Atop the Broadway Tunnel

Ella Gold Wade

My grandfather is eighty-one years older than I am, but we have always been very close. His apartment represents who he is. In the cracking lead paint and splintering floorboards I do not see the frail, deaf, ninety-eight-year-old but the many iterations of one individual over the course of a century. The wavy overused bookshelves, numerous copies of his own novels (especially illegal and foreign misprints), photos of beloved family members and long-dead literary adversaries, stacks of newspapers, vibrant Haitian paintings, corkboards covered with ancient Soviet telegrams, and one giant spider plant all represent the man in his fullness. The spider plant appears out of place, green and lively in a sea of dust and yellowed pages. But it remains the only living resident, aside from my grandfather, a small colony of mice, and the mold growing on the food he hoards.

There is a shift I feel when I drive across Van Ness Street, and up the hill. His home sits above the Broadway tunnel, walk a block north and you are greeted by a postcard of Alcatraz emerging between condominiums, or look west at any gap between streets as fog coming through the Golden Gate begins to smother you. My mother and I usually find an open parking spot one hill away near a small park surrounded by a colony of Julia Morgan houses. We walk down the steep hill, until the ground flattens, the houses turn back into apartment buildings, and the front garden sculptures turn into municipally planted sidewalk trees. The ground flattens into a plateau as we turn east. My grandfather’s building is one house past the plateau, at the breaking point before the gradient takes hold.

After walking a tenth of the way down the hill, I am greeted by the building. It blends into the sky, the vibrant blue it once was only peaking through the grey of dust and age. The majority of windows facing the street are adorned by plants and art deco lamps. But near the top of the building is my grandfather’s window, covered with moth-bitten gray fabric and crowded with political signs from decades-old local elections. There is no elevator, only steep gray stairs leading up to my grandfather’s house.

To reach my grandfather’s floor we pass simple doors, welcome mats, and maybe an Amazon package or two. I never memorized my grandfather’s floor number because his landing lets everyone know exactly who lives there. The door is decorated. Blue paint interrupted by his old Haitian press name tag, a yellow Sticky Note reading “NOTA BENA,” and picture of himself looking confused, annotated in Sharpie with the words “knock loud, faulty ears.” I never knock, knowing that he couldn’t hear me even if I tried. On the rare occasion that he is not expecting us, so as not to startle him, we call him. He only has a landline, but its presence is known throughout the neighborhood. The phone is specific, one of those medical-looking phones designed specifically for the hard of hearing. Even with the modifications, the volume is turned up as high as humanly possible, causing the ringing to broadcast out onto the street. But the door is always unlocked, and so I usually walk straight in. Past the first pile of books, past his office, through the curated hallway of family photos, Haitian paintings, and a large poster from the funeral of a Hell’s Angel. At the end of the hallway is the living room. He is always sitting in the same rocking chair, next to the glass door that leads to the decaying suggestion of a deck. He is always sitting right there, with the afternoon sun coming in through the opposite window casting a warm glow on the dust-covered books and the stack of every New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle issued since our last visit.

I always sit in the same seat, facing him. Every conversation, story, and argument we have has taken place from this exact perspective. In between us sits a coffee table, adorned with a painting of a pencil and a piece of paper. The painting is hyper-realistic, prompting firsttime guests to reach for the pencil, only to find traces of paint and dust on their fingertips. At some point during the visit, when my mom and grandfather begin to argue over his collections of newspapers, old food, or books, I walk into my grandfather’s office. The shelves have bent under the weight of books, and new volumes have been stuffed horizontally wherever a gap appears. When I was younger I would play with the typewriter, pudgy little fingers diligently stabbing one key at a time, producing one error-riddled sentence per visit. Recently, my mother and I have taken turns talking to my grandfather while the other person raids his closet for vintage t-shirts and Banana Republic button downs.

Sometimes I feel guilty about spending some of my limited time at my grandfather’s apartment away from him. But I often feel even closer to him after flipping through his record collection, or meeting him as a younger man through the introductions he wrote in historical accounts of Bohemia in San Francisco or New York or Paris. This place, his home, does not exist only as the physical objects in it, but rather as a story. In the collections of paintings, telegrams, stolen heaps of complimentary salt packets, records, books, newspapers, and fraying shirts, I see a century’s worth of a soul’s extrapolation into the physical world.

I try not to think about what will happen to this place in the future, because any changes it undergoes will quite literally happen over my grandfather’s dead body, and so for me it exists only in the present and the past. I love this place.

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Hailey Chin white charcoal