North Beach forever

The woman had a very strange demeanor. She was sprawled loosely and aggressively across a seat and had an expression I've never seen before -- lordly and vaguely extraterrestrial. Naturally, I immediately began chatting her up. Her responses were smart but slightly out of focus, like she was trying to hear something far away. After a few minutes I asked her if she wanted to get a coffee. She looked at me quizzically for a moment; it was like she was trying to figure out if I was hip enough to understand what she was going to tell me. "I can't go," she said. Then, with an odd, knowing little smile, she confided, "You see, I don't live in this reality."

I'd heard "I have a boyfriend" and "I'm too busy" and "Get lost, creep," and dozens of other rejections before, but this was a new one.

"Oh, I come down here," she explained, a sly glint in her eye. "I enjoy the show, go on all the rides -- I have an e-ticket. But then I have to go back up." As she spoke, I had the distinct and scary impression that she actually knew she was insane, but preferred being up there.

"So I guess this means you don't want to have a cup of coffee," I said.

Time went on and even Mr. Toad grew up -- sort of. I learned to avoid schizophrenic hotties and stopped putting out joints in my coat pockets. But I kept going to North Beach.

My dear old friend Jack Lind was the most boho dude I ever knew. He was a Danish jazz aficionado and former newspaperman who when I met him was living on a houseboat on Gate Five in Sausalito. Later he followed my footsteps into taxi driving, which he loved and which he kept doing long after all of us had gotten out of the gig. There's still a picture of him on the wall in Vesuvio, with a bunch of other taxi drivers, writers and drunks. He was a free spirit and a great, lovely man. I can still hear him snapping his fingers to Dexter Gordon, hear his deep voice saying, "You want to get a horn, man? You know, a little drinkie-poo?" He embodied what Jack Kerouac said about San Francisco -- "It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn." He was a lot older than I and he passed away of cancer eight or 10 years ago in Copenhagen, his native town.

When he died, his old friends, most of us by now married, with kids and jobs and mortgages and private school tuitions, all met in North Beach, scene of so many of our past escapades with Jack, to have a wake for him. We had a drink at Vesuvio, or maybe it was Spec's, and told each other stories about him. And we had to do it right, so we went out and walked a block up Romolo Alley, one of the great little alleys of North Beach that runs north off Broadway, and went past Fresno, another fabled alley that runs past the Saloon, which used to be the neighborhood jail in the 19th century before becoming a supremely raunchy blues bar. We chose this corner because it was surreal and deep and utterly urban and a secluded place to hoist a drink in Jack's memory.

There is one block of Romolo that is the most insanely ungraded street in San Francisco -- it has a hump that tilts off to the side so crazily that your car could almost tip over driving up it. There is an old parking lot across the way and as you sit on the curb at this little hidden four-way corner you're surrounded by the worn-out gray back ends of apartment houses, as the big buildings of downtown rise up in the distance. It's one of North Beach's sacred lost corners, places where romance and memory and loss are soaked into the cobblestones. That's where we said goodbye to Jack, and to a vanished time in our lives, of kicks and foolishness and dreams.

But North Beach follows you around. You don't lose it. It gets old with you. And the lines you see in its face, the cracks in its mythical façade, are just as beautiful as its dawn.

On the northern boundary of North Beach, at Chestnut and Columbus, stands a joint called LaRocca's Corner. La Rocca's Corner's claim to fame is its venerable neon sign, which proclaims, "This is It!" I have had a few horns in LaRocca's, and by every standard, this is the falsest advertising in town. But if you stick around 60 or 70 years, if your bar has an autographed photograph of Rocky Graziano on the wall, even the stupidest kitsch turns to hammered Byzantine gold.

Actually, that's the dirty little secret of the whole neighborhood, from the Barbary Coast days through the International Settlement, the Beats, the hippies, the brief and scary yuppie era, the dot-com Dieters with their Auschwitz haircuts and now the nameless refugees from GeorgeBushLand. The dirty secret is that there never was a Golden Age. North Beach has been dining out on its myth forever. We're nostalgic for Jack Kerouac? Well, guess what -- Jack Kerouac was nostalgic for Jack London, and Jack London was envious of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Louis Stevenson thought that Mark Twain got there first and ate all the candy, and Mark Twain -- he just wanted to be back on the Mississippi. The first Chilean who stumbled up Telegraph Hill and nailed a plank on Alta Street 150 years ago sat there looking out over the Bay and said to himself, "This Is It!" in big mental neon letters, and we've all been reciting that same smug mantra, the slogan of the Alan Watts Realty, ever since.

We know the pot of gold is bogus, but we still keep going there. We've been doing it for years -- as young men, not so young men and now not young men at all. We keep heading to North Beach, keep turning left on Churchill Alley out of the Broadway tunnel, even though in those 30 years we have never yet once hit the jackpot, felt the supreme high, made the scene, danced the dance, met the chick, seen the best minds of our generation doing anything, let alone walking through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

But it doesn't matter. There's always next time. And when you finally begin to understand that there ain't going to be no next time, that this is it, that's OK. You don't need North Beach to give up its secrets because you know them all. Because you're on the corner of Grant and Green in this sad old Italian valley beneath its two guardian hills looking down like kindly old paisans, and the waves are lapping down at Aquatic Park to the north and the filthy numberless alleys of Chinatown lurk to the south, and the glasses in every bar are full and Broadway is stupid jammed with John Dos Passos sailors and the Palmistry sign is reflected in the upper windows of Vesuvio and the parrots are flying above Washington Square and the Mason Street cable car rattle-clatters onto Columbus and you're at the dead center of town, the bull's-eye, where you've been a thousand times before and where you will always return, where you left your heart, and where you found it.

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