City Lights...Finger Cymbals...Alcatraz

NOB HILL--Thursday MaryAnn and I leave for San Francisco (and the other Nob Hill) for a few days. It will be a brief vacation to a place MaryAnn has never seen. And although I lived there for about six months, I was penniless and never bought a meal or even a cup of coffee the whole time. So it will be really wonderful and relaxing. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

I lived in SF during the fall and winter of 67 and spring of 68. If you are old enough those dates mean something to you. It was during the Haight-Ashbury days. I lived upstairs with a friend from Illinois over a Bank of America on the corner of Hayes and Octavia. You could walk to the Haight. You could walk to Market. You could walk most anywhere. And we did.

At that time, Alcatraz was in the hands of the American Indian Movement. I often looked at it from Aquatic Park while fishing from the pier. Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore was nearby, and I spent a good amount time reading poetry in the basement.

I attended a "Rolling Renaisance" poetry reading with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, John Wieners. I can't remember if Gregory Corso or Kenneth Patchen were there. I was sitting in the first row of the balcony of a very packed theatre. Everyone seemed to be smoking. You could see the cloud of smoke rising toward the balcony and then the ceiling. Nobody was smoking tobacco. Joints were being passed across whole aisles of the theatre. I passed one to the person next to me. He said, "No thanks, I never smoke when I'm stoned."

The stage was covered with mattresses. Indian bedspreads hung from a clothesline behind them. Allen Ginsberg came in dancing and wearing finger cymbals. Michael McClure sat sort of sideways near the front of the stage with his legs displayed at just the right angle. Robert Kennedy had been killed shortly before the event, and Ferlinghetti read a poem in his honor...well, more of a reaction to the assassination. It was based on Dylan Thomas' "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower." When it was his turn Ginsberg humped the podium as he read his poem with such vigor that I thought it might crash into the seats. Whenever one of the poets turned an image, the whole audience would snap their fingers. There were a thousand people there.

It was quite a time. But it was also difficult for many of us who were out there sort of searching for somewhere we might belong. My friend Michael Perkovich and I once didn't eat for three straight days. A hooker working a corner next to where we lived gave us a dollar. We went to the Safeway and bought 20 pounds of potatoes and a pound of margarine with the money. We ate it all in the next 3 days. For several years after returning to Illinois from that adventure I carried in my jacket pocket a can of sardines. For emergencies.