Candy-Coated Nightmares in Nirvana by the Bay

The story is told that a Mill Valley video-freak commune decided to make the bread for some new equipment with a little advanced, underground, commercial, sellout short subject. So they dressed a girl in a nun's habit and installed her at san Francisco International Airport, where she was greeted at the gate for the hip midnight ten-dollar PSA flight from L.A. by a rabbi who began by chastely kissing her. The bidden video crew filmed audience response as the rabbi embraced her sweetly. He put his hand under her habit. They began to struggle. She was gasping. Her cowl was knocked awry. Also his tie. They were both panting and biting, and his tongue was in her mouth, darting in and out, as she bent backward and eventually tumbled to the vinyl-marble floor, and they rolled around in an ecstasy of Welcome to San Francisco (Joseph L. Alioto, Mayor) while the cameras rolled. Tongues, zippers, cowl, pink folds and crevices undulating.

Well, the people streamed by without noticing.

Finally, one very straight citizen, maybe an insurance executive just in from a bit of desert sun, bent over the ecumenical thumping forms where they lay, tapped the pseudo nun on the shoulder, and asked, "Did you come?"

Despite encroachments of smog from Oakland and high-rises from Manhattan, San Francisco remains a name and place apart from other American places and names. Narcissistic, yes; but sexually narcissistic. Another big American metropolis, drilling subways, crowding highways, yes; but with a certain juice and languor to its making out and making do. The time of the flower children is over--partly because everyone now believes in being turned on. The police joke with the whores, they tease the transvestites, they laugh along with the tourists at the parade of Cockettes near the Palace Theater in North Beach at midnight on weekends; they don't beat them up as much as they do in my ancestral Cleveland. Hip Sheriff Hon-gisto introduced a gay minister to serve the gay community in the county jail. Police, real-estate promoters and big-city thugs are never quite Gilbert and Sullivan characters, or even lovable rogues from Guys and Dolls, but Veblenian marginal differentiation shows its power in San Francisco. So it's a big American city, true--but not just another big American city. Many visitors and transplants grind their teeth and hate it. It doesn't solve a fellow's problems. The Chamber of Commerce Tourist Bureau's gulls, cable cars, Golden Gate Bridge and romantic fog tend to zap hometown kids straight in the liver, providing instant hepatitis, or at least a jaundiced gaze. The town is being strip-mined for movie-of-the-week atmosphere. Disney discovers crookedest street in the world. Ford Times borrows picturesque Telegraph Hill. The Gray Line ships in busloads of chiropractors with aching backs for a dose of female impersonation (Finocchio's) or here's-where-the-stars-got-their-start (Purple Onion).

San Francisco is not Positano or Aca-pulco. They are tired, too. But despite the media overload, despite its being fed into the great international media meat grinder and coming out Hilton Hamburger and Fisherman's Wharf link sausage, San Francisco remains something of what people have always thought about it. The Southern Pacific Station still looks like a Western depot. While New York and Paris seem to be yearning to become larger versions of Cleveland, and Cleveland is becoming Detroit, San Francisco remains mysteriously itself. This may last for our lifetime.

What is this mysterious "itself" which Friscoville might remain? It is Halloween Time Forever. It is International Bohemia Village. It is the American city to which the freaks can flee without thinking themselves freaky, and where the straights can taste of strange without shivering. Like fine domestic wine, domestic California Strange is a comfort at San Francisco's open-air table. Much of the revolution of style originated here, and is domesticated here, and is civilized in this permissive, Italianate, salt-fog port, this white and sparkly city whose areas of creeping tract and virulent high-rise only show how much there remains to lose.

One day an old friend came to town for the first time. It happened to be the season of the Chinese New Year, and the streets were filled with costumes, dragons, papier-mâché, firecrackers and clanking bands dancing like segmented metal caterpillars. The day had been sunny and dry; the parks were filled. This is a city for strolling, and we strolled. The Mime Troupe performed its guerrilla theater, with a medieval Pope portrayed by beautiful Sandra Archer. Bobby Shields, the genial white-face, did his fantastic energy-raising acrobatics in Union Square. A time-lag rock band set up in the Panhandle for an audience of speed freaks who thought it was 1967 again.

It happened that night that my friend had a meal in the New Pisa, one of the Italian family-style restaurants on upper Grant, along with a Japanese opera troupe, which rose after the spumone to sing Oh! Susanna in Japanese, in order to show its appreciation for the meal. Then my friend fell into conversation with a pretty girl, who described herself as an actress and sex researcher. They discussed the theater. They discussed science. She said goodbye to the group she had come with and they went to La Tosca for a cappuccino, continuing their getting-to-know-you duet. Two cappuccinos on the leather banks of La Tosca. Little flutterings in the heart and elsewhere. She took him home with her that night.

The next day my friend asked me with a certain incredulity, "Is it always like this here?"

"Not every day," I was forced to admit. "On Tuesday, for example, I drive my daughter to nursery school. And Chinese New Year is over soon. Next month, I think."

But for some who come to San Fran-cisco, Chinese New Year never ends, despite the alcoholism and breakdown rates, the busing and ghetto issues, the complacent hustle of city hall. It's possible to treat San Francisco as a continuous costume party, Halloween by the Bay, and, amazingly enough--the flower-child spasm was partly about this--some manage to make of Halloween a way of life.

Here is a birthday party at Sally Stanford's humorously posh New Orleans-brothel restaurant on the Bay in Sausalito. The fest cost thousands. A 21-year-old ex-car parker--call him Lenny--was honoring his dope lawyer, who was just turning 30. Oysters flown West, steaks, girls in various stages of stoned and groovy silence, pink and chartreuse sweet liquids; and pilots, lawyers, groupies, coaches, rugby buddies and even a few proud parents of the businessmen. Lenny's mom and dad, glad that their son the accused dealer could afford to spend a couple, three thousand on a little birthday party, walked about in their Macy's groove clothes and said, "Yes, Lenny has a good head for business. Yes, Lenny bought us a little house in El Cerrito, plus some income property in Oakland. Yes, we're Lenny's mom and pop, man. Right on."

Lenny was wearing hotpants, full Pan Cake make-up, dark-red Cockette lipstick and, resting on his skinny arms, the two girls he was planning to ball later. Sally Stanford herself, the ancient madam now playing at crone's career, beamed over the money she was making and poured champagne. A satisfying fiscal popping filled the air under the chandeliers.

I don't want you to think this chic orgy, with all the good food and drink and beautiful girls and men grown rich and dramatic in the dope trade, was actually very rowdy and joyous. Everybody was too stoned to do much in the social line. But I enjoyed the fish and meat proteins and a cholesterol dessert. In the john two chauffeurs were discussing the virtues of Cessnas and Beech-crafts of various models in making the run up the coast from Baja. The Staff Headquarters of the Dope Air Force, a combination mercy and Mafia and general teenage rip-off operation, is in Sausalito. More planes than most nations with seats at the UN; the largest private air force on a war footing since Mike Nichols gathered his fleet for Catch-22. The unzipped pilots, relieving themselves of early champagne ballast, didn't stop their professional murmuring just because I happened to be standing there alongside. "What if I were a narc?" I asked the crewcut one.

He looked at me and said to the other, "I think the Nixon radar screen just made it easier. They're overconfident." And he shook himself dry and (continued on page 112)Nlruana By The Bay (continued from page 94 free, 24, a veteran of Vietnam, cool as Kool-Aid.

On the way out, a desperate group of tourists from a nearby table clutched my arm. They were ready to weep with frustration and desire. They watched 100 freaks gobbling up caviar, French wines, steaks, oysters, cool, so cool, and these Latter-day Saint tourists from Salt Lake City felt that I, perhaps the eldest member of that crowd, was their last hope for salvation short of the return of bearded Joseph Smith. "Who are those people?" one hissed, his fundamentalist talons scrabbling against my corduroy jacket.

"The strike committee from Pacific Telephone," I said, and they nodded. They, too, always knew San Francisco would be like this.

No picturesque weirdness means that San Francisco escapes being an American city, with all the problems of an American city, while it also has some of the provincial, exempted charm of other hilly and provincial port cities, such as Leningrad, Marseilles, Naples and Haifa, which live freed from the responsibilities of capitals--Moscow, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem--and therefore preserve something traditional, highly colored by the sea and less hectic. Once, thanks to the gold rush, San Francisco had an intense hour in the sun. This year, Mainland China Trade Stores opened with soft commercial smiles in the wake of the President Nixon China spectacular, and perhaps San Francisco could have another gold rush if shipping and trade really begin to shuttle between the old opium states and the West Coast. Whether or not the town becomes Venice again, a window to elsewhere, it still shares certain household frets with all other American centers--race, poverty, welfare, slums, freeways, school systems, smog, the resentments of middle America, the rage of deprived America, the flight of money from the central city. It is not exempt from the Seventies.

The problems that San Francisco shares with almost any other great American city can be summarized, alas, in its dogged, traditional city-hall politics and its burden of mayor. Mayor Joseph L. Alioto is an old-fashioned Jersey City-style chieftain, formerly an able, overhungry lawyer, now coyly giving out to hagiolaters that he reads Dante every night, and also plays the violin, before tucking himself into bed. Despite the squall and screech of Tar-tini, however, it's Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here for those who seek his aid for a limitation on high-rise massification and destruction of the city. He continually talks about "striking a balance between economics and aesthetics." Economics means the real-estate powers behind him; with the word aesthetics, he means to tar all those who long for clean air, viable streets and ecological balance, neighborhood feeling, realistic tax rolls, in addition to the precarious human balance and elegance of San Francisco, with a brush that somehow means to say they are mincing nonfiduciary faggots. At one time he had ambitions to rise to national eminence-- Vice-President? even President?--but a series of sourings, including civil and Federal suits for fraud involving his several-million-dollar fee in a complicated utility case, now have confined him to such provincial politicking as introducing Humbert H. Humphrey to his favored real-estate fat cats. He visibly chafes under tasks too small for him-- Dante, the violin and San Francisco--and is doing his best to remold the city into Manhattan, that eerie, luminous success that seems to be his archaic ideal. He'll go for governor of California when his legal troubles subside.

But Mayor Alioto, Jersey Cityman, Homunculus Tammany, somehow fits the old boss tradition without really representing what San Francisco has become. The traditional formulation of a man, a real man, a bounding savage armed with the leg bone of an antelope, doesn't seem to fit the local model. Here he is armed with pen, brush, guitar, or merely his pink and busy tongue. Despite all the money, power, shipping, unions, major corporations, despite the fact that it really is Mayor Alioto's American dream, it's still a consumer's easy garden city, a terrarium in America. But gardens, as everyone knows, are filled with worms and other beasties. The green hides violence, red in tooth and claw.

The barker at The Condor in North Beach looks like the star of a TV pilot called The Young Dentists-- on speed. He's skinny, sharp-featured and very fast, and he suggests slurping eroticism while doing busywork with his teeth. He paces back and forth with methamphet-amine rancor, chanting, "Come on in, organic sex! Sex is the best aphrodisiac! Come on in, all topless and bottomless college coeds!" He doesn't specify the school.

The Jesus people on the sidewalk outside The Condor are no longer shooting, sniffing or smoking; they've found Jesus, or at least Pat Boone. They have long hair. Their complexions look up at their scalps reproachfully, saying, Shampoo a little. One of them is selling Jesus Now, with a headline: "Moshe Finds Christ, Learns Love." "It's free, it's true," whispers a girl in a granny dress. She is thrusting the paper into hands that promptly litter.

A long-haired young man with square wire glasses, like a lobotomized Harvard kid, is crying out with fixed Teutonic smile: "Abstain from filth!" Meanwhile, he too is handing out leaflets that fall to the street from the nerveless fingers of tourists.

"Aw, knock it off," says the pacing Young Dentist. "I'm working this doorway, not you kids."

"Knock off this abomination!" cries the ambassador from Jesus-in-San-Rafael. "Here, read the truth as we learned it!"

The battle between the drag-'em-off-the-street barker at the topless bar and the Jesus freaks. "Be saved by Jee-zuz!"

"Get some sex! It's organic!"

"Christ will save you!"

"For Christ's sake, get the fuck out of here."

"We'll do what we can for you. Jesus loves you!"

"Tell you what you can do for me, go across the street and let Jesus love Coke's Bar."

It was a countdown between the short-haired businessman selling sex and the long-haired freaky Christians selling salvation. Some leather-jacketed allies of The Condor gathered about the barker to consider extreme unction; that is, kicks in rear, shoves over curb. But in the typical distortion brought about by the media, the fact of my standing there, gaping like a journalist, changed history. They said, "Aw, fuck," and went inside to drink and enjoy bottomless dancing, not living up to their promise. The Jesus freaks eventually climbed into a blue VW bus and drove back to their commune in the Haight, where they get high on Christ and brown rice. They mix the traditions.

A few weeks later they were busted for housing runaways.

Heroin is still sold in all the adjacent doorways.

When I packed my wagon and hit the trail from New York in 1960, I had plans to spend a year in Friscoville, where there had been happy times on a visit in 1957--Allen Ginsberg, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Mad Alex the Talker, Bob Kaufman the poet (Notes Found at the Tomb of the Unknown Draft Dodger), my brother beatniks getting beaten about the head by Officer Bigarani on upper Grant. By the time I came to stay, the beat movement was frazzled away by a combination of media overload, changing times and natural wear. Guitars were being traded in for washer-dryers, wine for grass, and the long somnolence that would suddenly erupt in 1966-1967 (flower children, Haight-Ashbury, "We are the children of the Beats") needed a certain incubation period. Still, doorways and chess bars were filled with patient dissemblers. (continued on page 154)Nlruana By The Bay(continued from page 112) awaiting the next call. San Francisco was a town in which no one had to decide whether or not to open the window. Good working. A host of lawyers, doctors, architects, postanalysands were deciding not to get rich but to get happy on the Bay. A nice place to idle away the rest of the century.

Then, around 1965-1966. . . . No, let's name the night. On the night when I heard the Jefferson Airplane in the Matrix on Fillmore--amplified? What's this? Speak a little louder, I can't hear you--it was clear that a new implosion had occurred, and an explosion would follow. The cybernetic revolution had hit the beat guitar. It was as if every washer-dryer in the universe were churning out its Bendix slurp 'n' roll. I was-- how to put it?--charmed.

The rest is the history of the moment. The primal horde discovered Levis. Old Cronus was dealing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Poster art became "visual rock 'n' roll," and the youth-quake became a market. Into the great media machine was fed the hope and dream of a time. "I'm not putting down the Vietnam war," declared a retired activist from Berkeley, no longer interested in politics, tuned in, turned on, dropped out and cured like beef jerky. "After all, Vietnam brought us all together, so it was a real good thing."

And in the flash of a season, it was Mafia hip, MGM groovy, a style for every college and big city in the country. A revolution, a fashion and an industry all in one. Then the bands were no longer playing for free in the park. The Diggers stopped serving their buffalo stew in the Panhandle. Emmett Grogan was writing his memoirs for Little, Brown. Posthip in San Francisco is like postbeat: There are still people in doorways, hiding out, waiting for the next movement. The town staggers along, looking for its next movement. There are those who swear that when it happens they won't tell anyone. But if they don't, will it be a movement? There are guru poets in the Friends & Relations Hall on the Great Highway, beating old coffee cans till their heads spin, expanding their consciousness and destroying their eardrums, but are they really a movement? They say, "We're a counter-cultural biggie," and maybe they are, but the traffic whooshes by and not many stop to receive the message.

On Haight Street a strung-out speed freak in dirty denims stops a passer-by and invites him to her pad. "I may not be a flower child anymore," she says enticingly, "but come with me anyway. Have you ever had a real pig?"

Haight Street for a while was a teenage slum; then worse, a speed and heroin real-estate hell. It dropped all the way out. And now speculators are buying in again.

The special story about San Francisco may be that it is a place to drop out while not absolutely dropping out. A former graduate student and mad bomber, fled to Canada after trying to end the war in Vietnam by ending the Bank of America, now dwells at relative peace with himself in Bernal Heights. He confessed, regretted, returned, did a bit of prison, had his skull fractured in the showers by a patriotic felon, recovered, wears a steel plate in his head and now works for Sparkies, delivering packages. He has a pretty wife. "That's not the way," he says about bombing. The urban-rural slum, an interracial community on the hilly slope of Bernal, gives him a home. There are even unpaved streets, and chickens, and back-yard gardens, plus coffeehouses and theater groups and action art galleries. Despite his periodic headaches and dizzy spells, life isn't too bad. A doctor says he won't necessarily develop epilepsy.

A former hot-shot editor, once quick and randy, now ecstatic, says calmly about his projects for the future: "I'll neither make plans for the future nor not make plans. I'll neither do things nor not do things. I'm learning about my body and soul these days, but I don't care if I'm really learning, either." His smile is beatific. His walk is smooth. His heart is pure.

A former Manhattan women's liberation activist has come to San Francisco and is losing the struggle against her sexist hang-ups. She still raises her consciousness at consciousness-raising meetings, and exchanges clitoral know-how with her sisters, but more and more she tends to regard her husband as a human being. She can't fight the town.

The habits of transferees from major corporations--insurance, banking, real estate, conglomerates left over from the great mergers of the Sixties, advertising-agency managers and media organizers --are known for a certain inevitable life direction. The pattern can be predicted. They arrive in their Eastern J. Press or Brooks Brothers neatness, look around with a certain distance and hauteur at the gray-haired, long-haired groovers, and they swear on their honor: "Well, I won't wear the vest. I'll wear the three-piece suit without the vest. But that's as far as I'll go."

"Don't swear," I tell them, "it's impious."

Pretty soon some little State University of New York at Buffalo dropout, now waitressing at the Trident or Shandygaff while she "gets her shit together," begins to recount her life story: "Neil broke my heart three weeks ago. Maybe I'm not a woman, just a little girl, but my heart breaks, too. So three weeks ago, when Neil broke my heart, I decided---"

And Mr. Media Transferee is nodding, nodding, nodding. Tell me more.

A few weeks later, as he sits there still nodding, he is wearing boots, jeans, leather jacket, has grown a mustache, smokes a lot of grass. "I chose a lower-paying job to live out here," he is telling some girl, "because six months ago, when my wife broke my heart, I knew I couldn't stand that uptight scene anymore---"

It's the sports-car menopause all the way. What looked like the groovy horde, maddened flower ghouls and warlocks is now, in the flash of a season, just standard American to Mr. Media Transferee. He may not have qualified as a card-carrying teenager in 20 years. That's no reason for not changing his life.

I speak with due diffidence as one of his spiritual cousins. I have lived in Cleveland, New York, Paris, Port-au-Prince, Detroit and New York, with way stations in Havana, Key West and Fort Bragg--a tipsy itinerary, I'll admit--and until I came to San Francisco, I always dreamed of eventually settling in Paris, the City of Light, where I had spent idle student and dreamy bohemian years. I would be a stroller on both sides of the river. In the capital of misery and the paradise of hope would I dwell forever, just like Villon, Carco and Sartre.

So when I arrived to pass a season in San Francisco, having sublet my flat in Greenwich Village, it was just to do a job. I was having a play produced at the old Actors Workshop. Hm, so this is Frisco, I thought.

Two weeks later I phoned New York and told my tenants to keep the place. I was staying. I left my clothes there so long they have come back into style. My blue suit, fit only to wear at Stalin's funeral, is now just right for the midnight show at the Palace, including the movie Reefer Madness and the Cock-ettes' newest comeback stage presentation. I still have things in storage with various friends around Manhattan, though I recognize the law that states that a loan for more than a year is a gift. Never mind those lamp shades, Japanese prints and wide pants, Marcus; they're yours.

Why? Why have I sold out Paris, abandoned Manhattan?

I'm trying to say it's fun here. Sad, true, that one must offer to change the name Russian Hill to Kansas City Hump in honor of the all-American developers who are neatly blacking out the views, so that you'll have to make masked guerrilla raids on a tower to see (continued on page 232)Nirvana by the bay(continued from page 154) the blessed blue, albeit polluted Bay. On the other hand, I can found such organizations as the Ecological Weathermen, devoted to destroying ugly neon and concrete, and thus far not lose a single member of my group (I'm also the only member). A few years ago, in another great battle, I was cochairman, along with S. I. Hayakawa, of the Anti-Digit-Dialing League. Well, we've got nothing but digits now. You can't win them all. We voted in a city-wide initiative against the Vietnam war. The freaks, the artists, the conservationists, the little old ladies and The Grateful Dead came together to stop the Panhandle freeway, and we won that battle. We also cleaned up the oil slick on the beaches. We are not a sweet garden separated from the real world, like Italy. It feels here as if we are living real life, only in a more advanced stage. (Of course, Italy may feel the same way about herself.)

Take Project Artaud and Project One, warehouses to the people. They were defunct real-estate disaster areas, gloomy brick and space in perishing parts of the town. What's valuable? asked a few revolutionary innovators. Well, for one thing, bricks, space, windows, doors, rooms, roofs--these things we love. The gloom we can do away with. Artists need space, and so do galleries, film makers, literary magazines, free schools, consciousness-raising women's groups, revolutionary-action societies, Zen meditators, musicians (especially rock musicians, who tend to shiver foundations and send neighbors to the emergency telephone): gropers and rappers need space, embryo-feeling orgs need space--people need space. Dollars per square foot is a real issue. Project Artaud formed a cooperative, including automobile-repair gurus in the courtyard, to take over the moribund buildings and give them to the people, spelled The People, at minimum rents, plus occasional basic metaphysic sessions. This is countercultural real-estate ferment, and it works. Project One followed Project Artaud, just as a few years ago the Free Press followed The Barb. Home organic-food bakeries, yoghurteries, leather connivers. all the enterprises of the countercultural ferment find an amiable environment south of Market in an old blue-collar, light-industry, heavy-trucking part of town. They even had a reading by Yevtushenko. with mobs waiting to support a new concept in square footage.

Countercultural San Franciscans some-limes think they are all of San Francisco, somewhat in the state of mind of the DuPont executive of the Thirties who refused to sponsor a Sunday-afternoon radio program on the grounds that "On Sunday afternoon everyone is playing polo." In fact, San Francisco is middle-class strivers, union people, dockmen straight insurance clerks, Chinese and Japanese immigrants looking to make out OK, a large black and chicano population--the usual mix of a great American city. All the turned-on minority do is what is most important: give the city its tone and reputation, its style in the breeze of the mind. The flower children, the traditional bohemians and the polo players are merely the minority that sets the tone. Out in Daly City and South San Francisco, in the Sunset and the Richmond, there are the standard-sized OK Americans who attend services at the First Church of Christ Discounter ("All Prayers Guaranteed") and think Ché Guevara is somebody's girlfriend. They are decent people who lead decent lives and read the San Francisco Examiner, flagship of the Hearst empire.

But the stroller looking for other news of the city might have found, say, the Physicians Exchange Pharmaceutical Service (PEPS) storefront office on Powell, along the cable-car tracks. Inside, instead of doctors or clerks there were cots with freaks sleeping a few drug- house magazines, and nothing much happening. Once in a while I'd hang around. They'd give me coffee and I'd feel so good. "Say," I might ask, "what are you chaps really-- "

The shrugs were beginning.

"Really, really doing?"

The shrugs were continuing.

"Don't tell me, I don't want to know," I added.

"OK you're a friend, mumble, mumble," they'd say. They were all lank, cadaverous fellows with beards, like young Howard Hughes fresh out of San Jose State. There were bunches of pencils in their pockets. They would write little things down, sleep awhile, then write some more. They smelled the same and didn't speak much to each other, in the fashion of family, as if they communicated by smell and didn't need to talk. They had the electronic-genius look an old laundry smell. They read Mad magazine and the underground press and only occasionally I noticed a ravishing pink blonde girl waking up on the cot in the back room.

"I didn't hear a word," I said in response to an explanation I couldn't make out.

Somehow it was nice to laze and gefuflle in that room, until one day it was closed and sealed by order of U.S. marshal and the beards and cots were gone. And now it's rented to a gift shop.

Who, what, where, why, how? Weathermen, underground press service, dope exchange, con rip-off freaks, kids playing send-away-for-samples? A pure exercise of style? I really didn't know.

Frisco days and nights. Paris used to be like this. I remember the pretenders to the throne of Holy Russia, printing posters, plotting their White revolution; probably they still have an office in Montmartre, three-generation refugees from Lenin.

Once I thought I saw the pink blonde girl on a cable car, but I couldn't catch her to ask what had happened, where our friends were meeting now. She was rubbing her chin in the collar of her suede coat. Perhaps that was a signal to me. I rubbed my own chin in response, but she just rode the cable car up Hyde Street to the summit. Maybe I chose the wrong signal.

Who are those other ghostly figures walking down Russian, Nob and Telegraph hills at dawn? Those samurai knights shrouded in mist are the stockbrokers, who must be at work by seven a.m. to keep up with Wall Street. When it's three o'clock in the morning in the dark night of the soul of Manhattan, it's only midnight in San Francisco. Peace to F. Scott Fitzgerald; the young are grieving over the death of the Fill-more, not ice-skating on the pond. Bill Graham, barely 40, is an ancient San Francisco rock millionaire. Soon he'll be starting a new career, a new marriage, new family; watch and see. It's only midnight in the dark night of the soul. The girl from Peps may be haunting some other place, waiting for the next Federal padlock. (Or maybe she's hijacking a plane someplace, holding it for ransom, getting bills in small denominations and trying to decide whether to ask for the halibut or the roast-beef dinner.) It does sometimes seem as if the heist artists have more style in San Francisco: the check writer who keeps buying Bentleys (his psychiatrist says he has a Bentley fixation), the would-be rapist who rejected his victim at the last minute, morosely describing her as a ball breaker. A woman named Gloria sued the transit authority, charging that a cable-car accident transformed her into a nymphomaniac, and a San Francisco jury awarded her a judgment of $50,000 for her psychic wounds. Suggested headline: "Gloria sics Transit." Later a local porn producer made a film inspired by this tragic episode in the history of transportation.

The city is not immune to all the American troubles of violence, spite and anomie. A young actress raped at knifepoint in the hall of her apartment house proceeded afterward to trudge upstairs to her fiat, telephone her boyfriend and say: "A funny thing just happened to me. We could use it in an improvisation. . . ."

Another well-known social lady had the following conversation with a rapist who invaded her house and forced herself and her children to parade nude in front of him:

Rapist (as she reported the conversation to the police): Gosh, you're beautiful.

Lady: Well, I'm a little overweight these days.

The rapist digested the thought, and then raped the maid while his accomplices held the family at bay. The rapist returned to the lady.

Rapist: Would you like me to rape you, too?

Lady: No, thinks.

The rape team then gathered up a few baubles and left. The lady reported to her friends that the leader stopped raping the maid when his accomplices approached. "And I think that shows a glimmer of sensitivity in the man, don't you?"

I don't mean to imply that random violence, drug fiends and sexual tensions are just cute in San Francisco. But they sometimes seem to be different. When I was slugged on the neck by a disappointed stock-market investor, and knocked sprawling into Montgomery Street, his first question as I came up was why Comsat hadn't lived up to its early promise. It had gone up, then it went down, then up again, and now back down. How can you count on a stockbroker who recommends a stock like that? I wasn't a stockbroker, but I deserved to be hit because I couldn't explain it to him, either. I think it showed a glimmer of sensitivity in the man that he didn't stab me, too.

I didn't mind getting married, because my wife told me to go on walking in North Beach. It's good for the legs, wind and cardiovascular system, and therefore the heart; my soul is aired in fogs salted by the sea, peppered by human spices; and although not the same --I'm not what you'd call prowling anymore--I have a new perspective on the tiny implosions of animus and entertainment in the Barbary Coast, the International Settlement, on Broadway, up and down Columbus and Grant, where ghosts, artists, tourists, pimps and would-be pimps, dealers and dealees, marks and targets wander the time-lag evening.

For example, Ken Rand, proprietor of the Minimum Daily Requirement cafe, had a little problem with the speed freaks, junkies, whores, two-bag businessmen, runaways and pouting poets who hang out without buying more than coffee. One evening he just got fed up with this near-albino lady, very ugly, about 22; huge doughnut buttocks, whitish hair a little darker at the roots, complexion of blah and bump, about 40 pounds overweight, poorly distributed. She looked like a girlfriend of Baby Doc Duvalier, I thought (I had just come home from a stroll in Port-au-Prince). She was talking too much, and she wasn't talking to anyone visible. Ken approached her with his neat, mustachioed suave (he attended various Eastern schools and enjoys his scene with a certain Charles River hauteur). "All right, Marlene, you should go someplace else now."

She said, "Unh."

"Come on, Marlene, let's give us a rest. Let's move, Marlene. I'll walk you to the door."

"Unh." This was half of unh-unh.

He took her by the elbow, firmly, between several fingers, and urged her forward. She flounced. She was not wearing a miniskirt, shielding half the squeezed, puddled doughnuts; she was wearing some kind of semi-Bermuda shorts and bare feet. Ken's pressure around elbow got through to her, because she was angry, but he walked, still gracious and smiling, as far as the door with her. Whereupon she turned, stared bale-fully out of eyes that could oink if eyes made oinks, and raised her sweater. Underneath there was nothing. That is, there was plenty, but nothing else. She took a breast and, still fixing Ken with that silent oink, lifted it between suddenly skillful fingers. And shot him a jet of milk straight between the eyes.

Ken recently closed the M. D. R. and opened the Sand Dollar, a relaxed and elegant seaside restaurant in Stinson Beach, down the coast a few miles from North Beach.

I get up in the morning and it's once more time to go where the city leads me. Another day of Halloween in that American place where fluent bohemian is spoken. A piece of strange is San Francisco.

Richard Brautigan is writing a poem about a girl with hair down to her ass, and everybody wants her, and there is Richard Brautigan, lonely with his brandy on the terrace at Enrico's, looking to find the girl he has just written about. The parade of girls with hair down to their asses passes.

I am an anti-guru. I too am sitting there alone, inspired by the sight of Richard Brautigan, but determined not to write a poem about girls with hair down to their asses. I write:

San Francisco Jewish Anti-Guru Poam

The anti-guru

Stood on the mountain

Extended his arms

to the masses below

below

below

below And cried

cried cried cried: "Do not follow me!"