Rachel Kushner: Gen-X Punk Rock Author

Rachel Kushner’s essay, The Hard Crowd

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“So many of my hours are spent like this, but with me as the camera, panning backward into scenes that are not retrievable. I am no longer busy being born. But it’s alright; the catalog of a life’s highs and lows regifts a person daily. Especially if she’s figured out how to do a thing that takes all of her, for better or worse, in its accounting. That is what writing does. All the memories, the ‘material,’ it starts to answer questions. It gives testimony. It talks.”

            Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd (title essay from the essay collection of the same name).

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Rachel Kushner—born in 1968, in Eugene, Oregon, but largely raised in San Francisco—published an essay collection entitled, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 in 2021. At the time I was living in New York still, in Lenox Hill, Manhattan, on East 70^th between First and York. I’d read a little of Kushner before, trying and failing with her novel called The Mars Room, which mostly takes place in S.F. I’d found the novel brilliant but distracted and overwritten; she went too deeply into certain rabbit holes that seemed, to me, back then, like fairly random asides. (Such as, mostly, her obsessively researched information about prison.) These rabbit holes hindered rather than helped, in my opinion. They felt like “info dump,” when a writer has done far too much research and they want the reader to know about it all. Still, the novel stuck with me. I liked her voice. Her edgy style. And I related deeply to the content, which was filled with risky, sketchy characters.

The Hard Crowd was a much more enjoyable, much easier literary thing for me to digest, like a T-bone steak compared to caviar. It had plenty of calories and protein and iron. It energized me both as a reader and as a writer. Kushner has been compared to Joan Didion and I don’t think this is a stretch; her style is both immediate, understated and intelligent. Kushner’s prose is razor-sharp, whether she’s discussing culture, politics, language or personal autobiography. She doesn’t talk down to her readers, but neither does she dumb down her language; instead she does something we seem to see less and less in contemporary writing: She respects her readers. She values her readers as intelligent, critical thinkers able to come up with their own judgments and decisions. She’s not ideological at all. Her writing is basked in realism. She’s luridly, wildly nostalgic, this us true, yet not gaudy or overly sentimental. This is a fine line to walk.

She’s also punk rock as hell. About 15 years older than me—my older half-sister’s age—she writes frequently about the carnage of her youth in San Francisco. She name-drops, it’s true, but this can be forgiven. When she started to write about punk I got nervous at first; too often this morphs into the really famous bands who were like silt on the surface of what was wriggling below that gaudy fame: Bands like Green Day and The Offspring and AFI, Dead Kennedys, etc. But Kushner lets us know right out of the gate that she was legit; she knows her stuff. She mentions the UK Subs, Agnostic Front and the Dead Boys. These are as legit as it gets. Only someone sincerely into authentic punk would know of these bands.

She writes about being a bartender in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, one of the most notorious poverty-stricken crackhead wastelands in the city. She writes about riding motorcycles with the boys. She writes about dive bars and the leather-wearing bikers who she drank with. She writes about the Greyhound station and the characters that lived inside and around it. She writes about tattoos before tattoos were cool and expected. (I got my first ink around 2002, when I was a senior in high school.) She writes about the punkers and alcoholics and addicts she knew and befriended and hung out with. She talks about a guy she knew who stabbed a dude and went to prison. Another guy was found headless in a dumpster. She writes about stealing makeup and getting caught one day and being booked in a jail below the store she hadn’t even known was there.

“…I was caught, arrested, and booked, in the department store’s subbasement, which featured, to my surprise, a police station and interrogation rooms where they handcuffed you to a metal pole in a locked cell, right there in the bowels of the store.”

            Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd

She also writes about growing up in the foggy, cool Sunset District, the suburban beach community in San Francisco heavy with aging surfers, Asians who rent out illegal sublet apartments behind their garages, Great Highway, the westernmost section of Golden Gate Park, etc.

I first moved to San Francisco in early January, 2008, with my pale-faced, red-haired, freckled 21-year-old girlfriend. I’d just turned 25 a week prior while on a trip with my girlfriend in London. We’d been in Europe for five weeks. Drinking. Walking a lot. Seeing Jim Morrison’s gravesite in Pere Lachaise in Paris. Wandering along the Seine, imagining I was there in the 1920s, running into Hemingway.

I remember mostly the thick, cool fog. The cold, frigid wind that rolled east towards us on La Playa, just down the block from Great Highway and the beach with its tall sand dunes and the wild crashing waves of Ocean Beach. We slept on a buddy’s couch for the first few weeks, his place on La Playa between Ortega and Pacheco. Down a couple blocks, at Judah Street, was a little café called Java Beach. The N-line Judah Muni-train ended there, and slowly circled around to shoot back east through the Sunset District and eventually into downtown San Francisco. (Which took a while.)

I’d go down to Java Beach and get a coffee to-go and then wait for the train and get on. The first time I did this I tried to give the exasperated-looking Asian driver a five dollar bill; he placed his palm on the slot, shook his head, gazed at me as if I were the dumbest fool on Earth, and said simply, “Change only.”

I recall those train rides vividly, slowly rocking eastward, away from the ocean, rollicking slightly, sitting on those little red seats, seeing the multicolored Victorian houses as we passed. It all felt so fresh and exciting and new at that time. I enrolled in CCSF—City College of San Francisco, and I’d take the muni and then a bus all the way out there, to the Ocean Ave campus. San Francisco was glittery and animalistic. It was a thrill to be there after 2.5 years in San Diego where I clearly hadn’t belonged.

(By the way, if you like existing in the setting of the Sunset District of San Francisco, and you like the edgy thriller life, check out my paywalled novel, which I’ve been posting each week, The Grim Room.)

In about a month my girlfriend and I’d found a small room in a five-room second-floor apartment in the Richmond District on Fulton and 24^th, across the street from Golden Gate Park. It was $250/month each. She worked at a fancy, famous restaurant across the bay in Tiburon, with her older sister, and kept working on her English Lit degree at San Francisco State, and I worked at a medical laundry pickup and delivery service located on Stanyon Street in the Haight, driving a company van all over the greater Bay Area picking up and delivering medical laundry at hospitals. I can still see and smell the blood-drenched clothes. And I attended city college, still hoping that one day I’d make my parents proud and transfer to a four-year college and get my degree.

By June, 2008, we’d broken up. We’d been together for a year and a half, my longest relationship to that point. We both stayed in the city. She found a little apartment in the Sunset District, somewhere around Noriega and the 30s, and I snagged a room with only three walls (the third “wall” was a massive hanging blanket separating my “room” from the communal living room) on 26^th and Judah, where the entire apartment slightly rumbled and shook when the trains went by, 15 feet away.

Later that year I reconnected with an old punk friend I’d known from Ventura who’d moved up north to S.F. She introduced me to some of her friends, a few of which I’d heard about or met once or recalled blurrily from Southern California or the few scattered trips to the Bay Area I’d made in the past. She lived in the Excelsior District. I remember going there often, to their four-bedroom apartment, and partying until the sun came up. There were a lot of mornings wherein we were all still drunk, and we’d start drinking again early, gathering together in one of the rooms, chatting and glugging beers and smoking cigarettes. Once I remember watching Factory Girl (2006), about Edie Sedgewick of Andy Warhol 1960s fame, together in the back room, about eight or nine of us, on a rainy, quiet fall morning, all of us still drunk, still drinking then, the light rain pinging the roof and windows outside, all of us warm and intoxicated and safe inside the womb. We were in our early and mid-twenties. I can picture us all right now, young, dumb, clueless and explosively alive.

“…after I decided that the real-world places and the people I knew would never be in books unless I wrote the books. So I deputized myself world’s leading expert on ten square blocks of the Sunset District, the west section of the Great Highway, a stretch of Market, a few blocks in the Tenderloin. My expertise is not just my knowledge but my permeability. The expert absorbs in excess to what is ‘useful’ for a person to remember.”

            Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd.

I have stories—wild ones—about basically every area Kushner mentions. I was living a very similar lifestyle to hers, only a decade and a half later. Drunken women in crazed Tenderloin bars. Fast drives along Great Highway. Anarchic alcoholism throughout the nights in the Excelsior. Friends who succumbed to cocaine addictions, as well as heroin, crack, meth, etc. I was 25, 26, 27 when I first came to San Francisco before I got sober, going to all the bars on Haight, the bars in the seedy parts of the Mission, the dive bars in the Sunset.

I often wonder, like Kushner does in her essay, if I was actually “hard” myself. Maybe. Probably in a certain way. But not really. Not genuinely. From a young age I’d learned to wear a mask. A social mask, which was hyper-masculine, hyper tough, hyper-hard and mean. For some reason I felt from a very young age that this mask was a requirement; it seemed like a tool I could not survive without. And yet under that toughness was something very soft, gelatinous, even. I was a rich kid, who’d gone to private schools all my life, including Catholic college-prep school which I’d (at the time proudly) been booted from. For all the mistakes my parents had made raising me, I’d also been coddled, warm and safe. I’d never wanted for anything.

“Was I hard? Not compared to the world around me. I tell myself it isn’t a moral failing to be the soft one, but I’m not actually sure.”

            Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd

When I got sober, in 2010, at age 27, I left the Bay Area for Portland, Oregon. But I only lasted eight months. I didn’t have a drink, though. I returned to the Bay Area circa summer, 2011. I was 28, sober about nine months. I got a little illegal converted-garage studio in North Oakland for a whoppingly low (this would never happen now) $750/month, all utilities included. I’d severed the cord with all my old drinking friends. I was very much alone. Isolated. I wrote a lot in that little studio. I wrote short stories, I wrote poetry, I wrote several novels in succession (The Grim Room being one). For the first time in my life I submitted my writing to literary agents, and, as was easily predictable looking back with hindsight, I got my first boatload of form rejection letters. But in 2012 I got my first short story published by a magazine and paid. I was beyond thrilled.

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I think what gets me, when I think back on those harrowing days of SF in 2008, 2009, is the ripe nostalgia: Being that age, so young, our whole lives ahead of us, me and my girlfriend in love, drinking far too much, working shitty dead-end jobs, hacking away at the never-ending jungle that was college, trying to survive, trying to make it all work. Even then I knew deep down I was a writer. It was in 2008, after the breakup, and after the 26^th and Judah apartment, renting a small room on Irving Street and the 30s somewhere, still in the Sunset (I never left the Sunset while living in the city) that I tried my hand at writing a novel. This became my first book, an autobiographical punk rock YA novel. You can read about my experience being rejected by agents for this novel here.

I didn’t know what I was doing with my life when I was 25, living in San Francisco. I knew I had a deep instinct to write. I knew it came from my mother, the fact that she was a writer and had had an excellent library when I was a kid, and from the sincere core of my self which told me constantly that I needed to record everything, take it all down with language, with prose on the page. But I was still drinking back then, still observing, still gaining “life experience,” which is the true writer’s MFA from the School of Life. I didn’t need a teacher to tell me what or how to write; I needed the lean, tough teacher of Experience to show me the way. And it did show me the way. Here I am now.

The truth is: I was the soft one. Always had been. Still am. And yet back then I acted hard. I’d always been a good actor. It’s in my DNA. I’m a writer: What else is writing, especially fiction, if not acting with a pen on a page? Sure, I wore a masculine mask of manliness, but it wasn’t “me” anymore than the drunk Michael was the Real Michael.

And anyway, when I think back on those days my main thought is: How silly and glorious it was, to be that age at that time in that city.

I was lucky.

But then we all are.