Cool Swinging in New York

The Party was swinging by nine, not an early start by Coast standards; by 10 most of the people had arrived except a few stragglers, white collars who'd had tickets to the Civic Center Opera and had gone there either because they still bore a few of the fading earmarks of squares, or because they were so far out that opera gave them some snide, snickering kicks. The place was a ground-floor-through apartment on Green Street near Montgomery, in one of those unidentical, typical San Francisco row houses that stand shoulder to frame shoulder, tilting up the incline of the steep streets like a squad of drunken soldiers at attention on a ramp. Identical bay windows looked out, glazed by the street lights as though they were still afraid of the earthquake of 1906.

This was the heart of the North Beach area, some 16 blocks centering on the junction of Columbus and Vallejo, the Coast capital of Beat and spoken of — landlocked in the center of a city as it is—as "going down to the beach."

Inside, the apartment was bare, almost barren, as their places so often are, partly as a matter of economics, partly from ascetic choice. The five huge old rooms were 11 feet high so that even the crowd that filled the place from wall to wall gave it somehow an air of aloof decay and cerebral serenity. It fit that party like a glove.

The old fashioned high narrow windows looked down on people standing or sitting on the floor, for there was little of anything else for them to sit on. A bed in one of the rooms stood alone, on four bricks. There were some cushions and a number of boxes in the living room. Beyond that, a kitchen table set up near the door and loaded with a clutter of Marca Petri and various Napa Valley wines and a few bottles of Regal Pale beer, was all the furniture there was. People were drinking out of coffee mugs and jelly glasses and half-a-dozen maple syrup pitchers stamped White Log Cabin on the side.

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The walls were covered with canvases—the host was a painter—all of them large. A few pictures were reminiscent of Clyfford Still, with surrealist titles like "Angina and the Elders" and "Ode to an Ancestral Eye." One rectangular painting, about four feet by seven, appeared to be painted entirely in one shade of red. On looking closer it was painted entirely in one shade of red. "It represents the inability of man to affect his universe," a guest condescendingly explained.

Almost all the people were in their early thirties. There was a scattering of college girls from Berkeley across the Bay in their skirts and sweaters. And there were the few tough old professional bohemians in their sixties that you saw at every party, still talking up the literature of the Twenties or the socialism of 10 years later, but now affecting the beat pose of chilled detachment. Not too much detachment, though — that might suggest a cover-up for caring. Most of the people, however, were thirtyish.

Of these, about half were tricked out as bohemians, the pure stuff, complete with sandals, paint-stained suntans, work shirt, beard and clutched roll of manuscript paper. They lived in furnished rooms, usually doubled up with a girl, changing the room and the girl every couple of months. Most of them had The Novel, unpublished except for sections in the little magazines. Since the end of World War II, they'd lived on the G.I. Bill, 52-20, state unemployment, on-the-job training and a 200-dollar advance from Random House. Some of them were going to work now, in mattress factories and as color matchers, still unregenerated by the echoes of Madison Avenue. America still stank for most of them. Only in France — or Mexico — was the artist understood.

"I saw Dingo last week," one of them said. He was bald and 40 and serious, and always discovering what everybody else had already discovered. "He left the Trappist monastery. He's in uniform now. He's playing traps for the Salvation Army. He's still finding himself."

The other half of the people were the young householders, shaved, suited and pressed, with jobs in the publicity department of Bank of America and kids and mortgages in Burlingame and wives in I. Magnin clothes. They had edited college quarterlies and had had one story in Atlantic. But they had gotten tired somewhere along the line and sold out. The beat attitude comforted them somewhat — in a sense it's square to be ostentatiously different, or unsuccessful — yet there was a lean and hungry eunuch look in most of the men. Their wives, for the most part, were squares: they just thought the Beach party was fun.

The thing was, this party and all the rest like it had really started 10 years ago. Half the people had gone on the prebeat circuit, through Montparnasse to Rapallo, then to Guadalajara and home. (Half the people had gotten married and never left.) But they all kept up the connection. The talk was the college talk of 10 years ago, but so cooled down by now, so refined through experiment and adaptation and boredom that it was farther out than Betelguese.

"Miller was right," they said. "America is an air-conditioned nightmare."

At one end of the big gaunt room, a combo was playing pure harmonics. There were five musicians: guitar, bass, trumpet, piano and drums. Four of them were in operation now, backing up a heavy-set man with a beard who was reading poetry from a sheaf of yellow paper in his hand, his eyes shut most of the time. The spasmodic, cool talk died down a little while he went on, but no one paid overt attention. It was something about the carborundum of industry and the stainless soul of man. The bass and guitar chorded quietly, and now and then there was fretwork from the piano, or a blast from the trumpet to emphasize a line. "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons." A couple of people looked up and the reader's expression became apologetic. The drummer sat still. The sticks were in his hands but he did not move. His close-cropped black head drooped forward on his chest; his eyes were closed. He sat like that, for maybe half an hour at a time, at intervals all during the first half of the party.

At first, nobody danced. In front of the pianist, a cute blonde in her middle twenties had drawn her chair up so close to the piano she was almost sitting in his lap. She did not move her eyes from his face. He did not look at her. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether she was bored to death or ecstatic. She was a Beach girl.

Our host, the painter, was a tall, gaunt, emaciated-looking man, the same age as most of the guests. Among other things he had formerly edited a literary magazine and translated Genesis into Speed-writing and had helped produce a surrealist movie that was mostly blank film. He was a Dadaist, 30 years too late. He worked now giving lessons in Portuguese. He came toward us. A small Brazilian monkey — a souvenir of an exchange instructorship in Rio — sat on his back.

"They want tea," the host said. He gestured behind him at a bright-eyed, eager girl — a novice to beat — in whipcord tight pants and an expensive-looking white silk blouse, with Capezios and a pony tail. She was with a very earnest-looking young man in a seer-sucker suit. "Another tourist," the host said. There was no timbre in his voice but there was a faint emanation of disgust. "I don't even know where to find it anymore." His brow wrinkled infinitesimally. "They used to smoke tea or take peyote and mescaline out here. And dexedrine in the punch and all that jazz. But now?" He shrugged, infinitesimally. "No romance." He went out to try to locate his marijuana. The door slammed, shaking the old house.

We stood for a moment by a group that was talking about the problems of the anarchists. "Rexroth is right," a thin sandy North Beacher said. He clasped his hands together. His voice squeaked a little in very earnestness and the others looked at him, pained. "The anarchists must organize." For a moment he seemed to see he was getting enthusiastic and he drew himself down sharply. His eyes went dull. "It's all organization now." His voice was acceptably expressionless. The rest of the group looked more at ease.

"Anarchists organize?" a girl in a peasant blouse and dirndl skirt with Indian hair and enormous eyes, said. Her full lips hardly opened. Her eyes stayed flat. "Non sequitur. Even for the country's leading anarchist." She turned her head. "Your turn," she said, glancing at her watch. She got up off the orange crate she'd been sitting on and sat down on the floor. The young man she was talking to sat down on it emotionlessly.

"...was a faint kick," somebody was saying, faintly, evidently recounting an anecdote. He looked into the middle distance. (Nearly all those who did the talking were bohemians; the suburbanites did the listening, at least in the early stages. They concentrated on looking tired. Around the speaker were six or eight people. Nobody moved. All of them kept their faces slack.) "Up there with gin and benny pills. Some joy." The speaker looked particularly joyless. "Somebody said, let's make sandwiches. We made. Western Union messenger came. Asked him did he want a hamburger. Said yes. Somebody said, put ground glass in it. Did. Gave it to him. Joy." For an instant his eyes kindled the faintest light. "Western Union," he added.

"Who needs it?" somebody else said.

There was a silence and then the man who'd explained the paintings said, "Where'd you get the ground glass there?"

"He had it there," the speaker said. "His brother was a picture framer. They use a lot of glass in the picture frame dodge."

"That's funny," the other said. "Having ground glass right there. I mean, having it right there."

As the party went on, the tonal key went lower, its climate got colder. The combo became more disharmonic, lighter and lighter and more Mozartian-complicated until it almost faded out under the spurts of cool talk. The poet read again, (continued on page 74)Beat/frisco(continued from page 22) and then another poet; voices were less audible at one than at 12, and less again at two than at one. Nobody paid much attention. The wine went down in a few of the bottles and was replaced by new bottles but nobody got loud. Everybody sat on the floor around the edges of the room. The beat stare became universal. That puzzled one of the white collar wives, why nobody got loud.

A man near her undertook to explain. "Goof balls," he yawned; not much of a yawn but just a little. "And the liquor, and the tea, that's all slow rolling. Kindergarten antics."

"But you have to pass the time," she said. "How about Zen?"

For a moment the man looked blank. Then he grimaced. "Zen is for the Ivy League," he said.

By the second hour into morning, two or three of the white collar couples were dancing. For a time the drummer got off the drums and danced with the girl in the peasant blouse. She was a silk screen maker, handprinting draperies, and she made a good living at it with half her mind. Nobody seemed to know what she did with the other half. She never smiled. Only occasionally did she and the drummer touch each other. The music was only to the slightest degree danceable; they had to imagine most of the rhythm. Every now and again they would drift off into solitary improvisations, paying no attention to each other, faces like stone. Then they would drift back together.

One of the white collars mentioned he was rereading Melville. (You don't read, in beat San Francisco, you reread. Everybody you talk to has read everything in some mystical past. Everybody has smoked and chewed and inhaled everything. It's all tired, man.)

"Melville?" the stocky man in the faded suntans who had read poetry early in the evening, said. "And James. And Whitman. Don't you read anything?" He looked scathingly weary.

"Maybe Sade?" the bright-eyed girl that had wanted the tea said doubtfully. "Is Sade all right, Mac?"

"Sade." The one in the suntans rolled his eyes upward. "Sade is for the Aztecs.

Read Fenimore Cooper if you want to sit out front. Read Nick Carter."

"Sound, man," somebody else corrected wearily. "Not words."

"Yeah," Mac said. "Dog whistles. That stuff up out beyond the human ear range. Where you just get nerve center reaction. That's all right, too." Mac was a real one. Once he had almost spoiled a perfect 10-year record by going to work in a bookstore but he'd jumped clear at the last minute. There was an older woman in Marin who admired Mac.

"Not even sex?" The bright-eyed suburban girl giggled, but she looked a little nervous at the same time.

"Unisex, bisex, monosex." Mac laid it down in an exhausted voice. "All beat gaffs." As he said that, the blonde girl who had spent most of five hours drawn up to the pianist turned around very slowly and stared in his direction. There was a long, long silence. At last Mac said to the blonde girl: "Pad me."

For a moment longer she continued to look at him. Then she said, "Why?"

"Why not?" Mac said. He raised one eyebrow, but he did not smile.

The blonde pursed her lips. Then she nodded a little, got up, went out the door and turned down the hall toward the bedroom. Mac gave the tin measuring cup he was drinking out of to the bright girl and followed the blonde. A door closed. The pianist didn't look up.

"Way out," the scrawny sandy man said significantly.

Again there was a silence. "Why did she do it?" the suburban square asked at length. There were times when it was hard being cool.

"She doesn't even love him, is that your problem?" The sandy one allowed himself a grin—he'd made a funny. It broke up the room.

More and more, the talk began to fade now as the early hours of the morning came on. The people sat motionless along the walls, hugging their knees. After the standard discussions of the Bay area's progression from Turk Murphy and Lou Watters' dixieland through Brubeck and Bostic cool to poetry/jazz; of the Alan Ginsberg acquittal when Howl was charged with obscenity and how it had put San Francisco poetry on the map and how the Beach boys danced that day in municipal court; of how Twelve Adler Place and Vesuvio's and The Hungry i and The Black Cat had all gone commercial and the only places left were The Place and Miss Smith's Tearoom for the dikes; after all that died out some of the suburban people were made restive by the growing silence. But they needed what was here. Halfway between the Beach and Burlingame and satisfied with neither, beat was their word, too. But the beat hipsters were joy popping: on pure thought. Not thought about anything, just pure thought conception: thought about pure thought. The party was shifting to overdrive.

The essence of the far-out, utmost, outermost beat Coast party is that San Francisco bohemia has run the gamut of drugs, liquor and sex experimentation and has come out at the end of it Bird's-eye cool. Tea and peyote produce an inverted world, of distorted time-space dimensions, a world of pure self. Now even the stimulants which produce that "Cosmic I" have been discarded. But the Cosmic I, pure essence, cool and far-out, remains. Everybody is an Outsider. Maximum withdrawal is the goal.

By three in the morning the tourists—i.e., the suburban crowd, tolerated by the hard core from the memory of other days, for what they might have become—were beginning to drift on back to their homes. The party began jumping, as it does out there, into lower and lower registers. For minutes at a time there would be no sound. Then a brief unconnected riffling of piano keys, or half a bar of mute work as if the trumpet were warming up. A girl got to her feet, her eyes closed, and moved through a slow drugged dance and sat down again. Nobody seemed to watch her. Nobody commented. Conversation, in the long intervals when it came, had the hazy, disconnected, confession quality of De Quincy.

"That soft pearly pearly," a voice said quietly. "Comes that rosy fingered, man."

"Got to get one job, one day," another replied after a time.

"Reach up and out, and up and out," another one whispered, almost inaudibly.

The key was so low now, so intense and internal, that the lifting of a finger, a loudly drawn breath, seemed enormous. One of the last remaining of the suburban girls got up and looked around and tried to smile, and couldn't, and wondered whom to say goodnight to, and gave that up also. She left on tiptoe. Nobody looked up. Nobody spoke. There was a terrific air of expectancy that in another minute would come a revelation, that everybody there would fly up and over and out, liberated.

And then very quietly, the last of the people began to drift away. Finally it was only the host and Mac and it began slowly to get light in the barn-empty, high-ceilinged room. The host was still staring when Mac blinked his eyes and pulled himself up stiffly and protestingly from where he had been sitting for a long time, his back to the wall under the window. Mac looked like he'd been a long way out and it was a long way to come back. He stood up finally and stared blankly at the window, out at the day.

"Great party, man," he said softly to the host.

"Great," the host agreed. He spoke gently, as if he did not want to break the spell. "A real romance."