Baby Beatniks in North Beach (where there isn’t any water and Big Daddy ain’t your fadder)

So, anyway, one Sunday afternoon in the Summer of 1959 the Baby Beatniks are heading for The City, twenty miles up the Bayshore Freeway. They were living big already, just blowin’ out of the suburbs and into that town of a million lost hearts’ dreams. At the moment they’re managing an off-key rendition of the gospel song Twelve Gates To the City: “Oh what a beautiful city, Oh what a beautiful city, Oh what a beautiful city, San Francisco is.” Man, it was going to be a good day. North Beach, here we come.

Rick found a place to park on one of Telegraph Hill’s steep side streets and the three cut down to upper Grant Avenue, as it was in the last golden light of the beatnik media frenzy. When City Lights Books published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl three years before and they were busted on obscenity charges, the trial put North Beach on the map — the center of the whole new bohemian, beat generation poetry and jazz extravaganza of sinful wonderfulness. Then Kerouac arrived along with rest of the beat poets and it seemed like by 1959 everybody who ever read Time Magazine knew North Beach was the place to go to catch a glimpse of those crazy, cool free spirits known as beatniks as they played their bongo drums and smoked tea and grew beards. And wrote their obscene poems. City Lights Bookstore was on the tour bus map — and that’s where we were headed today, to the world just three more high school tourists.

First we stood outside the Coffee Gallery to hear Pony Poindexter blow alto at the Sunday afternoon jam session. The sidewalk was the place for teenagers who wanted to hear jazz, and a small group had already gathered. Teenaged beatniks were considered a low life form on the Beach and our flip-flops (“satori slippers”), sweatshirts and incipient goatees gave us right way. Fortunately, Grant Ave was not like the nightclub scene on Broadway around the corner. The bouncers would card you but they wouldn’t shoo you away unless you were keeping the paying traffic from coming in.

Actually, my partner Ricky didn’t really like jazz that much; he was an actor, jazz left no room for his expansive personality. Cool poetry was more his style, especially if he could declaim it to peals of laughter. And we were always ready to laugh at Rick.

My other main man, Dave Parma, was silent, but you could tell from his eyes he was thinking, “yeah yeah go man!” as we whirled our eyes up and down the street watching to see how the big cats portrayed coolness. To me, jazz was the sound of hipness. I loved music in all forms from Little Richard to Prokofieff, but jazz was the key to the future I wanted to be part of and I needed to fill up my head with as much of it as I could.

Narrow Grant Ave was crowded with happy people heading down to the clubs of Broadway or up to their cars. Obvious tourists, usually two sets of couples chatting excitedly to each other. There was Paddy O’Sullivan down on the corner, hawking his poetry book, dressed like one of the Three Musketeers in boots and floppy black hat with a big plumy feather. He had a group of visitors surrounding him – it was a good day for the trade.

Oh Upper Grant Ave of 1959, street of wondrous delight, street of swimming crowds and cool daddy-ohs and remittance men in abstract residence hotels and little dusty Figoni’s Hardware store next to the Italian-French Bakery of anise bread delight. The beats and the tourists and the elderly Italian men walking out to play bocce ball and smoke evil-smelling (and tasting) rope cigars, and the dog trotting freely in the street and the pigeons waiting to be marked, and the Chinese ladies off to work at the sweat shop and Mimi and Rudolfo falling in love in their starvation garret out the window of the apartment above all on a sunny Sunday before school started up again and I went off to San Jose State to start college.

We ducked across the street and hustled up a block to The Scene, an art gallery next to the beatnik gift shop. We liked to go in there because, first they had no good reason to keep us out.

In Cafe Trieste, the coolest coffee house on the Beach, we could stand by the counter for hours, but good luck getting served. Good businesspeople, they had a vested interest in keeping suburban seventeen year old riffraff thinned out. (Actually, I did successfully purchase an orgeat soda there once, but I was twenty by then and a big well-traveled college student beatnik).

No chance to get into hip Vesuvio’s (the bar with Booths for Psychiatrists) - nope, it was a bar, a beatnik bar (actually, they would have screeched to be so characterized). Mike’s Pool Hall? The worldly streetly denizens would have had a good laugh if we penniless innocents had tried racking up the balls. After the laugh, we would have gotten bounced. Still, even though we were admittedly fleas and disease – teenagers from the suburbs – hey, WE WERE THE FUTURE and you can’t stop us!

The Italian deli at Broadway and Kearney treated us fair. Our money was always good there for French rolls and salami.

The bookstores – New Discovery, Logos, and above all City Lights, the literary center of the universe – let us in but watched us for they knew our hearts were larcenous. Also our fingers. But The Scene, the art gallery…it represented everything we aspired to be.

There were art galleries in our town, San Mateo, of course. Their windows featured scenes of waves breaking at twilight with the night approaching and glimmers of green and a little duck – perfect for that empty spot over the mantel of your upper-middle class living room .

But The Scene’s window presented other kinds of paintings – grey and mauve paint slathered on canvas with a palatte knife, the colors sliding into each other so you couldn’t see where they met. And a strange robot shape in tan outlined in black stranded frozen in the greymauve fog gloom. That was cool.

And inside there were paintings like psychotics make in art therapy with deep symbolism known only to the artist – like a guy roped to a tombstone (well, that’s kind of obvious), or maybe a huge guy squashed in a claustrophobic room with daggers raining down – stuff even I at 17 could recognize were great personal nightmares but terrible art, yet hung on the same wall with the cool grey-mauve palette knife stuff.

The yet greater attraction of The Scene was the way-out chick sitting bored at the counter. Man, she was beat! Thick black hair with bangs and a ponytail or falling down loose, and caked on mascara, layered eyeshadow, eyeliner — all that wonderful drama that made her look Egyptian, exotic and beyond all reach forever, wearing a loose dark sweater and tight skirt with black tights. She stood out from the paintings like a Leonardo amongst the psychotics. Me and Parm and Shapero studied the pictures while stealing looks at this goddess of the Lower East Side come to our own Grant Avenue North Beach. We never spoke, but there she is today emerging clear on my eyelid screen still perched on a stool behind the glass counter bored out of her mind with dark red lipstick on her Winston.

But you know where we were welcome in spite of our itchy, poetry-stealing fingers? City Lights, the legendary bookstore and meeting place for the Beat Generation at the corner or Broadway and Columbus.

City Lights had everything we needed to prepare for our journey to hipness – the passage that would get us a table at the Cafe Trieste and Vesuvio’s and The Place and maybe even the Coexistence Bagel Shop. They carried Celine (Journey to the End of Night), Jean-Paul Sartre – the cool French existentialists, and the nineteenth century guys you couldn’t find in paperback anywhere else, like Flaubert and Balzac. The Brits too – Down and Out in Paris and London, Absolute Beginners, Lucky Jim plus leftist history and politics, anthropology, psychology, Alan Watts’ books The Way of Zen and Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen– and all in paperback. Plus all of the Henry Miller and Djuna Barnes that wasn’t outlawed for obscenity.

I loved going down the narrow winding stairs into the poetry cellar because Shig Murao, the manager, or maybe Ferlinghetti himself had put up a bulletin board there that was like the Craig’s List of North Beach. Reading the scrawled notices on notebook scraps from hipsters looking for rides back to New York City or wanting to share expenses for an apartment on Russian Hill or about a poetry reading coming next week somewhere, it was heady – a window out which I could see real people actually living the life Jack Kerouac encouraged them to live through his books (That was actually the last thing on his mind, but he wrote about his time and place too well)

Continuing down the stairs you emerged into the poetry cellar, the unique collection of poetry books and magazines and literary journals from around the world — Big Table, Evergreen Review, Chicago Review, Partisan Review, and our own local poetry magazine — the hottest item on my list, Beatitude. Browsing in the poetry cellar was like walking into a great conversation between all the hippest, most creative people you could never meet in ordinary teenage life. And you could just sit there as long as you wanted, you and your pals, browsing, checking them out, and if you found something you really liked, stealing it!

What brats! Why did you do that? Why did you bite the hand that fed you?

We would never steal from a friend – but Lawrence Ferlinghetti? No problem! Yet if I had been caught and eighty-sixed from the store – or worse - I would have been devastated. The truth is, we didn’t think more than a minute ahead and…our ethics sucked.

I wanted the poetry and I wanted to steal it! Made it tastier. And then I got to read Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death or Bob Kaufman’s broadside The Abomunist Manifesto.

The funny thing is the poetry itself kind of encouraged the thief’s stance – sliding by, staying under the world’s radar, romantic yet cynical, the hipster thief. But were the Babies cynical hipster thieves? No way! Maybe they were thrill-seeking — no different than any other shoplifter who can afford to buy the product. They saw it, they wanted it, they figured they could get away with it. Simple and ugly. No different than any other sin. Seventeen or any age of our lives - the motivation to evil remains the same. (The trouble with all this pondering is now I have to go write a check to City Lights for poetry thefts forty-five years ago! Fair is fair.)

Night is falling as the Babies emerge from City Lights, head up Broadway to the delicatessen and emerge with a beat supper of French rolls, Italian dry salami, and a quart of milk. They’re walking past Mike’s Pool Hall in jubilant spirits and agreeing amongst themselves that “someday this will all be ours!” If I live long enough (this could take a while!) and we don’t get bored first - you’ll be able to decide for yourselves how true their prophecy was.

For now, let’s leave them sitting on the concrete balustrade at the end of Vallejo Street, high on Russian Hill, gnawing on French bread and looking down over their future empire. The neon lights of Broadway are switching on, the girl who dances in the cage above “Goman’s Gay Nineties” is just getting to work, the bouncers are sweeping the sidewalks, beyond the steets the Bay Bridge is glowing in the fading sunset light. Oh, what a beautiful City San Francisco is.

Note: Special thanks to Carioca for her trip to the San Francisco Public Library to check my facts.