Night Shot: Kastl's (Meetings with Remarkable Men), San Francisco, CA, 1980

flash memoir by Dory Adams

Photo copyright Kevin Scanlon (used by permission).

I fell in love with a man and a city, in that order. I kept the man but lost the city.

My San Francisco is gone. The place I’m homesick for and long to visit no longer exists—at least not as I remember it. My San Francisco of the late 1970s and early ‘80s is closer to the one in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the dreamlike one inhabited by Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, than to today’s real-world city where homelessness seems to be on every doorstep.

In my San Francisco the steel wheels of green N Judah streetcars still rumble and vibrate the Irving Street pavement; cool morning mist still hovers around the old seedy TransBay Terminal for the dawn commute to industrial South San Francisco; electric buses zap and spark along California Street; evening strolls lead to Kastl’s Coffee Cup on Sacramento Street (now gone, long gone—forced out by Bell Savings wanting the prime corner location); watching sunsets at Ocean Beach while eating takeout from Leon’s Bar-B-Que; and falling asleep at night to the comforting drone of foghorns.

Some of those things still exist, but in a different era and not quite the same. They feel a bit off kilter, distorted by distance and memory or by new things surrounding them.

I treasure my old San Francisco. Savor those memories. It was a time and place filled with love and youth and beginnings to be cherished, like old love letters.

Kevin jokes that I’ll watch any movie set in San Francisco, even if it’s a terrible one. He’s right. I’m a sucker for any San Francisco scene. My favorites are the classic ones: The Lineup, The House on Telegraph Hill, Dark Passage, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Harold and Maude.

Kastl’s lingers as a sensory memory, triggered by sounds and aromas. It is resurrected whole when I hear Elvis Costello’s “Allison” or Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain,” which often played on the jukebox there. We rarely referred to Kastl’s by name, instead calling it “the diner” because the layout inside reminded us of the diners back east with a long counter and stools along the interior wall, and deep booths against the window walls. The menu was far from diner food (brown rice and steamed kale were the standard side dishes instead of fries), but you could get a good burger and a real soda fountain Coke.

Kevin and I share a memory—a memory movie—of the rainy evening a tow truck driver double-parked his truck in front of Kastl’s with the yellow lights flashing. While the driver waited for his takeout order, he sat at an upright piano against the back wall and played a classical piece. I couldn’t identify the music, but in my stories it is always something by Rachmaninoff. In Kevin’s memory movie it may be a different score, but we agree it was definitely classical.

Kastl’s closed when Phil, the owner, lost his lease and was forced out of the space where he’d been in business for thirty years. In his sixties at the time and feeling too old to start over, he ended up retiring early rather than trying to reestablish his business in a new location.

I still have one of the typewritten menus, a single sheet of paper folded in half, which I nabbed on our final visit the night Kastl’s closed. I come across it from time to time in a box of old keepsakes. It has a little grease stain on the front that I like to think is from the oil-based blue cheese dressing that came with the spinach salads. Chunks of blue cheese in an oil and spice mixture better than any I’ve tasted since.

It took a bit longer to fall in love with Pittsburgh than with San Francisco. In this case, it’s the newer Pittsburgh I love. The one without the smoking steel mills. The one with the cleaned up rivers that people have claimed access to that were once dominated by industry. It’s a pretty city with a beautiful skyline, filled with new tech, medical innovation, and artists. A literary city filled with readers and writers. “The Paris of Appalachia,” as my beloved writing teacher Chuck Kinder described it. A very livable city with all the things I require, including hills and rivers. But don’t tell too many people. We like to keep it this way.

I fell in love with a man and a city, and then another city. A Yinzer, and a remarkable man. A city on the bay. A city on three rivers. Places we can never leave behind no matter how much they change, or even if they disappear. We’ll always have our Paris.

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Dory Adams earned an MFA in fiction writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and also holds degrees in Psychology and Photography/Multi-media. She was the fiction editor and cofounder of the independent literary journal Paper Street (2002-2009). Her short fiction and essays have been published in Slipstream, The Oklahoma Review, Blue Earth Review, The Avery Anthology, Workers Write! Tales From the Clinic, Common Ground Magazine, Hobart, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine.