San Francisco is one of those places where first-time pilgrims arrive with the city already in their heads: from the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge to the cable-cars climbing to the stars, we all know it from the songs, the books and, especially, the films.
So disillusion waits around every corner to ambush the wide-eyed newcomer. Fisherman's Wharf is tourist-city; apart from the slender taper of the Transamerica Pyramid, the Jackson Square skyscrapers are like skyscrapers everywhere. Even the best of the place - the bridge, Alcatraz, Haight-Ashbury - is the undoubted territory of seen it, read it, heard it all before.
And yet this is the city where an irresistible mini-world was created in the 1970s by a young journalist on the San Francisco Chronicle after singles stalking their pick-ups in the local Safeway supermarket refused to be interviewed by him under their real names. If you know Dee Dee Day, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and - my own runaway favourite - Mary Ann Singleton, you are a fellow addict. If not, the six books which form Tales of the city by Armistead Maupin are a treat in store.
Not just for their stories - rattling plots, warm-bath humanity plus sexy entanglements of every kind - but for the chance to discover a special San Francisco of your own. Battered paperback in hand, you take the cable to Jackson and Leavenworth and crabscuttle down the fantastic gradient of Jones Street. Your personal Tales tour is under way.
Vertiginously in front of you spreads the coveted "Bay view" - an extra $1,000-amonth on flat rentals - but your route suddenly forks off down an alley to the right. A glimpse of green between two wood-framed houses, and you are in Macondray Lane.
Threading between two terraces of scatty San Francisco architecture - in which the cantilevered verandah, or "deck", plays a prominent and varied part - the path gets half-lost in creepers, twists around an enormous eucalyptus and dawdles alongside a goldfish pond. Through the windows of the downhill row of houses shine the vivid blues of the bay and the distant hills of Marin County; beyond, the winking red beacon on Alcatraz.
This is the inspiration for Barbary Lane, where Mary Ann discovers the boardinghouse world of fey Anna Madrigal, whose cannabis plants would fit comfortably - possibly still do - among Macondray's tangle of shrubs. At the end of the alley, when you think that great ropes of nasturtium and morning-glory are the final delight, daylight bursts in on Macondray Stairs, an old San Francisco boardwalk whose wooden steps teeter down to Taylor Street between Green above and Union below.
Macondray and Anna Madrigal are part of Russian Hill, one of the characteristic neighbourhoods that make the city so different from the standard US formula of suburbs and downtown. The usual rigid grid is softened by a muddle of shops, small houses and cafes - not exactly startling to a European visitor, but very agreeable. Molinari's Italian deli on Columbus and Vallejo, where Mrs Madrigal shops, is every-thing you could hope for from a Cal-Ital store.
A meander around the area - the dip of North Beach and neighbouring Telegraph Hill - takes in Napier Lane boardwalk and Filbert and Greenwich Steps, all of them bitpart players to Macondray in Maupin's creation of Barbary Lane. At the junction of Filbert and Montgomery Street, the art-deco Malloch Apartments served as a regular backdrop in Dark Passage, and were also where Dee Dee and her foul husband Beauchamp had their venomous but wit-spiked rows.
Maupin's childlike wordplay is another pleasure of the books; among countless examples, the chapter-heading for Dee Dee's liberation sticks in my mind: Dee Dee Day's D-Day. But the puns and quips are servants of inspired coincidences and plot twists, which bring us - via another short walk - to Grace Cathedral.
Modest outside by the standards of European cathedrals like York Minster, the building has a cavernous nave as rewardingly sinister as Mary Ann finds it - "her eyes as round as communion wafers" - when she corners the Cathedral Cannibal Cult. To my great delight, a woman curate who intercepts me for a chat turns out to be a fellow Tales groupie. Together, we examine the giddy cross-shaped walkway, high above the transept, where the cannibalistic rituals take place.
In the kindly hands of Maupin, be assured that no actual killing goes on; but I won't spoil the plot. So cable on down Nob Hill to Perry's restaurant on Sutter at Kearny, where green-eyed, brown-haired Brian Hawkins dazzles the closet gay elite in Tales of the city. Alas for them, he is straight as a die and someone else - another of the series' surprises - gets him instead.
True to one of Maupin's main tenets that "everyone here is from somewhere else", the staff at Perry's come from Colorado, New York City, Daytona Beach - anywhere but San Francisco. Americans are naturally footloose, but the city is more of a magnet than anywhere else in the US, especially for the young. And, even by the generous standards of America's welcome, it is an easy place to make friends.
"Since we're neighbours, let's be friends," say the signs in Maupin's description of the Marina Safeway, prompting him to add succinctly: "And friends were being made." Whether or not you want to test your picking up skills over the boxed dates, this is another obligatory halt on the Tales tour. You can worship the shrine as the launch-pad of Mary Ann's brilliant career or as her first meeting place with her gentle gay alter ego, Michael Mouse. Or simply marvel at the skill of a novelist who can turn a supermarket into a place of dreams.
You should have enough time in this geographically small city by now to be thinking about striking out for the Palace of the Legion of Honour - much Rodin plus the cliffs where paedophile Norman meets his doom. Or the Buena Vista Cafe, where the world was blessed with the first-ever Irish coffee, and where Mary Ann makes her fateful decision to shake off Cleveland, Mom and apple pie.
Nearer to hand, why not head for the San Francisco Wave Organ, the peculiar backdrop to one of the finest chapters in the series? Mary Ann and Michael have a bleak but fundamental reckoning by this curious structure, which only the most determined tourists ever get to see. Less than a mile from Alcatraz, at the tip of the lonely breakwater beyond San Francisco Yacht Club, steps of carved stone surround concrete pipes that snake out into the bay, to record "the very music of the ocean itself".
The meaningless gurgles and hisses symbolise much in Maupin's final gathering of his threads - gay, straight, ruthless and romantic. Meanwhile, high above you, on the edge of Golden Gate Park and out of the fog zone, the great man still lives in San Francisco. "To leave this city," he says, during an interview in which we cluck about Mary Ann, Brian and co, "would be like leaving a lover."
There are scores of other Tales locations. And San Francisco's many other attractions should fill any spare time. The city is tailormade for cheap, independent exploring. Apart from the cable-cars, buses abound, often with enticing destination boards such as Sunset and Geneva. Taxis are everywhere in the centre, but otherwise sparse. Walking is best, though, thanks to the hills. And you can comfortably potter from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf cable-car station in less than an hour.
The Guardian News Service
