The Happy Hipster

Sam Doric was so hip that he walked about North Beach in San Francisco with his nose lifting the rest of him up toward Telegraph Hill, as if he personally had dropped the feather that sailed through the air of Carnegie Hall when Charlie Parker died. He had that kind of pride. He had the pride of the man who can do anything, blow cello, persuade ladies, learn French. He blew pretty good cello, he had persuaded many a lady, but he had not needed to learn French.

Why?

Well, when you communicate with the world on such easy terms as Sam's--99 percent from the world, one percent from Sam--what need have you of foreign tongues? (His share went on the cuff, of course.)

He had a long, creased, horsy face, intelligent and ugly, with large square teeth, a long lazy body with lots of lean on it--a face and a body that pleased everyone. His voice was soft. His words were friendly. It didn't matter how many years he had been identical with himself, shyly making out on North Beach and the slopes of the adjacent hills. He was a boy, permanently a boy filled with promise.

Sam had often made his own living in recent times, frequently not living off his friends. He had found a steady job. In fact, he had found a dozen steady jobs in the past two years, selling Honda motor bikes, bartending at the Monterey Folk Song & Coffee Club, bouncing at the Hot Dog Palace (although he was better at persuading), stage manager at the Actor's Workshop, sidewalk photographer at Fisherman's Wharf, Swedish meatball roller during Sweden Week in San Francisco, French cab driver during French Week, Mexican hat dancer during Mexican Week, distributor of The New York Times' Western edition during the last month before it suspended operations, waiter at Enrico's, pool instructor at Mike's Pool Hall, sideman in the band at Burp Hollow, and a few he forgot. It was easy to reason out why he left Burp Hollow: His ear was too delicate for Dixieland; and the Times had folded; and there were equally sincere explanations for all the other instances of permanent employment that he had found, invented, locked on, and finally lost. The world was a generous place in most ways, but to Sam, the world, the universe, and a steady job were economically unsound.

Until he heard that French teachers were in short supply. That did it. He believed he could do anything he set his mind to, provided his mind was gratified. He would become a professional French conversation teacher. All he had to do was blow a little French, and so he bought some books at the dusty little second-hand French bookshop on Polk and decided to learn French as Lord Greystoke had learned English--by puzzling it out. "I'll be the French Tarzan, man," he said. "How do you say 'you'?" he asked a young lady who took courses at San Francisco State and, on the side, nursed Sam in his perpetual good health. She wore stretch pants from the Sea & Ski--she had a little money. She filled them out plumply, in two handfuls--she came of good stock. She used eye make-up and white lipstick and looked serious when Sam talked. She had a face like a young, corrupt Doris Day.

"Vous," she said, "means you."

"Moi homme! Vous Jane!" he cried. "You see, I'm practically ahead of the mob already. The mob of French teachers." A troubled frown passed over his boyish, 40-year-old countenance. (He was dressed in a red turtle-neck sweater, jeans and cowboy boots.) "How do you say 'mob' in French?"

"Foule."

"Masculine or feminine?"

"La foule."

"Umm. After I learn their cruddy language, I'll have to reform it. What do they need masculine and feminine for? English doesn't have it. Or maybe"--as a cunning smile passed through his countenance, leaving tracks of pleasure--"I could save time by reforming it first."

Normally, Sam had his rounds to make. In the late morning he would steal a boutonniere from a Russian Hill wall or a garden, come prancing down into North Beach, and patrol Broadway and Columbus, Jackson Square and Portsmouth Plaza, until someone offered him a drink, a lunch or, failing those desired goals, a moment of nourishing conversation. What's doing? What's up? Who has published or painted or gotten arrested or heard from his long-lost father? What chick is pregnant, headachy, or improving herself with an evening course? What do you have in mind personally, pal? ... Many found themselves enlisted in finding Sam a job, despite the fact that he could hold a job for immense spans of time by his own standards, only briefly by the world's. But he was qualified by chipper wit, happy spirit and sincere intentions. He was continually recommended, frequently hired. At this point I should mention that his long, horsy face was also a smiling Irish face, with the kind of glow at its forward rampart that may end in a bulbous nose but had not as yet, a firmly unstable belly in his customary sweater, and a boyish bounce in crepe soles. He had just found a job as lobby portrait sketcher (in charcoal) at the Jack Tar Hotel when the inspiration about learning French somehow came to him. He quit the field of commercial art, leaving his easel standing until a porter took it home for his boy.

Now a syndicate was formed to support Sam's new enterprise. This was an unusually informal, high-risk, sure-loss corporation which met and put up the money: San Francisco's Groucho Marx, San Francisco's Nelson Rockefeller, San Francisco's Buckminster Fuller and San Francisco's Jonas Salk, who was actually a psychiatrist and interested in Sam's curious personality which fit none of the usual three categories--neurotic, psychopathic and psychotic--into which he divided the human race. (Nor was he a member of the several subdivisions of categories, such as alcoholic, teetotaler, etc.) At any rate, these four gentlemen, lunching at Jack's, made an agreement. They would provide the small sum necessary to teach Sam a fluent French. This was identical with the small sum required to support life in him--life being the fluttering, bemused hummingbird of his soul--while he absorbed the French language and culture from the air, in his own fashion. All four had confidence that they would both succeed in their enterprise and, somehow, some way, lose their investment. San Francisco's Nelson Rockefeller explained to them how they could take it off their income tax as a bad debt. San Francisco's Groucho Marx said, "You mean as a dad bet?" San Francisco's Buckminster Fuller said, "He is the sort of man who discovers a new mathematics one day, but finds no one to tell it to and so it is lost to the world. When I myself first discovered the secret of the universe--" San Francisco's Jonas Salk (but a psychiatrist) took mental notes on his colleagues and said, "Hm, hm."

"What? What? What?" demanded his friends.

"This lamb chop," he replied, blushing. "It's delicious. But if I didn't have a bad bite, I'd much prefer the club steak. My temporomandibular joint is out of whack and--"

If anyone could learn French on pure nerve, they decided, it would be Sam Doric. They parted in peace. San Francisco's Nelson Rockefeller went to his office to oversee construction of an atomic shelter in his Marin County retreat.

Three months passed. Sam wore a carnation in his lapel on Bastille Day. He sang songs by Prévert and Kozma. He spoke the French of the Latin Quarter, with de l'éclat, with de la souplesse, with du charme. "Alors!" he would cry when he saw his backers.

"What?" asked San Francisco's Jonas Salk (but in psychiatry).

"Zut! Aie 'ave ze zolution to ze problème de l'Afrique."

When he spoke English now, he kept his French accent honed up by employing French syntax and pronunciation. Eet help, he agree wiz heemself.

Now, of course, there remained the question of what to do with their investment. Having given up the easy life on the forever-April slopes of San Francisco in favor of hard work on the same slopes, Sam's health would suffer, they believed, if he did not put his training to constructive use. What would Sam like to do?

"Well," he reasoned with Cartesian logic, "I'd kind of like to be an ambassador or an actor in French films, or maybe head of the French desk at the CIA or the Pentagon."

"How about a waiter at the Fleur de Lys?"

Sam turned his horrified, pale, bug-eyed gaze upon this small-minded question and questioner.

"Purr'aps ze chef de section d'un rail gang," he commented with Gallic irony.

One point was proven by the experiment: that Sam had the stuff with which to learn when he set his mind to it. The savor of happy result of their experiment was lost to the four backers, however. They had always known that Sam possessed an airy genius. To test this was like proving that a salt fog has power to cool the fevered brow. Their expensive gesture had proven something, perhaps, but accomplished very little. Sam pranced down Pacific with the same bounce as always; he could cadge a drink at the Montmartre or a meal at the Hotel de France with unusual grace; things were very much unchanged. His affable horse face pleased them less.

The quartet of experimental philanthropists gathered again for their monthly business luncheon at Jack's. Concerned with higher matters, they all took the waiter's suggestion--turbot and salad--and then settled back to fret, to signify their fret by remarks characteristic of their separate characters, and to imply that the error lay in someone else's calculations. "We don't allow ourselves to let go and dive in, that's why we can't learn as fast as Sam," said one of San Francisco's. "Inhibition," another agreed. "He has a knack, he concentrates, that's good," said another. "Shall we argue about how he's extraordinary, and yet we are more so?" inquired someone else. (The last speaker turned out to be the waiter, returning to report that the turbot was all gone. He suggested the hangtown fry.)

Brooding together, an inspiration emerged from the friction of four of the finest minds of San Francisco. "Zut!" they cried--an expression they had (continued on page 146) Happy Hipster (continued from page 82) learned not long ago from Sam.

It was decided that he should have a job showing about touring French engineers, actors, artists, diplomats, cooks and businessmen. The port of San Francisco has a continuous stream of important international visitors and the local State Department office was burdened with the task of finding natives to entertain the visitors. Sam qualified as a native, and with the connections of the four important monthly diners at Jack's, it was not difficult to get him engaged, as in this quasi public-relations task, representing America at home. "Remember--every citizen is an American," the local protocol chief informed him at his indoctrination session. "You must never be sure to forget that."

Sam swore.

The protocol chief fingered a stack of withdrawn passports. "We count on you," he said. "I've had indigestion for years. Now I can eat at home sometimes." And he licked his lips over the hope of a patriotic family dinner of Metrecal, Lolitaburgers and Baby Ruth bars.

Sam's first job, as luck would have it, was with the famous girl novelist, Francine de Saigon. She had been a girl novelist for 22 years now, and after three marriages, a sports-car accident and the gradual weathering of age--which Colette understood so well--she had become a trifle sere. Under white front lighting she still looked like a girl in her photographs. When his task was explained, Sam rubbed his hands with fun-loving patriotism. He was now a dollar-a-year man, paid several times an hour.

"You will enjoy this?" asked the State Department representative.

Sam was cautious. "No. I think of it as a duty. But on the other hand, a duty is a pleasure."

"Good. You will be paid your per diem from public-relations funds."

"Good."

"Good. And next week we have a French-speaking Egyptian publisher from Cairo. You will not mention Jews, Zionism or Suez."

"Check. I'll get all that out of my system with Mrs. Saigon."

"Please, Miss. Or Mademoiselle."

"Sure, I know that word there. I'll take her to see the Beth Israel Temple--naw, I was only kidding. I'll take her tea dancing."

Which he did. The next weekend, when she wrote her new novel, he became the hero of it. But for purposes of modern literature, she changed the happy, gamboling, horse-faced American into a brooding, paraplegic, horse-faced American, whose inability to use his limbs came about from a childhood trauma concerned with guilt over the race problem. In the film, Sam was played by Marcello Mastroianni; there was talk of an American television series in which Eddie Fisher might do a Tony Curtis--become a serious actor.

The next week, Sam took the Egyptian publisher to see Mount Tamalpais, on a vague theory that (a) Mohammed went to mountains, and (b) at the green and misty top, where the high birds swirled and the grasses swayed, amid the scent of eucalyptus and pine, they would find no Zionists. There were none.

He discussed the zither with a French harpist, the city planning of Paris with a French architect, antique music with a classical guitarist. He became more and more a successful citizen of San Francisco in his own little private business, hosting for Gallic visitors who were subcontracted to him by the State Department, much as the post office subcontracts the cleaning of buildings to the scavenger specialists in this line. Since he was carried on the books as an Usher at Cocktail Parties (no Civil Service rating), he did not require an FBI or CIA clearance. He just did his simple tasks of making friends for America in his own simple way.

Naturally, all good things come to an end--good for society, good for San Francisco's four high-risk promoters, and good for Sam Doric.

The FBI found him to be a high-risk article because he had belonged to every subversive organization that ever asked him?

He fell in love with a beautiful French physicist and married her? (She lectured at Stanford that year.)

He demanded a permanent appointment with the State Department?

He fell back into wasteful, slothful, alcoholic old ways?

No, none of these. Actually, since his duties were part time, he had plenty of time left to love, to waste, to sloth, to alcoholize if he wanted to, and he drifted in and out of subversive organizations, looking for an evening's entertainment, without ever being tainted by scandal. Cuba, LSD and Indian rights all tickled his fancy, but did him no harm in his job.

What happened was that he took his occupation seriously. He began studying French civilization and culture. He read Ernest Renan and Adolphe Thiers. He delved deeply into the history of the excavations of Tours. He ceased to be an inspired and charming dilettante with an unusually long chin. The expressions of gratitude on the part of the visitors for whom he had been provided as guide began to grow less ardent. He was using them to fill out the gaps in his knowledge, which some of them found flattering; and then, with American pedantry and impudence, he began to argue about matters that they held closest to their hearts. Finally, there came complaints. Sam said that he knew the real cause of the population decline after the Napoleonic wars, and the usual demographic explanations were so much hogwash. French folk songs had a much greater Moorish influence than the visiting French chanteuse would admit; therefore, she was a fool. The Socialist Party in Lens, he informed a visiting French trade-unionist, had always been infiltrated more by the left than by the radicals.

Sam was called in and lectured on tact by the West Coast Chief of Protocol, but the next week he insulted a visiting traffic expert by saying that the trouble with the circulation of automobiles in Paris lay with French driving, not an excess of cars.

Sam was put on probation.

The Italians gave the Riviera all its spice. The annual bicycle races were a silly fad. Sam persisted in his bad habits. To many, his ugly face began to seem ugly. As a result, some now think, France recognized Red China and began trading with Cuba.

Alas, Sam had decided to give up being nice and become an expert, a demonic executive, instead.

Sam was fired.

Where is he now? Well, he wanders North Beach, a flower in his lapel, looking for people to buy him a meal or a drink or merely to stop for a moment of conversation. He has no money; mysteriously working his own will, if not God's, he survives. Recently a rescue movement has developed among four friends, the deep thinkers of San Francisco, who dine once a month at Jack's. They want to rehabilitate their old friend by inspiring him to take up Russian.

Will this save Sam Doric?

The cultural exchanges have begun. Sam is willing. He is learning. So far, he likes the taste of boeuf Stroganoff. "Ya drug! drug! drug!" he shouts over the linen at the waiter on whom he practices his eating. "I am your friend! friend! friend!"--with ferocious good fellowship and a liberal distribution of sour cream sprayed into the air.

Sam is ready for the genuine Soviet article. They are coming. But the missions of moviemakers, child psychologists and agronomists will inevitably be succeeded by serious and stubborn men, generals, scientists.

How, then, will Sam Doric take his place in the history of mankind, which includes the history of Sam Doric but is even more important? Can one man, singlehandedly, with the best will in the world, set off World War III?

Some optimists still believe in the importance of the human factor in human affairs. And some pessimists, too.