People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.” People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. “Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. Of her school friends, or the people she meets racing motorcycles in the Cabo 1000 or bartending in the Tenderloin, a scary number are now dead, including a young hustler who kept her company on slow afternoons at the Blue Lamp whose severed head was later found in a dumpster. “I am the one who lived to tell,” Kushner writes in the title essay - a memoir about growing up in a San Francisco where girls became strippers or cocktail waitresses and boys became skateboarders or skinheads, or worked as bouncers “in between prison stints.” Kushner and her friends are “ratty delinquents” who cut school to hang out in gambling parlors and head shops or with a Hare Krishna who may or may not be a singer for the Cro-Mags they sleep on the sidewalk outside the Oakland Coliseum to see the Clash, where they are given weed spiked with PCP by an unscrupulous adult: Partying with strangers “is what I spent a lot of my youth doing.” It’s territory covered glancingly by Joan Didion, but unlike Didion, Kushner is in the mosh pit, getting trampled. I was reminded of this Frenchwoman’s need to bear witness when reading Rachel Kushner’s collection of essays - not just because Kushner writes eloquently about being a girl who rides (and crashes) motorcycles, but because she keeps circling round this phenomenon of being the sole survivor of a scene, an era, a group of friends. She didn’t know if it was any good, she said, but she’d needed to write it because of all her gang of friends, she was the only one who was still alive. This woman, who now lives on a sheep farm with her partner and child, showed me a memoir she’d written about her hard-rocking youth. “You didn’t use the brakes? But I was just kidding!” I seem to remember that she smashed herself up and maybe the bike too, but she survived, and the guy was in awe.
The guy who lent her his motorcycle told her that the only way to make it down the icy hairpin bends to the bottom was never once to put your foot on the brake.
She was living up a mountain, it was dead-winter, and she needed to go down into the village for cigarettes. One story I’d heard involved her borrowing a motorcycle.
Not long ago I met a Frenchwoman legendary for her youthful wildness.
THE HARD CROWD Essays 2000-2020 By Rachel Kushner
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