SFX

GK: So how does a person know if you belong in San Francisco?

Well, let's say it's the second week of January and you're full of guilt (FN LOW PAIN), remembering how much you ate and drank over the holidays (FN MORE PAIN) and now you make yourself step onto the bathroom scale — (FN RESOLVE) you strip naked and take a deep breath and — (RATCHET GOES ON AND ON) the needle finally stops (BOINGGGG) and you force yourself to look down — (FN SHAME, SHAME CHORD) and you've gained weight.

TR (VOICE OF GOD): How could you—

SS (CONSCIENCE): Fool. Glutton. Idiot. Pig.

GK: You can't go on like this. You leave home (FN SOBBING) and you catch a westbound freight train (WHISTLE, FN RUNNING) and you hop up into an empty boxcar — empty except for a hobo named Dan— (TRAIN CLICKETY-CLICK)

TR (HOBO): Been on the road for twenty years. It all started one Christmas. I took a second helping of pecan pie. Somehow that opened up the floodgates. I started eating and couldn't stop. Started drinking, smoking, chewing, spitting, everything — now I'm a bum.
(BRIDGE)

GK: You ride all the way to San Francisco (SHIP'S HORN) and you arrive penniless in the city — and you start playing sitar in BART stations — (SITAR) and you pick up some spare change (FN: Thank you.....thanks, man.) and meanwhile you walk, trying to lose weight. Four days a week (SFX) 50 minutes per session, 17-minute-mile-pace (ACCEL), sustaining a heartrate of 110 (SFX), swinging little dumbbells (SFX), and pretty soon you start to look good. Really good.

SS: Hi. You don't know me but I saw you playing sitar in the BART station. I'm a photographer and I'm doing a big ad campaign for a new brand of men's briefs called PacMan and— well— you look like someone who'd look really really good in briefs.

FN: Wow.

GK: And you do the modeling — you, an English major, posing half-naked—

SS: (SHUTTER SNAPPING THROUGHOUT) Wow. Incredible. That's so great. Yeah. Like that. Oh, I like that. Oh wow. That's fantastic. Beautiful. (BRIDGE)

GK: And soon you have a penthouse apartment in the exclusive Inner Sunset neighborhood and every day you walk through Golden Gate Park — around the Botanical Gardens — (DUCKS, GEESE), and under the tall redwoods (SLIGHT CREAKING OF TREE) and the lilies and the Cloud Forest —people lying on the grass sunbathing, in long pants and fleece pullovers — people throwing Frisbees (“DUDE” FRISBEE FLIGHT) and a tour bus goes by (FN GUIDE ON P.A.“San Francisco's Golden Gate Park is bigger and better than New York's Central Park, to which it is often compared and always favorably.”). Some cyclists go by (SFX) in Che Guevara t-shirts and blue jeans with one leg rolled up, and U-shaped bicycle locks hanging from their belts — guerilla bicyclists (SFX), defiant, like bullfighters, daring motorists to hit them, taunting the drivers (TR: If it weren't for you and your car, we wouldn't be in Iraq!) and on you go to the Shakespeare Garden (FN TENOR SINGS: Where the bee sucks, there suck I. In a cowslip, I do lie.) and on to the Music Concourse, the giant band shell where the Grateful Dead once performed (GUITAR SOLO) and so did Luciano Pavarotti (TR TENOR) and today there's a banjo quartet (SFX) and there's the Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum (FN: The King Tut exhibit??? $39.00 for admission????) and there's a hot dog vendor in front of the museum —(FN: Get your chicken lemon bird dogs! Free-range chicken — no growth hormones — or we have the gourmet ketchup from vine-ripened organic tomatoes (SQUORT). You pass up the chicken dog —
GK: .... you walk down JFK drive (TRAFFIC) past the roller skaters (SFX), past the swing dancers (SFX), past the swing dancers on roller skates (SFX), over to Speedway Meadow and the little pond where people race their remote-controlled boats (SFX) and you wander south and west and there's — (FN: What????) it can't be— in the middle of the City? (FN: A bison—) — it looks like a bison — and your phone beeps (SFX) and it's your friend Kate texting you, asking if you want to get coffee, and you text her back (SFX, FN: You —won't—believe—this, but I'm in— Golden Gate— Park—and there is— a—) (BUFFALO BELLOW) and suddenly the ground shakes and a 2000-pound animal is galloping toward you and (FN: Feet, do your thing. RUNNING, PANTING, BUFFALO BELLOWING, GALLOPING) And you run and run and your heartbeat is right where you want it to be (HEART) and you fall (SFX) and get up as the buffalo lowers its horns (BELLOW AND RIP) and hooks your pants and now you're running through the park in just your underwear and you know something— it feels good (FN: YES YES YES) and that's how you know you belong in San Francisco.