‘Bred Crumbs

It was a heavenly goal: to roll a katamari across San Francisco. (If you don’t know what a katamari is, improve your videogame awareness now.) And though we never trod the sand of Ocean Beach, though our pointy spheroid of Japanese whimsy gave its last two miles back of the Bay to Breakers finish line, by all reasonable measures, we rocked that ball all the way across the city.

My share of this magificent feat was a small one; the only parts of the katamari I built were two "rolled up" objects, Coit Tower and one of the bim-bi-bim-bim-BIM! kids from the game — and even those were painted, marvelously, by unknown hands. But the brainfather of this concept, the genius behind Katamari Breakers, our King of All Cosmos, reminded us that the finished katamari, wonderful though it was, still needed plenty of Cousins to roll it. So there I was, at a most ungodly hour for a Sunday, in costume, ready to push that puppy.

I had walked the seven-plus miles of Breakers twice, the last time maybe seven years ago. It’s gone distressingly corporate since then. This year, they made a very big deal about setting some new rules that definitely go against the Breakers grain. This, from the Breakers website: "For everyone’s safety and enjoyment NO ALCOHOL or NUDITY is allowed and there will be ALCOHOL CHECKPOINTS along the course." Because nothing says enjoyment like checkpoints. As it turned out, the rules were an uptight fool’s dream. The checkpoints were profoundly ineffective.

Floury When Wet

But pre-start, we couldn’t count on that. Even though we were happy to place our 8-foot-ball well to the back of the starting pack, a race official insisted we couldn’t enter until 10 a.m. — two hours after the start. But you wanna try to stop Cousins on a mission? At about 8:10, we pushed that ball into the entrance and onto Howard Street. No one made any attempt to stop us.

The forecast was rain, rain, rain, and it had already showered predawn. (Unlike me.) Our King was prepared; though the katamari was made entirely of cardboard, it was painted with waterproof paint and given a waterproof clearcoat. But for the second day of the weekend, the forecast was wrong. The weather was perfect for rolling: no rain, but an overcast to keep the sun from making all us Cousins miserable.

Still, the earlier rain took a small toll. The tortilla shells that pave the start area by race time clung to the ball, giving it the start of a lovely odor. (Check Wikipedia for details on the tortillas, the salmon, and other Breakers landmarks mentioned here.)The enormity of our goal hit us. We laughed that if we made it as far as Third Street, we had done well.

We crossed the Start line at the 30-minute mark, and cleared Third Street easily. We were making a decent pace, no slower than any mere pedestrian; we crossed paths with our first salmon at around Sixth Street. By about Eighth, our hull integrity began to fail. Objects attached to the ball began to dangle, and a couple of big tears cracked the shell itself. But by the time we crossed Market at Ninth, the katamari had achieved a weird stability, a comfort with its partial disintegration. It didn’t deteriorate further as we approached the base of the dreaded Hayes Street Hill.

How I Missed My Ball Mitzvah

Unable to hear well in the wall-to-wall mass of bodies and music, not to mention the cones of my costume head, I pulled to the side to make a rendezvous-planning phone call, thinking it would be easy to catch up to my Cousins afterward. To my surprise, they plowed up that hill without a break or a doubt. Maybe it was easier for them to climb the hill then for me solo, because they had bulky cardboard leverage to push house-party stander-arounders out of the way. I didn’t catch up to them until almost the top of the hill. (So, in the Chronicle’s photo of the katamari climbing the hill, I’m either not there, or on the far side of the ball.) I felt like I’d missed out on a key maturity ritual in Katamari Breakers.

But there were still miles of rolling to help with. The ball’s date with entropy resumed. Objects began to peel off. For a while, we dutifully collected them and deposited them into trash cans along the way. By the time whole core boxes were falling away, we were over that. All the beer from the mile-long block party that is the Panhandle stretch of the course layered itself onto the katamari’s tortilla stench. As one bystander aptly put it at around Mile 4, "Your ball smells like ass." (Or maybe he was just coming on to me.) And it didn’t help that drunk guys were starting to throw themselves onto the ball — in one surprising case, from somewhere above.

We pressed on, but my morale began to fail as we pushed a lumpy wad of tape and cardboard into Golden Gate Park. I didn’t want to dim everyone’s spirit, so I repressed the urge to dramatically shout, "It stopped being a katamari a long time ago!" The Cousins were determined to go all the way, even though by now, three and a half hours after the start, we wouldn’t even be allowed to reach the finish; the end of the course was closed so the Great Highway could be reopened at noon. There was no way we could achieve more than six miles of the intended seven.

Stardust Memories

At five and a half miles, at the road to Stow Lake, the King called a pee break at the assembled porta-potties. And as we sat and hydrated and snacked, and stared at the katamari’s sad core, sense overcame us all. We declared victory and turned the katamari into stardust. Which means, threw what was left of it into a Dumpster.

That we rolled an 8-foot cardboard ball almost all the way across San Francisco was not the only amazing thing about the morning. The reactions of others was an ongoing thrill. People who knew what a katamari was were ecstatic at the sight; they wanted to touch it, or even help push it. Pirates helped push. Naked orange guys helped push. (Another personal Breakers first: seeing nudity I wanted to see.) At one point, an entire squad of Smurfs briefly took over the pushing for us.

People who didn’t know what our ball was, asked. When we answered, "A katamari," most didn’t pursue follow-up questions.

The most stunning and persistent question we got was, "Is somebody inside it?" We were asked this so many times that it raced from charming to a little amusing to dreadfully tiresome. Why would somebody be inside it? If we had someone inside it, wouldn’t we make it transparent somehow so that people could see our chosen David Blaine? Eventually, we tried to brush off the question with, "Not anymore," but that couldn’t counter the cumulative stupidity. And no, drunk boy, you can’t get inside it; the thing’s heavy enough.

Oh, and this: 31 people lay down on the road and let us roll the katamari over them. I can’t help but think that if they realized what it smelled like, they would have reconsidered. Even typing this ten hours later, after an epsom-salt bath, I can’t shake the feeling that I reek of tortilla.

But the odious aroma, and the aching, and the chafing, all are small prices to pay for getting to be a part of such a big, cool thing. King of All Cosmos, thank you for the brilliance, and generosity, and unflagging enthusiasm. You made a lot of people very happy, even the ones not rolling a big ball across this effing amazing city.

[Correction, 05.22.06: The katamari’s diameter was 8 feet, not 10 as previously stated. Someone at Breakers said 10, but a Cousin who carefully kept some stats called it 8, which seems more likely.]