Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,2

whose lives seemed to have not turned out well. I was nineteen and my life had not turned out yet; I was still early in the process of trying to figure out who and how to become, the usual task for someone that age. (I had taken the GED at fifteen and started community college full time at sixteen, transferring to a four-year college at seventeen; at nineteen I was a senior at San Francisco State University, the working-class college out in the windy southwest corner of the city.)

I got on the 5 Fulton near city hall and the bus took me past the housing projects, past a Fillmore Street church where a group of somber black men in suits were gathered outside for a funeral, past ornate old wooden houses and corner liquor stores, up a rise to Lyon Street, where I stepped off, and the bus lumbered on to the Pacific. I found the address, a building with a recessed front door that had, like a lot of the others nearby, an ironwork gate added for more security. The doormat inside was attached to the mail slot with a rusty chain and lock. I rang the manager’s doorbell, trudged up the first flight of stairs when he buzzed me in, and met him at the doorway of his apartment on the second floor, from which he dispatched me to the third floor to see the apartment directly above his.

The place astonished me with its beauty. A corner studio whose main room had a south and an east bay window through which light cascaded. Golden oak floors, high coved ceilings, and white walls with rectangular panels of molding. Glass-paneled doors with crystal doorknobs. A separate kitchen with another east-facing window that would explode with morning light when the sun came up over the big house across the street. It seemed luminous, a little unearthly, a place from a fairy tale, immense and exquisite compared to the spartan single rooms in which I’d mostly lived since I’d left home shortly after I turned seventeen. I floated around in it for a while, then went back downstairs and told the manager I wanted it. He said, kindly, “If you want it you should have it.” I wanted it passionately; it was more beautiful than anything I’d ever dreamed I could have, and being in it seemed like a dream itself.

He was a big black man of sixty, tall, stout, strong, clearly once very handsome, still an impressive figure with a low, rumbling voice, and if he was dressed that day as he was most days I knew him, he was probably wearing overalls. He brought me into his parlor. That Super Bowl Sunday afternoon when a local football team was in the game and a roar would go up from homes throughout the neighborhood with every score, he was watching black men play the blues on his big TV sitting on its own table near the six-sided green-felt poker table, the light outside filtered through old-fashioned wide-slatted blinds over his bay windows. When he handed me the rental application, my heart fell. I told him that I had already been turned down by the slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form. One of the employees had disdainfully dropped my application into the wastebasket next to his desk while I looked on; I didn’t make enough money to meet their minimums.

The building manager told me that if I got a respectable older woman to apply, he wouldn’t tell them of the deception. I took up that offer and asked my mother, who had often refused to go out on a limb for me, if she would. This time she did, filling out and submitting the form. The management company was not suspicious about why a white homeowner who lived on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge wanted the apartment—I think she said something about being closer to work, because she kept the books in a talent agency in the city. They probably gave it to her by rote as the most financially impressive applicant for a small place in a black neighborhood.

For the next eight years, I paid my rent every month by buying a money order and signing her name rather than mine to it. The lease specified that the person who’d signed it be the person who lived