1. First Impressions

1.1 I took a taxi from San Francisco airport to my hotel on Lombard Street. My taxi driver was a lady with electric blue streaks in her hair. She was a divorcee with eight grandchildren. She told me that she worked as a taxi driver to finance her studies. Having completed an MA in psychology a few years ago, she recently realised that her true vocation was painting, on account of her extraordinary sensitivity to colour. The car swerved dangerously as she rummaged around in her handbag for postcards of her paintings. I took my time looking through them, wassilating. Then I told her that they reminded me of Kandinsky. She was delighted. I don’t actually like Kandinsky all that much.

1.2 As we drove into the city I saw the mist cascading over the hills in the middle distance; beyond them lies the ocean. It was an impressive sight – a tsunami of cloud that plunged over the raised lip of earth before evaporating in ragged swirling tendrils.

1.3 On my first night I wandered down to Fisherman’s Wharf where my ‘school’ is. On the way back I stopped for a drink in a bar called ‘Dirty Martini’. A girl with a black eye sat down next to me. She explained that she had received the injury when she was mugged in front of her hotel – The Four Seasons – the night before. She went on to tell me that she came from a very old and wealthy family. Then she asked what I was doing in San Francisco. When I told her I had come here to train to become a clinical psychologist she replied that she had been a heroin addict and a self-harmer. Then she showed me her left forearm – it was a crisscross of livid scars and welts. I was tired, unenamoured and I wanted to go home. However, this was a dilemma: if I continued talking to the girl for too long I was in danger of giving the wrong impression, but if I left too soon or too abruptly I would presumably confirm the negative self image which had led to the self-harming in the first place. Eventually, finally, a suitable opportunity presented itself. I seized it gladly. As I wandered back to my hotel I wondered what I have let myself in for.

1.4 I have now moved into a hotel on Broad Street where the rooms only cost $150 a week. It is surrounded by strip clubs and within spitting distance of the City Lights bookstore. The narrow hotel corridors reek of marijuana at all times of day and night. There are some odd people slinking around, as well as a few cats (real cats). My room is tiny, about the size of the first room I ever had at school. That seems quite appropriate.

The City Lights bookstore, which was founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, was the country's first to specialise in paperbacks.

1.5 I was walking through Chinatown when I saw a mixed race gay couple pushing a young child in a buggy. They were both big muscular men. The white man crossed the road to have a closer look at a restaurant. His boyfriend remained with the buggy in front of a shop selling dried chicken’s feet which dangled behind him on strings. In a camp, petulant voice the black man shouted to his partner: ‘Ramon! Ramon! Do they have booze? If they don’t have booze I’m not going in.’