California Multilogue Two "Double Dumbass on You"
What I know of San Francisco I mostly know from Star Trek. The Cetacean Institute where they kept the whales is where the Exploratorium is. I went looking for the nuclear wessels, in Alameda, and found instead an elaborate Art Deco theater so I went inside and watched a movie. Being in California makes me want to watch movies. A new friend who owns the house where I'll be staying took me on a drive at sunset and there's this whole strip of old school bungalows and motels and for a minute I imagined she was Jimmy Stewart with an artificial background retreating behind us as she steadied the wheel with little jerks. And I wonder if California will ever seem real to me on its own terms and I realize it's none of my business and I don't care either way. Reality's a heavy load.
Rebecca Solnit* is around here somewhere. Hard to imagine her watching much TV but I can see her curled up on a modest futon with a cup of green tea while the TOS episode 'City on the Edge of Forever' plays on a black and white unit with a rabbit ear antenna taped into position. I bet Joan Didion watched a little Trek in her day. I wonder what either of them thought of Joan Collins as Edith Keeler, or Kirk saying 'hell' for the first time on television.
I sent a poem once with some troubadours to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books. They gave it to him in his office, they told me in a voicemail. They were from Galveston or somewhere in Florida. The poem was supposed to be a response to 'I Am Waiting' which at the time I thought was the greatest thing ever written. I'm sure mine was terrible. I was twenty years old and spent that summer scratching out desperate attempts to reconcile inner chaos. Most of it did not go well.
The patio at Vesuvio. Pardon the internal rhyme but I doubt the Beats would mind. They're around here, those guys, talky heavy drinking ghosts the lot of 'em. Who's whistling Art Blakey? That was me the guy in the corduroy jacket says. Who did the lyric? Hendricks and Ross. Jazz Messengers? Count Basie. That scans. My Uncle Greg lived on this corner in the Nam years, I tell them. Older guy has a City Lights bag with cucumbers and leeks sticking out of it. Chinese music in the alley and a kettle drum busts out a syncopated beat every few minutes. Alone but not lonely, here. Folks just hang out, the way we did in the 90s.
The woman one thinks of when one thinks of San Francisco arrives. Thin with a wild bush on her head. Demure but confident. Smoking a cigarette and kissing acquaintances on their cheeks. The table in the sun the hip literary dude is quoting a Norm MacDonald comedy routine. If you try to go to war with the world you shouldn't be allowed to be a country anymore. And she wears a little red shawl. I like your sunglasses she says and I'm in love because she seems a little off. Oh she's the bartender. She's been alone with one person for weeks, she says, she doesn't know how to be social. And I want so badly to know who this person is and to tell her my tricks for chatting up strangers were all exhausted years ago so I head out the door and get intentionally lost.
Rebecca Solnit
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