Sal and Remi’s life in San Francisco is the story of an improvised home that briefly promises creative work and companionship, then tightens into labor, dependence, and domestic conflict. In Mill City, a diverse wartime housing community, Sal shares Remi Boncoeur’s shack and tries first to write his way toward a Hollywood opportunity, then to earn a living as a barracks guard. The arrangement gives way to an increasingly volatile household, and Sal finally slips away while Remi and Lee Ann sleep; he and Remi are lost to each other.

Mill City and the Shack

Mill City is not the San Francisco of city streets so much as a settlement in a deep, wooded canyon: a collection of shacks originally built as housing for Navy Yard workers during the war, with project stores, barbershops, and tailors. The account describes it as the only American community where white and Black residents lived together voluntarily, and remembers it as unusually wild and joyous. That collective vitality forms the backdrop to Sal’s more intimate, increasingly difficult life in Remi’s shack.

Remi’s household is already marked by his appetite for improbable schemes and his unconventional resourcefulness. Sal finds him asleep with Lee Ann on a bed Remi had stolen from a merchant ship, an episode that encapsulates the practical audacity and comic excess Sal associates with him. The shack becomes both refuge and workplace: a place where Sal is expected to write, where Remi and Lee Ann’s relationship plays out, and where the narrator’s dependence on his hosts grows harder to ignore.

Writing, Hollywood, and the Guard’s Job

The original plan gives Sal a literary task and Remi an imagined route to wealth. Sal is to stay in the shack and write an original story for a Hollywood studio; Remi is to fly south with a harp, take Lee Ann along, and introduce her to his friend’s father, a famous director close to W. C. Fields. Sal spends the first week writing furiously, but his gloomy story about New York seems too sad for the intended purpose. Remi can barely read it and carries it to Hollywood anyway; Lee Ann, bored with the project and resentful of the men, does not bother to read it.

After rainy hours of coffee and writing, Sal admits that the story will not work and asks for a job. He has been relying on Remi and Lee Ann even for cigarettes, so the request marks a practical break with the fantasy that writing alone will support him. Remi arranges work like his own, guarding the barracks. Sal is sworn in by the local police chief and issued a badge and club; he needs navy-blue trousers to go with his black jacket and cap, and initially wears Remi’s ill-fitting pair. Because Remi is tall and potbellied, Sal flaps around at his first night shift like Charlie Chaplin. Remi also gives him a flashlight and his .32 automatic.

The job places the two men among colleagues Sal regards as eager to make arrests and win praise from the chief, unlike himself and Remi, whom he sees as trying simply to make a living. The guards are told that failing to make at least one arrest a month could cost them their jobs, a prospect that unsettles Sal. The account recalls one night when he is drunk along with the rest of the barracks, and the shift’s order gives way to disorder; at one point, someone urges him to have a drink, and he takes two.

A Shared Routine and Its Costs

The barracks cafeteria becomes a source of food as well as a workplace. Sal and Remi sneak in after checking that no one is watching, with Remi climbing through a window he makes sure is left unlocked in the evenings. He scrambles onto the flour table; Sal follows, jumping and crawling inside. At the soda fountain, Sal fulfills a childhood dream by plunging his hand wrist-deep into the chocolate ice cream and pulling out a skewer’s worth. They fill ice-cream boxes, add chocolate syrup and sometimes strawberries, and carry food away. The escapade is at once a lark and part of a household economy sustained by resourcefulness and taking what the workplace makes available.

That routine continues for ten weeks. Sal earns fifty-five dollars a week and sends his aunt an average of forty, leaving him with little room to build an independent life. In all that time, he spends only one evening in San Francisco proper. His days and nights are instead enclosed by the shack, the barracks, and Remi’s quarrels with Lee Ann. When he asks what they will do about moving on, the question registers how a temporary stop has become an almost total environment.

The hoped-for Hollywood venture fails to loosen that enclosure. Remi takes Lee Ann and Sal’s story to visit the famous director, but the director is drunk and pays them no attention. The couple linger at his Malibu Beach cottage, fight in front of other guests, and return without any success. The September rains arrive with more arguments, and the failure of the scheme intensifies the strain among the three people sharing the shack.

Domestic Crisis and Departure

The conflict culminates when Lee Ann, who says she lived in the place first, tells Remi to pack and leave. As Remi begins packing, Sal imagines being left alone in the rainy shack with Lee Ann and tries to intervene. Remi pushes her; she lunges for the gun. Remi hands it to Sal and tells him to hide it, with a clip of eight shells still in it. Lee Ann goes out through the mud in her raincoat to find a policeman, but the officer she seeks, Alcatraz, is not home. She returns soaked, while Sal retreats to a corner and crouches with his head between his knees. His fear turns inward: he questions what he is doing three thousand miles from home and why he came.

On the Saturday before he leaves, Sal has already quit his guard job, narrowly ahead of being fired for failing to make enough arrests. He has traveling money and gets drunk in the bar downstairs before joining Remi, Lee Ann, and Remi’s stepfather, a distinguished, tall man wearing pince-nez. Sal’s drunken French greeting confuses the older man and embarrasses Remi. Later Sal drinks heavily, talks to the doctor’s young wife, and repeatedly has to climb over the doctor’s lap to reach the men’s room. The evening makes the collapse social as well as economic: Sal feels that he has spoiled things with Remi, whom he genuinely loves, and expects Remi will never speak to him again.

In the morning, while Remi and Lee Ann sleep, Sal sees the pile of laundry he and Remi had been meant to wash in the Bendix machine behind the shack. He remembers the laundry as a formerly joyful, communal task, shared with the Black women and Mr. Snow laughing, and briefly resists leaving because he had promised himself he would climb the mountain on the canyon’s Pacific-facing side. But the promise does not restore the household. He quietly packs and slips out through the window with his canvas bag, leaving Mill City without spending the night aboard the old ghost ship Admiral Freebee. The departure ends the shared life in the shack; Sal says that he and Remi were lost to each other.

Meaning of the Episode

The Mill City stay gives Sal’s westward journey a domestic and economic counterpoint to its promise of open roads. The narrator arrives with an imagined writing opportunity, yet the Hollywood story proves unusable, the director ignores the visitors, and the work that sustains him is night guarding rather than literary success. Even that job is precarious: its rules demand arrests, while Sal and Remi understand themselves as workers trying to get by, and Sal ultimately leaves before he can be fired.

The episode’s turns are carried by ordinary objects and routines: borrowed trousers, a badge, a flashlight and pistol, an unlocked cafeteria window, stolen ice cream, a pile of laundry, and the canvas bag with which Sal departs. These details make the shack feel at once playful and confining. Mill City’s remembered communal joy contrasts with the arguments and dependence inside Remi’s household; the mountain Sal has promised to climb offers an unfinished route outward, but he leaves without completing that private pledge. What remains is not a successful partnership or a settled home, but the lasting consequence of separation from a friend he loved.