Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was one the Beats, but not quite one of the Beats. I walked into his store in San Francisco one day in 1976, and he spotted me, peered at me over a low expanse of shelving. I could feel his eyes tracking me as I slowed. I paused at a table and looked at a stack of books.

I think Ferlinghetti thought I might be a thief. I wasn't, but the businessman Larry had to be sure. You don't survive in the bookstore business for nearly sixty-years without paying attention.

More likely, he was merely curious about everything. Even me.

I looked up from the table of books and he was still watching me. I nodded, smiled. He nodded back. He realized I was okay. He returned to shelving books and I continued to browse.

I've always liked Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Of the San Francisco Renaissance poets, including the Beats, he has always been one of my favorites. Certain of his works still stun me today, with their translucent simplicity, their perfectly structured imagery.

He is 91 years-old now. His San Francisco contemporaries, the writers he first nurtured with his City Lights imprint, The Pocket Poets Series, are already gone.

I didn't speak to Ferlinghetti that day. As I was screwing up my nerve to approach him, a few of his neighborhood friends drifted in and they huddled together to talk.

I browsed some more and finally left. I walked across the street to Vesuvio Bar and ordered a beer. I sat down at a window table and watched Columbus Avenue. I'd found the place.

I was right in the middle of it all. North Beach, the heart of the greatest literary movement in my lifetime. The movement had stragglers now, I'd see Bob Kaufman on the street, a few others, but many were either in hiding or gone. I was only 20 years too late.

Kerouac was already dead.

I'd recently moved to San Francisco from Maine, where I'd finished a two-year assignment with VISTA, working as a community organizer. I'd met Lynn in Waterville, Maine. She lived in San Francisco, but she was in Maine visiting her father when she called my office. Her father was an alcoholic, and she was staying with him. Neither of them had rent money. Would I help them and talk to the city manager?

I met Lynn at city hall and we talked to the man in charge about a rent voucher. He relented and Lynn's father had another month to stay at home and drink.

He drank in his room alone, rarely came out. He was obviously trying to drink himself to death.

I spent a Thanksgiving with Lynn and her dad. He said hello and slinked into his room. Lynn and I made out on the sofa.

Then in early December, she returned to San Francisco. I'd known her for three weeks.

She wrote me long letters. When you are finished there, come here, she said.

And I did, that summer.

I moved in with Lynn and her roommate and his dog Cosa, a friendly Doberman, and Lynn's nine year-old daughter. Lynn was 30, and I was just 23; I'd fallen for an older woman.

I stayed for a couple of months in that flat on 17th, in the Richmond neighborhood, right next to Golden Gate Park.

Lynn was working a job as a bartender at a place on Clement Street when I finally arrived. She seemed happy to see me, but I'd noticed something. The letters had dropped off weeks before. A lot of their romantic appeal had vanished.

What the hell, I thought.

She took after her dad a bit, and drank heavily. She drank as she worked, everybody buying her shots. She was popular, quite attractive, smart, and good with a line of bullshit. She had a big following at the bar, bigger than I imagined.

She wasn't anything special in the sack, however. That's not old bitterness, that's the truth.

She got angry with me one night when I came in. Don't come in here so much, she told me. I'm working. You're a distraction.

I got into it with one of her regulars. Something petty, a pool game I think. That night, smelling of something with licorice in it, she told me I was an asshole.

This was news to me at the time, though I would come to understand that I might in fact be one.

Then she told me about Bob. Bob was a mailman, which meant he had money. Bob, she told me, was taking care of her. Hundred dollars a throw.

I moved out the next day, found a furnished room in a big house in Haight-Ashbury, at Cole and Haight. That's right at the end of the park, down from Stanyan, the street Rod McKuen rhapsodizes over in his popular book, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows.

I never got into it.

I was working as a sub-shop manager, a small chain operation, not a bad gig at all. I'd quickly become the manager of my shop on Geary Blvd., at Arquello. I was free every day by lunch hour, assigning work to my crew and leaving to go to Candlestick to watch the Giants, or drifting through the barroom scene in the Richmond district. It was huge, filled with Irish bars.

I drank a Guinness to start off around noon every day. Then I'd switch to something light, a domestic lager, or an Anchor Steam bottle. Coors was big down there. You couldn't get Coors in Oregon until much later.

After the lunch rush, I'd go back to the shop, see how things went, check the sales, hand out a few more assignments and call it a day.

Managing that place, I grew kind of lazy. I don't think I've recovered from that, either. But it's the American way, by God!

So I'd finish the job and head over to Vesuvio Bar, sit around there for awhile. There I was, in the center of it all.

The first trip over there, I walked into City Lights. I wasn't any god damned tourist. I had a job and I lived in the Haight.

Man, it felt nice, too.

I was living in Portland a few years later when Ferlinghetti came up to participate in the Portland Poetry Festival.

He sat on a panel with a group of writers. William Stafford spoke, a few others. When it was Larry's turn, he got up, a tall, wiry man, and said "Light!"

Then he said it again, and again. "Light! Light! Light! Light!" He said it many times, his voice growing louder and louder. He began to dance with the word. "Light! Light! Light!"

Then he sat down.

That was all, a poem and a lecture. Only Lawrence Ferlinghetti could have gotten away with that. Or perhaps Kesey.

Away Above A Harborful


Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
O lovely mamma!
her nearly naked teats
throw thrust shadows
when she stretches up
to hang the last of her
so white washed sins
but it is wetly amorous
and winds itself about her
clinging to her skin
so caught with arms upraised
she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the reachless seascape spaces
between the blown white shrouds
stand out the bright steamers
to kingdom come

Lawrence Ferlinghetti



TS