Altars
small things to hold
In the early 1990s I worked at Sami Sunchild’s Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast on San Francisco’s Haight Street. I had fled college to try and learn about filmmaking and was living in an unfinished garage behind the house of my parents’ friends. I had worked at a bespoke B&B in Providence the summer prior, making reservations, brewing coffee and baking frozen croissants, so that’s how I got the job at the Red Vic.
It was great to work there, people from all over came through. Sami Sunchild was not great, however. Though her paintings were all about peace and love, and the hand-decorated rooms were extraordinary (the Redwood, Butterfly, Peacock, etc), mostly what I remember from when Sami came around the lobby were stern words about not selling enough of her paintings or postcards from the Peace Cafe.
I see from Wikipedia that Sami Sunchild passed in 2013 and the Red Vic was later used for housing. After the Covid-19 pandemic, a collective called Fishbowl SF wanted to turn the hotel lease into subsidized housing for a multiracial group of queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people. After a lawsuit and settlement the Red Vic closed for good in 2021 and remains empty.
I wanted to write about taking walks with strangers and encounters with altars. When I was working at the Red Vic and taking classes at Film Arts Foundation with Craig Baldwin and volunteering at Other Cinema, among other activities, I would often meet people passing through town and we’d go for walks. Golden Gate Park, the Mission, the Haight. We’d walk and talk and then we’d go our separate ways. I loved these interactions without expectation.
Last week on the subway to the No Kings March I got to talking to a woman from Louisville who was visiting NY as she often does. She was a sociologist who had lived in Oakland for a long time and was now back in her home city to support her elderly parents. We continued talking as we exited the train onto the packed platform. A sea of people carrying protest signs elbowed each other and pushed through towards the exit. Sheryl mentioned Occupy Wall Street and was delighted when I told her I had been teaching about it the day before. She told me she stayed at a friend’s place in New York when visiting and she just needed to come to the city as much as she could. She loved going to independent cinema and asked if I recommended something. I told her to go see Annemarie Jacir’s film Palestine 36 to which she responded enthusiastically. As we reached the top of the narrow subway stairs we said goodbye. No exchanges or promises to keep in touch. It felt satisfying, complete, and the right kind of old-fashioned.
After several months working at The Red Vic and encountering zillions of Europeans (especially French, because the hotel was in their Guide de Routard), and going for walks with many of them, Sami hired another person and our shifts often overlapped. Michael and I became friends and spent a lot of time together, going to raves and hanging out at his apartment. Michael was gay and HIV positive. He had built an altar in his rented room and told me he invented his own mantras and prayers. He seemed calm about his HIV status expressing trust in his altars, teas, and meditation. I would often fall asleep on his futon that faced the altar and wake up in the warm buttery sun that streamed through one side of the bay window in his room. I drank black coffee because there was no milk in the fridge. He drank his tea.
When I left San Francisco to go back to Providence there was no email address to exchange or social media to continue with. I never saw or communicated with my friend Michael again. But I still think about him, especially in the change of seasons, when spring’s liquid sunshine pools across the floor and up the wall like it does today.
On March 20 I met a friend to go see the Whitney Biennial. I wandered through, drawn to smaller works and photographs. And I found myself standing for a long time in front of the works of Agosto Machado. I had heard the name but knew little about him or his life in the New York performance scene or as an activist or archivist or artist. I read those things a day or so later in his obituary because he died on March 21.
Machado’s altars drew me in with their tenderness, the felt expression, gentle placement, one thing next to the other, paintings, jars, masks, overlapping. Pictures from magazines, matchbooks, patterned fabric, a compact. Each shrine replete with a stories and lived encounters from the past and communicating forward. Palpable care.
In the spring’s renewal season I wonder what to hold, what to discard, what to restore and what to rearrange. In this time I will lean towards those small things that speak of trust and care. And give them my attention in the best way I can.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I did not intend to write this on the Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) but I have. At the same time I am devastated once more by the U.S. Supreme Court’s cruel ruling on this very day. The work continues. Collecting and building. Making anew.