Market Street, before construction of B.A.R.T tore it up in the sixties, had mom-n-pop shops and soap-box barkers for any cause…socialism… poetry… babbled curses… preaching doom and preaching salvation. It had a gritty wholesomeness about it. Craning my neck like the yokel I was, I looked up at the Bank of America building…. It was magic and I was alone and answering to no one. I could go wherever I wanted.
I went first to a seedy South of Market hotel… Sign outside said it was five bucks a night… I went through the lobby where a couple of old winos sat on threadbare chairs arguing over the noise and static of the ballgame on a the smallest screen of a TV I’d seen since the early fifties. It was about The Giants and whether Willie Mays would hit 500 that year. The clerk put down his porn mag… Lusty Ladies…and snarled at the interruption… “Shut the fuck up you two, I have a gentleman here!”
I had my harvest money in a wad I carried in my front pocket… it was mostly fifties and hundreds… I put a fifty on the counter through the window of the cage. The clerk’s eyes squinted as he picked it up. He leaned as close as he could and signaled with his forefinger for me to lean in too.
He spoke in a muted… quieter than a whispered tone, “Boy, you got anything smaller?”
“Naw, that’s the smallest I have.” I spoke loud enough for anyone to hear if it weren’t for the excitement of the announcer on the TV as Wills smashed another one over the wall at Candelstick Park.
“Damn… ya gotta watch it with a wad like that. Hide it in your room.” He shelled out the change for the fifty from a locked drawer. Three tens, three fives and five ones… “Three bucks more and y’kin have a bath and TV in your room.”
I thought about it, “No thanks… temporary… just checking in a few days while I look for an artist studio… a permanent place…. Know what I mean?” I wanted to impress him… this keeper of the gate… this skid-row desk clerk. I wanted him to know that I was an artist… the next great artist… you’ll hear all about me and see my face on the cover of Time like Andy Warhol. I paid three days in advance without even taking a peak at my room.
He looked disappointed but slipped me a key, “Take the lift to the sixth floor and the third room on the left from the end. It’s the furthest from the elevator I got right now.”
I wondered if that contraption for an elevator would make so much noise until I got on it. The elevator was a cage with accordion gates that I pulled open to an ancient platform that had to be as old as Otis was by then himself. It groaned and rattled my weary two-day-bus-trip body up to the sixth floor where I made my way down the musty hall over a worn-to-the-floor carpet to my room. I slipped the key into the lock on the door that showed evidence of being kicked in and repaired several times in its day. I sat down on the creaky bed and lumpy mattress in the tiny room big enough for the bed, a dresser, a corner sink and closet. The hotel rules were posted on the door where an upper case anarchist “A” in a circle in red was inscribed on it above a declaration… a proclamation… a shortest of all manifestos…“Rules are made to be Broken!”
I was tired and just wanted to take a nap. I lay there on the bed and watched a cockroach wander over and around and behind a peeled-back sheet of paint on the wall. The roach came out later with a couple more buddies. I wonder where they would go and how many more would show themselves before I drifted off to sleep. I did finally dozed off for about an hour and got up to see the view... I pulled the blinds on the window to the vista of a brick wall less than ten feet away. I had to lean out the window to see the street at one end and a wall with little windows on each floor where the community toilets and showers were. The building went up about four more floors to a line of pigeons posted along the frieze. Down in the causeway between buildings was carpeted with debris, broken bottles and possibly the shadows of broken men curled up under cardboard blankets even though it was mid day.
I sighed but there was no time for grief. After all, I had a city to explore. Hoofing it down Market all the way to the Ferry Landing with its huge clock: taking the street skirting the wharfs and busy port down all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf: catching the trolley for twenty-five cents over the hill and to the top where I got off and sat in Huntington Square facing Grace Cathedral. The college boy’s words, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic…” drew me to the doors. I stopped… they were fantastic reliefs. Who did them? Is anyone that good in San Francisco? I stood for well over an hour before I even wanted to move or think about anything but the contours and illusion of perspective in bronze before I’d pulled out my sketch book.
I went inside. It was the first cathedral I’d ever been in. It was sparer than I would have expected from a Catholic cathedral. It had some rather austere and drab churchy murals but other than that the Gothic grace of the architecture saved. I hadn’t even thought of it being Episcopalian… one of the volunteer docents in the gift shop explained the difference to me. I don’t even think I knew that there would be any difference. I just knew that Episcopalian priests were allowed to marry and I found out that Bishop Pike had his chair there before he disappeared in a psychedelic mystic haze in some desert somewhere. I had no idea what a psychedelic haze was but I knew from newspaper accounts about Bishop Pike. Most importantly, she told me that these doors where by Ghiberti and where originally created during the Renaissance for the baptistery at the Cathedral in Florence. They were taken down during the War to protect them from bombing and one casting was done just in case the worst happened. Grace church was able to finagle the only copy made… “Whew;” I said to the woman behind the counter, “they must have had some real financial clout!” and I bought a set of post-cards with pictures of the doors.
I had money in my pockets and dreams of grandeur in my heart. I was free to go anywhere and do anything I put my mind to. I found a hotel at the corner of Grant and Bush, The Saint Charles Hotel. It had no lobby… just up a brief set of stairs from the Bush Street side to a landing where behind a counter a friendly… kindly looking, man in his sixties awaited anyone coming or going. He showed me a room on the third floor with a window facing Grant Street. The room was only slightly larger than the one had in the Tenderloin below and on the bad side of Market. This one was clean and the bed wasn’t so bad… a picture of a sailing ship was on the wall across from my bed where I could lay in bed and imagine Jack London adventures aboard it. I paid a month advance on the room and left the room below Market with two days left on the rent… no refunds… and lugged my trunk down Market and up Grant to the Saint Charles across from the entrance to China Town at Bush Street. From there I was sure to get a studio where I could paint my way into becoming the next Van Gogh… dreaming dreams and writing poetry to be sure to be published by City Lights. I could envision myself with bohemian women on each arm, with fame and fortune as constant companions. I had no idea how far a few hundred dollars would be stretched at the time and I had no idea what it would take to be any kind of artist without pedigree or training in art academies… some kind of sponsorship or grants… there or anywhere.
After taking the room and settling in, I cruised around town on the buses and trolleys. I walked through China Town… there was no fancy gate at the entrance in those days… there was a regular greasy spoon diner on the corner next to a crammed to the rafters mini-market on Bush. My senses were treated to the noise… the wonder-woks stir-fried-concoctions-sweet-odors as foreign to me as the people I was in the midst of. Shops with chickens hanging stripped of their feathers…. vegetables and fruit stands… delivery trucks unloading right in the middle of the street… no one honking… streets empty of gawkers and tourists… secret places… gardens behind gates … and down from Grant I sat down in a park named Saint Mary’s Square because of a modest but uncharacteristic Catholic church on the corner. I watched old and middle-aged Chinese men and women going through slo-mo exercises that I would later come to know as Tai Chi. I watched and wondered of the ancient traditions… the civilization these people came from. How did they get here? I was watching from the sides and never tried to find out what they were doing. Whatever it was, it had to be good.
I walked alone all day. I never left my room at night out of fear mostly… my first big city. I still remember the feeling of dread when the sun set and the city lights took over. What was magical in daylight took on the appearance of sinister corners where shadowy creatures lurked. I so isolated myself that I hardly spoke to anyone and that extended to an even more dread of the city at night.
Broadway and Grant, around the corner on Columbus Avenue, was my Mecca… I went down the stairs into the basement of the City Lights Book Store; you could sit and read all day if you wanted. I tried to sit at the bar across the alley at the Vesuvius to buy a rum and coke but was carded. I looked as young as I was… Damn… I wanted so badly to hang-out there and maybe rub shoulders with Gregory Corso or Neil Cassady. I had my first espresso at the Café Trieste where I could imagine Ginsberg and Kerouac jacked-up on coffee and bennies.
I walked through Washington Square and on down Columbus Avenue past the thick aroma of a coffee roasting company and all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf where I ate cracked crab with a merchant marine I met and shared Tokay on a vacant pier overlooking the bay where liners, tankers and cargo ships ghostly shrouded crossing foggily.
The merchant marine, Mario, was an Italian from San Francisco. We walked out on the Marina Park Pier. A couple of young girls in mini-skirts and go-go boots passed… I had an, okay-Tokay, buzz going: in my best fake Liverpool accent I called out, “Hey, Hey birds!”
They turned… my hopes soared as they giggled but got real when the cutest one flipped me off.
“Damn, I’m horny,” I complained.
Mario perked up and I had to block an advance while we walked out on the Marina Pier after he put his hand on my butt, “Don’t fucking do that…”
He was unabashed and unafraid of being called queer as he brought his hand back to my shoulder, “You said you were horny.” he whispered in my ear, “Don’t be afraid, Red, I won’t hurt you.”
“I’m sorry,” I responded by shirking and throwing his arm off my shoulder, “I just was talking about the chicks… I’m not queer.”
“So, you just want me for booze, eh?” he acted as though he was deeply offended. “You think I’m just another fairy you can take advantage of?”
I wasn’t pissed as much as I was puzzled “I’m not taking advantage of you, fuck off!” I now just wanted to get away… this guy was going too far. Teddy had never tried to put any moves on me and he was what he termed, “a flaming fag”.
Mario stomped away… swerved down the pier bumping into the side… grumbling undecipherable curses.
I stayed… going out to the end of the pier where I pictured Al Capone, Mickey Cohen, Machinegun Kelly and the Birdman in shackles being loaded on a launch to be taken to Alcatraz from there. I’m not sure where they would have been loaded on a boat but it suited my imagination. The island sat out there unguarded and uninhabited… a ghost of the past… it had been closed and shuttered up two years previously.
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