By Joe Canas

My life was profoundly influenced by my childhood home. Its qualities, and my family's actions while we lived there, determined who I grew up to be.

My family moved to San Francisco when I was five. After nine months in our first city apartment, we relocated to a safer, roomier Russian Hill flat half a mile away, where we lived for the next 15 years. We moved in to the ground floor flat of a four-story building. Our first evening there, May 25, 1969, my mother burst into tears because the place was so unattractive. There was plenty of space -- a bedroom apiece for my mom, my aunt and me, a huge kitchen and living room, a foyer, a storage room, all connected by thirty feet of hallway. But it took Mom weeks to believe that her decorating abilities could ever make our new apartment feel like home.

Decorating

We plastered the kitchen with simulated wood grain contact paper, which helped darken an already not-bright room. We fell into the '70s country-style decorating trap -- ferns, little oak tables, seashell mobile sculptures -- as did so many innocent families, but we also remained true to the '60s. Mom made maroon velvet bean bag pillows which we pretended were a considerable advancement over a sofa. We had lots of Greek and Persian and Indian statues and pictures everywhere -- Mom wanted to be from some more exotic culture. We also listened to music from around the world, and burned incense, and hung beads in doorways.

Mom affixed 50 or 60 photographs to a cork bulletin board on the inside door of the "half-bath", also known as the "toilet room". Whenever anyone went in there to rest a spell, they were cheered on by dozens of happy faces -- family, friends and strangers in snapshots, polaroids, school photos, baby photos, hamster and turtle and kitty photos, arcade photo booth strips, magazine celebrity cut-outs. In time, everyone we knew would send us material for the bulletin board -- jokes, stories, scratch-n-sniff stickers, and especially postcards. When people came to visit, they'd often remark with delight that their contributions were on the wall in the toilet room.

Mom eventually turned the hallway into a picture frame museum. Big frames, little frames, even tiny frames with one-inch square photo cutouts, hung no more than ten inches apart down both sides of the entire 30-foot hallway. Because everything was so close together, none of the pictures stood out. Going to the kitchen was like running some sort of art gallery gauntlet.

Bugs

The building had cockroaches. We talked with enough other city-dwellers to trust that ours was not a unique problem, and that once a building had roaches, all you could do was try to keep the population down. Though the roaches were disgusting and ubiquitous, we got used to them. We were only really conscious of and embarrassed by our bugs when we had company. Whenever we'd turn on the oven, the roaches inside would congregate on the outer oven door, waiting for this untimely annoyance to pass. They reminded me of workers milling about the exterior of an office building during a fire drill: "Any new projects, Stan?" "Well, these days I'm pretty busy with that mac and cheese box in the left cupboard." We dispatched the bugs by mashing them with a potholder. This was no challenge at all, unless one was cooking for company. The trick then was to keep the guests in another room while you cooked. Within five minutes of turning on the oven, it was all ashore that are going ashore, and the race was on to smoosh all the momma, poppa and baby cockroaches hanging out on the oven door before the guests unwittingly sauntered in. In effect, the guests were more annoying than the cockroaches.

Family

Now, this was my home for 15 years. That means it was the backdrop for almost all of my memories of family and growing up. When my aunt was pregnant with my cousin, she waddled around that apartment. Her manic depressive boyfriend threw a fit in our kitchen and broke a window, then sobbed because he hadn't meant to do it. When I first saw my cousin fresh from the hospital a few months later, I remarked that he was no bigger than a shrimp, and that's what we all called him for years afterward. When my Mom began dating Kirti, they would fool around on those infernal bean bag pillows in the living room, with the soundtrack to "A Man and a Woman" playing over and over on the hi-fi. A few months later when Kirti moved in, Mom encouraged me to consider him my dad. "Father" and "Dad" were too literary and alien, so I began calling him "Pa," which is how Mom still refers to him even now.

After Aunt and Shrimp left the city to live with Gram, they would all return for our many family get-togethers. Gram would usually bring her gentleman friend, and occasionally Aunt would bring hers, if she had one. In the family photo album are a few tell-tale shots from these living room-based events: dazed adults with red eyes and bent grins surrounded by beer cans and stuffed ashtrays, with me somewhere in the background looking like a bored film critic.

When my Aunt reached her quarterly breaking points while living with Gram, she would call Mom and invite herself and Shrimp over for "a couple of days." Long before the fourth or fifth day, our own little family was conspiratorially complaining and making rude facial gestures behind closed doorways: when would they leave? This is when I first realized that warring factions tend to join ranks to face a common enemy.

Daily Life

We used to joke that there was a force field at the front door preventing us from leaving home. It was difficult to get out the door to an appointment without doubling back for one more remembered item. We had to carry our laundry to a laundromat a block away, and often a designated laundry day would slip by, the pillowcases stuffed with dirty clothes and towels sitting in the hall. We'd negotiate around the giant sacks for days, until finally some collective mental gate clicked open and we'd each grab one and head out the door with our roll of quarters. It might just have been that we were a family of procrastinators, but I find it more charming to imagine that our home was possessed by the ghosts of tardiness and inertia.

Since I lived there for so long, it seemed natural for the apartment to become a part of my life. I took for granted the nature of the walls, the floor, the windows. I ended up using that place as I would an appliance. We had a central heating vent in the middle of our hallway floor, which served double duty as a hair dryer. For years, part of my showering ritual consisted of grabbing a hair brush and lying down in the hallway with my wet head over the heating vent. I'd brush and fluff my hair into a reasonable '70s style, something close to David or Shaun Cassidy, that decade's role models for teenagers. Mom and Pa did this as well, and every week or so, one of us would have to remove the grate to fetch all the hair that had fallen inside and begun to burn.

My parents drank and fought, and in essence lost the best years of their lives in that apartment. I've since discovered that mine is a fairly common experience, that one's parents are often a raging disappointment, sometimes two disappointments in orbit around each other. But during that long stretch of time before adulthood, I felt I'd gotten a uniquely crappy deal. I can easily recall the many sounds of combat: Mom and Pa talking, arguing and finally screaming in that weird dialect of sloppy, drunken English; Pa and Mom running down the hallway in pursuit of each other; Mom slapping and struggling against Pa until he knocked her down; the increasingly frequent sound of Mom rattling the kitchen cutlery drawer for a steak knife to use to fend off Pa; Mom and Pa struggling until she at last managed to lock herself safely into the guest bedroom, with Pa screaming at her from the other side of the door. After a while, Pa would retreat to their bedroom and pass out, and Mom would hide in the guest room and sing along with Middle Eastern records until she passed out at dawn. I preferred to think the place was haunted by drinkin' and fightin' ghosts, though I was well aware that this was just the curse of chemistry working away at Mom and Pa.

Sunday Walks

During our first year in that home, when I was six, I began taking my Sunday walks. I just decided one beautiful Sunday that I wanted to go walking and exploring, alone. My Mom let me, though my Aunt diagnosed her as out of her mind. And nearly every Sunday thereafter, I would make my simple preparations and head out the door, announcing to one and all, "I'm going on my Sunday walk." I discovered all the quaint Russian Hill side streets which likely charmed adults. I ventured regularly to "Spy Park" about a mile away, where I'd scurry and amble for hours. I'd stare at the skyline, study people, whistle and skip. This was the vital counterpart to my life in my room alone with my toys. Many years later, Mom remarked that she could tell it was something I just had to do, that I had an independent streak and needed this time to go discovering, and that she knew I'd be okay. I just needed to get out of the house to feel more at home walking through the neighborhood.

Traveling

We went on three family vacations during my entire childhood. One trip to Mendocino. Two trips to the minute town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. We enjoyed Carmel so much the first time that we returned a few years later to further explore its many subtleties. I might as well count the numerous trips we made to Gram's house 45 miles away as family vacations, since those are the only other times we left home en masse for more than a day. We traveled so rarely because Mom suffers from terrible motion sickness. She can ride in a car at 20 miles per hour without doubling up from vertigo, but buses, planes, trains and boats are out of the question. Before she quit drinking, alcohol helped her travel more easily. But then Mom was plastered during the entire trip, and despite Pa's stern warnings not to drink any more than was necessary to make the trip, she'd invariably continue after we'd reached our destination. Pa would begin drinking upon arrival, quickly catch up to Mom, and they'd proceed with their alcoholic road show while I retreated to whatever neutral zone was available and began looking forward to going home.

Travel, in the only form available to us, was extremely difficult for all concerned, so we endured it as seldom as possible. Even now, I'm still an uneasy traveler, no matter what the circumstances. I sometimes wonder if I'm expecting the trip at hand to go the way of those family vacations and devolve into chaos.

New York

From the age of 13 on, I was obsessed with New York City. I soaked up every nuance of each Kojak episode -- "who loves ya, baby?" I studied the scenery behind the opening and closing credits of The Jeffersons ("movin' on up") and Welcome Back, Kotter ("that same old place that you laughed about"), watched Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night Fever for all the location shots. I subscribed to New York Magazine. Long before The New York Times went national, I regularly visited the few specialty hometown newsstands to pay the premium rate for a Sunday edition. I ate bagels and lox, drank Dr. Brown's Cream Soda, even ordered these things with my well-practiced New York accent. I felt urban; after all those childhood Sundays walking through San Francisco, the concept of "city" spoke to me. But I wanted the best city, the most urban city. I wanted to be from New York, though it was too late for that. Somehow I figured that I was meant to have sprung from Manhattan, and that this San Francisco nonsense was a freakish accident; my real home, I reasoned, was over there.

I still remember at 18 coming home from my trip to New York, the one I'd plotted and planned for years. The power was out; Mom kept offering fudge brownies which she'd made the day before. Mom and Pa were on good terms, which surprised me. Just two days earlier, I had been on the phone with Mom, ho was crying while Pa tormented her from offstage. It sounded so bad that I had even considered returning home a day early. Mind you, for years afterward, I regretted ever leaving New York -- had I only stayed there for good, I reasoned, so much of my life would have perked right up. But it was always easier for me to rush home rather than to flee.

Redecorating

We always talked about leaving the apartment for something classier, another apartment rental or perhaps, someday, a house. However, we were locked in to rent at 1969 prices (the original $135 per month rose in sporadic increments to $210), and were reluctant to leave. So in the early '80s, to revitalize our home, Mom decided to redecorate. She went to town. She picked out paint, carpets, wallpaper, mirrored tiles and furniture. We turned the living room into a gold and copper ballroom; her room became a rose bedchamber; the guest room, which was really our stereo room and which for some reason we always called "the blue room," finally became a blue room; for my room, I chose blue carpet, periwinkle paint, orange levelor blinds, and maroon bedding. Though Pa had officially moved out, he was over nearly every day while he and my Mom slowly dragged their separation through the brambles. He and I bonded slightly by joining forces to redecorate. We spackled the peeling, pitted ceilings, painted all the rooms (non-bedrooms were painted "eggshell"), laid the padding and carpeting, applied the wallpaper and the pale smoked-salmon colored mirror tiles.

The landlord agreed to pay for the paint, as long as we did the work. But we paid for everything else. It took a year, planning, shopping, laboring, stopping for a bout with the flu. But when it was all done, the place looked absolutely smashing. After the headache of having ladders and paint cans and newspapers underfoot for a year, this was a shock. We felt like royalty, and were proud of our new old home, amazed that it could ever look so good.

Leaving

Sometime in the ensuing year, the landlord, Tommy, stopped in to let us know about an upcoming fire inspection. He looked around, stunned. His eyes got just a little bigger as he wandered through the apartment, quietly taking it all in. "Looks very nice," he said, on his way out the door. Then, a couple of weeks later, he gave us a 90-day eviction notice. The official story was that his father was coming over from the old country and needed a place to stay. But we knew that when Tommy had said "looks very nice," he must have been thinking, "looks like I could get a lot more rent for this place."

My Mom and I switched into combat mode and went on excruciating apartment-hunting outings, during which she would delay leaving until late in the afternoon, look at one or two apartments and then declare she needed her coffee and chocolate break. This was her way of dealing with the stress and anger, and the looming reality of much higher rent for much smaller accommodations.

"You've got a case," our attorney told us, before we moved out, "as long as you don't deface anything. Although you'd probably like to vandalize the apartment and burn your landlord, it will go much better for you if..." We winced, because it would have been grand to have scattered rotting fish and cat turds and black paint everywhere, yet the promise of recouping any of the money invested in the redecoration hinged on our politely packing up and handing over the keys. No revenge allowed.

Well, the lawsuit never panned out. The landlord had agreed to pay for the paint, and we had agreed to do the work. That was the extent of our verbal agreement. There was no way to prove that he wanted to bring new tenants in at a higher rent. "And really, landlords do this all the time," our attorney told us, after we'd moved out.

Returning

I dreamed about that place for years after we left, and occasionally still do. During the first few years, all I had to do was walk or drive past the old neighborhood to trigger a dream that night. In the dreams, I always feel as though I am intruding. I'm returning to a place I've been forbidden to revisit. The dreams are exercises in stealth -- can I sneak back into my old apartment and live there without the landlord or the new tenants finding out? For some reason, I have no choice but to live in this place in secret, darting in and out unseen.

I'm amazed, even within the dreams, how little things have changed. The layout of the apartment is always fairly accurate. All that's missing is our stuff, but even then there are discrepancies. Sometimes, we've left everything behind, and this is the incentive in these dreams to return, to at least shepherd our possessions to safety before the landlord or the current inhabitants discover we're back. Occasionally, the apartment is in disrepair, with paint cans and plaster everywhere, and this is why we're able to sneak back in, because the place is between tenants.

The network of dark scary rooms beneath our first-floor flat always chilled me, even in my late teens. I could easily picture piles of bodies, sequestered ax-murderers, pointy-headed killer dwarves hiding down there, and in the dreams, the downstairs labyrinth often becomes a much larger world. What in reality was the tradesman entrance, trash area, metering and storage rooms becomes in these dreams a subterranean village. Several times, it's my only place to hide from the evil landlord, after executing a neat half-gainer from the living room window to the fence and the concrete below and darting into one of the storage rooms packed with old newspapers and paint cans.

These dreams remind me of the unfairness of it all. Not just being evicted, but being trapped there all those years before finally receiving the gift of eviction. Had I moved to New York, had I moved even one neighborhood away, I could have left so much sooner. But I stayed, because it was home.

Home at Last

The other day, my wife studied a map of San Francisco while I recited from memory all the streets in the northeast corner -- north-to-south and east-to-west. I'm a part of the city, yet now, living less than 25 miles away, I'm still stunned when I return. I'm too aware of noise, litter, bad roads and beggars. But I'm also aware of so many stretches of pavement, doorways, street signs, sudden panoramas which boggle visitors from around the world but which merely ring the bell of familiarity in me. I'm stuck with the city as a home, and even more shocking, I'm stuck with the memories of my own youth. I wanted to trade one city for another, one home for another, and if at all possible, one set of parents for another -- or none. But luckily, all that I was issued served its purpose. I still managed to grow up. Leaving home meant leaving childhood and accepting my ability to create a safe haven somewhere else in the world. And though many years passed before I had the strength of character to do so, at last I was able to make a home where I could feel at home.