Bohemia lost

I turn my back on a city that turned my head and then broke my heart.

By King Kaufman

Aug. 8, 2001 | ST. LOUIS -- For as long as I can remember, I wanted to live in San Francisco.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I thought of San Francisco as a magical place. We'd drive up there for vacations. The houses were old and funny and there were hippies wandering around. People wrote songs about the place and called it "The City." The sunshine had this different look to it, more delicate somehow, though I wouldn't have stated it that way at the age of 8. You'd get cold in July.

San Francisco had Divisadero and the Embarcadero and North Beach and Mission Dolores, places that sounded so much like San Francisco they couldn't be anywhere else. Even the name of the city itself, in block letters across the shirt of a hated Giants batter on the Game of the Week, looked fantastic, endlessly more exciting than any number of what should have been equally exotic place names closer to home: Santa Monica, San Fernando, San Pedro.

I did it. I got close when I went to college in Berkeley, and eventually made it across the bay to a series of apartments in the Western Addition and the Mission District. I've lived there for half of what so far has been my life, and the love affair I carried on with Baghdad by the Bay, with the City That Knows How, with Frisco, San Fran, the City, little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars, was as intense and all-encompassing as anything experienced by Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Tristan and Isolde, Brad and Jennifer.

Which is why my friends looked so shocked when I told them I was moving to St. Louis, the Gateway City, a town that defines itself as a historical jumping-off point to somewhere else, a city in which, according to an essay in the anthology "Seeking St. Louis" by Philadelphia transplant Gerald Early, "there is a tendency for at least a certain class of its citizens to apologize for having what appears to them the bland misfortune of living here."

On a family trip here a few years ago, my dad gestured at the people surrounding us and said, "These are the descendants of the people who said, 'Eh, this is far enough.'"

So what brings me here? How could I leave the only place I could ever imagine living? What kind of West Coast boy travels east and stops before hitting an ocean?

One whose love affair was dashed by cellphone-talking, SUV-driving, Frappuccino-drinking dot-com yuppies.

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