Two Ladies on the Loose in San Francisco: Part 2

In pursuit of the Beats

North Beach mural

September 2019 (5 min read)

With only one full day in San Francisco, Linda the Loquacious (LL) and I intend to start early, despite getting to bed so late and after so many samples of the excellent Californian wine and a gin martini. But it’s not until 12.22pm that we raise our sore heads off the pillow and begin the afternoon with a Berocca.

Yet we are sissys compared to the Beats. These hard-drinking, pen-wielding, drug-experimenting, impecunious rebels formed a coterie in the early 1950s and floated in and out of San Francisco. Of the dozen or so inner core, the work of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg is the most renowned today. Kerouac’s novel On the Road, published in 1957, and Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems, 1956, are classics of their time.

LL and I polish ourselves up and walk to Fillmore St which runs straight as an arrow from the Lower Haight down to the Marina. About 33 years ago, I used to work in a Café Trio on Fillmore and I’m hoping I’ll find the spot. LL humours me in this crazy endeavour. In Cow Hollow we come across expensive boutiques and mid-range cafes, but none strike me as the right fit. We stop in Joe’s Juice Bar for something green and realise it’s a franchise; damnit, there’s even one in Sydney’s international airport.

On the corner of Union, we take a right and hit the active wear shops all bunched up together. How does the economics of that work? Faced with the steep hill that leads up to Washington Square, we hop on a bus and meet Eddie, a greybeard denizen of North Beach who insists on accompanying us to City Lights bookstore, the Holy Grail of any self-respecting littérateur.

The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded this book shop in 1953. He was 34 then and in March this year turned a 100. That milestone provoked a visit from Dwight Garner of the New York Times who stated that City Lights is the best bookstore in the US: “It’s so dense with serious world literature … and so absent trinkets and elaborate bookmarks and candles and other foofaraw, that it’s a Platonic ideal.” Foofaraw!

That’s frills and frippery to you and me. I hereby confirm that Mr Garner is correct and furthermore that City Lights is open from 10am until midnight. On this account, LL and I postpone our bookshop browse in favour of the Beat Museum over the road which closes at 7 (or earlier if the devotees behind the counter have had enough). The huge black, red and white banner outside the museum gets our hearts racing. Jack Kerouac and his loco ex-con travel buddy Neal Cassady were handsome fellas.

Inside, amid the photos, books, letters, paintings, posters and an old houndstooth jacket of Kerouac’s, I’m transfixed by the documentary on Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. Ferlinghetti published “Howl” as part of his City Lights Pocket Poets Series and was arrested on charges of selling obscene material. Like that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK in 1960, the subsequent trial changed laws and the literary landscape, and author and publisher emerged triumphant. In the doco, the actor Jon Tarturro recites “Howl” with his characteristic sad-eyed verve. The poem begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”. It typifies the “stream of consciousness” mode of the Beats, which Kerouac was experimenting with in On the Road.

Ferlinghetti reciting while a Mrs Allan does a mock striptease, c 1956

My favourite Kerouac artefact is the letter he sent to Marlon Brando imploring him to make a film of On the Road, which ends “Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write”. The Fifties belonged to the Beats, but come the 1960s Ginsberg was espousing Flower Power and the era of the beatniks began. By 1968, the “fabled North Beach was nothing but tit shows”, according to the journalist Tom Wolfe. Ginsberg died in 1997 of liver cancer. Booze killed Kerouac in 1969. Ferlinghetti is the last survivor.

Jerry Cimino, the owner of the Beat Museum, rightly reckons the inclusivity and open-mindedness of the Beats makes them more relevant than ever in these troubled times. Kerouac was horribly careless of the women in his life, but you gotta love a guy who said “If Jesus was the son of God, then so am I.” Brimming with Beat fervour and loaded with 6 new books, we stumble out straight in to the Stinking Rose, a kitschy North Beach Italian devoted to garlic.

LL reckons no one worries about garlic breath anymore. We slurp up the frying pan of sweet cloves and linguine with clams, then make our way to Vesuvio on Jack Kerouac Alley. A stone’s throw from City Lights book store, this bar was where the Beats “hoisted” drinks en route to poetry readings or nowhere. Lacking a seat, we linger in a corner over our cheap vino and channel our inner Beat until a table comes free. We’re happy to share with Francisco, a local who came to the city from Mexico when he was 2 and is hanging out this Friday night with his brother, a guy from Puerto Rico, 2 Mexicans and a couple from Chicago. The group flit in and out of Spanish. Kerouac would still feel at home in Vesuvio.

We rock in to City Lights books reeking of garlic and wine, but it’s quiet at almost 10pm. I could buy 500 books, but settle on the Grove Press edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, figuring it’s as American as pumpkin pie. Weighted down with our books, we cross the threshold of the Comstock Saloon, where a quartet are playing gypsy jazz on a balcony above the bar and the doorman, a long-haired gent of at least 70, tells us to go on in and find a space.

Named, for some reason, after an illiterate foul-mouthed prospector called Henry Comstock, this 1907 bar has kept the original white-tiled urinal drain that runs along the base of the counter. Wicker paddle fans revolve slowly above our heads in the gloom from the old-style saloon lighting. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Deadwood’s Al Swearengen hanging over the balcony. “In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is… one vile fucking task after another.” He would have given the Beats a run for their money. A pisco sour is the signature cocktail here and it’s pretty darn good.

LL with Wesley at Taqueria Zorro

By the time the gypsy jazz folks have passed round the hat, the Comstock is clearing and we’re ready for a burrito in the Taqueria Zorro up the road. This is the real deal. The tortilla is thin as paper and the filling as huge as a brick. We share one with chicken, beans and rice for $9, and that comes with corn chips and salsa to tide you over while your burrito is prepared. From midnight is the busiest time for the Zorro. LL, of course, says hello to Wesley, the security guard. Wesley is part Chinese and his great grandparents came over here during the Gold Rush. We talk politics, San Fran history and the North Beach scene, no longer a tit show mecca. After 2 nights in this city, I’m a big fan of the locals. They all seem to have a sense of humour.

I can hear live music up the street, so we walk in to the Tupelo and shake it up to the Blues. The band members are our age, but we are the oldest folks in the audience. We dance our socks off until the last song and then fall out in to the cool night air of the street, two middle-aged ladies revelling in our “wild-night neon twinkle fates”, as Jack Kerouac once described his wanderings.

EXTRA

The Beat Museum is open daily from 10am to 7pm. Their website is full of information on the Beats. https://www.kerouac.com

City Lights Book Store is open daily 10am to midnight. Leave some space in your suitcase for a couple of new books, or catch a book reading at the store. See http://www.citylights.com for events and a biog of Ferlinghetti.

There are two branches of the Stinking Rose: if you miss out on North Beach, try the one in Beverly Hills, LA. Don’t miss the signature Bagna Calda, a skillet of about 40 oven-roasted garlic cloves served with bread. https://www.thestinkingrose.com

You gotta “hoist” a drink in Vesuvio, but stick to the cocktails or beer: http://www.vesuvio.com

The Comstock Saloon has “music nightly” according to the website, https://comstocksaloon.com Try a pisco sour, or go for the famous Sunday brunch

The Taqueria Zorro is open until 2.45 on Friday nights. Say hello to Wesley. https://www.taqueriazorro.com

The Tupelo hosts a jam session every Monday night. Check their website for the line up of live music https://www.taqueriazorro.com

Also in North Beach is the Saloon, the oldest “living” bar in San Fran according to SF Heritage. It’s a good Blues venue. See http://www.sfblues.net/Saloon.html

Caffe Trieste is another North Beach institution; see http://coffee.caffetrieste.com

READ

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan details the lives of Chinese-American residents in the city. It is epic and gripping. A film was made in 1993.

Armistead Maupin’s series Tales of the City are all set in San Fran, mostly among the Gay community. The first one came out in 1978 and the last in 2014. There are nine books in all. If you only read one make it the first. Netflix brought out a miniseries in 2019.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is infuriatingly chauvinistic but his vignettes of Beat life and train-jumping are unforgettable.