Peace for my Soul

I'll never forget the first time i went to San Francisco. It was February, frigid ass cold in my hometown of Omaha NE, and i was flying to San Fran for a long weekend to meet a guy i had only spoken to on the phone.
See, at that point in my life, i was working for a company called Utell International, taking hotel reservations. Not as straightforward as it sounds, as most people who could afford our service never seemed to know anything more about where they wanted to go than what city it was! So part of my job was not just taking info, it was also researching the cities, the different areas of those cities, and the types of hotels in them; then we had to probe the customers to help them figure out what they wanted so we would know what to recommend. Time consuming, but pretty interesting and fun as well.
Part of the hotel-education part was meeting different reps from hotels in different cities. One day we all filed into the conference room for a snack and a slide show with a rep from the Queen Anne Hotel in San Fran. Great food, beautiful slides (that didn't put me to sleep for once!), and a presentation done by an older gentleman who was obviously a sample of San Frans gay population. (I have lots of gay friends who have never minded me using that word, but not sure if its currently "pc"... someone help me out?) He was a great guy with a good sense of humor... which is a good thing as i kept throwing out comments through the whole thing! I had never been there before, but of course i had all kinds of remarks and anecdotes about Janis, The Greatful Dead, the Haight-Ashbury, Hippy Hill... had never been there, but always wanted to go!
I really should have been around for the 60s in the City... alas, i was born way too late. My mom wasn't even old enough for that kind of fun in the 60s!
Anyways. I made a few comments that had everyone laughing, which is, of course, my usual goal. We broke for a few minutes for the smokers to smoke, while a couple of us and the hotel rep stayed in the room and chatted. At some point, the gentleman asked me if i minded if he asked me a personal question. "No, of course not..." was the gist of my reply; God knows i never mind talking about myself! But when the question was "Are you single?" i couldn't help but laugh. No way was he asking me that for himself!
And he wasn't. He started telling me about this kid Blake who worked at his hotel that he thought i would be just perfect for. He piqued my curiosity; after all, i had never had a gay man i had never met before try to set me up with someone a few hundred miles away! He gave me the toll free number to the hotel and said if i wanted to maybe give Blake a call sometime, he'd be sure to tell him about me when he got back. I didn't wait that long.
I, being the brazen ballsy bitch that i was (and still am...), called that day on my lunch break. Took me a minute to convince the guy that no, i wasn't crazy (how i convinced him of that i'll never know), and that yes, his coworker really had told me all about him. And that we were allegedly perfect for each other. Shockingly enough, Blake was a pretty good sport about the whole thing, and we really did end up talking without too much awkwardness.
And we did hit it off... go figure! We ended up talking a lot, for a good 6 weeks, and then decided we wanted to meet in person.
Now let me explain a little bit about where i was in my life at that point. Yes, i was still managing to hold down a job and keep my apartment, but i was definately already on the edge of the abyss. I was using regularly (that was The Month of acid, ecstasy, coke and speed in very LARGE quantities- daily), had started shooting up a couple months before, and had a tweeker named JJ living in my walk-in closet. It was a pretty crazy time, with me doing some pretty crazy shit, and loving every minute of it. JJ and i had been together, but although he had been pretty odd when we got started, by this time i was seriously watching him go deeper and deeper into insanity. So i was ready for a change, and some space, for a minute at least, and this guy who wanted me to visit him in San Fran seemed like a damn pleasant way to get it.
So i took a long weekend off, scrimped for a discount airline ticket from the company travel service, he managed to comp me a room for the weekend... and voila! I was off to San Francisco.
That one weekend included a lot of firsts for me. First time on an airplane. First time going far from home, on my own, to meet a guy i was interested in but had never met in person before... hell, first time on any trip alone. Definately the first time i had ever gone that far from home. My first time also for taking very illegal drugs and not-much-more-legal rigs onto an airplane and across state lines; several state lines, in fact. And, of course, my first time in San Francisco, a city i had yearned to see, no matter how crazy the circumstances that took me there.
This is gonna sound cheesy and cliche as all hell, but there's just no other way to say it: from the moment i stepped off the plane and smelled the spring air, my soul was at peace. By the time the hotel shuttle got me to The Queen Anne Hotel at Sutter and Octavia, i was blown away by the city and convinced that was where i belonged.


next: Blake, the park, and more drugs... of course...