November 20, 2002

Extreme Measures

Something in the air

HIS ENERGY WAS ferocious, and I felt his presence before I saw him, a young man with long, unruly hair blowing across his face, a stack of flyers stuffed into a satchel bearing a Red Cross insignia, and a frantic look on his face. "There's going to be blood in the streets," he said, his chest heaving with emotion as if nothing in the world was as certain as that. I remember thinking he was about to cry. He moved quickly through the crowd. "Blood is going to run in the streets of this country." And he had our attention, for sure – things were like that. Then: "Saturn is squaring Pluto," he announced furiously. We blinked hard and rolled our eyeballs. Urban mayhem and fighting in the streets were plausible, desirable even, depending on who you were and what kind of mood you were in. Astrology was Marin County hippie shit, and my friends and I laughed about it.

It was early March a long time ago, and the grass in Dolores Park shimmered thick and green in the kind of brilliant late winter sunlight that follows rain. Chris Dunworth and I had swallowed a lot of mescaline and walked to a park at 19th and Valencia. Insects roared by our ears like jet planes, and we watched the asphalt playground bubble up and melt. After that we wandered toward the palm trees on Dolores Street and stumbled into a demonstration. I understood joy, sorrow, and gloriously flawed humanity until suddenly it was clear I didn't – my mistake – because two hours later I saw the once-agitated believer from the park sprawled awkwardly beneath a bus that had crushed him at the corner of 18th and Guerrero. His flyers were scattered everywhere. Blood oozed down the street into a gutter. I burst into tears.

The image of that dead boy still marks the Mission for me. And if I hallucinated the whole thing, call me an unreliable narrator, but I'm not alone – that's how memory operates; the present slips away leaving bits and pieces of life to rattle around in your brain, assuming odd, unpredictable, and sometimes unwanted shapes. Memories may not be ghosts, but they can haunt you just the same.

Naomi Iizuka calls in the spirits while taking a long view of the Mission in her latest play, 17 Reasons (Why), now in its first week at Intersection for the Arts. It's a looping, time-traveling mystery set in the venue's backyard over some 140 years. The play is loaded with landmarks and bits of history – interviews with longtime Mission residents, hidden history, and old film clips and photos, a whole parade of black and white ghosts. Some 30 characters come to life, a few straight from the grave, and it's too bad the long-dead hippie Cassandra who blew through my life that day couldn't be one of them.

Iizuka has a thing about ghosts; they pop into her plays all the time. 17 Reasons, a sign that for 65 years adorned a building at 17th and Mission, is itself a ghost. Her work sometimes has a cosmic spookiness, an elevated quality that hints at forces lurking in shadows, at turmoil below still surfaces. But her ghosts are human – or were, anyway – and people fly close to the ground, uncertain, unconscious, and untrustworthy; ghosts are along for the ride.

Mary Holland Sparks, who presides over 17 Reasons, claims to be 167 and the oldest living Mormon around. She's seen a thing or two, and although she's a storyteller herself and is suspect because of it, she knows what keeps her going: "I like stories," she tells a homicide detective named Olividado, who's working a case. "I bet you do, too, your line of work. I like to know about people, strangers. Pass a person in the street and I think: 'What've you seen, who were your kin folk, your first love, the thing you fear, what was that thing, that thing that marked you, carved its name in the inside of your heart?' "

"What if the dead could talk?" Dr. John Graves asks in the play. "What would they say?" If you learn to listen, the dead talk all the time.

'17 Reasons (Why)' runs through Nov. 18. Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15 sliding scale. (415) 626-3311.