was tired when I got to San Francisco. Driving up the coast -- spectacular though it is, with its explosions of color, the crash of the waves always to the left -- demands attention. Turn here. No you're not done yet, keep turning, yes turning and -- the curves go up and down, not right and left, and ripple through Noe Valley. Of course there's no parking. There's never any parking.

I am with two college friends, now engaged, at a party that has been written up in Wired. It's the last hurrah for a weekly and somewhat famous something-or-the-other tech salon from the Nineties, none of which I comprehend really. People seem nice. The dip is good.
I go downstairs alone to smoke and begin riffing about the peculiar ingenuity of the city. Nothing where it should be: houses on hillsides, a sink inside a kitchen closet, the front door in the back. A homeless man walks up to me with a cardboard sign. "Smile. It's a beautiful day," it says. The man adjusts something and the sign changes, like reversing the slats on a vertical blind. "You're alive, you're a part of the city. Be happy. That's FLIPOLOGY."
"Neat," I say. "Your sign flips."
"They call me Flipper."
"Nice work, Flipper. I'm Sarah."
Flipper tells me how a couple of hoodlums took his bag today. A bag, from Flipper, what use could anybody have with that, he asks? But he's staying positive, Flipper. He's looking on the positive, you know? I nod, smoke, think how I'm glad I left my wallet upstairs.
Our attention is snagged by a man and wife leaving the party. The man is bald, wears an ankle-length skirt, and holds in his arms an apple-cheeked darling of a baby.
"What a sweet baby," I say. I'm careful to exhale my smoke away from the couple. Nothing makes me feel worse about smoking than a nearby child.
Flipper gasps and takes a step toward the baby, holds his hands up to his mouth like a woman. "Look at that."
"Don't touch the baby," the woman says, yanking the child from her husband's hands and walking off.
"Did you see that, Sarah?" Flipper asks, dumbfounded.
I did. It kind of made me sad, Flipper.
"I ain't gonna touch nobody's baby. Am I not a man? Was I not born to a woman, like everyone else? I'm not some man prancing around in a skirt, I'll tell you that much. Did it look like I was going to touch her baby?"
A little. To be fair.
"I wasn't gonna touch that baby. I only ask that you acknowledge me, as a man. As a human being named David."
I thought your name was Flipper.
"My name is David, and I was born in Ohio, and I have a mother like everyone else, and all I'm asking, Sarah, is that you acknowledge me."
I take out another cigarette from my pack and offer him one. He takes it and snips the filter off with a fingernail clipper. "I usually smoke Luckys if I can get 'em," he tells me. David and I talk for a while. I keep waiting for him to hit me up for money, and to his credit, he never does. I'm glad; he makes for good conversation. He tells me how he ended up homeless -- a string of bad women and bad luck and, to be honest, some utter nonsense that lets me know neither of those things was the real problem. I tell him about my roadtrip, and his dark, liquid eyes go wide.
"Are you going to North Carolina?" he asks. I tell him I am.
"You know what I love more than anything? The leaves --"
"-- in the fall," I say. "I know."
"The crunch under your feet."
"The colors. It's like magic." And we both take drags off our cigarettes and sigh out the smoke.
"I'm not trying to get money from you," David says.
"That's good. Cause I don't have any money."
"I just have one request before you go, Sarah."
"Let's hear it."
He rubs his beard, which is starting to gray, and throws his arms wide. "Can I have a hug?"