The 53-Southern Heights

[I have three ways I get to work, all involving the fine public transportation systems that are among San Francisco's and the Bay Area's many amenities. (I know there are many amenities because so many people want to live here, we have the most expensive real estate of any metropolitan area.) Plan A is the 27-Bryant, which picks up right outside my door, and drops me off in the Potrero flats to face an eight-block walk up the hill. It gives me a little exercise, the climb isn't that bad, there's a coffee shop other than the Starbucks at Bryant and Mariposa (yeah, yeah; the scone cancels out the exercise), and I already mentioned where it picks up.]

[(This is leading somewhere.)]

[Plans B and C actuate when I'm standing there waiting for the 27 and it's not coming. I stalk down to the Powell BART station, grouch my way down the escalator, and allow the train driver (conductor?) take me two stops to 16th and Mission. It's at that sketchy but vibrant intersection* that I face a delicate choice. Plan C is easier: it involves taking either the 22-Fillmore or 33-Stanyan buses east, and facing a longer, steeper walk up Potrero Hill. I hate plan C because I hate to sweat, but those two buses come pretty frequently.]

[If I hit Heroin Haven (16th/Mission) at the right time, however, I can take the 53-Southern Heights, an obscure route that just goes up Potrero Hill and back again, and which only runs every thirty minutes. I like this route because it lets me off right in front of my work. Its main purpose, besides ferrying those few sad souls who, like me, live or work on the hill and who don't have a car, is to transport students to International Studies Academy.]

[If you've heard of any San Francisco public high school, it's probably hyper-academic, hyper-competitive, and (nowadays) hyper-Asian Lowell. Margaret Cho got kicked out of Lowell. Anyway, I.S.A. is sort of the anti-Lowell. If you read the link, you saw that I.S.A. is "an alternative high school that focuses on international relations." That may or may not be true (I should ask the student who comes in a few hours a week to help here at work), but it looks like it's just another public school, serving the largely African American and Latino populations of Hunters Point, the Bayview, Potrero Hill, and the Mission. To my white, country bumpkin eyes, it seems awfully ghetto. I work in close proximity to the school, and the scene every afternoon at three o'clock would probably make an Oakland po-lice officer reach for his pepper spray with a nasty grin.]

[So, when I elect Plan B, I tend to be on the same bus as the kids on their way to I.S.A. The boys try to look gangsta, and for all I know, some of them are gangsta. I want to tell them to pull up their pants, but I don't. The girls all wear really tight blue jeans, have intricate hair, and tote pink sparkly backpacks of the type that I'd always thought girls lost interest in at about age eight. They ALL carry them; my research has yet to extend to other high schools to determine whether this is universal.]

[The 53-Southern Heights (aren't you excited to know, if you didn't already, that S.F. bus routes have both a number and the name of a street they traverse?) is a small, local-service bus, and I often find myself cheek-by-jowl with the kids, who I used to call "the Little Nippers" when they'd swear loudly, pump their bass, and dump litter outside the front door. Now that we've been sharing that cozy bus, I've begun to recognize a couple of them, and now have to acknowledge their humanity. I hate when that happens. (All the following people are black unless indicated otherwise.)]

[There's one overweight kid who I know is a big homo. He dresses gangsta like all the boys, and talks, or grunts, kind of like them, but when he's not gossiping with the girls, he's sitting kind of sullen wondering why he's not...quite...the same. I hope he finds a drama club, and soon.]

[There's also these twin girls, really tall, slender, and beautiful. I want to ask them if Eileen Ford or similar have ever scouted them, they've got that kind of physiognomy. Of course they dress just like all the other girls, and talk like them, too. I've had to confront a little nugget of racism around the dialect I've been hearing, and I think it's about rooted out.]

[Anyway, these twins get on the bus Tuesday morning...]

[To be continued.]

{*Actually, sitting on a bench there yesterday, I looked around and realized there wasn't much there that says "San Francisco," in particular. I could've been in East San Jose or Bell Gardens or some parts of Oxnard, not that there's anything wrong with that.]

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