There was a bar in the Lower Haight called the Midtown, and the first time I walked in I thought of the cantina scene in Star Wars. Not as a compliment exactly, not as a criticism either — just as a fact. Dark, loud, full of people who looked like they had stories and weren't necessarily interested in telling them to you. Tattoos and black clothing and cheap beer and the particular smell of a bar that had been a bar for a long time. If a seven-foot furry alien had sat down next to me I would have nodded and ordered him a round.
As it turned out, the guy sketching the aliens was already there.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This was the early 1990s. I was in college at the University of Nevada, Reno, which meant I was living in Reno, which meant I was living in a completely different universe from San Francisco even though they were barely four hours apart. Reno was open sky and sagebrush and the kind of place where you knew what you were going to do on a Saturday. SF was everything else.
I'd come over to see Zack.
Zack and I grew up together in Groveland, a small mountain town on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, the kind of place where your parents know your parents and the whole geography of your childhood fits inside a few square miles. We'd been best friends since we were kids. But somewhere along the way — the way these things happen without any single decision being made — we'd ended up in different worlds. I went the Tahoe direction, the outdoors direction, the Reno direction. Preppy might be too strong a word but it's not entirely wrong either. Zack went the other way. Punk rock, grunge, urban, SF. He didn't just move to the city, he became it. By the time I was flying down from Reno on weekend visits he was already fully fluent in a language I was still learning to hear.
Sometimes I'd fly. Sometimes I'd drive Highway 80 over the Sierra and down through Sacramento and across the Bay Bridge with the city rising up in front of me like a promise. Either way the transition was the same — you left one version of your life and entered another one, and the other one belonged to Zack.
He lived on Pierce Street. 424 Pierce. The apartment was everything the Midtown was, compressed into a living space — dark, full of personality, walls that had absorbed years of music and late nights. People came and went. Situations arose. Things happened in that apartment and in that city that I would never have encountered in Reno, not in a hundred years. I was a visitor in the best possible sense — wide-eyed enough to notice everything, trusted enough by Zack to be let in.
And the Midtown was where we went to drink.
Zack owned the pool table.
That's the only way to put it. He'd get on it early and he'd stay on it, running games, dispatching challengers, completely in his element. The pool table at a bar like the Midtown was its own social world — a rotating cast of characters would come up to play, some regulars, some strangers passing through, all of them carrying the particular energy of the Lower Haight in that era. Zack moved through all of it naturally, comfortable with everyone, fluent in the unspoken language of bar pool — when to talk, when to shut up, when to let a shot speak for itself. I'd watch him work the table and think: this is who he became. This city made him this person. Or maybe he always was this person and the city just gave him the room.
One of the characters we met that night — at the table or near it, the details blur the way details do after thirty years and considerable cheap beer — was trying to break into creature design at Lucasfilm. Not the guy who designed the aliens, not yet, but someone who wanted to be. The kind of person who carried a pen everywhere. The kind of person who saw the world in shapes that didn't quite exist.
He was sitting in this dark grunge bar that looked exactly like that cantina, and somewhere on the table, probably on a cocktail napkin, he was sketching things with limbs in the wrong places. You could imagine him getting there. You could imagine those sketches, refined just enough, ending up in the background of a scene you'd watch ten years later without ever knowing where they started.
Which is around when the argument began.
R2-D2 versus R5-D4. Not which one was better — everyone knew the answer to that. The question was more interesting and considerably more damning: did R2 deliberately sabotage R5 to make sure he was the one who went home with Luke?
Think about it. The Jawas pull up to the farm and they're selling droids and Uncle Owen picks R5, the red and white one, and then almost immediately R5 has a catastrophic motivator failure right there in the driveway. Very convenient. Owen pivots to R2 instead, R2 goes to the farm, R2 plays Leia's message, R2 sets the entire plot of Star Wars in motion. The rebellion is saved, the Death Star is destroyed, the Empire begins its long decline — all because one small droid had a bad motivator at exactly the right moment.
Was it an accident? Or was R2-D2 the coldest operator in the galaxy, a calculating little robot who saw his moment and took it, who bumped a competitor out of the picture with surgical precision and then played innocent for the next forty years of film franchise?
There was no way to settle it.
This was 1993. No phone to pull out, no way to look anything up, no canon beyond what you remembered and what you thought you remembered. No endless threads of strangers arguing the same point in slightly different ways. Just memory and conviction and how loud you were willing to be about it. The argument had no exit.
Zack had a position. Zack always had a position. In his city, in his bar, in his element — he held his opinions with the full confidence of someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility of being wrong. I don't remember exactly which side he landed on, only that he held it completely, the way he held the pool table, like it was already his and the question was just whether you understood that yet.
The aspiring creature designer may or may not have weighed in. I'd like to think he did. I'd like to think the guy sketching future aliens on a cocktail napkin had something to say about the moral character of the most famous droid in the galaxy. But the beer was cheap and plentiful and the night was loud and some details don't survive.
Thirty-some years later the answer is four seconds away. You could settle it before the next round arrives. You could stand at the bar, pull a phone out of your pocket, and collapse the entire argument into a screen. There are explanations now, deeper cuts, expanded stories that assign intention where there used to be accident.
But that wasn't available to us then.
Back then the argument stayed open. It lived in the air between you and the person across from you. It got louder, then funnier, then louder again. It dissolved into the next beer and then came back stronger. It didn't need an answer. In a way, it was better without one.
And the Midtown — of course — is gone now.
That part of the Lower Haight has been cleaned up, straightened out, made more reasonable. The kind of place where a bar like that doesn't quite fit anymore, where the smell has been replaced, where the edges have been sanded down. If you walked in today expecting the cantina, you'd be disappointed. Or maybe you just wouldn't recognize it.
But Zack would still think he won that argument. I'm certain of it. Somewhere in San Francisco my best friend from Groveland is still holding his position, still completely sure, the pool cue metaphorically in his hand.
And honestly?
I was just happy to be there.