Broadway at Columbus

I’d just moved to San Francisco and was mulling over accommodation options. I expected my apartment to be clean, spacious, of architectural note and comfortably situated. A view of The Bay would be nice. More importantly, I required a neighborhood teeming with other accomplished writers. It needed to be home to a wide range of artists—be they painters, dancers, film and video makers, actors, sculptors, web designers, cartoonists, musicians, poets or barristas. This being Pompei By The Bay, it had to have multi-ethnic connections, a history of romance, great restaurants, and a hill. Sure, I was fussy, but I hadn’t trekked all this way to hang my hat in suburbia. No, I demanded a neighborhood one could hear, smell, taste and feel; a place with renowned haunts, great bookstores and espresso hangouts. So, naturally, I chose North Beach.

“The Marconi fit the bill. The room wasn’t large nor particularly luxurious…you wanna talk romance?”

But not just anywhere in North Beach. I’d repose within a stone’s throw of City Lights, that fabled and most celebrated bookstore in the land. I’d be just up the street from the architectural landmark housing Francis Ford Coppola’s production team, and around the corner from the very coffeehouse in which he penned much of The Godfather. I’d share the block with a restaurant owned by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s own blood brother, with numerous exclusive men’s clubs—and I’d live mere steps from Vesusio’s— where an entire generation of Beat poets and writers had been 86ed after long, windy nights of grossly over-served swill. Yes, indeed—I’d live and prosper in storied North Beach, gain instant success, and chomp all the bennies that come along with the ride.

I spent that entire first morning…well, okay—the last few minutes of it before noon—hunting down the perfect domicile. I didn’t require concierge or valet service, but I’d settle for nothing less than that befitting someone of my enormous artistic potential.

What I found was the Marconi Hotel. This guy I met at the Green Tortoise Hostel said it’s where Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl. He also claimed that “up there”, and he pointed to a hotel window, “is where Lenny Bruce launched his swan dive into Romolo alley’s asphalt.” My newest bud was a delusional psychopath, but no matter. The Marconi fit the bill. The room wasn’t large nor particularly luxurious, nor was it without vermin, but they didn’t charged extra for the rats. It featured a rust-stained sink with a few decades of slime growing on its pipes. Ahhhh….history.

The bed was smallish, the mattress thin, rancid and lumpy, but the window opened up to the alley. Poor Lenny. My closet seemed custom made to fit my entire backpack in it. There was a working bathroom down the hall, but you usually had to stand in line and hold your breath. Oh, and they were pulling the plaster from the walls. Something about mold and water rot. No refrigerator, but I figured this being the most European of all American cities, that I’d just shop daily for what I needed. I hadn’t counted on record September heat, nor on cockroaches and ants—but in theory it was a pretty good plan.

Some say you are the company you keep. I hope that’s not true. My companions those first few months included a brother and sister junkie team, a crazed street yawler, and an enormous homeless women who hadn’t been the same since the Summer Of Love. She badly needed a change of socks.

I rolled and smoked untold boxes of Top tobacco, and carried cheap hootch at all times, slurped from brown paper bags while plunked down on the sidewalk leaning against the wall next to this-or-that liquor store or strip joint. I even chased the dragon one night, and learned to bum change. So, you wanna talk romance? Now, if I can only figure out how to get Ferlingetti to read my poem…

BROADWAY AT COLUMBUS

Poets shuffle
aching
like rats in neon strychnine
barking boys team
with mock-wanton beauties
lost children sit and shake their cups
at tourists
dying for a jug
and manicured pros strut their stuff
realtors, barroom accountants and
baseline hookers
all sweating out the fix
paper in those pleasure pockets
monks and nuns
hump in hiding
glim jittering winds
dancing paper and plastic and styrofoam refuse
dancing to destiny
dancing to live
to pay the rent
dancing
diving ecstastically
through the pavement
car alarms and blasting horns
the man chases monkey off his back
down this piss-soaked sacred alley
Joe too is high
behind his counter
counting change
keeping an eye out for quick-slip monkeys
linguini everywhere
tentacles of olive-oiled scorn
ignoring the monkey
demanding more, more, more
Raven plucks and serenades
and Coyote tricks himself
while wine swells up from the gutter
bottles smashed to murder this night
as I sing
I dance,
I muck around in your hotted slurry
junkie bud still pounding down my door
burnt grease, garlic its elixer
creeping down the stairs
quizzling signs
ripped nylon and skid-marked drawers
one clue, lost
ageless and demeaning
one clue
perfumed and wet
shorn of long term commitment
wanting, kneeling
the touch of ten thousand romeos
lesbos blushing
all carried on high
to the pyre
this being our last markdown
all sales are final
so on to recovery
that final frontier
meanwhile
dim peepers
cook gas down collapsing avenues
like piss shot down an earthquake sink
bone-froze and
quantum shaking
then all’s nice, warm and rewarding
so nod to the streets
this night’s still yang
the yang and the clueless

© p. joseph potocki