, and horny, and a man with those three attributes can never deny a pretty girl a damn thing, especially if all she wants is two lousy balloons. She gave the nice man a hug and came galloping back to me with a yellow and a purple balloon tied to her wrist like daddy’s innocent little girl at the town carnival. Only this was not the town carnival with the ferris wheel and cotton candy. This was something else.
    Down a ways those same sweet mangy dogs were surrounded by a group of dudes. The dudes were wearing identical superhero costumes with the built in Styrofoam pectorals and six-packs and huge biceps. They were fat, in real life.
    “You thirsty, poochy?” asked one guy. His friends laughed, hysterically. “I bet you’re reeeeeeal thirsty under this sun huh?”
    “Don’t do it man. Ha!” his friends cried.
    But the guy did it, and what he did was take a bottle of rum, pry open the mouths of the dogs and channel rum down their little throats. The dogs cowered and snorted, but did not run away. Instead, they stuck around, hoping that the guys might have something a little less harsh to give them to drink. The guys walked away. The dogs followed them, but were admonished and told to fuck off.
    “I told you these people sucked,” I said to Penelope. She grabbed my hand. I chugged a couple more beers.
    Later on we made it to Stanyan street, where we had originally planned to get off of the train before it started calling all the shots. We found Chase with a wad of chewing tobacco in his lip. He was an ex-college baseball player. I was an ex-college baseball player. I was beginning to feel real drunk. I asked him for a chew. Soon he and I were spitting all over the place, swigging tequila and really feeling the burn in our intestines, all the while laughing, hysterically.
    Penelope began giving me weird looks.

    Everywhere there were cowboy hats, fake mustaches, fake tits, political signs with overused and understudied statements, superhero costumes, kegs on wheels, shopping carts holding sound systems that imploded any beating heart within a thirty foot radius, Elvis impersonators, flower girls, and SPANDEX. It was a serious party.
    We laughed, hysterically. I drank more of everything.
    Chew spit was dribbling down Chase’s chin. I didn’t realize it, but chew spit was also dribbling down my chin.
    “You might want to fix that, there, guy,” said Chase, about my chin. I took his tequila and washed my chin with it, then swallowed a shot which was peppered with slivers of fiberglass and mint-flavored tobacco.
    “Who cares. It’s Bay to Breakers!” I rationalized.
    “That’s right!” laughed Chase.
    “Where’s my girlfriend?” I coughed.
    “Baby!” I heard her call from a distance. “Look at this!”
    Penelope was standing next to a man sculpted with raw, bulging muscles. He looked like a Russian Olympic lifter. There was a grin on his face like he knew something I didn’t. It was a grin of pure everything. Pure. It pissed me off.
    “Hey,” he said and extended his hand to me. “How’s it going, I’m Troy.”
    Also: he was wearing nothing, except a shower cap. (You can’t make this stuff up.) His cock was as long as a normal cock is with a tube sock hanging off of it, as long as a Christmas tree limb with a banana peel ornament. And of course, all of Troy’s pubes were shaved to eliminate those few squiggly centimeters that might lead someone to suspect that his cock wasn’t huge. He was the only young human that had the balls (and cock) to walk around in front of thousands of people purely naked. A specimen of flawless human perfection. When I reached to shake his hand, I was half afraid he would sling it into his hand, much like a cowboy quickly drawing his gun from his holster, and force me to shake his cock as a neat prank. I was pissed.
    “Hey, pal,” I said. “Great to meet you.”
    “Will you take a picture of me with Troy?” Penelope asked me. “Is that weird? Is that ok?”
    “I guess so.”

    Surrounding civilians were visually absorbing Troy and his circumcised boa constrictor. Penelope smiled for the picture. Her balloons were so big and round that they should have somehow been muscles on Troy’s body.
    “Bro, would you mind taking a picture with my camera as well?” he asked, and produced a camera out of a small satchel tied to his wrist.
    “Jesus anybody checking out that guy’s dong?” asked Chase, in the background.
    “That won’t be a problem, I guess,” I winced.
    Again, Penelope wrapped her arms around Troy’s pectorals and had no problem beaming for the camera. I was praying Troy would not accidentally get excited— praying he was gay. I snapped the photo, handed it back to him and tried to get away with Penelope as quickly as possible.
    “Have a nice day!” Penelope called to him as I dragged her. His shower cap winked back at her.

    Troy walked off and was intercepted by girls in spandex who were interested in doing photo shoots with he and the skinned gopher hanging between his legs.

    “Just harmless expression,” Penelope noted, then she grabbed my hand.

    I walked up to Chase and stole the tequila out of his hand. He watched me FUCKING CHUG it. He laughed, hysterically. Time elapsed. I was hammered, and becoming delusional, and more pissed. What void is filled for a girl by taking a picture with a man whose cock is throbbing? I wandered off for a while, with the tequila. More time elapsed. Everywhere smelled like a fart. I sat under a eucalyptus tree.

    Penelope approached me with her balloons. She had a pretty smile. She reached for me. When I tried to get up, I fell. Once I was on my feet I decided it would be best to shadowbox one of her balloons, the purple one. She giggled, then I actually got a good punch off on the balloon, and it was promptly detached from its little band of tinsel that had fastened it to her wrist. The balloon was already out of reach, floating away. Penelope made a pretty little sad face. I said sorry, I think.
    “Oooh BUDDY!” laughed Chase from afar. “No chitty-chitty bang bang for you tonight!”
    Chase, whether he knew it or not, had a remarkable knack for saying phrases that made vaginas completely evaporate into sawdust. Penelope looked at me sourly.
    “Sorry,” I said again to Penelope. I drank beer and she looked disappointed.
    “Let’s just see how long we can watch the balloon,” she said.
    It started out like a juicy purple cantaloupe. In its flight it hit streams of air and was propelled swiftly in different directions. When that direction was up, the balloon drastically shrunk in our eyes. Now it looked like a purple upside down pear. It was traveling over a nearby tree. It was a purple thumbtack. Wind carried it up higher and higher. It was the purple glitter under Penelope’s eye. The sky was opening up its cottony arms and welcoming the infinitesimal purple speck into its home. The purple balloon was now a figment of our imagination. We couldn’t tell if we were seeing it or seeing things, seeing floaters and other tricks that our eyes play on us on pretty days when we look directly into the sun. The balloon was gone.
    She had a yellow balloon left.
    “Well, that’s that,” I said.

    Suddenly, something spectacular was happening. I looked for Penelope.
    “Babe, look at over there!” I slurred.

    She was gone.

    Suddenly I was laughing, hysterically.

    There was an actual gopher stiffly poking his head out of his tunnel, quickly, in and out, in and out. I thought of Troy. Whatever caused gophers to go to the tip of their hole, the gopher was presently feeling that urge. Humans were surrounding the gopher, attempting to lure it out, and since they were flicking shredded carrots and hot dog bun crumbs at it, the gopher felt no fear about bringing its whole body out of the hole.
    “Theeeerre you go little buddy. Just like that,” said a bearded little hipster with a weird grin. He was wearing an Obama “Yes We Can!” shirt. A fanny pack was strapped to him. He took out his i-phone and gave it to his friend to document this unfolding event. The gopher was poking half of its body out. The hipster pulled out a cigarette and began putting it in the gopher’s buck-toothed face.
    “Look, Penelope, get over here babe!” I shouted, riveted, losing my balance. The gopher assumed that this hipster was its friend, that it was being fed a delicious paper stick from its giant human chum.
    “Anyone got a lighter?? Quick!” the hipster reached his hand out and shook it urgently as if it had been dipped in hot glue. He was treating the prospect of lighting a cigarette in front of a gophers face very seriously. In moments, people would cherish him for his boldness. His satirical genius would be of a potency never before seen in the long and creative history of Bay to Breakers. He felt in charge. He needed that goddamned lighter. And I was hammered, drooling in preparation for the event. A GOPHER BEING FORCED TO SMOKE A CIGARETTE!
    “Penelope, get over here! Watch this fuckin’ GOPHER take a drag!” I hollered, without taking my eyes off of the blindly ambitious rodent, the fearless piece of meat.

    “Nobody’s got a lighter? How about a matchbook? You guys are a bunch of bummers.”
    “I’ve got a lighter!” someone stepped up.
    “Over here!” demanded the hipster in charge.
    “Penelope!” I yelled. “You’re going to miss it!”
    I stood on my toes, and looked around in a circle. Penelope was nowhere.
    “Did you see Penelope?” I asked Chase, who was giggling.
    “You seeing this gopher nibble a fuckin’ stogie?” he returned.
    “Yea, I see it. It’s legitimate.”
    The cigarette was lit in the gopher’s proximity.
    “Penelope?” I called. “Penelope?”
    “Hey why’d you let her take a picture with that ape dick?” Chase asked. He passed me the tin of tobacco and I filled my mouth up with it even though I was already queasy. Fuck it, it was Bay to Breakers!
    “Bad call?” I asked, drooling.
    “Probably,” he said, and drooled.
    The gopher sniffed the cigarette then got the hell out of there, which caused everyone to go ballistic with praise to the hipster. They LAUGHED. HYSTERICALLY. I went over and sat down under a tree. The sun was directly overhead and I was experiencing a hazy disorientation from being intoxicated in the early afternoon. Soon it would be time to sleep. Penelope did not want to be found. I called her of course, a thousand times the way drunken people do.
    I looked at the eucalyptus trees, long and thin, climbing hundreds of feet into the air on Mount Davidson, waving in slow motion like American flags in light wind. It felt good in the shade.
    Penelope. It was a sweet, pure little name.
    Something was rising over the eucalyptus trees, floating like a corn kernel, like a gold capped tooth. Tiny gusts accelerated it this way and that. It looked miles and miles away from me. Rising towards the sun it steadily shrunk until it was a staggering bread crumb, a daylight star, and then there was nothing.
    Chase asked me what I was looking at. I told him Penelope. He walked away. Under the tree, I laughed, hysterically.
    (You can’t make this stuff up.)

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