Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2023 March 22 • Wednesday

Violet Blue's A Fish Has No Word for Water: A Punk Homeless San Francisco Memoir was a departure from our usual reading habits and an incredibly rewarding one.

The subtitle gives you an indication of what you might find inside but there's a lot more than you might expect. Whatever you think about teenage runaways, you're probably wrong unless you happened to be one yourself.

Certainly A Fish Has No Word for Water was an eye-opening and riveting account of an entire section humanity about whom I knew nothing, depite sharing the same streets and sidewalks with them. It's not a surprise at all to find out that Blue is also an investigative journalist.

The care she's taken to document and describe, sometimes dispassionately but often forcefully and from her as a real person with real feelings as opposed to an impartial observer and chronicler, is palpable throughout the book.

But what's most impressive is the high quality of her writing, a model of the power of economy, sacrificing nothing and gaining everything by using few words that have great impact. It's a model of authorial brilliance and control.

We always like to include the first line of a book. This one merits the whole first two paragaphs:
My mother was a hacker and Stanford engineering graduate. When I was a little girl, she worked as a radio signal jammer for a US government contractor in Silicon Valley. She was single, so she picked up a second job: negotiating the import and sale of cocaine from South America into the San Francisco Bay Area. My mother was a popular techie and she took me to all the parties. Her clients made sure I had all the games and computer equipment others only dreamed of. I spent my days as a ten-year-old cutting and packaging large amounts of coke and watching my mother and her tech-elite companions unravel, until someone got shot and then everything fell apart.

I began junior high school fresh out of federal witness protection. By my freshman year of high school, I was homeless and alone on the streets of San Francisco.

The story more or less starts here, dropping the reader into Blue's world, where she's just regained consciousness in a hospital after getting hit by a car.

Soon we meet her mother, get brought up to speed on various things that have happened so far, in step with Blue herself who is remembering them in a way that seems like an effect of concussion.

The steps to street life and a daily struggle to survive seem ienvitable as she takes them, and also seem to lead only in one direction.

Since this is the 1980s Blue is also an eyewitness to the effects of the AIDS epidemic and some inspiring people who worked to control some of the damage while the federal government was content, perhaps even pleased, to let it run its deadly course.

That she's alive today is a circumstance that seems pretty unlikely. And we're lucky that she gave the world this riveting and valuable book, easily one of the best we've ever read.

It's also inspiring and uplifting. The people from her story that stayed in mind after reading it were the good ones, the friends who became family, the strangers who became friends by virtue of merely being kind. The predators and manipulators simply aren't as strong and it's a relief, perhaps a luxury, to leave them behind.

Next time we go to San Francisco we'll be looking at it differently.