A changing S.F. gets a sober look
Chuck does drugs. Lots of drugs. And in his state of constant haze and blackouts, he wanders around a skewed version of modernday San Francisco in “The Black Hole: A Novel” by Bucky Sinister.
The first sentence of Sinister’s debut novel reads, “Then one day, you’re the creepy old guy with the drugs.”
Sinister started writing the book when he was 43, and the character is loosely based on the author, if he still used drugs.
“I got sober in 2002, and I wondered what would happen. Let’s say I don’t die from it,” says the Oakland author. “I was already the oldest guy at the punk house. It was, like, sad.”
Drugged-out Chuck works at a dwarf whale distributor. Dwarf whales are all the rage among the elite class of San Francisco, and it’s a status symbol to have one in a whale tank in the house.
The whales were based on a recurring dream that Sinister had while he was still using drugs.
A lot of scenes take place in the Mission District and the Tenderloin. Chuck watches a friend completely lose his mind and get 5150-ed outside of Tartine. Throughout the novel, Chuck is upset at the changes happening in San Francisco, to what used to be the punk rock scene, and he clings to the past.
“A lot of the attitudes in the book are attitudes I remember having, both while I was using and newly sober. In 12-step, there’s a fourth step ... where you write out a lot of your resentment, and I had a lot, and it was really kind of fueling my drug use, an unspoken anger and bitterness and feeling everything. I tried to put a lot of that in there. That’s where all of his rants are and where my mind was in the last days of it.”
To maintain readers’ attention, Sinister creates a subtle humor to Chuck as he weaves in and out of using drugs and using even more drugs between punk shows and waking up in squats in San Francisco. Sinister used his experience as a stand-up comedian to finesse the narrative.
“There’s such a fine line between being angry onstage and alienating people and being onstage and getting them to laugh. It’s just so close to each other. That’s kind of the trick of it: Can I have him be angry and pissed about everything, but can I still have people on his side?”