You’d expect to see in a model railroad set
Minus the trains—
Tracks torn up
After a massive fire
Almost a hundred years ago
But each little house
And road sign
And tree
And store
Glued on
Exactly where it belongs
There’s a hair salon on the corner
With a hand-painted sign outside
Doesn’t say the name of the salon
In fact I don’t even know the name of the salon
Or if it has a name
Just HAIRCUTS
A barber pole
And a giant pair of scissors
Someone not from here
Asked me if Mill Valley is a Hollywood set
And I’m still not sure it isn’t
I mean it definitely has a cast:
There’s Alex the rug guy
Poor thing looks like he hasn’t eaten in a decade
Doug behind the counter
Who co-owns the market
His son Eugene
Who surfs big waves at Ocean Beach
Jason the bartender
Who knows everything
Theodosia the barista
Who only knows how to frown
Kecia who sells flowers
From a cart over the arroyo
Larry the Hat
Who needs no explanation
And Denis
An 80-something fellow
Gentle giant of sorts—
At least six-and-a-half feet tall
Maybe seven feet with the giant mop of white hair
He would dig through the trash
And return things to me in paper bags
That he thought I didn’t mean to throw away
Denis was also my landlord—
And property manager
As I’d round the corner
Up the stairs to my apartment
I’d peek over my left shoulder
Into Denis’s gallery—
And store I guess
I mean nothing had a price tag
But hundreds of oils on canvases
Leaning against the walls
Stacked ten deep
Like cardboard boxes broken down for recycling
Then in the very back of the store
Or gallery or whatever it was
An easel facing the rear wall
And balanced in one of Denis’s enormous hands
I’d see the edge of a mottled palette
And a few fronds of white hair
Jostling around as he tinkered with his brushes
Most of his massive frame
Hunkered behind his latest work-in-progress
An old man emptying his brain
Filling canvas after canvas
In a race against time
Next door is a store called Poet and the Bench
That sells neither poetry—
Nor benches
That was pretty common here in Mill Valley
Also sometimes it was really hard to tell
What was for sale—
And what was just part of the store
I lived above these art galleries
That wanted to be stores
That wanted to be art galleries
In a tiny apartment overlooking
The pedestrian tunnel entrance
On the third floor of El Paseo
In an unlikely love affair
With Mill Valley
A model railroad town
And Hollywood set—
Featuring majestic redwoods
In the shadow of Mt. Tam
From my tiny apartment
I’d watch glorious sunsets
And make vintage cocktails
In my little kitchen
And at 8pm sharp
In a coordinated show of support
For essential workers
We’d howl out the window
Like a bunch of fucking lunatics
The echoes bouncing off the buildings
And through the El Paseo tunnel
I would live above the entrance
For more than three years
Which felt like home
Until suddenly it didn’t
El Paseo was not the only tunnel in Mill Valley
The other one cut between Piazza D'Angelo
And the Balboa Cafe
That tunnel leads through wisteria to a small parking lot
The exit of which faces an old theater
It’s small—
Seats fewer than 300
But just a few months earlier
I gave my first musical theater performance
As J.P. Morgan in Ragtime, The Musical
It was a pro-am cast
With a 21-piece orchestra
Quite a spectacle
Anyhow, I’m sure most of Mill Valley didn’t care
That ten times—
For ten performances
I was J.P. Morgan in Ragtime, The Musical
But that didn’t stop me from feeling—
And acting
Each time—
Like a local celebrity
I would don my wardrobe and do my makeup at home
Then I’d walk the two blocks from my El Paseo apartment
Actually it was more like prancing
Off to the theater
Dressed like J.P. Morgan
Navy blue pinstriped
Three piece suit
Ivory sash
Black top hat
Silver monocle
Chrome pocket watch
Wooden cane
And a ridiculous mustache
I was J.P. Morgan
This weird little place
Half model railroad town
And half Hollywood set
It felt especially right for me—
When I was J.P. Morgan
See, there are a lot of J.P. Morgans
In Mill Valley
And for most of them
It’s not a fucking costume
During the summer of activism
Around police violence
Which could have been any summer
Or anytime really in the last 150 years
So that doesn’t narrow it down much
But I’m talking about the summer of 2020
The mayor of Mill Valley
Herself a dark-skinned woman of Sri Lankan descent
Shut down any discussion of Black Lives Matter
At the town council meeting
Saying it wasn’t an issue of local importance
I guess that was on-script for Mill Valley, too
Where I rarely saw anyone who wasn’t white
And either enormously privileged—
Or descended from enormous privilege
Or at least they acted that way
There were other problems, too
In Mill Valley
Related to being black
See Ragtime, The Musical
Is about a lot of things
Like immigration
And love
But mostly it’s about racism
Specifically whites
In the early 1900s
Being truly awful, racist pricks
To blacks
So to pull off a musical like this
We needed three casts:
An “immigrant” cast
A “black” cast
And a “white” cast
Some members of the black cast
Both adults and kids
Came from the greater Bay Area
But others came from Mill Valley
I don’t know where the hell we found them
But somehow we did
We also needed guns
Fake guns, of course
This was musical theater
Not a theater of war
See what I did there?
So anyway our guns—
Theater guns
Some revolvers
Some rifles
They were vintage
And fake
Of course
But they were also kinda
Real-looking
One day the director
She sat everyone down
And gave us a very serious talk
About only using the guns—
Theater guns
In the theater
And only on stage
During rehearsals and performances
This had me wondering
Because very few things in theater are serious
But this sounded serious
Did some “well-meaning” white person
Wander past the theater
And notice a kid in the black cast?
With a gun—
A theater gun
Way more irony than I can stand
To have a police shooting
During the making of a musical about racism
Weeks later somebody spray-painted
Some KKK-related garbage
On a small building down the street
White people clutched their pearls
And said Not in Mill Valley
But until the police stop
Relentlessly provoking and killing black people
And proving
Again and again
That black lives don’t matter
This will continue to be an issue
In Mill Valley
And everywhere
Walking to rehearsal one evening
I noticed Theodosia wiping down tables
Sporting new purple streaks in her hair
My gaze lingered an instant too long
She frowned at me
Very much in character
Then I passed a parked Prius
Informally the official vehicle of Mill Valley
The paint was dinged up and worn
But the bumper stickers intact:
C O E X I S T
You know—
The blue one with all the religious symbols
And another with a raised black fist
This was exactly the kind of person
Who would probably call 911 on a black kid—
With a theater gun
And this is what makes me want to smash my fist
On the Hollywood set
On the little model railroad town
Watch the little fake houses and stores and trees snap
As they peel up remnants of the fake asphalt
Because the Prius driver would never identify as a racist
On the surface they would deny it
They’ve got the bumper stickers to prove it!
But their racism doesn’t live on the surface—
Like a bumper sticker
It’s buried deep within
And sometimes it has a way
Of sneaking through
Do we have to have our own real police shooting
Our own dead black kid
Right here in model train town
For it to be an issue of local importance?
Though I loved Mill Valley
With its quirky cast of characters
I didn’t like this plot development
Not in the slightest
So I’d end up living in Mill Valley
For another eighteen months after Ragtime, The Musical
So much of that in the thick of coronavirus
To keep everyone safe
We played apartment trading games
Quarantining with my teenage daughter
In El Paseo
Or sometimes it was just us
Oh and the cat we were hiding there
For months!
Keeping the cat litter
And empty food cans
In separate trash bags
And sneaking out late at night
To deposit cat trash in the dumpster
Behind the nameless hair salon
So Denis—
The dumpster-diving landlord
Wouldn’t suspect anything
We did such a good job
That not even Jason the bartender found out
And he knew everything
Plus he lived next door
A paper-thin wall separating our apartments
And my bathroom window opened
Right onto his patio
(Don’t ask why)
(Because nobody knows)
And before COVID canceled love and everything
People would get married
It seemed like every weekend
At the Outdoor Art Club
Across the street
One time I even recognized the music
Cosmo Alley Cats, a San Francisco swing band
From the comfort of my postage-stamp-sized living room
And then there was the time I helped Kecia
By climbing over a railing
And down an embankment
To fish fallen orchid stems out of the arroyo
And the time a woman at the market
Asked me to help her get basil off the shelf
But wouldn’t accept the basil I had right there in my hand
And the time a guy tried to pick me up
At the bar of Tyler Florence’s old restaurant—
In El Paseo
But I acted straight
And it was hard to watch
(Most guys really need to learn how to flirt)
And the time I asked the metermaid
If moving violations
Were within her jurisdiction
To stop her from yelling at my ex-wife
Perhaps an unlawful u-turn was involved
But that wasn’t my point
And those times I slipped out
Through the El Paseo tunnel
The careful art of triangulating
Between the elementary school
The restaurants
And the homes
So I could smoke a half a joint
Without getting dirty looks—
Or even actual aggression
Damn you Mill Valley!
The little model railroad town
That won over the train-loving kid in me
The Hollywood set
Where I learned to love community theater
I love you still Mill Valley
Because of you
And in spite of you
In some ways you need to change
And change is coming
Whether you’re ready for it or not
But in some other ways—
Some important and curious ways
I hope you’ll always stay the same
