Jubilee Hitchhiker (27 page)

Not everyone was equally enthusiastic. Ruth Witt-Diamant, offended by the wine-drinking and general rowdiness, gestured at Rexroth to tone things down. He ignored her, removing his eyeglasses, wiping away tears of joy. According to other witnesses, he was “visibly annoyed” by the proceedings. Kerouac reported the tears. What has incorrectly come down in literary history as Ginsberg's first public reading of “Howl” lasted twelve minutes. When it ended, the room exploded into a wild roaring ovation. “It was like bringing two ends of an electric wire together,” Philip Lamantia remembered. For Michael McClure, “a line had been drawn, and either we had to stand at that line or else we had to step back from it.”

Kerouac jumped up to congratulate his friend. “Ginsberg,” he shouted, “this poem will make you famous in San Francisco.”

Kenneth Rexroth anticipated wider horizons. “This poem will make you famous from bridge to bridge,” he said, moist eyes glistening.

Gary Snyder wisely waited for the commotion to die down before approaching the lectern. (“Japhy Ryder [. . .] in rough workingman's clothes he'd bought secondhand in Goodwill stores”) The final poet on the evening's program, Snyder read “A Berry Feast” in rich sonorous tones and recaptured the attention of the excited audience. Kerouac found the sound of Snyder's voice “somehow brave, like the voices of oldtime American heros and orators.” This last poem, prophetic in its embrace of traditional Native American ways and the natural world, provided a fitting conclusion to the electric evening.

After the reading, the poets, along with their friends and lovers, piled into a rattletrap fleet of secondhand junkers and drove to Sam Wo's on Washington Street, Gary Snyder's favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Ferlinghetti and his wife, not feeling “part of the scene,” went home instead. Open until 3:00 AM, the narrow, three-story noodle parlor was better known for the glib rudeness of its impatient waiters than for the quality of the cheap greasy food it served. Snyder taught Kerouac how to eat with chopsticks while the group noisily reviewed the highlights of their triumph at the Six Gallery. No one could quite articulate what it all meant. In retrospect, Gary Snyder judged the evening as “a curious kind of turning point in American poetry.” Typically, Jack Kerouac, always the myth-maker, described a more heroic vision. For him, the reading marked “the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.”

thirteen: on the beach

W
HEN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN arrived in Frisco in August of 1956, he headed straight for North Beach and made City Lights one of his first stops. The bookstore served as the hub of the bohemian community, with thumbtacked notices on the bulletin board advertising rides, cheap rooms and apartments, lost pets, used vehicles, astrological charts, and sundry other arcane offerings. For a time, Dick Brautigan used “General Delivery” as a mailing address but soon got a room on upper Grant Avenue. His earliest recorded San Francisco domicile was apartment number 38 at 1648 Grant. A letter from D. Vincent Smith written in July arrived about this time from Japan. Smith had decided to use all the Brautigan poems he had on hand for
Tiger in a Telephone Booth
and planned to print copies of the little book soon. Smith promised Dick he'd keep him informed.

On August 27, again through the auspices of D. Vincent Smith, Brautigan mailed a copy of “The God of the Martians,” the latest of his minimalist notebook novels, to Harry Hooton in Sydney, Australia. An anarchist poet born in Yorkshire, England, and known as “that flaming archpriest of Neo-Bomboism,” Hooton once served eighteen months in Maitland Jail for “unarmed robbery.” He had been a fixture in the Sydney bohemian scene since 1942 and published a small literary periodical there called
21st Century, The Magazine of a Creative Civilization
. The first and only issue to date appeared the previous September. Dick used general delivery for his return address but never heard back from Down Under. Hooton died five years later. Brautigan's manuscript did not resurface until after his own death.

By mid-October 1956, when he typed a short postcard note to Edna Webster in Eugene, Brautigan felt sufficiently settled to ask that she send his manuscripts to Grant Ave. “I really need them,” he wrote, typing his name (“dick”) in lowercase at the bottom. Dick eventually received a return package from Edna. She sent him “The Shortest Book of Poetry in the Whole God-Damn World,” recently rejected by New Directions, along with the same brief postcard he had just written to her. Edna did not return the manuscript of “Why Unknown Poets Stay Unknown” (which had come back from Random House early in September with a polite rejection letter signed by editor Albert Erskine) or any of the several notebook “novels.” These went into a safe deposit box in Eugene and remained out of sight for the next thirty-five years.

Bill Brown was one of the first Frisco writers Dick Brautigan met, and they remained friends for the rest of his life. Brown, a rugged, powerfully built man with the no-nonsense features of Sergeant Rock, drove a cab in the city at the time and was largely unpublished (
Coyote's Journal
and his novel,
The Way to the Uncle Sam Hotel
, still years in the future). “He'd just blown into
town,” Bill said, recalling his first meeting with greenhorn Dick. “He heard I knew Bill Williams and selling pot.

“‘How's Bill?'

“I said, ‘I don't want to talk about Bill.' I was hungover on Lasker's couch. I said, ‘I want to talk about Flossie.' So, we went on and on. He was asking questions like ‘Where is this?' and ‘Where is that, downtown, like on the beach?' He didn't know zip—zip about anything.”

Zip came fast in the narrow streets of North Beach. A new world as far removed from Oregon as a rocket ship journey to the moon waited outside the cramped confines of apartment number 38. Within sauntering distance of his rented room, a three-block stretch along Grant Avenue offered almost everything an impoverished young poet might require. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop (1398 Grant), with a cartoonish wall mural by Aaron Miller, served up bargain breakfasts. Cheap dinners and dago red attracted hungry hipsters to the Old Spaghetti Factory (just off Grant at 478 Green Street), where numbers of antique wooden chairs dangled from the rafters high overhead. Miss Smith's Tea Room (1353 Grant) offered booze and poetry readings. For an afternoon java hit, the newly opened Café Trieste (corner of Grant and Vallejo) provided sanctuary and the daily newspapers. Mainly, there was The Place, at 1546 Grant. The public forum this nondescript joint provided prompted Brautigan to send for his manuscripts.

Kerouac called The Place “the favorite bar of the hepcats around the Beach.” To Mike McClure it was “the Deux Magots of Frisco.” Since opening in 1953, when Leo Krikorian, “a short, husky, ferocious-looking man,” bought the bar for $3,000, The Place had attracted a steady clientele of poets, working men, artists, and such local oddballs as Hube the Cube, Red Fred (“a port wine freak” who sat on the counter and played the piano), Boring Boris, Badtalking Charlie (the “crazy black seaman”), and one-armed Paddy O'Sullivan (a faux-cavalier bedecked in Vandyke beard, plumed hat, and a cape).

The Place had a comfortable no-nonsense atmosphere. Fresh sawdust covered the floor every day; a battered upright piano obscured the front window; an antique back bar sported mirrors and columns. Licensed to sell beer and wine, Leo Krikorian stashed Coke bottles full of whiskey out of sight under the sink for the old-time neighborhood Italians who occasionally wandered in looking for a real drink. The bar opened every morning at nine.

In 1954, Knute Stiles, a fellow painter who knew Krikorian from Black Mountain College, became his partner “for about a year,” from one April Fool's Day to the next. Leo took the day shift and Knute ran The Place at night. “We were a freak joint,” Stiles recollected, “poets of all sizes and ages, some painters, some photographers, some merchant seamen, some radicals, some conservatives.”

It didn't take many customers to make a crowd in the bar's four hundred square feet. According to Knute Styles, “We arranged it in such a way that there wouldn't be any single-tabled people, that people would be all kind of together. The smallness of The Place ensured the continuity of the dialogue—it was very hard for anybody to get lost.” The barroom had a staircase in the rear leading to a tiny balcony with tables for twelve or fifteen. It overlooked the entire establishment. The first staged event “was Jack Spicer's cacophony band from his class at the Art Institute. They were a very noisy lot—almost drove the customers out really, making noises on the balcony.”

Two painters running a bar resulted in a gallery by default. The Place began showing the best contemporary art in Frisco. In 1953, after the close of King Ubu, and prior to its reincarnation as
the Six, the city had no galleries adventurous enough to exhibit abstract art. Leo Krikorian's bar on Grant Avenue filled the gap. Among those featured in one-man shows at The Place were Robert LaVigne, Deborah Remington, Joel Barletta, and photographer Bill Eichele.

Jay DeFeo had her first show at The Place after returning from a stay in Paris and Florence with stacks of paintings on paper. DeFeo remembered the barroom walls “sort of plastered with these little drawings,” and Knute Stiles recalled that there was so much of her work, “we had to put some of it on the ceiling.” The boisterous iconic paintings of DeFeo's husband, Wally Hedrick, hung prominently in the first two annual Dada shows held at The Place. As a couple, DeFeo and Hedrick personified the Frisco art scene, at the time in every way a family affair.

“The bars in the ‘Beach' were people's living rooms,” said John Allen Ryan, who started tending bar for Leo Krikorian in 1956, shortly before Dick Brautigan arrived on Grant Avenue. Ryan described the establishment's evolution into a hotbed of hipness: “The Place was like a cultural center, poetry in fourteen languages in the toilet, pasted, written, painted on the wall. We had art shows, Blabbermouth Night, poetry readings, jazz. There was always something going on.”

Until 1967 there were no true bars in California in the sense of the taverns and saloons elsewhere, two-fisted hard-drinking watering holes where you belly up and toss back your shot. In order to legally pour hard liquor, a California bar in that era had to have a kitchen and also serve food. It had to be a restaurant. All the other joints, places where writers and artists could afford to hang out, served only beer and wine.

Dick Brautigan hadn't started drinking when he first began hanging out at The Place. California law in those days didn't prohibit minors from entering a bar, provided they consumed no alcohol. Tall, awkward, and blond as a newborn child, Brautigan looked younger and far more innocent than most men of twenty-one. He came in shyly and took a table by himself, his perpetual notebook under his arm. Because he didn't ask to be served, Leo Krikorian assumed “he was no more than sixteen.”

Wherever Brautigan took his first drink, at 12 Alder Place or Vesuvio or Miss Smith's Tea Room or at Mike's Pool Hall or perhaps slugging it down from a brown-paper-bagged pint on a quiet corner of Telegraph Hill, it wasn't long before the frugal young poet, meticulously noting every minute expense in his notebooks, began devoting ample bookkeeping space to The Place, where a beer or a glass of port cost a dime.

A couple years later, when Brautigan was a drinking man and lived a bus ride away from the Beach up on Potrero Hill, he jotted the following list:

THIS WAS AN exorbitant tally by Richard's pinch-penny standards when his total expenses for all the rest of April came to only $6.55. If Brautigan sipped coffee every day during his first impoverished summer on the Beach in 1956, he drank it at Leo Krikorian's bar. John Allen Ryan remembered the young poet: “He'd sit and write in The Place, in all the bars, he wrote everywhere and carried his notebooks with him.”

Richard joined an informal cadre of notebook-toting unknown poets hanging out and gossiping at The Place. There was considerable talk about Gary Snyder, who had left for Kyoto, Japan, in May, his studies funded by a grant from the First Zen Institute of America. Hipsters also chattered about Allen Ginsberg, back in town in September for the City Lights publication of
Howl and Other Poems
. The
New York Times Book Review
had published an article on Ginsberg and the San Francisco scene by poet Richard Eberhart on September 2. Rogue wanderer Robert Creeley with his pirate's eye patch (he lost the use of his left eye before he was five), really set Frisco poet-tongues wagging.

Creeley breezed in from Black Mountain back in March and blazed through the next three months, befriending Ginsberg and Kerouac, typing the stencils for an informal first mimeograph printing of “Howl,” brawling and getting arrested, editing the final issue of the
Black Mountain Review
, and running off with Kenneth Rexroth's wife, Marthe Larsen. The affair started with a party bidding Gary Snyder bon voyage on his Japanese freighter.

The next night, Jack Kerouac and Bob Creeley, both drunk, got the bum's rush from The Cellar, a club featuring poetry and jazz. Creeley's lip was bleeding from the bouncer's haymaker. Kerouac invited him to stay at “Marin-an,” Snyder's rustic cabin over in Mill Valley. Not much more than a shack, the little place had windows without any glass. Creeley accepted, bringing along Mrs. Rexroth to a eucalyptus-scented Marin County love nest. The cuckolded husband eventually took his revenge in print. A prominent literary critic, Rexroth never missed an opportunity to attack both men with scathing reviews.