Remembering Herb Caen

“Sacramenna Kid,” Herb Caen (April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997), San Francisco’s epic satire columnist had a lifelong love affair with The City. He immortalized San Francisco with nearly 60 years’ worth of pithy columns chock full of local happenings, insider gossip, and puns. He was credited with coining the phrase, “Baghdad by the Bay,” and bestowed the term, “Beatnik” upon poet Bob Kaufman.

Caen introduced and popularized the term “hippie” (never hippy—unless you were a hippo), Summer of Love and Frisbeetarianism, and Berserkeley. But San Francisco, his real mistress, was always The City. Caen’s daily columns were paeans, "A continuous love letter to San Francisco" and a special Pulitzer Prize called him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco.

Herb Caen loved what he dubbed "Namephreaks"‍—‌people whose names (aptronyms) were appropriate or inappropriate to their vocations including substitute teacher Mr. Fillin, piano teacher Patience Scales, orthopedic specialist Dr. Kneebone, and the Vatican's spokesman on the evils of rock 'n roll, Cardinal Rapsong.

I had a seriously uptight ramrod of a science teacher in seventh grade called Mr. Sliney. And the other science teacher who replaced him (after he broke a ruler over a student’s hands) was called Mr. Plant.

The quasily-fictional character, “Strange de Jim” was Caen’s chief informer, alter ego, and purveyor of naughty puns. Caen called him "gu-ru di tutti guruskies.” (Strange showed up to Caen’s memorial to deliver a eulogy while wearing two Sesame Street pillowcases over his head.) But soon everyone got into the informer act—he had an “army of reliable tipsters.”

If you made it into one of Herb columns either as an informer, or by (un)honorable mention, you had either arrived, or you had to live down the tale. It was an honor to be lampooned in Herb’s column. Even my father who lost his wallet to a combative squirrel in a park never quite lived down, or up to his new moniker, “Squirrely Hurley.”

*. *. *

Many of Herb Caen’s stellar columns were published in collection of essays, “Baghdad-by-the-Bay,” in 1949, and in “Don't Call It Frisco‍”—‌after a judge's rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles")‍ in 1953. In total he wrote 11 books, including children’s stories.

One reader remembered: When Herb Caen left Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner to join the San Francisco Chronicle, he took 10k subscribers with him. Our man about town was so popular he was nominated for president at the 1984 San Francisco Democratic Convention. Word has it some of those buttons are still floating around in bottomless martini glasses.

Caen received a special Pulitzer Prize (which he called his Pullet Surprise) in 1996 for "extraordinary and continuing contribution as a voice and conscience of his city."Caen was an astute collector of The City’s urban folklore.

After writing upwards of 16,000 columns, at a thousand words a day on his loyal Royal, he thought it was a joke. "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist," he wrote. "Well, it does have a certain ring to it. And it will definitely add a touch of class to the obituary.” Then he shut his door and wrote his column.

June 14, 1996, was officially celebrated in San Francisco as Herb Caen Day replete with a parade to the Ferry Building. TV news legend Walter Cronkite even showed up and the Damnbarcadero was rechristened "Herb Caen Way…

Caen, the king of what he dubbed "three-dot journalism" was famous for his signature three-dot ellipses separating his short news snippets. And the characteristic three asterisks designating a sea change, separating the acts from the grind.

“In 1993, he told an interviewer that he declined to retire because "my name wouldn't be in the paper and I wouldn't know if I was dead or alive," adding that his obituary would be his last column: "It will trail off at the end, where I fall face down on the old Royal with my nose on the 'I' key.” —Wiki

*. *. *

In his eulogy, Robin Williams said, “A very special Herb communion will consist of dry martinis and sourdough bread. And if you don't see God then, you never will.” And “I think that I know that you wouldn't mind me making jokes up here today because that's part of what you did. You made it kind of possible for us all to gather here and appreciate this very bizarre place.” Williams owed his early career success to Caen’s promotions.

My college schoolmate Robin said, I'd like you to turn to your hymnals. This is (Caen's book) "Baghdad by the Bay." and he read from it: 

"The crowded garages and the empty old buildings above them, the half-filled nightclubs and the overfilled apartment houses, the saloons and the skies and the families huddled in the basements, the Third Street panhandlers begging for handouts in front of pawn shops filled with treasured trinkets, the great bridges and the rattle-trap street cars, the traffic that keeps moving although it has no place to go, thousands of newcomers glorying in the sights and sounds of a city they suddenly decided to love instead of leave." —Herb Caen, Baghdad by the Bay

“I'm sorry you had to leave, man, but you're still here. See ya.”

*. *. *

“If I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, "It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco." —Herb Caen

*. *. *

The day Herb Caen died, it was standing room only at Grace Cathedral, and at all his local watering holes, people stood a dozen deep, the Stoli and gin ran like water and the bartenders ran out of martini glasses, so they improvised with wine and water glasses. All for six-bits as Herb would say. A few parched souls opted for this infamous Vitamin V shot - Stoli over ice in a wineglass with a twist.

People noshed on his favorite meal, meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Next day, the entire city awoke with a massive, pulsating hangover. Pass the aspirin and Alka-seltzer.

Yesterday I had meatloaf and mashed potatoes in honor of Herb Caen, but I passed on the six-bit martinis. I had adult gu…I mean wine, instead. Here’s to you, Herb, wherever you are.

AFTERNOON TEA AT WOOLWORTH’S

     

AFTERNOON TEA AT WOOLWORTH’S

                     —for Al Winans

My grandmother made a beeline to the lunch counter

for a brisk pot of afternoon tea after a hard day of shopping.

We watched the green and cream trolleys rumble down Powell 

to the Market Street turnstile, then spun like musicbox dancers,

while the electric trams labored like lugubrious caterpillars, 

the air singed blue with cascades of sparks whipping the air,

as their antennae criss-crossed an electric junction box.

Iron wheels groaned, singing the lost songs of mines

to the embedded tracks where horses once labored.

I remember the little scoop of vanilla ice cream, 

a summit to be conquered with fork and finger,

while she worked a raft of apple pie adrift on a pale plate,

and the clink of spoons as she stirred her tea, 

was a braille of fairy bells. They did it right, she said, 

beating a spoon staccato on the sides of the thick mug. 

Waiters scalded the teapot before filling with boiling water 

with the Lipton teabag already inside the pot—

they knew to follow her instructions to the letter.

God help them if they brought out the teabag 

still in its ceremonial wrapper on a separate plate.

She would have none of it, no lukewarm water in the pot.

No teabag afterthought. Utter nonsense, she said. 

Afternoon tea, properly made, righted the world. 

I practiced my alphabet, my finger tracing slow sounds 

along the shores of the puddle flooding the Formica table.

8/23/21

Easter, 1950s (photo)

New Easter bonnet and new maryjanes with cutout designs. The Shirley Temple look replete with ruffled rompers. Note the little cardboard purse with its gold chain. I’m sure my little white lace gloves were inside it. I loved that headband hat made of lace daisies and dragged it around for years. The dress was itchy, I was not above trying to take it off in public, and I got into trouble for dragging the toes of my new shoes on the sidewalk. I remember the little fence, it delighted me as it was just my height. I remember the photo being taken, I remember being scolded for fidgeting, and my legs were cold. They’re also crossed because I probably had to pee. I also stood like that because I was shy. I still do. But I knew enough to smile. We were either headed toward, or returning from Star of the Sea Church, where I was baptized, in San Francisco.

My very first Easter bonnet. My hair was bright copper, my mom's hair was auburn. I was some fatty, my mother, so lithe and lean. I remember I loved that celadon silk baby quilt to death—it was pale lavender on the other side. Her Hawaiian print skirt later became couch pillow covers. Forest Knolls, CA.

Sutro Baths (photo)

If my grandmother hadn’t met my grandfather at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco, I wouldn’t exist. She didn’t even know how to swim... but somehow she swam right into his arms. Lol, FB autocorrected Sutro into sutras. Ken Larsen said: “I love your typo (maybe intentional?) conjuring images of bathing in sutras. I’m too young to remember the baths but fond are the memories of skating there. Be sure to check out Sutro Bath giant water slide movies on YouTube—perhaps your grand parents slid into each other’s arms???” And Ken Bullock asked: “And if you never existed, who would've started the fire?“ Amergin’s fire in the head.

From a FB post

That City by the bay: by any other name

During a TGIF moment, a woman named Erika posted a whimsical iPhone photo of the Transamerica Building, replete with sunspot bubbles, on Facebook, and called it Frisco. People lost their shit. It was a landslide against. But old monikers die hard. 

One reader said, "frisco, the word that sounds like a brand of lard, sucks. everyone is entitled their opinion. You can be an outlier, but just know that people will make fun of you for it. Sorry not sorry," 

 I get weird connotations too: Frisco/Crisco, Friskies with Crisco.

Another reader tried to establish a quasi terminus post quem by stating that Frisco, Texas was...

So named because part of the Frisco rail line, originally incorporated in 1876, ran nearby. Care to guess which city's name is in the full name of the line? Frisco is in Texas only because it was here first. You do realize that the place in Texas was so named because part of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway a.k.a. the Frisco line ran through the area."

True, Frisco, Texas was named after a railway line, but wasn't named after the city of San Francisco. Frisco, Texas was called Frisco City. And the train system never left the Midwest. Not only that, it was named after another San Francisco landmark, a name of a mountain range that predates the founding of San Francisco. 

That same someone who headed up an unsuccessful campaign to rename the Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton, then tried to call in the race card, saying it was a class system. He said only the cocktail set call it by its full name, while the African Americans in the Divisadero, and the Latinos in the Mission call it Frisco. 

Well, I beg to differ. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Besides, the Mission was Irish, it was not always Latino. That came much later. It is not a class thing, it’s more about old San Francisco vs the influx of outsiders that began arriving during the 1970s.

He said

A 175-plus-year stream of San Franciscans have addressed their city with this term of endearment. What also is true, though, is that the longshoremen of the 1860s and the African-American residents of the Fillmore district, a century later, never were going to have the approval of the cocktail-party set. Antipathy to "Frisco" often has been an index of class snobbery."

Well, speaking of presentism, lifting a theme from today's social milieu and blanketing the past with it—about all we agreed upon that people from outside SF called it Frisco—primarily sailors who didn't live here. A frisco was the place where you got your boat repaired, it was not so much about the city's name. Frisco stems from an old Icelandic term for safe harbor. And equally for 175 years, people have been objecting to outsiders calling it Frisco. Nothing to do with demographics, or cocktail party sets, as he put it. Not class snobbery either. But if it fits his agenda....

He said:

"There are number of theories about the origins of "Frisco." Peter Tamony's little article, "Sailors Called It 'Frisco,'" in the July 1967 number of the journal Western Folklore, is worth checking out. No agenda here. It's fine that many have been schooled to have a distaste for "Frisco." But, they should be honest enough to admit that it is, in fact, an issue of taste. When they step into language policing, to say that it is objectively wrong to say "Frisco," they are out of their depth."

So you know I looked it up, only to find, he lifted it out of context from an article. Tamnony was merely strengthening the sailor reference. How folklore works, is what's passed down. More people grew up with the full name vs. using the moniker Frisco. It had nothing to do with working class vs the hobnob set. It's not a matter of taste, status, or even language policing, it's a subcultural trait. And it's not cut and dry either.

JL said:

To the contrary, Mo, it is precisely BECAUSE preferences about the name of the City are "passed down generationally" that these preferences become, and are, a matter of taste, status and language policing. I don't challenge the point that "more people grew up with the full name vs. the moniker Frisco." I simply am saying that THAT FACT, such as it may be, does not give those who weren't trained to tolerate "Frisco" the right to badger those who do use "Frisco" into some kind of submission, as though the "Frisco" crowd is "doing it wrong."

So, according to JL, those who say Frisco are allowed free reign, and a pat on the back because they feel justified in calling it Frisco, but those of us who learned it as San Francisco must stay mum because he says so? De gustibus non est disputandem; call it what you will, but expect a reaction.

I pointed out that there are 14 place names called Frisco, or Frisco Station, or Friscoville, none of them were originally called San Francisco, then shortened to Frisco, and they're named after a St. Louis, Missouri train route that didn't even go to San Francisco. Ever. "Despite its name, it never came close to San Francisco." It never even left the Midwest.

For the record, there's a town called Frisco, aka Fresco, in Alabama, Frisco, Arkansas (no train), Frisco is a Colorado mining town, as was Frisco, Idaho (no train), Illinois, Friscoville, Louisiana, Missouri (trains), Frisco, North Carolina on Hattaras Island (too watery for trains), Oklahoma, Pennsylvania (no train), Texas (train), Tennessee, Utah, a  mining town named after Frisco Peak in the San Francisco Mountains, named BEFORE San Francisco was founded, I might add; and Frisco, Virginia.

Yes, dahling, calling San Francisco Frisco is a bit problematic. It could refer to some place completely different. If you want to live in Frisco, consider moving to one of those states. Then it won't be an issue.

JL went on to say:

"The narrative that San Francisco natives and residents never have, or don't, call their city Frisco is both tired and false. The term has a long, storied history here dating back before 1850."

I repeated: The only problem with your train story, is that it never came to SF. And not once did I say that San Francisco natives and residents never have called their city Frisco. I said, it wasn't a class issue, that was too cut and dry, because many working class people, my own family included, never called it Frisco.

Many of those Frisco place names were derived from other places: In 1629, Spanish friars founded a mission at Oraibi, a Hopi village, in honor of St. Francis, 65 miles from the San Francisco Peaks. The Franciscans gave the name San Francisco to the peaks to honor St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their order.

The San Francisco Peaks, and the San Francisco Mountains both lent their names to several hamlets. Frisco Mountain, Washington, got its name from a mining camp, as did Frisco, CO, UT, etc. Frisco Coloradans are quick to defend their town's name, saying it's NOT named after San Francisco, CA, but that it's an acronym.

"Frisco, CO, wasn’t named after San Francisco. The name Frisco is desired from the letters associated with the St Louis- San Francisco Railway company. You have the FR from Francisco, IS from St Louis and CO from Company!" Frisco Colorado History Facts

So, the point is that the moniker, Frisco, did not originate in San Francisco. It's an exogamic term. Accretion. Like those barnacles on the ships.

The name of our city, San Francisco (est. 1769), was derived from the Latin, San Franciscus—full name: Mission San Francisco de Asis (1774), which was later dubbed, Mission Dolores. And it brought much sorrow for the Ohlone and Coast Miwok tribes.

Saint Francis of Assisi was a Frenchman. Frank, France, or Francis means a "free man." Oui! San Francisco's first European name was Yerba Buena. Good herbs. The island we now call Yerba Buena was called Goat Island. What, goats?San Francisco was also called The Golden City, after John C. Frémont dubbed it Chrysopylae in 1846, before the Gold Rush. It was also called The Golden City, or The City, probably because nobody could pronounce Chrysopylae. The Yelamu Ohlone names are lost. One candidate is Ahwaste, "place at the bay."

San Francisco was also called the Barbary Coast, and coined Bagdhad-by-the-Bay by Herb Caen. Though we refer to SF as a she, and Francisco may be a masculine name, in the City, gender is fluid. 

Herb Caen, the Pulitzer Prize–winning San Francisco Chronicle columnist, was adamant that no one call his "fair city by such a sliced-up moniker." Herb Caen, "the voice of San Francisco," wrote a a sequel to his 1949 loveletter to his multicultural adopted city, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, entitled Don't Call it Frisco in 1953, "named after a local judge's 1918 rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles")‍." He said “the F word” as “a salty nickname, redolent of the days when we had a bustling waterfront.”

Caen's column appeared in the SF Chronicle for nearly sixty years (with a brief defection to The San Francisco Examiner). Everyone turned to his page first, then, read the news. "Herb Caen" (archive) was the longest-running newspaper column in the country, until Caen's death in 1998.

Caen also coined, or popularized the terms Beatnik, hippie, and Beserkeley. A thousand words a day with Caen's trademark ellipses "three-dot journalism banged out on his "Loyal Royal", defined our city. June 14, 1996, was designated Herb Caen Day. He had that much influence. He didn't call it Frisco.

Herb Caen articulated it best.

You don't call New York, York do you? Nor do you say Kong. Or Angeles. Or Diego. Maybe Moscow should just be 'Cow. And while we're at it, let's cheapen St. Louis to just Louis. Why should San Francisco be shortened?

For the most part, only people from out of state, the recently arrived, or the tragically hip call it 'Frisco. There are exceptions. But it still draws ire. And it's also an old saw. There's even a sitcom called Don't Call it Frisco.

You also need that apostrophe BTW, as 'Frisco is a contraction. Otherwise it could refer to those 14 other cities legally called Frisco.

I found this 2006 story by Sean C., a frequent contributor to Trip Advisor:

"The city is named for Saint Francis, one of the most loved Catholic saints. Apparently, that word was shortened to "frisco" and was used by sailors to refer to a place where a sailing ship could be scraped, repaired, and refitted. The Court of Historical Review convened to decide if such a nickname was acceptable. The court ruled that the name of the city was San Francisco and that no nickname should be tolerated."

LOL it's the law!

Pancho (or Paco, Chico, Cisco,) is a diminutive Spanish baby name for Francisco. But Ess Eff is not a baby. Then, by way of parallel structure, in English, we oughta be calling The City St. Frankie, San Pancho, but not 'Frisco.  Just don't call it San Poncho, or San Pacho! SF may be free and easy, but nothing is ever truly free. One way or another, there's always a price to be paid, la mordida. Absurdum infinitem.

Can you imagine Tony Bennett singing, "I left my heart in Frisco"?

Me neither.

B/G Sandwich Shops plate, or the tale of Ralph Moody who wrote Come On Seabiscuit!

To coin, or resurrect a word, I'm a nostalgist, I prefer old, used things to the shiny and new. Chipped crockery lives out its last days on my shelves, and when it finally breaks, it lives a second life mounted on my wooden fence outside the kitchen window—not a wall of shame, but an honored spot for venerable service rendered.

I have an old B/G Sandwich Shop plate from San Francisco. I knew it was old but I had no idea that it dated back to the Depression era, or that B/G Sandwich Shop ushered in the era of counter lunch sandwiches. My plate is from the ancestor of the lunch counter sandwich and apple pie with a mug of java joe era. Move over Subway. And fast food.

B/Gs motto was "A meal a minute" "A National Institution," "Purely American," and "A place for nice food."And they served it up in 40 cities across the nation. Nobody knows how many B/Gs there were, LA had six, Chicago had at least ten, and Milwaukee had two shops. What began as a toasted sandwich joint in 1926, expanded into hundreds of railroad car styled diners in 40 cities. By the end of the 1960s early 1970s, most had disappeared. Enter the era of McDonald's.

END OF AN ERA

In the garden, I found an old plate
encrusted with dirt, from my family home,
chipped, and stained, it had seen better days.
But I couldn't bring myself to toss it out.
It's an old school cafeteria-style plate
with a plain boring logo on it: B/G
and two blue lines like railroad tracks.
I thought the initials stood for my brother and I,
so we fought over who got to use the plate,
and it fell to the floor with that ringing sound
and hubub of a train leaving the station,
but it never broke. I never once thought
to turn the plate over to find the logo,
of an Indian hunkered down making pots
for B/G Sandwich Shops, in PA.
Who says plates can't talk?
So I Googled it and found a story
of a man who came out west, Ralph Moody
to manage a sandwich shop on Market St.
When things got tough, my family would yell:
Come on Seabiscuit! He was a rebellious horse
who won races but only when he put his mind to it.
Ralph lived between Tanforan and Bay Meadows,
and because he'd tell tales of his storied life
as a ranch hand, a hobo, a stunt rider for the movies,
someone suggested a night class in creative writing.
It became a book, followed by another,  17 in all.
He penned a story, Come On Sea Biscuit!
Guess that old plate had a story to tell after all.

 4/3018

Scanning Photos on the Solstice & Father's Day

For the Solstice and for Father's Day I scanned and posted some photos on Facebook of my father. Some were photos that I had never seen before, as I had packed away his photo album soon after the funeral and never looked at it again (my mother died soon after, in 1994). I never really knew my absentee father so Father's Day is not something I've ever celebrated. Ever.

Photos forgotten until I decided to scan all my family photos. A momentous project I never meant to take on, but when my uncle began throwing out old photos when we cleaned out my grandmother's house, something needed to be done to preserve the past. So I collected and sorted and saved boxes of photos.

Back in March, during the Equinox, I began scanning my grandmother's photos, then I scanned my aunt's photos, then my mother's photos, and finally my father's photos on the Solstice.

I was surprised by the composite five-generational story that emerged from filing the separate photo albums of family members. The first album begins in the 1890s, with my great-grandparents; and the richest albums by far, are the old black & white photos up to the 1960s. My personal favorites are the photos from the 1940s and '50s. That's where I enter the picture, so to speak.

RIP Canice Reilly 3/30/1937 - 5/12/2012 (photo)

M y aunt Canice Reilly holding me on the back steps, 3rd Avenue, San  Francisco, 1953. Lori, the boxer, coming in for a snuggle. Look at how light my hair is—the same color as the dog. A redhead too. Then my hair turned dark. Woof. Look at the cuffed jeans. So very 1950s! She was a teenager here. Clearly, my main babysitter. Yeah, she babysat me when I was young. and I, in turn, took care of her kids when I was young—Full circle. So, her daugher is one of my best friends too. But Canice also drove me crazy too. RIP Canice Reilly (Dinsmore/Santos) 3/30/1937 - 5/12/2012.

I was changing my Facebook cover photo to the  Funeral Mountains, Death Valley—when my cousin Dave posted the link. You couldn’t get more literal than that. I was up all night. Couldn't sleep. That dream of the bowl of scorpions haunted me. Portent of things to come. Now I understand all the disturbing dreams. But we do have this weird death ESP in our family. Her death sentence was not commuted. She measured her demise in days, not months. she gave up the ghost. (Alas, she got only two weeks notice. She died on a Saturday. It was mercifully quick.) My aunt is gone. Blessed be.

Added 5/20

• GEALACH

In North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle

11/17/ 2004  We’re in Myles O'Reilly's pub at 622 Green St. in North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. Ha, ha, ha, we're all drinking somebody's open swill – Pinot Noir for breakfast. Ugh. I was hoping for food. It’s Myles’s birthday. The jazz club band brings us in with a little swing, some Maria Callas, and the Tarantella and the Godfather meets the Irish in North Beach.

Nearly an hour later, Roddy Doyle saunters in and steps up to the microphone, taps it thunderously, and says he's now a Yank, having been in nine cities in 10 days. We laugh.

Doyle is bald as a skinhead, it takes some getting used to. He read from Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and a small bit on Henry Smart, an IRA volunteer, from A Star Called Henry, and some stray bits from a play he's been working on, and then he thanked Elgie Gillespie for making this so. There is a River of free flowing booze. By this point, we're all fairly toasted.

Neil Jordan, steps up, looking upscale and fashionably thuggish, wearing shades, having just returned from a TV interview, he's a rare bit of gloom, despite it being sunny, midday. Maybe the alcohol's wearing off. 

He begins with: I know when I died, May 1950. It was a rare whinge, the perspective is written from that woman. He ended on an upbeat note: George killed me... He reads from The Dream of a Beast, with a segue into Interview with the Vampire.

After they were finished reading, there was a Q&A. Someone asks: Would you like to write The Commitments today?

Roddy Doyle said, Well, I'd need to express the conditions along similar lines. The Irish, the blacks of Europe would figure into it.

Jordan said the USA has been good to me, re: The Crying Game. 

At the Bob Dylan concert

We are standing in line waiting, hoping to get into the Bob Dylan concert. A last minute decision. We decide to join Vito and Connie but we have no tickets. Freddie, a parole officer, joins in the search. We are so many, we are circling the entire block of the Bill Graham Theater. We stand next to four buses idling, and are overwhelmed by the sooty odor of diesel. We know that Dylan is inside one of those dark buses. The buzz grows. 

The 20-somethings in the crowd may have tickets, but aren’t too sure who Dylan is. Neil works the crowd. Scalpers galore. Prices are through the roof. But he is optimistic. He works his magic, and finds one ticket at price halfway around the block. Final stretch into the auditorium and we still don’t have a second ticket. He scores one ticket at the box office, and a second ticket in the street, and bingo we’re in. It was so stressful. 

We are up in the rafters. The place is jammed. Blue light. Everyone is lighting up. It smells like the 1960s. The 20-somethings are rocking out, what’s the connection? This is their parent’s music. 

It was so strange to see Dylan in his maroon country and western leisure suit, opening with the Patsy Cline-ish cowboy songs. The concert was a musical pistache of R & B rock ‘n’ roll, swing, bluegrass—a progression of styles. He must’ve had a bank of a dozen guitars lined up for each nuance of the set. Shenandoah, nostalgic Civil War song reminds us of where we’ve been. I think of the juxtaposition of song, and war, and flag. No discourse, but the lyrics of the songs build on a political statement, ending with the antiwar songs. 

Dylan is still going strong at 60, a most dedicated performer. The music goes beyond his personality. Beyond his voice. But we don’t care. He sings I’ll be your baby tonight. Everyone knows the words. And they sing along with the times, they are a changing. Blowing in the wind. He brings down the house with Imagine. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Weird to think that about the time that Dylan became Christian, Cat Stevens became Muslim.

Someone lights up. You know what the next song is going to be. Everybody let’s get stoned. The audience lights up, right on cue—myriad red dragon eyes, or fireflies surround us. We are all stoned, It can’t be helped, we’re one giant contact high. Women throw bouquets of roses and scream, We love you Bob. I’m not a huge fan, but I get into the groove. They stone you when you’re playing your guitar. He changes the words to lyre. We giggle. It’s practically a karaoke club. His dozen guitars light up the night. 

Blue-eyed sons, all bald, now. No reprieve from the ravages of time. Neil is singing blowing in the wind under his breath. The only way to recognize some of the tunes is by the guitar chord progression. I’m thinking of rainy day women, hard rain, and blue-eyed sons. Today is not an endless highway, but we’re rocking in the balcony in unison. There must be some kind kind of way out of here, because the times they are a changing. 

As we leave the building the exit is a caracol, a human chain-snail oozing down the stairs. The bus screams, four more decoy buses pull out. Suddenly I know which bus Dylan is in. I flagellate Neil, telling him to run. I know where the bus will stop. Don’t ask me how I know, I just now. Call it newshound savvy. It’s all about timing. We run across the street and damned if the the bus doesn’t stop right in front of us. The impossible, possible, the improbable, probable. Bob Dylan opens the window, sticks his hand out and shakes our hands. Neil won’t wash his hands for the next year.

Intangible Instructions

There is always the desire to return. The tail of a blue fish emerged from her fingers, his arms were fins. Memories floated backwards in time to listen for the vestigial singing river in the dry riverbed. I never wanted the plane to land, but the Andes rose like a white dream to punctuate the sky. Faith in miracles. Here, Pizarro slept. There, Blake saw God in an apple tree. Time flowed backward, lined up like the homeless, like the basureños in makeshift houses along the Apurimac, or in Tijuana. Lined up like the locked eyes of death into the burning future on several continents. Myth: I carried a new gift of life. In the end, memory fails. Conquistador y amor. In Quito, the snake dancer from the selva cursed me. The bridge failed me. Coltrane’s sax defines qualities of night but the doors are locked. The six-legged nightmare rides on the smoke. Ask me what this means, I cannot read history written in the smoke of the victor. Say that in Selma, Dubrovnik, Darrio City, Bagdhad, Blake’s London, or L.A.

The descending fog envelops our feet. A warning call clearing the double-vision down the canyon past temptation. A gorge divides water from water, brings it together again. Except for the L.A. river. Do you know how to soar down through the dilemma, both following and leading? Counter-clockwise dance. Remembrance, resemblance. Which direction does the vortex choose? What carries us on and on? The child’s face buried in the moon’s path. They wander through the empty streets of Cusco, Moscow, San Francisco. In every voice, in every mirrored face, the bell toils for them. We speak with our hands. The gift of hands offered language to the children.

She stored apples under her bed. Illicit money whispered in the palms, Feel me! The teeth of graveyards are built on this foundation: the tail of the 20th century rendered in the useless orchestrations of Oppenheimer’s regret. The eagle keening. Living art in empty sheets. Riderless horses. Where is Schrödinger’s cat? Pandora? The blind mouse sleeping on the back of a dead bird dreams of angels. Clear the shelves of omnipotent windfalls and quantum malignancy. The marriage hearse reinvents the mother. Death reinvents the mechanics of fear. Open the box. Not.

Fear of the scent of money, fear of poverty. Fear of the telephone in the dead of night. Fear of needing glasses, fear of not enough time to read the face inside the eye of night. Fear of repeating the past, of paradoxes, of ambivalence, of love’s trap. I said I stayed in my dreams. Memorized floor patterns, but specific moments never came. The hunter flame burned celluloid memory. Imagery: Hopperesque scenes shot in black & white. The desire to return embedded in the fear of fear.

Fear of not growing up. Fear of control. Fear of growing up and not being in control. Or of growing up and being in control. What if I ran away and no one stopped me? That moment of star-crossed thresholds. Not saying, Now I lay me down to sleep. Saying, I see my future as nothing, becoming nothing. Becoming the breathing of the open door. The thrones of angels. Fish with the hearts of men. Each belabored breath blinded by the light, I open my eyes. Looking forward, looking back. My erotic dreams littered with scorpions. Carpe Diem. Descend with eyes open wide, like Beatrice.

Do you remember when we danced face-to-face? The way your mouth opened into my darkness. I’d asked to move forward. Just a little more time. I wanted him out of my vocabulary and into a room with no walls. We swam to the ceiling. You flew into the light, grew fins. We needed to rearrange definitions of speech, of the forgotten rain. The dance continues. Kiss me while the bones of humanity learn how to sleep in open doorways, and eyes learn not to see. Out of necessity, they bathe in the streets where privacy is closest held, yet farthest away. To suckle memory. Whose tongue in my mouth? Por el loro, he said. Van Gogh’s sunflowers weren’t gold enough in the city of bankers. I held a namesake lover who cried in front of Vincent’s Self Portrait. But my arms weren’t strong enough to hold back the digital madness. I thought of Rilke. Raucous words escape the phosphor screen, take flight, flock to the trees like wild parrots. The computer becomes the 13th muse.

Fear of your thoughts. Origins of a code trickling down my thigh. What I ought to have said. Or, if I said too much. Fear of my thoughts. Fear of the telltale beating of the apple heart. Fear of finding the naked dawn descending the fire escape, each step of light defining the canyons of man. Exponential dreams of sirens scream in prime numbers, the mellifluous sax, the real voice of street corners. Notes bleed from the page escaping a shipwreck of blood. Fear of blood enters into it, another equation.

Fear the exponential division of prime numbers. The audience dreaming of an audience dreaming. Fear the agony of doors destined to be reduced to numbers. Fear the stairwells destined for darkness, stolen lives, stale smoke. On bulkheads facing the sea, and in stairwells facing dark alleys, fear the semen trapped or not trapped in translucent orbs, a tangible sign on all the continents. The bridge becomes a flamenco skirt for the moon. Whose father swam in the Amazon with the piranha? Who wears the moon’s mask? Learn to describe doves, the twin orbs of a woman’s ass. The lover’s hand under my dress. No mermaid’s tail. Then the cunt. When I said love, I got religious. Learned to walk, then crawl. Desire silences the guitar strings with scissors. Think about post-modern love deconstructing beneath city clocks without hands. Orgasm is closest to art. I didn’t mention syringes or T-cells.

No need for voices from the void flung like arrows. Or the bell tower of the heart’s drum. What are we willing to accept? The clichéd rose asleep on the piano lid. Maxwell’s hammer descending in slo-mo. Kennedy shot again and again. Some are not yet dead. Others were never really alive. Fish trapped in the sheets. The approaching storm delivered in monotone. Or in natural speech. Bukowski, dead. The TV channel-surfing in an empty room. Think of random blue noise as a way of life. Intangible instructions. Love’s fascism, asleep in a pool of blood, wants touching, stroking, punctuation. The restless sky mounts the moon. When will blood learn how to become stone? Was it better than anything, walking on the moon? Were we ever in the garden? The endless pit? One thing is certain: Night is neither noble nor sacred; her indifferent legs are open wide.

© MAUREEN HURLEY 25 April 1994; rev. 6/21 Freewrite on the 1993 Poetry Film Winners

POEM TO A MAN LEAVING HIMSELF BEHIND

POEM TO A MAN LEAVING HIMSELF BEHIND

As the plane taxiing out the runway,
a rainbow appeared right in front of the storm.
The plane’s red shark fins slice through the clouds,
as if to sever the rainbow for hope, for the gays,
for the artists, a rainbow for all of us.
Afraid of flying, you eat Mary’s brownies
I smuggled through security,
the plane was delayed and so we had a beer.
We are more than a little intoxicated,
chemicals within, chemicals without.
Last night I heard you whisper thank you for being there
as you turned out my light, kissing me good night
and then sleeping alone. It was not our time for love.
but the love is there nonetheless, yes the pull.
The heart wants what it wants.
Vins says you’re equally gay, I say equally straight.
But we kept kissing each other goodbye anyway,
your hand slipping down my back, skin against skin,
as you said, thank you for being my mother,
my sister, my grandmother, my brother, my...
stopping at the word that won’t rest easily upon lips.
I thought unrequited love was reserved for old plays.
Watching your plane rise, momentary smoke,
my heart in my throat, remembering the plane crash
I witnessed at the Bijlmer, and in Portugal.
Your plane pierces the sky, one moment a black dot,
another, gone forever. Will I ever see you again?
And I think of your fear of flying,
especially after the Dutch airplane disaster,
you said you didn’t want to be buried
in the hinterlands of Leissel,
you wanted to be among friends. And you said,
how lonely you are for no boys will sleep with you,
and the despair that you loved women too.
You get lost at the point between a woman’s breasts.
What I will remember is you rising up from the bath,
all brown and golden, a tawny feline,
something gorgeous to behold.
My eye grabbing that moment in time.
With your photography—the impulses in the moment of taking,
a thief of light, whereas mine is in the taking of images,
without film. A thief of memory.
These are the words of our lives.

1/7/93
SFO
First draft

Each Seeking the Other (no efile)

Journal entry, 1/4/93, San Francisco, with John McBride, Jan Bogaerts

1/4/93 I spent last evening with John McBride and Ken Bullock drinking wine and in Enrico‘s. John gave us the key to his uncle’s house on and we wound up hanging out in the Mission district going to used bookstores. I got a full length man’s tweed coat for six dollars. It’s freezing, I relish the warmth.

Jan went off on his own into the night. We didn’t have a preset time to meet up, he had no key so it was a bit touch and go. I’m sleepy, crabby, not particularly interested in either John nor Jan. But John looks better and better these days, he will never leave the memory of his exwife behind. I’m feeling a bit jaded these days myself. Confusion has fled and I am left with sheer crabbiness. 

We staggered around Washington Square afterward, and I was definitely feeling the wine, we were listing a bit. I was esconced between John and Ken so I wouldn’t get lost. We were laying hands upon each other quite a bit at Enrico‘s. Like raccoons at the cat bowl.  

Most likely it was the wine but John didn’t just put his arm around me to steady me, and I still can’t tell if there’s interest, or it’s merely politeness. John was looking particularly attractive, but it didn’t do anything for me. Timing is everything. And John tells me that Enrico‘s is where, after a couple of “far out motherfuckers,” which is a deadly cocktail, John proposed to Marianna Rexroth. It didn’t end well. Kenneth didn’t like him, mad their life miserable.

The trouble with all this attraction stuff is that once acted upon, you cannot go back to being friends, no matter what they say. There’s an easiness that flees when we become lovers. I thought love was supposed to draw people closer together. Instead, the walls grow higher. Maybe there something wrong with me that it happens so. 

I’m sorry for the vast gulf between Jan and me, I know there’s nothing I can do, after the fact. Again he tells me I’m so beautiful and that I should believe it. I’m perplexed. He takes myriad photos of me that I will never see.

After a meal, some harmony is restored, something that was there before all this craziness started, resurfaces. Friendship abides. We have a shared history to anchor us, when I stayed with him in Lissel, and Vins. We are torn between virtual realities. He was so pleased by my photo proofs, they’re not the best that I’ve ever done, but I just don’t have the time to work on them. 

Ah yes, the interim between shifts, we are off again to Enrico‘s. Who knows where it will take us this time? I may wind up coming home alone. I walk on, Jan photographs Columbus Street from inside Enrico‘s, I feel at home, the waiter recognizes me from last night. Ken is a few minutes behind me. 

Ken and I managed to kill off most of a bottle of Beaujolais before Jan returns. He has shot over three rolls in less than 45 minutes. I thought I was fast. But he has a sweet and stealthy Leica camera. Ken tottered off, and we headEd for the Saloon. I have been inside more bars during the past two weeks than I have in an entire lifetime.

Jan is working the crowd. I am alone, but not alone—which is an interesting phenomenon. He is very good at working his way into people’s psyches. He both charms and disarms. He will do anything to get the photo. I watched him get right into the singer’s face, rhythm and blues, heavy on the rhythm.

It truly is interesting hanging out with him. I can observe in a way not necessarily available to me if I was on my own. He’s like a satellite knight. The world really is a stage. Some drunks turn up, break the 4th wall. 

Before dinner, we tore down the walls that had risen between us. Jan said, I am a servant of the light. We talked about the stories of who, and what we are. We were in agreement that we have met in previous lives, that everything is circular. He said, you don’t have to explain it to me, I know. 

We listen to 60s music and have trouble with our relative age. Are we 40 and 44, or are we 20 and 24? How ironic, he’s the same age as Bob, my old boyfriend. He tells me about Mark’s story, how his father came home looking for his wife and she was upstairs, dead, having killed her daughter as well. Mark was only six when this happened.

Jan says he loves Mark’s vulnerability and wants to have sex with him. I say I hope you want to make love as well… Need I remind him that he is in the AIDS capital of the world? He wants to fill this trip with as experiences as possible—soon he will fly home to Amsterdam.

When Jan tells me Mark’s story, I cannot stop the tears from falling, maybe it’s because my own mother tried to commit suicide so many times. Maybe it’s the immediacy of words following between us, across the dinner table, the intimacy of shared meals softens the harshness. Jan says, as a man I know what a man wants, I like to have a cock to hold onto so I won’t fall out of bed. I can’t begin to know what a woman wants.

We wind up in the Castro, at Moby Dick‘s, he’s saying goodbye to his new friends—it is a dead night in North Beach as well. We stumbled into Spec’s on Saroyan Alley, the poet’s bar, I an on home turf. I haven’t been there in years.

Jan wanders off to take photos. I’m sitting at the bar, taking it all in, and it’s OK really, though he claims to be a gay lover, there’s also the heterosexual attraction but he can’t negate it, hence the dilemma. Spec asks me about Herman Berlandt, and how the writing is going, offers me a drink.

Weird, I can sit in a gay bar and feel OK. I am as sexual as I want to be, and I don’t have to worry about fending men off. For Jan, it’s the possibility of an endless meat market, and all I can do is to be a buffer for him. Who’d a thunk that I’d be in such a predicament? Jan thinks I should document the lesbians of Castro Street as my assignment, but I don’t have an interest in lesbians. I am content just to watch him in action. I tell him I am looking for poems, not women.

Journal entry, 7/21/91, on the last flight home

7/21/91 on the flight home, I watched Robin Williams in Awakenings. The L dopamine story weaving of  catatonic events. When I opened the airplane windowshade I discovered that it was nightfall. I fell asleep, it was as if… Robert De Niro was fantastic as Leonard Low, the first encephalitis patient to awaken. I remember reading about the cases in the early 70s. And I was sobbing throughout the movie. It’s based upon real cases. Oliver Sacks was the technical consultant. I’m a big fan of anything by Oliver Sacks.

We are banking over San Francisco and I have lost nearly 5 hours on this flight home, leaving at 2 PM only to arrive 4 1/2 hours later, at 10 PM, San Francisco time. I opened my window to see the half moon in the sky, crepuscular, no distinction between sky and earth. Clouds becoming one, the transition of two elements.

On the other side of the plane it is deep sunset. Jupiter is visible on the edge of night. Above the declination line between light and darkness where the stars shine, the Big Dipper points the way north. North by northeast, where the darkness decisions upon us all. The bell curve of the edge of the earth throws its shadow against the universe, having harmonized with a moonshadow during the eclipse. We are all part of the universe. Periodic table is an absolute order, even within the chaos.

I thought I saw part of the Southern Cross, but I think it’s only visible in Hawaii during the winter months. But I have seen the Southern Cross shining over the Pacific as we descended the Nazca planes in Cusco on a similar summer eve.

We have not quite reach the apex of summer, and transitions, and many awakenings are about to unfold. Never have I felt so much at a crossroads, as now. Only this time there is a little anxiety or fear. I‘m cognizant of the events of change unfolding. Usually we go through cataclysmic change with only hindsight as our guide—unaware of the apex, or the agent of change until long after the fact. Recollection reflected in tranquility. Call it 20/20 hindsight vision if you must. I can see clearly now.

RUSH HOUR

RUSH HOUR

As we approach the Bay Bridge toll plaza

the guy driving the red Honda 

finishes up a close shave. Pats his cheeks.

In another lane, a man is poring over 

the stock exchange, the newspaper

slumped over the steering wheel like a blanket.

He's squinting, I worry about his eyesight, 

and the relative safety of driving during rush hour.

I finish off my apple down to the core.

Spin it on its axis. El mundo.

Two Mexicans roll down their window 

and ask, Si? and laugh. Please.

Another driver adjusts his headphones, 

taps out a complicated beat on his steering wheel 

with dueling pens. I can see that he's a drummer.

Everybody's multi-tasking while driving 

in their hermetically sealed cars. 

I'm the only one with my car window open,

and I worry about what eating happy meals 

while commuting does to one's digestion.

I marvel at the dexterity of those businessmen 

while I, the poet, haphazardly scribe it all down

between the blue lines of my notebook,

glancing up at the last minute, just in time

to see the warning flash of the red taillights 

of the car in front of me.

4/21/1986

added/rev. 2/17

MANTLE

           —for Bob Kaufman
              April 18, 1925 to Jan 12, 1986

News travels slowly.
In the time it took God to make the earth
you died and a voice fell from the sky.
I've been looking for you
in each bent and ragged head
of those stumbling down Telegraph,
of those ranting in Brautigan Square,
of those who live in Market Street doorways.
They say Lenin's legs were blackened
when the shroud slipped off.
I saw the map of death on your face
as you wandered the outskirts of your city.
The same map in my mother's eyes
and in the faces of those in the streets
who followed me even in sleep
but who held my hand in the dark?

A crowd laughed at the screaming woman
whose hands beat against our car window
as a man dragged her into an alley.
Another woman, still drunk, comes over
and complains of lost car keys and stolen children.
And in that order.
The sky caught fire
and seven astronauts were swallowed
by a blue-mantled snail.
Film makers converge upon us,
their eyes taking in odd angles of light.
It's like watching Kennedy shot over and over
with Jackie piecing together bits of skull and memory
with ineffective hands.

Bees carry the skull of night back into the hive.
The dead have taken to scratching poems on the water.
Even if we scatter your ashes to the wind for ten years
and listen for lyrical translations from the other side
it still won't cleanse this place.
Ten years of silence is buried.
We had a vision but the map is lost.
Who will collect the messages?
We confuse pinholes of light
leaking from rotted buckets
for the ancient rain of stars.
In my dreams they are coming and the door won't lock.

While in exile, lean closer to the sun.
Become birdlike
until you land spread-eagled
on this bone of the word
and in this endless blue
your flexing soul
will be the sound deep space sings.

2/2/86      


1988 Green Fuse
1986-88 Falling to Sea Level
1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Prize
         Thread Winding the Loom CPITS

MANTO                                                                        

                                    —para Bob Kaufman

Las noticias viajan lentamente.

En el tiempo que le tomo a dios hacer la tierra

moriste y una voz cayo del cielo.

Te he buscado en cada cabeza agachada y harapienta

de los que tropiezan por la avenida Telegraph

de los que viven erl los zaguanes de la calle Market.

Dicein que 1as piernas de Lenin se ennegrecieron

cuando se deslizó el ataúd.

Vi el mapa de la muerte en tu cara

mientras vagabas por las afueras de tu ciudad.

El mismo mapa en los ojos de mi madre

y en las caras de aquellos en la calle

que me seguían incluso en el sueño

pero ¿quién me cogió la mano en la oscuridad?

La muchedumbre se rió de la mujer gritona

cuyas manos golpedban nuestro parabrisas

mientras un hombre la arrastraba hacia un callejón.

Otra mujer, todavía borracha, viene para

quejarse de las llaves perdidas y los niños robados.

El cielo se encendió y siete astronautas fueron tragados

por un caracol de mano azul.

Cineastes convergen sobre nosotros

sus ojos toman originales ángulos de luz .

Es como mirar a Kennedy tiroteado una y otra vez

mientras Jackie junta pedazos de la calavera

y la memoria con manos inefectivas.

Las abeias llevan la calavera de la noche a la colmena.

Los muertos ya están granando sus poemas en el agua.

Aunque esparéramos tus cenizas al viento por diez años

esperando traducciones líricas del otro lado

ni así se limpiaría este lugar.

Diez años de silencio están enterrados.

Teníamos una visión pero se perdió el mapa.

¿Quién reunirá los mensajes? Confundimos los agujeros de luz

goteando de las cubetas podridas

con la lluvia antigua de las estrellas.

Vienen en mis sueños y la puerta no se podrá cerrar.

En el destierro, inclínate al sol.

Hazte como pájaro

hasta que aterrices extendido en este hueso del mundo

en este azul sin  fin tu alma desdoblada

será el sonido que canta el espacio profundo.

2/2/86                        —traducción John Oliver Simon y Juvenal Acosta                                           

1986-88 Falling to Sea Level