Copyright 2009, by Don MacLaren The following story was published in the summer 2009 issue of the literary magazine Wilderness House Literary Review.
The
writing has been copyrighted, so if you wish to use or quote anything
in this story you must properly cite the source, including the author's
(Don MacLaren's) name. From the Lone Star State to the Golden Gate
I began to seriously think of going back to New York, where I had lived
for a while after I got out of the Navy, but instead, on Sunday,
October 14th, 1984 I packed my things into a car and drove
west, figuring if worse came to worst and I ran out of money I would be
better off in a California winter than a New York one. Oklahoma City,
Texas Panhandle, cooking rice, beans and potatoes on a grill in the
middle of nowhere with no one in sight. First snow of the season in
Tucumcari, New Mexico – through Taos, Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon.
Through the beautiful desert of New Mexico and Arizona and the desert
wasteland of the Mojave. Road signs led to Los Angeles and I thought
about it but bypassed them and went north to the Bay Area to complete
my second trip across the North American continent on Sunday, October 21st
1984. I stopped at a 24 hour diner in Oakland, ordered breakfast at
10:30 pm, walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and stared at
the face looking back at mine for a long time, till it convinced me
that whatever road I took was the right road. I crossed the Bay Bridge
into San Francisco and slept in my car, near the Golden Gate Bridge, as
I did for the next few days until I paid for a room in a fleabag hotel
in Oakland.
One night I went to a bar in North Beach called The Saloon, the oldest
bar in San Francisco, built before the 1906 earthquake. One of Charles
Bukowski's books has a photo of it on the cover. There was a band
playing jazz, with an attractive woman on the saxophone. A man who
looked to be in his 50s, dressed in a suit and tie asked me if people
could read poetry there. I told him I didn't know, but if people could
I wanted to read some. I told him I was a poet.
As it turned out, there was no poetry read there, but I befriended this
man and he befriended me. He chain-smoked Camel regulars, and read me
poems as we sat at Zim's at the corner of Market and Van Ness late into
the night. I asked him what he thought of Allen Ginsberg. "He says he's
a Buddhist." I asked him what he thought about Jack Kerouac. "Jack
spent three days at my house, drying himself out. He told me he was
giving up alcohol, embraced Jesus again and was going to get back to
his Catholic roots. We went to church once."
Tom Powers became a friend of mine. He'd been thrown off a roof when he
was eight years old and suffered from ataxia, among other ailments. He
walked with a cane and a wobbly gait, as if he were drunk. His wife and
one of his sons had committed suicide. His two remaining children had
abandoned him. He lived in the Tenderloin in an SRO, on social
security, after losing his job as an insurance adjuster in the 1960s.
He was an alcoholic and a member of AA, and constantly short of money.
As with most good friends Tom and I fought and sometimes separated for
months or even years. Despite the fact I could match every drinking
story he told me with one of my own I did not consider myself an
alcoholic. I asked him if it was OK to drink while I was with him. He
said it was. I would go to his tiny room on Ellis Street, smoke the
cigarettes he offered me and drink ale, while sitting on the floor,
listening to him read poems as his transistor radio, tuned to KDFC-FM,
played classical music. I'd begun to take an interest in jazz and blues
when I was in high school, and began to cultivate an interest in
classical music in the Navy as I picked up KDFC on my radio.
"Why do you always write about hate and fear and filth?" Tom would ask
me. "Just look out your window, Tom." Actually, out Tom's window was a
very narrow space between another building. Below it was an alley too
narrow for much of anything but rats and roaches. Nevertheless, once a
body was found there.
Tom was prescribed a variety of medicines – lithium, codeine, and
countless others I can't remember the names of. Oftentimes he offered
me samples, most times I refused. * I spent Thanksgiving of 1984 alone in my skid row hotel in Oakland eating baked beans out of a can.On
Christmas 1984 I lay on my bed in my tiny room with a headache because
I hadn't eaten anything at all for two days. A couple days later I was
walking down the street when I saw someone I recognized from the Navy –
a black guy that was in my division on the USS Coral Sea. He invited me
to drink a cup of coffee. I told him about my financial situation and
he said I should have stayed in Dallas, but he lent me some money, and
helped me out again later. If it weren't for him my time would have
been much more difficult. I ran into him several more times in the Bay
Area – about once every year. The last time I saw him was just before I
was about to go to Japan. He worked at the Sizzler restaurant as a
waiter, and whenever I went there I gave him a humungous tip. *
The move from Texas to California was scary for me because I didn't
have any job or connections in California when I left Texas, nor did I
have much money. I didn't tell my parents I was making the move as they
would have almost certainly tried to dissuade me from doing so, thereby
adding to the fears I already had, and perhaps tipping the scales in
favor of abandoning the trip, thereby preventing me from embarking on
the next step in the journey of my life.
Later, I found a job as a waiter at the Palladium Disco in San
Francisco, commuting there from Oakland by BART. The Palladium was open
four nights a week – Thursday through Sunday. While waiting on
customers I had to carry drinks on a tray through the crowd that was
packed wall to wall with people. I would go throughout the area where
the tables were located (on two levels) and even on to the packed dance
floor sometimes to take orders. Somehow, I managed to keep from
spilling any drinks. My first night there I made good tips, but that
was the only night I did.
The Palladium is at the edge of North Beach, an old Italian
neighborhood in San Francisco, and the company that owned the disco
also owned a handful of strip joints in the neighborhood.
I don't remember filling out an application for the job before I was
interviewed by a guy a little bigger and a few years older than I named
"Mondo." Mondo had black hair and olive skin and looked at me coldly
with dark brown eyes. "Let me see some ID," he said and I showed him my
Texas driver's license. "Do you have a job now?" "No," I told him.
"What are you living on then?" "Savings," I told him. Mondo
drove a corvette and wore suits that looked custom-made. He sometimes
gave good-looking girls free drinks, and all the girls at the disco
liked him. One of the other managers, a middle-aged guy in a suit that
looked custom-made, came in one night before the place opened and
showed off his shooting techniques with an unloaded pistol. I recall
him saying something about being in prison. People seemed to respect
those guys. I never respected them, but in order to earn enough money
to eat I had to swallow my pride and work for them.
And work I did (though that particular job didn't last very long
because I was fired for inadvertently serving drinks to a minor). I
spent countless hours of my youth doing things like operating factory
presses, driving taxis, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. One of the
better jobs I had was working the graveyard shift at a motel on Lombard
Street in San Francisco, on the city's "motel row". Working the
graveyard shift allowed me to do homework for the college classes I was
taking and watch movies on TV. The other desk clerks in the
neighborhood called it the Bates Motel, because it looked like the
motel in the movie Psycho.
Coincidentally someone who looked like Anthony Perkins checked in while
I was working one night. Another night an old woman jumped out of one
of the motel's windows to her death while I was watching Hiroshima Mon Amour on TV at 3:00 AM. * During the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 17th,
1989, I went to San Francisco to check on Tom and he told me his
building would not be considered habitable until it had been checked
for structural damage. I let him and a friend of his stay in my
apartment in Oakland a couple nights, until they found it was all right
to go back to their residential hotel. 15
years after I first met Tom I called on him, but he was nowhere to be
found. Tom was an old man when I first met him. He may have died and
been reborn a young man, or he may be wandering the earth and sea like some mythological character- perhaps somewhere beyond the Golden Gate.
Many people who reach the edge of the continent feel there's no place
else to go. I guess that's one reason the Golden Gate Bridge is a
popular suicide location. But with the end of a continent and the end of a story comes a new beginning.
After I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1990 I began a different journey
- to Japan; a journey that was longer and fraught with more danger than
the one I had taken to the Golden Gate. But that's a story I'll tell
later. Right now it's time for me to open a bottle of ale and a book of
poetry, tune the radio to KDFC and take a look out the window. Copyright 2009, by Don MacLaren