North Beach forever

Dec. 5, 2006 | When I was a kid, growing up in Berkeley, San Francisco's North Beach seemed as old, sinful and mysteriously hip as a daguerreotype of a 19th century stripper. I might have driven through it once or twice with my parents, and my memories are a blur, the gaudy lights of adjoining Chinatown, the scary strip joints on Broadway, the cafes reeking of espresso and vanished Beats, and the indefinable Italian-ness of it all combining to make up something that felt less like a neighborhood than a dream.

Eventually I realized my dream and moved there, but I still felt like I was wandering around in a place more grown-up than me, and more fabled than I deserved. The whole life history of San Francisco was in its streets, from its roistering Gold Rush start to Mark Twain's wild newspaperman days to Kerouac and the jug-guzzling, chanting Beats. It was seedy and glorious. Broadway looked like Times Square at night, all glowing lights and glory, and in the day turned into a 25-buck whore with her makeup peeling off. City Lights was the church of literary revolution, and I'd see Allen Ginsberg and even the reclusive Bob Kaufman walking down upper Grant. Jazz wafted from little clubs. Unclassifiable post-Beat hipsters, not hippies or eggheads or anything else recognizable, wandered its byways. The Beach was vaguely decrepit, already past its glory days, but its mephitic vibe made it even cooler. It was a neighborhood of beautiful losers in a city that specialized in that.

North Beach was the heart of the city I inherited and first loved. I didn't think it would ever lose its aura: it would forever be frozen in amber, like Baudelaire's Paris. But it changed, or I did.

Cities are archaeological digs, and the layers are made up not just of decaying objects but of memory. As I walk through North Beach today, I walk through a place as resigned, well-behaved and familiar as I am. All the years I spent looking at it with completely different eyes, with the wild surmise of youth, are gone.

But sometimes, turning a corner onto a certain alley, I remember.

My memories are, alas, erratic. One drunken evening was so much like another, around the corner of that green and neon dreamland that has vanished now except for the flashing nipples that sometimes blink at me a moment before sleep, that I can never remember if I chugged a 48-ounce when I was 32 or chugged a 32-ounce when I was 48. All the North Beach stories stagger down to the cross-eyed shitfaced sea, and I put in my hand and bring out whatever I can find. And I pull out my gray tweed jacket and the unextinguished joint.

I was walking one night from Nob Hill down Pacific Avenue to North Beach. My destination that night was not Vesuvio, or Tosca, or the Caffe Italia, or Keystone Korner, or Frank's Extra, or Gulliver's, or the Saloon, or Mooney's Irish Pub, or Grassland, or the Lusty Lady (honesty compels me to surreptitiously drop that name like a greasy quarter into the dead center of this Homeric list of watering holes), or the Portofino, or Spec's, or Silhouette's, or the North End, or Tony Nik's, or the Columbus Cafe, or Gino and Carlo's, or the Old Spaghetti Factory, or La Bodega. No, it was, of all things, a theater. I was going to a play -- one of the few times I ever imbibed anything remotely resembling High Culture in North Beach.

This play, a piece of British frippery called "Bullshot Crummond," was being performed in a theater that briefly and unsuccessfully occupied Carol Doda's old strip club, the Condor. Beyond being the Ur-fake-titty bar, the Condor was famous as the place where a bouncer screwing a dancer was crushed to death by a piano. The piano was fitted with a hydraulic lift that raised it slowly to the ceiling. After mounting the dancer, the aforementioned bouncer accidentally kicked the start lever. Distracted by the throes of passion, he failed to realize that his love was literally, to quote the immortal words of Jackie Wilson, lifting him higher. He was crushed slowly and inexorably against the ceiling and died. Cushioned by his expiring body, the stripper survived.

It was a sad and instructive tale, and one that should have made the rogues of North Beach change their lecherous ways. Yet so sunk in vice were the Beach's habitues that the only discernible effect it had on male behavior was that for months afterward, a near-total aversion to the missionary position was reported throughout the neighborhood.

But such grim thoughts were far from my mind as, like Toad in "The Wind in the Willows," and about to meet the same humiliating fate, I went a-pleasuring gaily down the street. In my pocket was cash, in my young heart was frivolity and in my hand was a burning joint, which I partook of freely as I strolled down Pacific. Arriving at the theater in fine spirits, I casually crushed out the joint with my fingers and placed the roach in the pocket of my gray herringbone jacket -- for years one of my favorite coats, a respectable-looking number that I had picked up from a free box in the city's Noe Valley. With the suave demeanor of a boulevardier, I paid for my ticket and entered the theater. I looked around for a seat. The place was almost full. It was dinner-theater-style seating, people jammed close together around cafe tables. I found a seat in the midst of a group of people right near the stage. The play was just starting. With the aplomb of a man of the world I sat back and watched the action unfold.

The actors cavorted, the audience laughed. A warm and intimate feeling suffused the room, a sense of easiness and comfort. Then I became dimly aware of a peculiar smell. I paid it no heed. The play continued. Bulldog Drummond ambled across the stage. The audience laughed. The smell became slightly stronger. I ignored it. Men of sophistication do not look down. The play went on.

The female lead made her entrance. Now the burning smell seemed to be coming up from directly below my seat. Was it some sort of special effect? An undeniable cloud of smoke was wafting in my face. I looked down. To my horror, I saw that a plume of acrid smoke was pouring out of the pocket of my gray herringbone jacket, rising into the air like an innocent campfire. The smoke was now thick and the smell noticeable and unpleasant -- eau d' wool jacket, with just a hint of cheap weed. The people sitting around me turned and looked at the smoking coat and then at me. I sensed confusion and disapproval -- even, God help us, the beginning glimmers of a fatal knowledge. Soon the firemen would come, and the police, and Mrs. Prothero, and I would be taken away in handcuffs.

I hastily smothered the fire, burning my hand in the process. The bad-smelling smoke hung in the air for a few moments like a humiliating fart whose origin cannot be plausibly denied. After it dissipated I tried to resume my former debonair pose, but it was no good. I was no longer a man of the world. I had been exposed to all of Paris, or at least to the theater-goers of North Beach, as a buffoon who had ignited his coat with a still-burning roach.

But youth is nothing if not resilient. Like the irrepressible Toad, my role model at that point in life, I popped up from that humiliation to once again try my luck. And so I found myself one evening in some now-vanished bar at Broadway and Montgomery, listening to a jazz trio and eyeing an attractive woman.

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