San Francisco, California holds two sharply different versions of Nic’s life: the city where his father searches for him among street kids and drug use, and the city of North Beach where father and son once shared ordinary pleasures. It is also a focal point in the book’s account of methamphetamine’s destructive arrival in the Haight-Ashbury. These layers make the city more than a setting: its streets hold both the remembered child and the missing young man, while its recent history gives a wider frame to the family’s crisis.

Methamphetamine and the Haight-Ashbury

Illicit methamphetamine laboratories appeared in San Francisco in 1962, as the illegal speed craze gathered force. Speed inundated the Haight-Ashbury and preceded the first national methamphetamine epidemic of the middle and late 1960s. David Smith, who founded the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, recalled the change in the neighborhood: earlier bad acid trips had seemed comparatively mellow, but meth sent young people to emergency rooms and some to the morgue. In his account, the drug ended the Summer of Love.

Smith’s work connected the neighborhood’s street crisis to medical observation. While still a student at the University of California Medical School, he began clinical research after the hospital emergency room started seeing overdoses from the new drug. In experiments, rats given small doses died in massive seizures; rats caged together died after smaller doses when meth altered their interpretation of ordinary grooming as an attack. The local danger was not presented as a passing disturbance: in 1967 Smith went down from Parnassus Hill to work in the community, and in 1968 he issued the original speed-kills warning.

The danger also took a social form in the Haight. At the Crystal Palace, users held meth shoot-offs, passing a needle around a circle. Smith received calls early in the morning about users who had become psychotic, and the shared needles contributed to a hepatitis C epidemic. The neighborhood’s history thus links methamphetamine’s effects on individual perception and behavior to the public consequences of injection and shared equipment.

A city searched for Nic

Years later, the narrator crosses the Golden Gate Bridge on a cool, overcast morning to look for Nic, despite recognizing that the search may be futile. He suspects Nic might appear in either the Haight or the Mission District and drives aimlessly through the Mission before parking on Ashbury and walking down Haight Street. He checks Amoeba, Nic’s preferred record store, as well as cafés and bookstores. The route is a father’s attempt to turn uncertainty into a set of places he can search; the city offers possible traces, but no assurance that Nic is there.

The Haight he walks through has changed through gentrification without losing its old funkiness. Runaways gather in doorways, and the narrator sees young people who are paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, and sometimes psychotic. Nic had once described the street scene as no longer being about peace and love, but about punk music, drugs, and idleness. Against the neighborhood’s romantic reputation, the narrator reads the visible damage as illness: children who would be in a hospital if their condition were any other disease are instead left on the streets. The search therefore becomes an encounter with a broader landscape of vulnerability, not simply a hunt for one missing son.

North Beach and the remembered child

San Francisco is also the place where the narrator raised Nic. For their planned meeting, Nic chooses Steps of Rome, a café on Columbus Avenue in North Beach. The setting brings back a childhood geography of familiar routes: Nic played in Washington Square opposite Saints Peter and Paul Church; father and son browsed City Lights and walked toward the wharf, where they watched the Human Jukebox play trumpet. They also crossed into Chinatown for vegetables and stopped at Caffe Trieste for coffee and hot chocolate.

The memories retain their particular, intimate details. At a sushi bar, Nic ordered tempura made only with orange vegetables; at Vanessi’s, the cooks knew his child-sized Caesar salad, ravioli triangolo, and zabaglione. He watched brandy flare in the pans, and believed the costumed women outside the Broadway strip clubs were superheroes patrolling North Beach. When he grew sleepy, his father carried him home with the child’s arms around his neck. These recollections make the present meeting place bear the weight of a former closeness: the café belongs to a city in which the father once knew Nic’s routines and could carry him home.

Place as memory and uncertainty

At Steps of Rome, the narrator waits nervously in a nearly empty café, with two waiters folding napkins at the bar. He hopes, however faintly, that meeting Nic might reach him, while recognizing that reason and love have not given him a way to do so. The remembered North Beach routes and the search through the Haight and Mission create a stark spatial contrast: one San Francisco is intimate and legible through childhood rituals; the other is a city of uncertain whereabouts, street exposure, and danger.

That contrast gives San Francisco its narrative force. The city does not resolve Nic’s absence or restore the earlier family life. Instead, familiar neighborhoods hold incompatible times at once: a boy carried home from North Beach, a young man who may be somewhere in the Haight, and a father moving between memory and a search whose outcome he cannot control.