WHAT’S LEFT Sometimes I go down to Vesuvio Bar in North Beach, San Francisco, where Kerouac drank with Lew Welch and Wally Hedrick sat in the window to help sell the “Beatnik Kit” to anyone who wanted it. Across the alley (now, “Kerouac Alley”) is City Lights. Long ago, I was in the musty downstairs of City Lights, lean, young, hungry, embraced by something. Down the street in a café, a tragic girl, older, her cropped hair shadowing her oval face, her green eyes lit, calls over to me: “Hey literary. Got a match?” I had a pile of books from City Lights in front of me, making me “literary.” Out in the bone-chilling night, walking through the Broadway Tunnel, I was home. Now, down on Montford Avenue, in Homestead Valley, I can visit my friends who live where Kerouac and Snyder and The Dharma Bums lived, embraced by something. When I go there, it embraces me, if embrace is not arms, necessarily, but a sense of “Yes. That’s right. That’s the way. That’s blessed: which means it’s what I should be doing and where.” Now, Jack’s cabin is burned down, and goats pasture where he dreamed. His bedframe is a rose trellis on the dusty hillside where the oak leaves crack under your step and, with the eucalyptus and the mountain clay, send the sweetest odors to your wandering mind.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 23:43:47 +0000
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