Now That's Amore

In S.F., spring is the season for romance. And pig coitus. And mouse erections. And ...

Comments (0) By Matt Smith Wednesday, Apr 3 2002

...continued from page 1

First, researchers snipped the arteries of a group of mouse wieners, creating a pack of impotent Mickeys. Next, they injected the same mouse wieners with a protein that helps vascular cells grow. Awhile later -- and here's the part Souder, Thompson, and Rehnquist might want to look into -- researchers used an electrode to induce mousy erections. Then, they killed the mice, midboner, to study mice members in the aroused state. Technically speaking, this is known as an S/M fantasy made real. Morally speaking, the scientists are not merely encouraging living beings to have sex, they're forcing them to have a perverted, morbid, lethal kind of sex.

Where are prudish Republicans when you need them?

Aaron Farmer

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Since we're on the subject of springtime and amore, I'd like to tell a San Francisco story of passion and love lost. It is -- need I mention? -- a story about real estate.

Many years ago, in a conceptual kingdom far, far away, San Francisco was in the midst of a dot-com boom. Northern Potrero Hill was on its way to becoming a modern Venice of Internet animation; South of Market, a Paris of Web design. As for the Inner Mission: This would be a digital SoHo, a colony of successful creative types who would turn a piece of gritty urban landscape into a congenial place to live.

In part because they were the only apartment buildings the city allowed to be built during this era, hundreds of expensive live-work lofts were erected in all sorts of unlikely places, and young urban professionals bought them, dreaming of dot-com Eden. In the unpleasant South of Market industrial district, loft buildings had body shops as neighbors. In Potrero, stylish bathroom windows looked over light-assembly plants. And in the Mission, some of the most expensive apartments in California were sold on a block where crack dealers, heroin sellers, prostitutes, and gangsters plied their trades. A two-bedroom apartment at 588 South Van Ness, a block from the vortex of prostitution, drugs, and gangsterism at 16th and Mission streets, last year sold for $485,000.

It wasn't long before the new residents woke up and realized that Left Bank- style life might never flourish in the worst areas of San Francisco.

"I am in the evil Live/Work at 588 South Van Ness. After years of scrimping and saving and living beneath my means, I did what I thought was impossible -- buying a home in San Francisco," writes Paul Sauer via e-mail, in a moment of ambivalent hindsight. "If you ride by slow enough on your bike, you can catch the scent of urine in the spring time air."

Sauer says a group of his condominium-owning neighbors are now joining to oppose plans by the nearby, low-income Mission Hotel apartments to add two floors, and 76 new units.

"I think the way I think of this is, "Enough in my backyard,' not "Not in my backyard,'" Sauer explains.

Hearing Sauer tell it, if he and his neighbors can keep 76 additional poor people from moving into their neighborhood, they might preserve some facsimile of the gentle life they once dreamed of.

"If you sit near the window, you can see the occasional hooker strutting down Capp St. But the neighborhood is getting better," writes Sauer. "I'd be happy to meet over a beer or a cup of Joe. I might even be able to get some of the 550 [Van Ness condo owners] to sit down with you."

"One more quick thought on an angle for the story, which is the idea of homelessness being used as a growth industry for the politically-connected SRO-owning slumlords," he added in a subsequent e-mail. "And what more proof do you need that homelessness is a growth industry than the Mission Hotel's plans to expand by more than 50 percent?"

Well, in this particular instance, it would be homefullness that's the growth industry. But that's quibbling. What we've really got here is a romance, once pregnant with possibilities, now gone awry.

An ordinary mortal's first response to such a tragedy is to lash out at the ex-lover, or the neighborhood, which once promised so much. In the end, however (as any reader of Dan Savage knows), it's best to let go. Move on. Find another object of affection. Sell your overpriced live-work condo at a loss, and let the hotel down the street build a couple of floors of low-income housing. With so much love in the air, it's a shame to waste passion on romance gone bad.

1 No relation toSF Weekly.

2 Fans can write Lorenzo Lamas, star of the TV seriesThe Immortal, at Lorenzo Lamas, c/o Stu Segall Productions, 4705 Ruffin Rd., San Diego, CA 92123.