A week or so ago, I found myself at lunch outside the Transamerica Pyramid, and I decided, out of that weird mix of whimsy and nihilism that I seem to have so often these days, to go inside.

I've worked two and a half blocks from the Transamerica Pyramid for five + years, off and on (much more on than off, I should add).  During that time, up until this point that I'm talking about, I had gone in exactly -- 0 times.

The pyramid alternately freaks me out and pisses me off.  It, after the Golden Gate Bridge, is probably the universal signifier for San Francisco.  And it's never The Pyramid.  It's the Transamerica Pyramid.  The Transamerica company gets free advertising with every postcard, every car ad, every stock photo reference that uses the pyramid in it.  That's a helluva lot of free advertising.

Also, the pyramids, brilliant and awesome designs that they are, are the palaces of the afterlife for kings as built by their slaves.  While this may add a certain subliminal charm to Transamerica's various retirement packages they offer bank customers, I find it a little bit -- icky.  Yes, that's the word.  Icky.

There were a couple of seminal events that made me decide that I wanted to move to San Francisco way back when.  The only one that still comes to mind again and again is a book I read back in high school, Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber. Our Lady of Darkness is a horror novel about a down-and-out writer living in San Francisco that is researching an idea that certain cities can achieve sentience.  Of course, the deeper the writer digs, the more it seems that the city most likely to achieve sentience is San Francisco.  And the event that really brings it into life is the completion of the Transamerica Pyramid.

Our Lady of Darkness is both a brilliant book and a really boring, flawed one.  It has wonderfully creepy moments (great moment when the narrator hikes up into the spooky park of Corona Heights and uses a telescope to check out his neighborhood.  When, on a lark, he looks to see if he can see his apartment window, he finds that he can kind of see into his apartment and it almost -- sort of -- looks like there is someone moving around in it.) and a lot of dull ones (the protagonist, who seems like a thinly disguised version of Leiber, spends a lot of time rubbing his hands over the much younger woman that's he having a relationship with) but the book summoned up such a feeling of mystery about the place that I decided it was where I wanted to go.

San Francisco, bless it, has lived up to that feeling more than a few times.  But, despite having tried to conjure up the feeling a few times (why else would I wander along the remains of the Sutro Baths late at night?), I've always avoided the Transamerica Pyramid.

I just felt it was bad juju, basically.  Everyone knows about how prominently the pyramid figures into various spell-like and magical stuff, and, heck, I don't know.  You know, I can't remember if it's on the cover of the Leiber book, but I've just never shrugged off the idea of this big old eye up there, looking down on everyone. Brrr...  I've worked up the nerve to eat in the little park to the side of it, but that place is kind of creepy, too.  There's these fountains that are in the gaps of the stone tiles on the ground, like the earth had fallen apart in that section, and there's this hideous bronze sculpture of a bunch of kids playing.  The kids have all joined hands and they're sort of leaping up in the air, skipping or something, with these grotesquely real expressions of soulless mirth on them.  When they invent the fourth-dimensional atom bomb, the one that explodes in the fourth dimension and sends shockwaves throughout our three, our bodies will leave weird 3-D equivalents of the shadows at Hiroshima, and they'll look like these sculptures.  3-D Hiroshima shadowburns, captured in the air.

So, as I said, a week or two, ago, I'm outside the Transamerica Pyramid, feeling that weird way that I've been feeling lately.  So I go in.  I walk around, having no idea what I'm looking for or why. I'm just looking to look.  I'm just looking because I sort of want to.  I notice that there are a lot of security people around, so I'm trying to look purposeful so I don't get hassled (even though, for a white guy like me, "hassle" means someone going, "excuse me, sir, can I help you find something?")  I see a sign that says, "Sorry.  No unauthorized visitors are allowed to visit our upper floors.  For your convenience, this way to the virtual observation deck."

Huh.  Typical Gen X'er that I am, I'm pulled by the word "virtual."  So I follow the arrows and end up on the opposite side of the building, in this sort of lobby/kiosk thingy, and in front of me are four different color monitors and a blaring tv off to the side.  Each of the four monitors has a control panel with a series of red buttons.  I walk up to the nearest monitor and control panel.  The pyramid people have put high power video cameras on each side of the roof.  With the control panel, you can swivel up and down from side to side and zoom in and out on each of the different views of San Francisco.  The blaring tv blasts two Transamerica commercials over and over and over.  Each one runs about thirty seconds.

I, of course, am in love with the cameras.  I start making them swivel down as far as they can go, up as far as they can go.  I zoom down into the park in Chinatown and watch tiny people move back and forth.  If I swivel the camera from side to side, I can watch someone make their way across the park.  I try and follow them as they move across the street into a building.  They disappear from sight and I swivel the camera from side to side, trying to find someone else interesting to follow.

There's a lot of people who come and check out a monitor.  Some seem to have some sort of fetish for a particular view.  One guy frames and reframes Coit Tower so that it fills up as much of the monitor as possible.  Another guy likes to move the camera up and back to give the most abstract view of the cityscape.  Everything is still in his monitor.

Me, I'm zooming forward and back, up and down.  I find that by swiveling the camera up while zooming in, it feels like I'm flying in close to the roofs, all of which are these strange territories of geometric frames filled with a random hodgepodge of blacktop, piping, vents.  Trying to follow people as they make their way through Chinatown, I realize that angels must be very good at recognizing people by the tops of their heads.  It's a hard skill to master.

And I'm enjoying all this  -- a lot -- and the time goes by, and I must hear the same two commercials for Transamerica over and over again, one of which is the most hideous ad chestnut of all, the little kid and the Grandpa having a discussion.

Kid:  Grandpa, what is retirement?

Grandpa:  Retirement is just another way of living.  It's a way of doing a bunch of things.

Kid:  Like what?

Grandpa:  Like doing chores for your grandma.  And taking little boys fishing.

Kid:  What does it take to retire?

Grandpa:  Not much.  A little bit of planning.  And someone you want to spend time with.

Announcer:  Here at Transamerica, blah, blah, blah.......

Argh.  Nonetheless, I am hooked into this completely free voyeuristic experience, I keep tilting up, trying to see into windows, or just follow the tangles of broken banners across Chinatown roofs, discarded and unwatched after Chinese New Year celebrations ended. Or moving over to the other monitor and watching someone furtively leave the Lusty Lady and cut across Columbus, up and into City Lights bookstore.  Typical s.f. intellectual, I would say.

So I leave, kind of lightened and glad I went in.  I'm strolling merrily back to the office when it hits me.  The eye in the pyramid, watching over everyone. It exists. In fact, I realize with a low-key sort of nausea, I was it for a little while.  I can't help but wonder, was it planned?  Did some group of odd and unknown men cook up a solution to all those pesky visitors who wanted to see the view from the top?  Did one of them realize after the fact that the solution would allow people to become disembodied voyeurs, watching over the city?  Did they ever feel, the way that I did at that moment, as they made their way through the city that there was an eye watching them?

If you ever get the chance, and you have some time to kill, be warned.  There's a little room where you can listen to a grandfather endlessly snow his grandson, where four monitors look out of every corner of the city.  If you have the time, and the inclination, you can float in the sky and look down below.  You can follow up the paths of the pedestrians, the progress of the autos, the abandoned skins of rooftop banners shifting in the winds.  But there's a price that you might be paying, that I might have paid, beyond being able to recite commercials by heart.  I can't help but feeling that I have in some way participated in a ceremony or a symbology that perhaps I shouldn't have, perhaps in no way more sinister than happily letting a corporation turn me into a disembodied eye spying briefly on fellow citizens, perhaps in no way more horrible than giving myself, despite my earlier feelings, so easily up to them.
 

Email me at groder@red.org

All material on these pages (with the exception of the book photo) is © 1997, 2000 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.