Jubilee Hitchhiker (25 page)

After the frenzy of the war years, the fifties preferred tranquility. Ike was our president. Everyone loved Lucy. Cars sported tail-fins in an absurdist vision of the future while the urban landscape retained the elegant look of times past. Approaching Frisco on the F-train over the Bay Bridge, the skyline glimpsed through harpstring suspension cables revealed graceful white wooden Victorian buildings clustered on the hills like shoals of distant seabirds. That was the look of the place. Rents were low and red wine cheap. In 1955, it was still possible to leave your heart in San Francisco.

The four-story Montgomery Block was the very essence of that old Frisco, lost now forever. Located on Montgomery Street at the foot of Columbus, the building filled an entire block between Washington and Clay and was the tallest and most expensive structure west of the Mississippi when it went up between 1852 and 1853 at a cost of more than $3 million. The money came from Henry W. “Old Brains” Halleck, one of those larger-than-life characters flocking to Yerba Buena in the ferment of gold fever. Virtually fireproof and constructed on a flexible raft of redwood logs buried beneath the ground, “Halleck's Folly” survived many earthquakes, including the big one of 1906, when the neighboring business district lay in smoldering ruins around it.

Decades before, Sam Clemens and Bret Harte got together for serious libation and literary gossip at the Bank Exchange, the Montgomery Block's corner saloon. Robert Louis Stevenson and Ambrose Bierce came along later. The aforementioned Mark Twain sweated off the booze in the building's basement Turkish steam bath, where he played penny ante with a local fireman named Tom Sawyer, a moniker he never forgot. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Financial District had migrated south, and the neighborhood declined. When rents dropped in the 1880s, writers and artists moved into the skylit studios, making the Montgomery Block the most important literary gathering place in the West.

On one corner stood Coppa's restaurant, beloved by the bohemian crowd for its copious meals and easy credit policy. George Sterling and Mary Austin dined at Coppa's on platters of shrimp and sand dabs in 1906, before heading up Merchant Street to Portsmouth Square to fill the bronze
galleon topping the R. L. Stevenson memorial with violets on the eve of the great earthquake and fire. At the opposite end of the block, occupying the southeast corner at Montgomery and Clay, the marble-floored Bank Exchange saloon featured a carved mahogany bar shipped round the Horn by schooner for its 1853 opening. The place was famed for Pisco Punch, invented in the 1870s by its bartender, Duncan Nicol (the secret recipe died with him after the place was closed by Prohibition). Sterling drank here and kept a room upstairs, mainly for love affairs. He lived at the Bohemian Club, which did not admit women.

At one time or another, down through the decades, resident writers included Twain, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Gelett Burgess, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Frank Norris (as well as his brother, Charles, and sister-in-law, Kathleen). Later, in the 1930s, poet/ critic Kenneth Rexroth joined the illustrious tenant list, along with Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, when the famed muralist stayed here while working on a commission for the California Stock Exchange.

Nearly two thousand long-forgotten literary and artistic residents found refuge over the years in the rabbit warren of studios and converted offices crowding the venerable edifice. The grand old building survived for more than a century, torn down at last in 1959 to make way for a parking lot. Ten years later, the Transamerica Pyramid went up on the site. The tallest structure in town at 853 feet, it has become as potent a symbol of today's San Francisco as the “Monkey” Block was for that fabled city now vanished forever.

When Richard Brautigan arrived in the late summer of 1956, the old bohemia still flourished in North Beach. Three years earlier, a man named Larry Ferling had opened the nation's first paperback bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue, near the intersection with Broadway, in partnership with Peter Martin, son of the assassinated Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca. The shop took its name, City Lights, from a literary journal (christened in honor of the great Chaplin film), which Martin published out of a cramped office upstairs in the building.

After Martin moved to New York a year later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who had started using his true name after sending for his birth certificate to apply for a California driver's license) bought his partner's half of the business. Open from ten until midnight, seven days a week, City Lights Pocket Book Shop quickly became the focal point of the artistic population in North Beach. Newly arrived, Brautigan stopped here to check the notices posted on the community bulletin board and browse through periodicals and poetry magazines.

John Clellon Holmes pinned a new label on older bohemian tendencies in “This Is the Beat Generation,” his article for
The New York Times Magazine
(November 16, 1952), but at the time of Brautigan's arrival on the scene the term had yet to gain much currency with the public at large.
On the Road
would not be published until the following year, a month before the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik
. The Russian achievement provided
Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen with the source of his pejorative neologism, “beatnik.”

Caen frequently and sanctimoniously objected in print to hearing his favorite city called “Frisco” when this was how anyone even remotely hip had always referred to the place. In
On the Road
, Jack Kerouac wrote of having “eyes bent on Frisco and the Coast” and made energetic prose-poetry out of the evocative name: “That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street and the eleven teaming hills.” Are Philadelphians offended by “Philly”?

It is impossible to pinpoint the exact beginnings of art movements. Certain events, the 1913 New York Armory show or the first Paris performance of Stravinsky's
Le Sacre du Printemps
, are considered watersheds. What came to be called the “San Francisco Renaissance” had its origins at a poetry reading given on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, a tiny converted auto-repair garage at 3119 Fillmore near Union Street in Cow Hollow at the western edge of the Marina District. Richard Brautigan, often called “the last of the Beats,” did not arrive in the city until almost a year later. Prophetically, many of the poets involved in the reading came to play significant roles in his life.

The little garage began its life as a performance and exhibition space in December of 1952, when poet Robert Duncan, his partner, the painter Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins), and fellow artist Harry Jacobus founded the King Ubu Gallery there. They gussied up the old garage with a pair of ten-foot gilt and glass doors salvaged from the Mark Hopkins Hotel and opened with a show of large works on paper by Jess, Jacobus, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and several other local artists. Rent was $50 a month. Art not often being a profitable enterprise, they had to close their doors after barely a year.

On Halloween 1954 the place opened again, renamed the Six Gallery to celebrate its new proprietors, poet Jack Spicer and five visual artists: Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan, and David Simpson, all students in Spicer's “unorthodox” English class at the California School of Fine Arts. In January 1955, the Six staged a reading of Duncan's new play,
Faust Foutu
(“Faust Fucked”), starring filmmaker Larry Jordan as Faust; Jess, in drag, as Faust's mother; stern Jack Spicer atypically cast as a gentle Muse; “Mike” McClure as a boy; and the author, who stripped buck naked by the end of his performance, as The Poet.

Spicer, born in Los Angeles in 1925, met both Duncan, seven years his senior, and fellow poet Robin Blaser in Berkeley in the mid-1940s. Drawn together by mutual interests in literature, magic, and homoeroticism, the three formed the nucleus of a group they called the “Berkeley Renaissance.” In 1956, Duncan became the assistant director of the San Francisco Poetry Center, founded two years before by fellow S.F. State literature professor Ruth Witt-Diamant, whose flamboyant public gestures often caused the poet to stuff hankies into his mouth to gag back his laughter.

Michael McClure moved to San Francisco in 1954, seeking to study art with Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. The artist Bruce Conner, McClure's boyhood friend in Wichita, Kansas, introduced to him abstract expressionism, and McClure hoped learning more about such gestural styles would inspire his poetry. He was also interested in following Joanna Kinnison, a young woman he'd met the year before at the University of Arizona. She'd sought greener pastures in San Francisco after a brief first marriage disintegrated. When McClure arrived in the city and found that Rothko and Still no longer taught at the School of Fine Arts, he promptly enrolled in Duncan's poetry workshop at San Francisco State.

Through Duncan, Michael McClure was introduced to Kenneth Rexroth, the grand pooh-bah of the Frisco literary scene. Indiana-born (1905) and an anarchist at heart, Rexroth gravitated to the West Coast in the twenties. He was a generation older than the poets, artists, writers, and filmmakers who flocked to the Friday night soirees in his book-lined second-floor apartment at 250 Scott Street, above Jack's Record Cellar on the outskirts of the black Fillmore District. Rexroth's energy and lively intelligence had nurtured radical thinking in San Francisco for better than two
decades. Rexroth wrote a column for the
Examiner
and recorded a weekly radio broadcast for KPFA, tapping into his seemingly encyclopedic font of esoteric knowledge to pontificate on any subject under the sun. A man who cut his own hair and did all the repair work on the beater Willys Knight he drove, Kenneth Rexroth held firm opinions on just about everything.

At one of Rexroth's evenings, McClure encountered the native San Francisco poet Philip Lamantia, proclaimed by surrealist André Breton as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years” upon the young man's precocious first publication at age fifteen. A shared interest in mysticism drew them together, and Lamantia was soon a frequent visitor to the flat Michael shared with his new wife, Joanna. The Frisco art community at that time had a remarkable fluidity. Painters, poets, actors, dancers, all knew one another and supported each other's work in an intellectual, creative, and often matrimonial cross-pollination. The performance of
Faust Fouto
had been a success, and in early September of 1955, Wally Hedrick said to Michael McClure, “That was real nice, that thing we had with Robert Duncan. You wanna have a poetry reading?”

McClure agreed to take charge of the event at the Six Gallery. It was a tall order, as Joanna was pregnant and Michael very busy with a job at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Later in the month, McClure ran into Allen Ginsberg on the street and explained that he was in “a kind of crunch” and didn't have time to organize the reading. “Can I do it?” Ginsberg asked.

“Absolutely,” McClure replied, greatly relieved.

In June of 1954, Ginsberg had returned to California from six months of Mexican jungle adventures. He stayed first in San Jose with his sometimes lover Neal Cassady, Kerouac's model for Dean Moriarty in
On the Road.
The sociopathic Denver hipster car-thief and sexual con-man seemed oddly domesticated, living in a nine-room house with a blond wife and three little children. His Mrs., Carolyn, caught him in bed with Ginsberg and kicked the poet out, loaning Allen twenty bucks and driving him up to Berkeley.

In early August, Ginsberg trimmed his hair and shaved off his vagabond's beard. Donning a tweed jacket and preppie tie, he took a square's day job doing market research for Towne-Oller on Montgomery Street. He also fell in love with a woman, an ex-roadhouse singer named Sheila Williams Boucher, and moved into her Nob Hill apartment. Whenever Neal Cassady's job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific took him to Frisco, he'd get together for wild sex with Allen and, on occasion, a ménage involving Sheila. At the same time, Ginsberg's mentor, William S. Burroughs, had departed his residence in a male brothel in Tangier, sailing for the States from Gibraltar in September, hoping to reunite with his young lover in San Francisco.

A descendant of adding machine money, Burroughs had graduated from Harvard in 1936 and received a small monthly stipend from his parents. Older and better-read than both Kerouac and Ginsberg when they all met for the first time in New York's Greenwich Village around Christmas of 1943, Burroughs engaged in a life of petty crime and drug addiction. One drunken evening in the spring of 1952, a tragic miscalculation in Mexico City jump-started his writing career. Burroughs shot his common-law wife in the forehead while playing William Tell with a six-ounce water glass and a .380 Star automatic. The Mexican authorities charged him with
imprudencia criminal
for the shooting of Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, classifying him as a “pernicious foreigner.” The shooter soon headed south into the Amazon jungles in search of the elusive hallucinogen
yage
. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death,” Burroughs later observed.

A little drunk after a fight with Sheila one lonely night in December 1954, Ginsberg wandered into Foster's Cafeteria in the Hotel Wentley at the northeast corner of Polk and Sutter. He'd been hanging out here with Michael and Joanna McClure ever since meeting them in October at a crowded inaugural reception for the San Francisco Poetry Center following W. H. Auden's dedicatory lecture. Not finding the McClures, Ginsberg began a lengthy conversation with Robert LaVigne, looking bearded and handsome at a table crowded with “young artist types.”

They drifted in the early hours over to the painter's nearby ground-floor Victorian flat on Gough Street. A dumbstruck Allen Ginsberg confronted LaVigne's full-frontal nude portrait of a tousle-haired youth. He found his “pilgrim soul” at last. The subject, twenty-one-year-old Peter Orlovsky, shyly stepped out of his room down the hall. Five days later, Ginsberg took up residence on Gough Street.