Broadway is a circus tonight.

Joy leaves the dark trenches of her restaurant job and hikes up Montgomery Street.

The fog failed to arrive this afternoon, which means the last of the day’s sunny sky spills onto the streets, instantly lifting Joy’s dulled spirit.

It seems to have the same effect on the rest of the city as well, because people are out in hordes. Joy ponders the possibilities for her free night.

She corners Broadway and turns to look down its slope toward the Embarcadero and sees a blue sliver of the San Francisco Bay sparkling between two high-rises.

The beauty of the city sometimes takes her breath away – the urban landscape clinging to the sharply steep hills, beautiful pastel architecture, and the people – from all walks of life and every corner of the world. Joy faces them now as she turns back toward Broadway to begin her journey to the bus. She herself adds a unique flavor to the masses.

Joy relishes the energy on the street and feels no hurry to get home. She knows though that her boyfriend is anxiously awaiting her arrival, at which time they’ll both go out to drink up the city together.

An open doorway to a four-story building on Joy’s left stands out as a few young punk boys rush out of it laughing. She slows to see what’s going on inside.

It’s dark inside the door. There are narrow steps going up to a second floor. As Joy starts to go up, two girls dressed in gothic-style clothing with pale skin and jet-black hair trot down. They’re about the same age as Joy and inspect her out of the corners of their eyes as she slides past them.

Hypnotic sounds echo down the stairwell – loud sounds. Looking to the top of the steps Joy sees smoke swirls dancing in black light gleams.

She enters some kind of alternative club. It’s so expansive, it seems as if there are no walls, and the ceiling is at least two stories high. One wouldn’t imagine looking at the building from Broadway that it could contain such a space. But here it is – full of mesmerizing sounds and darkness everywhere. Curiosity sated, she turns to leave. Not today, she thinks. The day’s too beautiful for brooding.

Across the street an outdoor café bustles with patrons. The ambience is such that it gives one the feeling of being in nature with its lush landscaping and rich earth-tone colors.

In one corner, under a forest-green awning, sits a middle-aged couple, both golden haired and severely suntanned. The man is buried in the afternoon newspaper while the woman fingers her wine glass and watches passersby with pleading eyes, as if she’s anxious for someone to give her some attention.

Joy has dined at the spot before and wishes now that her boyfriend was with her so they could stop in for an afternoon aperitif.

Broadway also sits speckled with a few strip clubs, and one of them stands as a stark contrast beside the uber-trendy eatery. Two young haggard girls flank the outside wall doing all they can to entice men on the street to come inside and spend some time.

Joy often wonders what stories go on behind the tightly drawn window curtains, and on numerous walks home has found herself trying to sneak peeks inside the doors when patrons go in and come out.

It amazes her that these girls’ tawdry work lives are being played out in same vicinity as her mundane one in the restaurant she’d just come from less than a block away.

Joy approaches the intersection at Columbus, where she begins the last leg of her walk to the bus stop.

As she turns up the avenue, she’s immediately drawn to a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the wall of the corner establishment. He doesn’t appear to be soliciting for anything; he’s only focused on his cat, which is lying stretched out across his thighs.

He’s petting the cat as he moves his face nearer to it as if he were planning to kiss it. Joy lingers to the furthest stretches of the sidewalk to go around him, for as she gets closer, she realizes the cat is dead – and stiff. Its mouth is locked open, and the man is spitting his saliva into it.

Joy has never seen anything so strange and loses herself wondering what the man was trying to achieve with the spit. Reincarnation, she considers.

Her thoughts are intruded upon by the boisterous bellows of the Italian machismos working at an open-air coffee house. She receives daily greetings from these buff beauties, clad in brilliant white Oxfords against creamy dark skin. She smiles and says hello as she passes.

Once at the bus stop, Joy looks up a tilted narrow street into the thick of Chinatown and catches only a glimmer of the Stockton cresting the hill. She’s got a few minutes to kill so she sits on the curb and lights a cigarette.

Out of nowhere appears a craggy old woman, shrunken with age and seemingly shaking.

“What on earth are you doing sitting down there?” she asks Joy. “Don’t you know people vomit and urinate all over the curb?”

Joy shrugs, amused, and bites her lip to keep from smiling.

“It’s okay. I don’t see anything down here. I’ll make sure I wash my hands.”

This doesn’t seem to satisfy the woman. She shakes her head and scornfully says “Such a young girl – and look at you – sitting there in the gutter.” She then turns and walks away in disgust.

Joy’s relieved getting on the bus that it’s not too crowded, which at this time of day could very likely be. She grabs a seat; the one next to her is empty. She feels at great peace today. She sits thinking about the city – her beautiful city, her love, and this moment of time in her young life. There’s nowhere in the world she’d rather be.