Tempest

Tempest

It had to be that night with the seas building and my fears beginning to mount. I was sure this was going to be it. I was about to die. I know I started thinking about my good times in the City. I ran through walks and conversations and bars and fights and sitting on the sidewalks in the rain. I began to give myself a pride at being a San Franciscan.

Later, I wrote sitting at a small bar that I never went to since it was off my normal path through the City. The people were yuppies in the extreme and every so often I would be asked what I was doing while I was concentrating on putting something profound on my pad. I guess I looked odd using a pen and paper during this age of fingertips on palms.

I felt I had to write but did not know why only at night. I tried repeating places. I tried the park. I tried sitting on the sidewalk in North Beach. I tried leaning against a stone at Yosemite like I had done before. I found I tore everything up… until, I would sit anywhere after the sun went down. The sun setting seemed to open my imagination enough to let my mind catch the words that I needed at that moment about almost any subject I was interested in. And, I would say to myself after writing something: where did that come from?

Something like this:

I walked the wrong way to catch my bus, but decided to take a walk to the marina as an award to fate. I went into a liquor store and bought a half-pint of the word rum on a bottle and continued my walk. I mounted the hill above the tunnel and looked out at Chinatown. I stopped and sat on the cement rail above the tunnel and sipped from the bottle. It burned my throat and made me take a slug this time. I wanted to get drunk, I thought out loud. I was in my City and I wanted to be a San Franciscan. I wanted to get good and drunk.

The breeze caught me up on that rail and I remembered my Gull sitting at her berth and wanted to be there right now. Capping the bottle I put it in my overcoat pocket and put the overcoat on, shouldered my bag and skipped down the steps into Chinatown.

Chinatown makes me who I am every time I smell and walk its streets and alleys. My youth was spent courting those pretty little ladies who found me exotic, I was smiling now. Looking around at laundry hanging in droops from secret windows on blocks of buildings that I always guessed contained half of China’s population I breathed like I was back in town. I took another pull while walking and spilled a bit on my overcoat but did not care. I was at home.

I could stop writing and put my pad in my pack and leave but maybe two days later find that little bit and try to write a finish or continuation to it but nothing would come. My brain was a white cave illuminated my pad’s colouration with little blue stripes running horizontally across it’s walls.

I pulled out my pad aboard Gull one night sitting in the cockpit and my pen started moving along those blue lines and my cave started filling up with what I felt was my heart. It continued as though I hadn’t stopped writing:

I was sweating now since I was not being touched by a breath of air passing from one familiar street to an alley shortcut to a street. I pulled off the overcoat and hung it through my bag strap, careful for the bottle’s easy access. Into North Beach I thought I should celebrate something. I was home? Na, I always celebrated that one. I was representing my people, my hometown? Yes… yes, that would do.

I stopped passage and turned at Washington Square, looking at the statue of Benjamin Franklin at its centre and crossed the street to enter Grant Avenue and some good bars.

Years before it was the Anxious Asp. A cigar smoking lesbian midget ran the place. I was sixteen looking like I was twenty-five. I met two good friends there. One is dead now and one is a house-husband. Both were bad muthas, then. What was I now? The Asp is gone. A blood I had met in Mexico had bought it and moved it to the Haight during those latter stages of the hippy landings but it had failed. I did not like that guy anyway.

Mike’s Pool Hall was gone also. It went when topless came in… almost to the day. Mike’s was wonderful and introduced me to the hierarchy of San Francisco’s underworld. Genovese to Sicilian to Bloods, all funded by Chinese. The heroin, pot and coke were routed through the toilet at Mike’s and deals were made at the pool tables for more than samples. Mike’s smelled like a German Beer Hall and had crushed peanut shells soaking up anything on the one foot up levels of its two floors.

Now, I was at Specks in his own tiny alley. Across from Vesuvio’s and City Lights Bookstore. The bouquet was memory. I poured the last of my rum into the last contents of my beer mug and ate my traditional cheese from the big slicer on the bar. The bartender saw me but knew me since I was a kid.

It took me a while to figure out that I had a thing going on where I only wrote good stuff after the sun set. How that happened I have been trying to trace. I had memories of my writing during the day light hours in different places and I would go to those places to see if I could recapture a time when I started not writing. It didn’t work. I could not remember not writing during the day light in any of those spots and could not write anything worth keeping afterwards.

I was on my way down the coast trying to make Monterey before a predicted storm moved South and I didn’t make it. The Bay of Monterey seemed like the place to hide but of course it wasn’t since it is a very large open bay and the winds and seas gave themselves a chance to thwart civility. I tried to beam reach out with a double reef in the mainsail and just the staysail up. Then the seas grew and my dread became real.

So, why was I going through my times as a youth being wild in my home town? A storm made me write? Night made me write? Fear made me write?

It occurred to me that night was the ending to day; it brought a consciousness of mortality. If a whole day could end then I could end and what I needed to do in my life was pass on my way toward immortality and the night was what instilled that in me, and the remembrance of that fearful night. That sounded way too complex for who I thought I was, or think I am. Already putting myself in the past tense there…

Tonight, sitting here at Vesuvio’s in North Beach I wrote, I mean I am writing my continuance:

I was already drunk. I knew I was drunk and when I knew I was drunk I must be really drunk, I thought, looking out at the city lit with haze and little spectacles of wonder. I was looking and looking around to see everything. The world might go in a second and I have to inhale all through all these digits and nostril hairs and tongues and ear throbs. Music somewhere but I didn’t need that tourist shit. Well, there might be a babe down there looking for a little Langston Hughes and I was packing it in my overcoat, wasn’t I? Bloods are supposed to say ain’t I, not wasn’t I? Damn.

Looking up at wisping clouds, getting a grasp on things, moving legs with feet on wet concrete with lines separating pads, don’t walk on a line, break a back or how does that go?…step on a crack. Shook my head three times and looked up at Chinese lanterns and bright red and yellow lights advertising something that I didn’t have no time to study. Moving and moving, clearing the head.