This is the sixth in a series by staf writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
John Steinbeck liked and admired Seattle, but if he were along on this trip, he would find some discouraging trends of 1960 confirmed and exaggerated: traffic rushing along “with murderous intensity,” foul air and frantic growth. everywhere progress that seemed and seems more like destruction.
And he might want to do some rewriting — not of “Travels With Charley” but of the novel he said was about American morality: “The Winter of Our Discontent.”
It would be grossly unfair to be only critical. Seattle has the soul and diversity of all port cities. It is a gateway to Asia, the gateway to Alaska. You still can walk through the old port and inspect fish and crabs on shaved ice, drink clam nectar, share round loaves of sourdough bread with gulls. You can walk the city’s hills, stare at the mountains, play in the clubs, or haunt the waterfront and smell kelp and creosote and think about Jack London.
But the hills are more crowded now, the exhaust thicker, and the harbor is more a curiosity than a magical place of sailors and tradesmen, more a locale for too-precious shops than a home to true characters.
And where the trendy shops haven’t reached, there often is decay and sleaze. “When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned,” Steinbeck wrote, generalizing after Seattle. “The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men…”
Once men skidded logs along a Seattle road to a sawmill, and the road came to be known as Skid Road, and the name evolved and became part of our language as skid row. In Seattle today, it is 1st Av., and at night I watched scruffy men close to ruin line up for places in a flophouse next to an X-rated video arcade. Men with nothing in their pockets watched men with quarters in their pockets go to the movies. Other men with nothing in their eyes wandered or sat alone on curbs and talked loudly, angrily, to nobody.
It is a curious sleaze district, many blocks pocked with arcades and cheap theaters and halls where marquees promise “50 naked show girls,” and all it takes to raise the curtain, really a dirty vinyl blind in a confessional-sized booth, is a quarter. In other clubs, men pay women in underwear $5 to undulate very close to them as the men sit in chairs, surrounded by other men, and this is called a dance.
But what’s curious about the district is that the wealthy and trendy young people come through it, too, because some of their dance clubs are there, and some of the little bars that sell hand-brewed and expensive local ale.
Some people can spend an evening in such a district and find reasons to vote for George Bush, others for Michael Dukakis. It is an issue, this disparity in our fortunes. So is the range in what we consider acceptable moral behavior. And so are the links between fortune and morality. But our solutions would cover a waterfront much bigger than Seattle’s.
Days earlier, I had stopped in Wallace, Idaho, to see what was on people’s minds, but what struck me more was something they apparently pay little mind to, a nonissue: prostitution, not only tolerated, apparently, but nearly celebrated.
It’s a pretty, rock-framed town of about 1,800 people, where downtown is still the center of things, the hotels are still hotels, and there’s a bench of wood and wrought iron on nearly every block, an open invitation to loiter or think.
Sylvia Vandeventer was standing with Lynell Meligan on a downtown street corner when I pulled in at 8 a.m. They are members of a church, and they were downtown to distribute copies of a church publication warning about nuclear war and the end of the world.
I took one of their papers, and we talked about how people are doing in Wallace. Better, they said, since the price of silver went up and the mines reopened this year, putting Vandeventer’s husband and hundreds more back to work. Other than the mines, they said, Wallace depends a lot on tourists, who come to see the mines, buy silver, envy the town’s charming bungalow homes, or hiss and boo at the nightly Old West shoot-’em-up melodrama on 6th St.
“We get a lot of truckers and traveling salesmen who stop,” Vandeventer added. “Wallace has a pretty good reputation for its ladies of the evening.”
The desk clerk at my hotel said it’s true, but that the trade may be declining. “There used to be five houses and now there’s just two,” he said. “It’s illegal, it’s expensive, and now people are worried about AIDS.”
But it still goes on?
“You maybe can see it from your window.”
Well, I didn’t. But at Sweet’s Bar, you can buy a souvenir bumper sticker that says, on a brazenly red background, “Honestly, I’ve never been to Wallace, Idaho!” The bar also sells souvenir panties.
“It’s gone on for a long time,” said Dave Mason, an editor of the Shoshone News-Press in nearby Kellogg, which covers Wallace — but not its illicit sex trade. “People pretty much accept it,” he said. “It’s the idea of the Old West cathouse, I guess. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s something of a local sacred cow. We don’t write about it. But all our readers know about it. The local churches make no stir, and the police don’t like to answer questions about it.”
A sheriff’s deputy said my questions would have to be submitted in writing, and any answers would be in writing. So I passed.
Mason said the peculiar institution is tolerated partly because there’s never been any evidence of organized crime or drugs being part of it. “And one of the madams has contributed band uniforms for the high school and is something of a civic leader.”
As I headed west through Coeur d’Alene, out of mountain forests and into the rolling, almost treeless reaches of eastern Washington, I wondered what Steinbeck would have thought. Surely he would have mentioned it if he had stopped in Wallace. He certainly would have mentioned souvenir panties.
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Another issue that divides Americans to a sometimes bitter degree is abortion. Antiabortion protesters besieged Atlanta all summer, and restrictive measures are on the ballots of three states this fall. Above all, partisans on both sides see the presidential election as critically important, because the winner may get to appoint two or three Supreme Court justices, who in turn could sustain or dismantle the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
In Seattle, the fight has reached into the local United Way, which late last month booted Planned Parenthood from its membership. Lee Minto, local director of Planned Parenthood, said her agency was hounded out of the United Way by the Catholic Church. Russ Scearce, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Seattle, said Planned Parenthood forced the issue by announcing some months ago that in 1989 it will offer abortion services.
“That created tension in the community between those who are prochoice and those who oppose abortion,” Scearce said. “There is so little consensus in the community on this issue, so it was a no-win position for the United Way.
“The archdiocese has never felt comfortable about Planned Parenthood being in the United Way. But because this is a very liberal community, we’ve tolerated that. But when they made it clear what they propose to do, we had to take a position opposing that.”
The expulsion will cost Planned Parenthood more than $400,000 a year in United Way support, money that paid for education, counseling and clinical care for low-income women. “It’s hard to give up that kind of money,” Minto said. “It represented about 12 percent of our budget. But we’ll make it up. We’ve received more than $10,000 just in the last few days in small contributions.
“Up until a few years ago, we didn’t feel a need to get involved in abortion services,” she said. “But the cost of malpractice insurance has increased dramatically. That has caused some physicians to quit doing abortions, and the cost has gone up. So we will offer services to these women ourselves, to protect their access to the procedure.
“One of the things that often keeps a woman from having an abortion in the first trimester and moves her into the second trimester – and that’s a health risk – is looking for the money. They do all sorts of outlandish things to try to get hold of those dollars.”
Planned Parenthood will make abortions available for about $150, she said, about $50 less than the current average cost. “If you’re young and vulnerable, and many of these women are, it’s a lot of money,” she said.
The United Way tried to arrange a compromise, asking Planned Parenthood to establish a separate, independent corporation for the abortion services, but that arrangement satisfied neither side and was dropped.
Ron Gibbs, a United Way officer, said it’s too early to measure what effect the dispute will have on fund-raising, but hundreds of people have called or phoned to say they’re unhappy. “And we’re disappointed,” he said. “Our board believes that the issues they deal with, like teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, are critically needed in our community. It’s a fine agency, and we wish we could continue to fund them. But we won’t fund abortions, or agencies that provide them.”
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I left Seattle as part of a massive, glacial traffic jam, and it took hours to reach Oregon, and then it was dark before I could break off onto back roads that angled toward the Pacific Ocean. Miles from the coast I stopped to make a phone call, and I could smell the sea. Then, driving up to a beach near Tillamook, I could hear it, like a steady, fast-moving freeway.
I sat on the sand with a bottle of wine and a loaf of Seattle sourdough bread and squinted into the moonless dark, and then I could make out the bigger waves crashing against breaker rocks.
I had sat there a long time when suddenly I realized I was listening to the Pacific and thinking about the Atlantic, about the waves that rolled onto Montauk Point on Long Island more than a month ago when this journey began. And then, still with my back to it all, I traced my way through all the geography of the past weeks, towns and cities and long stretches of open country, and it all seemed very close, all connected, all part of me in a way it wasn’t before.
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When Steinbeck talked about “the City,” he generally meant San Francisco. “I fledged in San Francisco,” he wrote in “Travels With Charley,” “climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts… It remained the City I remembered, so confident in its greatness that it can afford to be kind.”
It must be great and kind now and compassionate, too, for there is a profound difference in San Francisco today. It is the heart and capital of gay America, and more than anywhere else you can mark there the sweeping human cost of AIDS.
You see reminders everywhere: in billboards and window displays for benefits and fund drives, or in the haggard face of a young man who leans on a cane as he walks slowly across Castro St. At the DNA Club in the South of Market district, the Lonely Hearts Band played Beatles music last Sunday to mark John Lennon’s birthday — and to raise money for Open Hand, a meals-on-wheels program for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the ones too weak to leave their homes. And sometimes the old music still fits: “I read the news today, oh boy…”
In the Bay Area Reporter, a gay paper, there were pages of obituaries for men in their 30s and 40s. including Ronald J. Eide, 41, born and raised in Minneapolis, a Vietnam veteran, in San Francisco a buyer and remodeler of houses. He died Sept. 30, and his ashes were scattered at sea beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
In many places around the country, especially in taverns and on pickups in small towns, I’ve seen bumper stickers that say this tavern or this pickup “is protected by a pit bull with AIDS.” Marsha Brayer shuddered when I told her about it.
“I don’t know that I could laugh about AIDS,” she said. “It’s too serious for too many people.
“And there’s a tremendous amount of respect here for the gay population. They’re highly visible people – in the arts, in politics. And they’re our buddies, our friends. I lost a very good friend last week, and probably one person a month in the last three years.”
I met her while walking near the waterfront. She came to San Francisco from Atlanta 10 years ago “because I couldn’t fit in conservative America,” and she loves the city for its freedom and tolerance. “I can be very businesslike during the day and then put on weird costumes and go South of Market at night,” she said.
“People here are terrific. They’re very accepting. But even the heterosexual population, when you go out dancing now after work, there’s very much a wariness. People aren’t picking up people. Everybody is really careful because this isn’t something you get a shot for and it goes away. You die.”
Paul Steindal, 38, is codirector of Rest Stop, a drop-in counseling service for people with AIDS at the Golden Gate Metropolitan Community Church, one of several alternative churches that serve largely gay congregations. He has tested HIV positive; he does not have AIDS, but the virus is present in his system.
“A lot of our clients live in small hotel rooms, in studio apartments, on the street,” he said. “They’re isolated and lonely. They come here to talk about their fear, their mortality, how they can take responsibility for their lives. Many of them used to be quite comfortable, but the disease has devastated their finances.
“The people I see who are healing are the ones who are learning to give, to share what they still have, and who come to terms with the fact that we’re only guaranteed moments in life. When that happens, I see mercy, compassion, caring. And joy.
“Sometimes it’s a real roller coaster. I’m dealing with my own mortality. And in the last 14 days, I’ve lost four people. I thought it might become easier as the numbers increased, but I find I’m just as vulnerable now as when it started, especially when I see my brothers die alone because their families don’t want to deal with them.”
He has a ministerial smile and a gentle tone, but there’s an edge when he talks about mainstream churches, about politicians, about “the element of genocide in those who perceive this as a gay disease and that we deserve what we get.” AIDS is a human disease, he said.
He was raised a Lutheran. “The Christian church has failed miserably in dealing with sexuality,” he said. “Sexuality has been separated from spirituality, and I believe they are intertwined. My sexuality was created by a very loving God, a God who makes no mistakes.”
California voters will face the usual host of complicated ballot measures next month, including questions on school finance, auto insurance, ocean dumping – and AIDS testing. The gay community opposes the AIDS ballot measures as paranoid and intrusive, but newspaper polls show the testing advocates leading-Dukakis has come out against the measures, and in a state with 300,000 people who test HIV positive, a state where the election is expected to be close, people like Steindal could be the difference.
He isn’t sure about Dukakis, but he fears Bush. “If George Bush is elected, it would be a continuation of what we’ve had from Reagan,” he said. “And it took several years before he would even mention the word ‘AIDS.’ And if it ever came to internment, it would be George Bush who would do that.”
Steindal said straight people in San Francisco are better-informed, less paranoid and more compassionate than people in other parts of the country because of their regular contact with gay people as friends, neighbors, colleagues.
“There are two elderly women who come here to our church, Mother Hubbs and Kay. They’re both in their late 70s, straight women who love to be around our guys because they want to affirm God’s love for everyone.
“They love to hug, and they love all the attention they get here. And part of it. I think, is that they, too, have lost a lot of people these last years. They’ve lost friends to old age, infirmity. And they’re dealing with their mortality, too.”