Forever Isn't Over Yet

The word of the month is "frustrated." Up quite early, just time enough to drink a cup of coffee and read some news online, then I'm out and onto a bus to Bayshore. Teaching until noon, another bus to the library where, if there's an event or a rental, I may stay until as late as 9:00 pm.

I'm a morning person, which means I write in the morning. No time for that now. Hence, two weeks without an entry, and nothing but this dry explanation when I do get around to it. My fiction takes longer too. Usually it only takes me one week to germinate and get at least a first draft of a story. Now it's two weeks, three if it's troublesome. I like the kids I see every day, but dear God what a relief it will be to have my mornings back in a few weeks.

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.

Tuesday night was Poetry Night. In honor of it, I started the day by baking brownies. There’s something deeply satisfying about carrying a still fragrant tray of brownies through downtown San Francisco just before noon. You hear murmurs in your wake of “….chocolate…,” “Oh, that’s lovely, did you smell…” “Ohhh brownies!”

Poetry is alive and well in this city. We had thirty reservations. About twice as many people showed up that evening. We were a little late in opening the room because our café manager had hurt herself doing yoga that morning and was moving slowly (and let me digress for one moment to say that I hope when I’m in my eighties I can, as she did, truthfully utter the words “I hurt myself this morning doing yoga,”) but a godsend of a volunteer pitched in and everything went smoothly from there on. When the moment came, when we crossed over from getting ready for the event to the event itself, when the lights were properly dimmed and darkness had fallen outside, the faux candles on the tables were “lit” and everyone had stopped talking and had eyes front, when L stepped up to the microphone and said, “welcome everyone,” I could not see a single empty seat.

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Yesterday as I was plowing through my emails, a couple of the readers were rehearsing for an upcoming reading in the room next door. There was much discussion and rustling of papers, then:

“DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT,
OLD AGE SHOULD BURN AND RAVE AT CLOSE OF DAY…”

The voice boomed through the open door, down the hallway, bouncing against the walls and echoing on the tiled floor. There was no escaping it. It was a raw-throated, baritone, drunk-with-art bully of a voice, tearing around corners and beating at office doors. I pictured the players in the Chess Room looking up unhappily from their boards, realizing it’s coming from our department, and shaking their heads, resigned. It’s poetry, and there’s not much anyone can do about that.

“…RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT..” he roared. I got up, peeked around the door into the other room and recognized the reader. A local writer and actor with a wonderful tough-guy face. He’d read at Bloomsday last year and looked every bit the hard-drinking Dubliner.

“…DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT…”

I returned to my work, then a stanza later became conscious that someone was standing in the doorway of the office. One of the members, a lady in her sixties, smiled shyly at me.

“…GRAVE MEN, NEAR DEATH, WHO SEE WITH BLINDING SIGHT
BLIND EYES COULD BLAZE LIKE METEORS AND BE GAY…”

“Do you think they would mind if I just sat in the hallway and listened?” she asked in a sibilant whisper that managed to cut through all the Dylan Thomas.

“I don’t see why it would be a problem.”

She withdrew.

“…CURSE, BLESS, ME NOW WITH YOUR FIERCE TEARS, I PRAY.
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.
RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT.”

Silence fell for a moment. There was more murmured discussion, more rustling. Then:

“HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY!
HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! HOLY!...”

He’d launched into Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl.”

“THE WORLD IS HOLY! THE SOUL IS HOLY! THE SKIN IS HOLY!
THE NOSE IS HOLY! THE TONGUE AND COCK AND HAND…”

I got up again and this time glanced down the hall. She was sitting there on the hall bench, still smiling.

God, I love my job.