House of Skin

Can a man love a city?

Can he reach out and embrace it like a woman, make love to it and be loved by it? I’d lived in San Francisco for less than half of my life and it was only in those last precious years that I fell in love with it. And it fell in love with me. Together, we shared things in the dreaming, hot night. We whispered to one another of woes and hopes and nightmares.

I knew the charmless concrete and pavement like a lover’s body. I knew its boulevards and avenues and dead ends and cul-de-sacs. I knew where to find life in the city. And death.

I loved it. But did it truly love me?

Or did it just tempt me, stealing away my innocence with whispers of love, allusions of a midnight seduction? Was it just a taker? A user? A cold and loveless thing that made away with my sanity in the dead of night?

There was no way to know.

No way at all.

But if nothing else, the city showed me itself like it had to no other. It was open to me, with me, showing me its depravity and lust and hatred of anything approaching order. After all, it was little more than a confused tumble of crowded streets and monolithic buildings parading as an orderly, modern city. And in its black, hungry heart, it hated those who had built it originally and those that resurrected it after the 1906 earthquake, breathing an ugly semblance of life into its diseased carcass. So if you happened to be one practicing certain atrocities upon its unwelcome tenants, the city would show you new and obscene vistas of pain.

Because it loved agony.

And it lived on human suffering.

It took me under its wing, under the guise of a lover, and by the time I was hopelessly infatuated with its decadent ways and profane means, it revealed to me that I was little more than a tool to it, an instrument to act out its criminal appetites.

But none of that bothered me by then.

Love of steel and stone, exploited humanity and nameless perversion had captured my heart. For that was the city. I loved it and I wanted to be used.

And was.

The city had dreams and so did I. And together we merged, flesh and concrete, thought and hopelessness.

We were lovers, host and parasite, needing and taking and giving no quarter.

We were one.