The Mayor of MacDougal Street (18 page)

Our virtuous deed did not go unrewarded: Andrew had a driver’s license and was only too happy to spell Gary at the wheel. Of course, the insurance on the car would not cover him as a driver, but the clock was still ticking and money was still mighty scarce. Gary proposed that he and Andrew take turns, eight hours on and eight off, driving and sleeping, all the way to San Fran. I thought this really sucked the big one; the idea of sitting in that car for eighteen hours—give or take a couple—made me sick with dread. For a change, A.K. agreed with me. He wanted to have a look at Salt Lake City and do some “real gambling” in Reno. “OK,” Gary told him, “you pick up the motel bills. Besides,” he added spitefully, “they’re not gonna let you gamble in Reno; you’re only a kid.” That actually shut him up for a while. (Red Chief had never been Mr. Popularity with us, and after the “High Noon in Cheyenne” caper, Gary and I tacitly agreed that the more sequestered we kept the kid, the safer we all would be. Personally, if there had been room I would have stowed the little rodent in the trunk.)

With Red Chief silenced—there was no way he would agree to pay the motel—I was outvoted. I glumly resigned myself to an eternity of cramps and claustrophobia and let the matter drop.

West toward the Utah line, Route 80 rises with the terrain into the Wasatch Range—not exactly the Himalayas, but formidable enough—and very scenic, weather permitting. Weather did not permit. As soon as we began to climb, the snow began to fall, and with predictable synchronicity, the higher we climbed, the harder it fell. I am not sure how it happened—maybe the interstate had not yet been completed through the mountains, or maybe some half-wit (probably me, since I was the expedition’s navigator) spotted a shortcut on the road map—but the next thing we knew, we were on a narrow two-lane road in the middle of the mountains, up to our asses in snow. Those were seven or eight of the hairiest, scariest hours I have ever lived through. No question of finding a nice motel and waiting out the storm; there was nothing out there but mountains and chasms with five-hundred-foot drops, and that pathetically narrow road, snaking and hair-pinning around them. We were doing fifteen miles an hour. Once in a rare while, some idiot would actually pass us, raising the tension in the car even higher. Some stretches of that route could not have had more than a few inches of clearance, but the trucks went barreling on through. Did those lunatics
want
to die? No one had spoken for hours, and I was on the point of screaming, or praying, or just gibbering like an idiot, when the road finally leveled and straightened, the snow tapered off and stopped, and we were out of it.

We slept that night in a motel, and did not even try to make A.K. foot the bill.

Salt Lake City I recall only as an oblong blur. (Rosalie Sorrels, who was living there before she took to the road as a folksinger, assures me that this is a fairly accurate description.) We zipped across the Bonneville Flats and the Great Salt Desert, on over into Nevada, where, mirabile dictu, there was
no speed limit.

Gary had been living for this moment. Our handy-dandy road atlas had a chart listing the speed limits of the various states. Next to Nevada it said only “Reasonable and proper.” It was cold out there, and there was snow off the road, but the asphalt itself was straight, flat, and bone-dry. “Hoo boy, lets boogie!” And boogie we did. That Impala was a sweet little item, and Gary put his foot through the floor and got her up to 120. “Gary,” I said, the voice of sweet reason and propriety, “don’t you think a hundred
will do?” He grumbled a little, but moderation prevailed and we scooted on past Elko at a stately 100 miles per hour. Splat! A lump of reddish-gray goop appeared on the windshield. “What the fuck was that?” Gary yelled.

“It’s a bird,” said Andrew.

“Yeah sure. It’s a plane, it’s Superman.”

“No, really,” Andrew explained. “The road gets hot from the sun and they stand on it to get warm.”

Sure enough, there were flocks of them now. At our approach, they would take off, but we were moving too fast for all of them to get out of the way. Splat! Splat! It was getting hard to see the road. “Fuck ’em,” Gary grunted through clenched teeth. “We’ve gotta make time! When it gets too bad, we’ll scrape ’em off.” Splat.

“We” turned out to be me. Gary was the driver; Andrew was a guest of sorts; and Red Chief refused, point blank: “Oh no you don’t! Slow down, and you’ll stop hitting them. I’m in no hurry.” So from time to time we would pull over to the side of the road, and I would trundle out, ice scraper in hand, to peel ten pounds of bird porridge off the windshield. Everybody else in the car seemed to think this a perfect division of labor. Be that as it may, we were in Reno in five hours.

In Reno, a mere five more hours short of San Francisco and blessed surcease, the word came down: Route 80 over the Donner Pass was closed to vehicles without tire chains. This was the last straw. We were just about broke again, since the unscheduled stop in Salt Lake had used up our motel money. We could just barely afford some gas and a bite to eat, and that was it. Of course, Gary
could
phone Triple-A again and ask them to wire us the money to buy a set of chains—it was certainly a legitimate expense—but the money would not get to us until tomorrow, and in the meantime where would we sleep? Gary and I looked pointedly at Red Chief, who we knew still had some cash reserves. “We can sleep in the car,” he quoted, with a big evil smile. “It’s warm in Nevada.” I did not kill him.

I suppose I should admit that, while A.K. was something of a skinflint, he was no freeloader. When a collective expenditure was necessary, he ponied up like a mensch. If worst had come to worst, he would probably have shelled out for a cheap room in a squalid motor court—I think. But at least to my sleep-deprived mind, it seemed as if there was another way
out. “Guys,” I said, “we have nothing to lose. Here we are, in the gambling capital of the United States, with twenty bucks between us. Let’s see if we can parlay that into some kind of grubstake for the rest of the trip.” Not my sharpest reasoning perhaps, but to a bunch of young louts of the male persuasion it seemed the soul of judiciousness.

Reno in those days was even more of a stockman’s town than it is now. Cattle kings and cowboys—Andrew knew the town well—Indians off the nearby reservation, Basque sheepherders, and at this time of year, very few tourists. There was no “strip.” The casinos were all downtown. If you did not care for your luck in one joint, you just walked across the street. We chose Harold’s, mostly because I had heard of them: they used to circulate matchbooks all over the country with a cartoon of a naked guy in a high hat, walking around in a barrel. The caption read: “I was there.” On the basis of my acknowledged (by me) blackjack expertise, I was to be custodian of the treasury. Amazingly, the cards ran well. Betting no more than a buck at a time (all small bets were in silver dollars), it took me less than an hour to amass forty dollars in winnings. Time to redistribute. We divvied up the money, and Gary and Andrew went off to find their own tables. Red Chief stuck by my elbow, offering advice. By now he was calling me “Doc,” and refused to budge an inch. Betting such small amounts, it takes a long time to make any kind of money, but the cards still liked me and I persisted. Then a voice hissed in my ear: “Stand on sixteen, Doc. The dealer’s gonna bust.” I stood. The dealer busted. I had not won enough yet to see us on our way, but I was getting close, and A.K. was driving me nuts. I handed him a couple of silver dollars. “Here, kid,” I said nastily. “Go get yourself an ice cream cone.” He made a face at me and took off. Ten minutes later, while I was sweating over a possible five-card Charlie, he reappeared. “Here,” he said, displaying a hat full of silver dollars. “There’s more in my pockets. Let’s get out of here, this place bores the shit out of me.”

We rounded up our coconspirators, one of whom had also come out a winner, turned our clinkers into bills at the cashiers cage (except for A.K., who liked his hat full of silver), and went our way rejoicing. As we were leaving, I stuck my hand into my pocket and discovered a last silver dollar I had overlooked. What the hell; I dropped it into a slot machine by the
door, and hit a goddamn jackpot. Not of Red Chief proportions, mind you, with bells and whistles, but another forty bucks or so. We were rich! Let the good times roll!

Now we could afford tire chains, food, gas,
and
a cheap room in a squalid motor court. We proceeded to do all of the above. We gorged ourselves festively that night in the dining room of a Basque boardinghouse. All you could eat for five bucks a head, and they kept our water glasses—A.K.’s included—filled with some of the most awful sour wine I have ever tasted. What the hell did we know from wine? We loved it. And so, merrily, to bed.

Next morning, somewhat subdued (oh God, that wine . . . ) but with skid chains duly in place, we proceeded up and over Donner Pass, through the Sierras and some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. There was plenty of snow on the ground, but the day was glorious and the road was fine. Our morale was improving. Coming down into the foothills, someone said happily, “Open the windows, it’s stifling in here.” I did so, and received a blast of warm, moist, and vegetal Pacific air that was pure bliss. An hour later we spotted our first palm tree.

R
olling down through the Coast Range and over the Bay Bridge into Frisco
¹⁴
was a new approach for me, and a bit of a comedown. My previous arrival, floating in under the Golden Gate, had been incomparably more dramatic. Still, right then it looked like the promised land. Gary dropped me off in North Beach, which was still the beat capital of the West Coast, albeit in sad decline from its glory days of a few years past.

This habit of showing up just in time to miss an incandescence seems to be a signature trait of mine. I am like a bellwether: “Uh-oh, here comes Van Ronk. The party must be over.” There have been a couple of exceptions, but when people burble at me, “Oh what a colorful life you’ve led!” I am tempted to tell them, “Look, I’ve known people who were busted with Emma Goldman, worked the riverboats with Louis Armstrong, beat Marcel Duchamp at chess, bunked with Bix, hopped freights with Joe Hill, and shot grouse with Leon Trotsky.
That’s
colorful.” On the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that when Pericles hit Athens, everybody told him: “Boy! You should have been here last year, the joint was really jumping.” You takes what you can get.

In any case, there I was, standing outside the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in North Beach. I had heard through the grapevine that this was where “all the haps were going down,” but on entering I was quickly informed that the place, an innocuous coffeehouse, had recently been raided by the cops.

This was 1959, and the city’s raffishness had not yet been commodified. The cutesy boutiques and hipsey-poo restaurants that currently blight the whole peninsula were still ten years off. Ghirardelli Square was known for a derelict chocolate factory, Chinatown was a neighborhood where Chinese people lived, and Fisherman’s Wharf was a fisherman’s wharf. The petite bourgeoisie’s unerring homing instinct for kitsch would change all that, but as yet the campaign to make Bohemia safe—and salable—had not begun. Still, the preconditions for the campaign ahead were falling into place. A kind of demographic slum clearance—“Drive the riff-raff out of North Beach”—had begun. Or as we put it at the time, “The heat was on.”
¹⁵

The heat took the form of harassment by the cops of anybody who looked like a “weirdo,” accompanied by the occasional beating, and the aforementioned raid on the bagel shop. All of this was done to the tune of a strident crusade against “beatniks”—the word had only recently been minted by Herb Caen of the
Chronicle
, bless him—in the gutter press. Until that damned word came along, nobody noticed us, or if they did it was just “those kids.” We had all the freedom anonymity could bestow—a lovely state of affairs.

What had started the current crackdown was an incident that occurred a week or two before I arrived. Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, an outstanding example of the poet-hustler type this country seems to make a specialty of (back east we had Ted Joans), had been running a series of bogus “rent parties,” charging the clydes at the door and selling them drinks. At one of
these wingdings, somebody got very drunk and fell—or, some said, was pushed—off the roof. The resultant “Splat heard ’round the world” triggered a Kulturkampf locally and, within a year or two, nationally that would simmer and flair up from time to time over the next decade.

The upshot of all this was that I was forced more or less to avoid North Beach during my stay in SF. Most of the time, I stayed with my old IWW fellow worker Al Graham in the Mission District or crashed with some college kids across the bay in Berkeley. The only scene in North Beach that attracted me was Pierre Delattre’s Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue. Pierre, an Episcopalian priest, had somehow conned his superiors into funding an apostolate to the freaks. It was a storefront operation, with a big room cluttered with chairs, tables, and cast-off sofas facing the street, and a couple of small rooms in the back where Pierre slept and hosted wine-swilling poker sessions every now and then. (That boy was my kind of missionary.) Besides the free spaghetti dinners every Friday night, the mission had other appeals as a hangout: the connection with Holy Mother Church rendered it, we imagined, pig-proof, and in my case it was also a source of income. On one or two occasions, Pierre produced store concerts for me on a pass-the-hat basis. I split the billing and the take with Paul Schoenwetter, a fine frailing banjoist and fellow member of the Folksingers Guild who was also rattling around Frisco with no money and nothing much to do.

Across the bay in Berkeley, I was hanging around Barry Olivier’s place, the Barrel. Barry gave me a gig after I helped him unload a truck full of furniture—a somewhat unusual technique for getting onstage, but it worked fine. He also set up a couple of blues guitar workshops, which brought in a few dollars more, and meanwhile I honed my poker sharkery on the wallets of a bunch of UC students who could no more hold their liquor than they could resist drawing to an inside straight.