The Opiate, Fall Vol. 7
I’m Really Going to Miss This Joel Streicker
R
oger stopped to look at the penises. This was not something he regularly did; he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually stopped and looked at them. He knew they were there—proudly displayed in the windows of EverHard and Boy Toy on Castro Street, on his usual route to the metro. They were large and white people flesh-colored, with thick red or purplish heads. Some came with accessories—accessories to the accessory, he thought, although maybe a penis, even a fake one, shouldn’t be considered an accessory—like lube or handcuffs. Six months ago he and Janet had bowed to the inevitable and began looking for a more affordable apartment, which meant venturing outside San Francisco’s overheated housing market. More than five months later they finally found something suitable in what the landlord called a “transitioning” neighborhood across the bay in Richmond. Only in this last week before the move did leaving San Francisco seem real, and one symptom of this reality was that he had begun taking note of all the things he took for granted about the city. He knew he’d still come back— the Latin American Resource Center, where he worked,
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had a year left on its lease and so couldn’t be priced out until then—but it wasn’t the same as living here. He’d be a commuter, rushing into the office blearyeyed in the morning and fleeing home in the evening to his husbandly and fatherly responsibilities. His twenty years in the city would soon come to an end when he and Janet loaded up the U-Haul and the kids and drove across the Bay Bridge in what he couldn’t help but think of as the wrong direction. The undertow of nostalgia for what hadn’t yet disappeared from his life was disorienting, as if his space/time coordinates had undergone some kind of sci-fi slippage, but he found it impossible to resist. These penises, for example: he knew he’d miss them even though he’d never given them a moment’s thought before. It was like the weather in the Midwest, where he grew up: unchangeable in its predictable changes, shaping his sense of time—the slow oscillation between extreme cold and extreme heat and all the delights in between those temporary terminal points—in ways he never registered until he moved to San Francisco and its much more limited palette of seasonal weather variations. Of course, with climate change, even the
