The Sherry Mae washed upon our shores a few weeks ago. Tossed undoubtedly by some meteorological terror far from our home in San Francisco’s Sunset, a Pacific unforgiving deposited the twenty-five footer in our neighborhood of beach bums and immigrant Chinese.  Single mast sailboat with a course set for fail, its arrival set abuzz our sleepy borough with speculation on its mysterious origin and ownership.

Sand dollars and jellyfish are the normal scuttle that show up in Ocean Beach sand, with the occasional timber a local eccentric erects in some strange nightly phallic ceremony of his.  Rarely a sizeable shark will gulp its last gillful on our black magnetite banks and then rots for days until finally one of the retired set calls the beach patrol to cart it away.  If the fierce locals don’t keep the tourists away, the notorious riptides and undertows do.  It’s the one beach in California where nothing, nothing of any consequence occurs.

In this banal, grotesquely ordinary backdrop, an honest-to-mackerel shipwreck is something else.  No one knew what to do.  At first, everyone just took pictures.  It’s manifestation on Flickr grew almost nightly with every shutterbug from 7th to 48th exploiting the obvious cliche.  Some hippie woman did a album cover shoot in a full length flowing skirt of vomit-inducing gypsy print.  A parent let her kids run about the beached ship’s deck and cabin, turning it into a maritimely challenged jungle gym.  For the week or so while the hull was unmolested and the lines were unsevered, it was a wholesome oddity – a welcome, quirky addition to a neighborhood starved of color.

Of course, nothing stays wholesome for long in this town. The first vandal was a prankster, not one of the dozens of posing wanna-be gang bangers whose tags have begun to litter our visual landscape over the past year.  Himself likely a castaway in this barrio, some child of the 60’s rechristened the Sherry Mae with a new name: “Bad Vibes Bob” in Krylon black a foot and a half tall.

With the graffiti cherry popped, the taggers descended like hyenas upon a downed boar.  It wasn’t a week before every make-believe street outfit between Geary and Ulloa had their John Hancock on the Sherry Mae.  Soon all the windows were busted and the lines were broken, all manner of illegible territory markers covering every square inch of the exterior.  The cabin showed signs of habitation by tweakers and homeless, thrashed by the drug addled and hope deprived.  Spent butane canisters and a broken gallon jug of five dollar wine were scattered among old Wired magazines and ripped marketing handouts.

Who knows what horror now passes every night in that wayward vessel.  The graffiti and stench of piss keeps the kids well away and their parents mortified. What once was novel and pure had been quickly perverted by San Francisco into something as ugly as anything could systematically become.  Would the Sherry Mae have fared better had it landed a couple hundred miles north or south?  Had it smashed against the sharp rocks of Oregon, would its passing been easier on the passers-by?

A few feet to the boat’s aft, the last shred of the shipwreck’s innocence laid in carnal form.  Sticky with sand and God-knows-what, a seven inch rubber dick laid by one of the sailboat’s spent lines.

We won’t ever know from where the Sherry Mae came.  Or the dick that dorked its decency.