When I moved to San Francisco, I got an apartment in a small building in North Beach.
The ground floor was the garage, the second floor was mine, and on the top floor were a couple of German engineers who worked at Salesforce. My apartment didn’t see much other than the basketball court across the street, but the roof deck had a pretty cool view of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Fisherman’s Wharf.
After a few months, I was still only half moved into the apartment. My Menlo Park startup had recently crashed, and all I had to show for it were five banker boxes of files I was required by the IRS to keep for seven years as a badge of failure. I put them in the garage, along with all my old computers — I didn’t need them anymore but couldn’t yet persuade myself to dump them.
Adding to that insult, I was newly separated, and my furniture was all the crappy stuff Jen didn’t want. More specifically, it was the furniture I owned when I had met her 20 years earlier, now given back as a parting gift. Otherwise, most of my stuff was still at Jen’s until I could get settled.
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Still, I loved my new affordable and roomy apartment. It even had parking.
I often hauled down to Santa Cruz to see my kids. Jen had a boyfriend she was anxious to see, so she was okay letting me stay in the house to parent.
I was also starting to date, and as summer rolled in, I had just connected with a yoga instructor, Katie. We had talked on the phone a few times and finally agreed to meet in person. I invited her over for a Fourth of July barbecue that the guys upstairs were having on our roof deck.
The morning of the fourth, my ex called; Jonah, our 11-year-old son, was sick, and Jen had planned to be out for the day.
After a debate about our priorities, I was persuaded to bail on my city agenda and get down to Santa Cruz for the night. I called Katie, and we postponed until the next day. She was sweetly understanding.
My phone rang in the middle of the night. There’s some folk wisdom that suggests nothing good comes from 3 a.m. phone calls. It was my upstairs neighbor Sebastian.
“Are you in there?” he asked frantically.
“Am I in where? Am I in the apartment? No, I’m in Santa Cruz. Why?”
Sebastian was out of breath, and I could hear an alarm. “The building is on fire. And the firemen just broke down your door to rescue you. I’m glad you’re not there. Oh my god, oh my god…”
I sat up in the dark and could feel my heart pounding in my neck. I couldn’t just leave. And if I did, it was still an hour and a half away. I connected with Jen about getting back to the house. She arrived at first light, and I jumped in the car and headed north.
I pulled up to see faint smoke still wafting from openings around the building. Sebastian was a wreck, standing in the street, freaking out about his insurance.
The garage doors were open, and I could see that the area where I usually parked my car was piled with smoldering rubble. Sebastian’s new BMW was next to my spot, but it had melted to the ground — all the nonmetallic parts were gone, and it sat on the concrete, a weird shell that reminded me of the Terminator in the last scenes, where its biology was gone and just metal remained.
A group of firemen stood around his denuded BMW, casually talking. They let me walk through the building with them to assess the damage.
It took only a few minutes for me to be smudged in soot. The air was gross with burnt rubber. The banker boxes from the startup were in a soggy pile in the street, along with what seemed to be my blackened furniture and books.
Apparently, after the party, Sebastian had put the ashes from the barbecue grill in the trash can in the garage. The fire started there and then coiled up the stairway in the middle of the building like a chimney.
The trash can lid was literally embossed with the words “Do not put hot ashes in trash can,” which I can only imagine Sebastian missed.
My crappy furniture was destroyed. The files from the failed startup were, too. I lost random personal items. Some things, like ceramics and travel souvenirs, were salvageable, albeit a little broken and burned, which I thought was sorta cool. It added to their character.
I realized all of it felt like catharsis. All the shit from the prior year — the failed business, the separation — was wiped clean in a single night.
A car pulled up to the address. It was Katie. I had forgotten to move our date again, and now she was standing here to meet me.
“This is my apartment,” I said. “It was nicer before.”
“That’s what they all say,” she smiled.
I moved back in with Jen for the rest of the summer, but the series of lousy events in my life was weighing heavily, apartment hunting was depressing, and being home again wasn’t helping.
I had lived in the building for only five months, but I loved the neighborhood. Unfortunately, rental prices were already going up, and everything I looked at in the same price range was vastly inferior — smaller, sketchy, no parking or laundry. And the idea of paying more when I was out of work was gut-wrenching.
It started to make me angrier about the fire and grumpy about these misfortunes. If I got a lousy apartment, it would be a daily reminder of my life spinning downward. It would be one more step in a series of horrible negative turns.
After shopping around for a few months, though, I had an epiphany: I rationalized that if I got a place that was inspiring, then every day I’d appreciate my good fortune. And the fire wouldn’t be some horrible event, but rather the pivot when all the horrible stuff ended and the good stuff began. If it hadn’t been for the fire, I wouldn’t be here.
The fire itself was neither good nor bad — it was my response to it that defined its nature. I believe I was living a Zen koan.
And that’s when I found Sonoma Street, a third-story walk-up on a hill. I stumbled into a large living room with hardwood floors and gorgeous light. Oh, hell, and a view.
I didn’t even walk into the rest of the apartment before stopping in my tracks and declaring I’d take it.
In September 2011, when I moved in, I was embarrassed to tell people how much I paid for rent — it seemed like too much for a single guy’s apartment.
Just a few years later, however, I was embarrassed to tell people how little I paid for such a great place. Market rates had increased so much in San Francisco that my rent-controlled apartment was a bargain. Funny shift.
My son always felt I owed him big-time. He’d remind me that if it wasn’t for him getting sick, I’d have lost not only the apartment but also my car, and it seemed to him like I owed him a car. He brought this up again when he turned 18.
A year after moving into Sonoma Street, I had lost 40 pounds, I had a girlfriend (not Katie), and had landed a cool job at Adobe.
Even with so much out of our control, the decision to reward myself with the apartment reminds me that we have more power than we realize.
I stayed at Sonoma Street for the next nine years.
