In my yout', I spent some time learning how to stumble down North Beach streets after drinking coffee and brandy faster than my liver could process the toxins. Funny how certain places have cultural and personal significance to multiple generations. I consider Venice a similar place, and New Orleans in a slightly different sense (at least prior to Katrina)
North Beach forever “It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn,” Jack Kerouac said of San Francisco. But what happens when you and your city grow up?When I was a kid, growing up in Berkeley, San Francisco's North Beach seemed as old, sinful and mysteriously hip as a daguerreotype of a 19th-century stripper. I might have driven through it once or twice with my parents, and my memories are a blur, the gaudy lights of adjoining Chinatown, the scary strip joints on Broadway, the cafes reeking of espresso and vanished Beats, and the indefinable Italian-ness of it all combining to make up something that felt less like a neighborhood than a dream.
Eventually I realized my dream and moved there, but I still felt like I was wandering around in a place more grownup than me, and more fabled than I deserved. The whole life history of San Francisco was in its streets, from its roistering Gold Rush start to Mark Twain's wild newspaperman days to Kerouac and the jug-guzzling, chanting Beats. It was seedy and glorious. Broadway looked like Times Square at night, all glowing lights and glory, and in the day turned into a 25-buck whore with her makeup peeling off. City Lights was the church of literary revolution, and I'd see Allen Ginsberg and even the reclusive Bob Kaufman walking down upper Grant. Jazz wafted from little clubs. Unclassifiable post-Beat hipsters, not hippies or eggheads or anything else recognizable, wandered its byways. The Beach was vaguely decrepit, already past its glory days, but its mephitic vibe made it even cooler. It was a neighborhood of beautiful losers in a city that specialized in that.
North Beach was the heart of the city I inherited and first loved. I didn't think it would ever lose its aura: it would forever be frozen in amber, like Baudelaire's Paris. But it changed, or I did.
Cities are archaeological digs, and the layers are made up not just of decaying objects but of memory. As I walk through North Beach today, I walk through a place as resigned, well-behaved and familiar as I am. All the years I spent looking at it with completely different eyes, with the wild surmise of youth, are gone.
But sometimes, turning a corner onto a certain alley, I remember.
My memories are, alas, erratic. One drunken evening was so much like another, around the corner of that green and neon dreamland that has vanished now except for the flashing nipples that sometimes blink at me a moment before sleep, that I can never remember if I chugged a 48-ounce when I was 32 or chugged a 32-ounce when I was 48. All the North Beach stories stagger down to the cross-eyed shitfaced sea, and I put in my hand and bring out whatever I can find. And I pull out my grey tweed jacket and the unextinguished joint.
I was walking one night from Nob Hill down Pacific Avenue to North Beach. My destination that night was not Vesuvio, or Tosca, or the Caffe Italia, or Keystone Korner, or Frank's Extra, or Gulliver's, or the Saloon, or Mooney's Irish Pub, or Grassland, or the Lusty Lady (honesty compels me to surreptitiously drop that name like a greasy quarter into the dead center of this Homeric list of watering-holes), or the Portofino, or Spec's, or Silhouette's, or the North End, or Tony Nik's, or the Columbus Cafe, or Gino and Carlo's, or the Old Spaghetti Factory, or La Bodega.
I'd like to visit SF more frequently.
Tags: San_Francisco
On the northern boundary of North Beach, at Chestnut and Columbus, stands a joint called LaRocca's Corner. La Rocca's Corner's claim to fame is its venerable neon sign, which proclaims, “This is It!” I have had a few horns in LaRocca's, and by every standard, this is the falsest advertising in town. But if you stick around 60 or 70 years, if your bar has an autographed photograph of Rocky Graziano on the wall, even the stupidest kitsch turns to hammered Byzantine gold.Actually, that's the dirty little secret of the whole neighborhood, from the Barbary Coast days through the International Settlement, the Beats, the hippies, the brief and scary yuppie era, the dot-com Dieters with their Auschwitz haircuts and now the nameless refugees from GeorgeBushLand. The dirty secret is that there never was a Golden Age. North Beach has been dining out on its myth forever. We're nostalgic for Jack Kerouac? Well, guess what -- Jack Kerouac was nostalgic for Jack London, and Jack London was envious of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Louis Stevenson thought that Mark Twain got there first and ate all the candy, and Mark Twain -- he just wanted to be back on the Mississippi. The first Chilean who stumbled up Telegraph Hill and nailed a plank on Alta Street 150 years ago sat there looking out over the Bay and said to himself, “This Is It!” in big mental neon letters, and we've all been reciting that same smug mantra, the slogan of the Alan Watts Realty, ever since.
We know the pot of gold is bogus, but we still keep going there. We've been doing it for years -- as young men, not so young men and now not young men at all. We keep heading to North Beach, keep turning left on Churchill Alley out of the Broadway tunnel, even though in those 30 years we have never yet once hit the jackpot, felt the supreme high, made the scene, danced the dance, met the chick, seen the best minds of our generation doing anything, let alone walking through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.
But it doesn't matter. There's always next time. And when you finally begin to understand that there ain't going to be no next time, that this is it, that's OK. You don't need North Beach to give up its secrets because you know them all. Because you're on the corner of Grant and Green in this sad old Italian valley beneath its two guardian hills looking down like kindly old paisans, and the waves are lapping down at Aquatic Park to the north and the filthy numberless alleys of Chinatown lurk to the south, and the glasses in every bar are full and Broadway is stupid jammed with John Dos Passos sailors and the Palmistry sign is reflected in the upper windows of Vesuvio and the parrots are flying above Washington Square and the Mason Street cable car rattle-clatters onto Columbus and you're at the dead center of town, the bull's-eye, where you've been a thousand times before and where you will always return, where you left your heart, and where you found it.
I love to go to City Lights Bookstore and buy yet another copy of "Howl" for a Brazilian friend. Debate whether we should have Chinese or Italian.
However, I was very disappointed at the gentrification around Union Square. It looks like a replica of Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills. Bummer.
I'd like to go to Sausalito and see if the bar that had a toilet as decorative motif is still around.