Forever Isn't Over Yet

Our much heralded lunchtime event with Da Mayor took place yesterday without too many hitches. In spite of some dire predictions – “He’s always late you know. Always” -- and the announcement the day before by his social secretary that he could only stay until a little after 1:00, Mayor Willie Brown stepped out of the elevator at exactly 12:00 and cheerfully settled down to signing and occasionally personalizing copies of his book, Basic Brown for attendees. He gave his talk, held a Q&A, and stayed a good half hour past the time we’d been told he absolutely positively had to leave. (The warning about him being always late impacted not us but his next appointment.)

Willie Brown is a true San Francisco character who will probably be remembered in the same way Abe Ruef, Lillie Coit, and Melvin Belli are remembered. I see him occasionally in our neighborhood, usually walking up Leavenworth. There seems to be a legal requirement that the word “dapper” appear in any description of Willie Brown, but it’s not an unreasonable one. Yes, by God, the man is dapper as all Hell. His taste in ties and suits is impeccable, his hat is always set at a perfect angle, and his handkerchief always peeks out in four precise little points from his breast pocket. Listening to him speak is like watching a magician. Brown is adept at a sort of verbal sleight of hand in which you become so engaged by his wit that you only notice after he’s finished that he just spent thirty minutes talking about himself to an extent that would be dull and irritating if he were anybody else. I do believe he could make an hour-long lecture on tax law entertaining by including at least five anecdotes about Willie Brown. And it might very well be a damned good lecture on tax law.

Well why shouldn’t he be delighted with himself? He was born poor and black in Mineola Texas. He’s now rich and powerful in San Francisco California. How he managed this, whether by hook or by crook, is worth knowing. He is smart, pragmatic and absolutely ruthless. He has the faux naïve charm of a bon vivant who considers the fact that he enjoys good things wonderful news that should be shared with everyone. The day before the event one our members dropped by the office to make his reservation and told us an anecdote about encountering Brown at Wilkes-Bashford, passing him in the store. The weave of Brown’s suit was so beautiful. so soft, that he tentatively reached out to touch it, and Da Mayor stopped, grinned, and obligingly held out his arm.

His ghost-writer, P.J. Corkery did a wonderful job. Basic Brown is no ordinary boring political memoir. It begins with a description of Brown’s dirt-poor childhood in Texas, then leaps to an almost gleeful account of Brown’s deft and merciless payback to the “gang of five” who tried to oust him as Speaker back in 1988.

I have some serious problems with Willie Brown as a politician. During his tenure as mayor, many working class San Franciscans, many artists and filmmakers were driven out of the city because of his emphasis on development. The only citizens he seemed willing to acknowledge as worthwhile San Franciscans were either the people he encountered at the Big Four or other uber-wealthy hangouts or the affluent-on-paper young dot-commers who helped drive rents into the sky (many of whom by now have probably moved out of the lofts they infested in SOMA and back into their parents basements.) He’s even quoted as saying at one point, “poor people shouldn’t live in San Francisco.”

He never keeps records he declared, smiling, during his talk. “When I was an attorney, I learned that’s how people got in trouble. So no records. No emails, no letters, nothing.”

There’s a scene in the horror film, The Ninth Gate, where a wicked old woman says that, as a young girl, she once glimpsed Satan himself. “I saw him one day. I was fifteen years old, and I saw him as plain as I see you now: cutaway, top hat, cane. Very elegant, very handsome. It was love at first sight.”

At the time, I pictured Satan as a dashing young Italian count. Now I’ll always imagine the Devil she saw as a rather stocky late-middle aged black man with a moustache, a tilted hat and a perfectly tailored suit.

Yesterday I went in to work because there was a rental using equipment that required supervision. It was a long event that took up most of the day, but I wasn’t on the clock the whole time – just a couple of hours, one at the beginning as I set up for them, and the other at the end when I break everything down. On weekends, with most of the tenants out and the Financial District practically empty, it’s very quiet and relaxing. I catch up on a little office work, use the Xerox machine, nod at the Chess players as they wander down the halls. Once it’s obvious that everything’s going all right for the renter, I usually either run some errands downtown or go down into the library to read and relax.

When you work in a library, you become familiar with the spines of certain books. They are landmarks, little bars of color, little rows of words that flash past -- “Travels in the Northern Tundra,” brown and long, “The Journal of Eugene Delacroix,” dark blue, frayed, and thick, “The Parades Gone By” shiny and pale… Every now and then, I stop and open one of them. Yesterday while in the library I picked out an appealingly fat book in an orange library binding I’d noticed on my to-ing and fro-ing while setting out flyers. Its title is "Characters of the Inquisition" by William Thomas Walsh, copyright 1940. The earliest return date I can find on the little slip in the back is 1976, but I can faintly make out “1941” stamped where some past librarian was in a hurry and missed the “Date Due” card (you can find these in just about every old book in the collection. The earliest one I ever encountered is, “1927” in a very old edition of "The Diary of Samuel Pepys.")

Mr. Walsh, a prominent Catholic historian, made it his business to straighten the world out about all the awful things people were saying about the Inquisition, which really, his book maintains, is just dreadfully misunderstood.

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I don't usually do this, but it has to do with books, which makes it irresistible to me. According to midnightvoyager you:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.

And so:

"Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfullly to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. GERMANY, HE SAID BLUNTLY, MUST EXPAND IN THE EAST -- LARGELY AT THE EXPENSE OF RUSSIA."

(From my ancient coverless and backless paperback copy of William Shirer's THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH.)

Is this perhaps some form of Bibliomancy? I hope not.