Looking Back

In the late 60s I'd been living in a condemned building in San Francisco, teeming with deadbeats, which I more or less managed for Coldwell-Banker in exchange for free rent. It was at Sacramento and Stockton on the Chinatown end of the Stockton tunnel which emitted a round-the-clock cacophony of honking horns, yobs testing their echo voices, the occasional terrified scream. There was a gas station down below and between it and my crumbling building was a nicely-maintained little garden bungalow occupied by a man described by Herb Caen as “man about town, Mathew Kelly.” 

There were mornings when I could look out my kitchen window and watch the dapper Kelly unwrapping a fresh shirt as he prepared for another low intensity day of calls to his broker, lunch at Jack’s, a cab ride on up the hill for drinks with Herb, Wilkes and Cyril. I envied him, not so much for his money and his social circle but for his daily fresh shirts, and the expensive bouquets of flowers I could see on his tables. I wondered why Kelly lived there; not that it was an unattractive little house, but it was placed at the mouth of the tunnel and the adjoining gas station and their perpetually toxic stew of noise and vehicle fumes.

In 1769 there had been an Indian sweat lodge, a temescal, at the foot of what became Sacramento Street, and in 1873, the original Grizzly Adams brought his 1500 pound Griz. Samson. to star in Adams's animal menagerie in Leidsdorff Street. since downgraded to Leidsdorff Alley. One day the beast “got out of his cage and took possession of the lower part of the city” before he was trapped in a livery stable and recaptured. It’s 2007; there’s a sign in an apartment window in the 106 block of Clement that says, “Return the Presidio to the Mukema Ohlone Nation,” the long gone occupants of the 1769 temescal on Sacramento Street. If the ghost dancers were right. all the Mukema Ohlones have to do is wait a few more years and we'll be gone and they'll be back amid the ruins, and a thousand years from now an Ohlone paleo-seismologist will be scratching his head over the ruins of old San Francisco. 

One hundred and sixty years after the Ohlone’s temescal, where Sacramento Street runs into the bay, my Sacramento Street menagerie included a large family of industrious gypsies whose men sold transmissions and other hefty car parts out of their living room while their women sold camellias at Fisherman’s Wharf. “How ya doin’ today. boss?” the men would greet me. “You need a differential maybe? “The Gypsies paid their rent in cash, like everyone else in the building, the whole crew off the books except for the booking logs.

When I'd fled north for Mendocino, the Vietnam war raged on and on, and amphetamine, heroin, the criminals who sold it, and random homicidal maniacs had taken over the city streets. I’d go north, I thought, a hundred miles north, up into redwood country, up 101 until it was so rural I couldn’t see anybody except the people I wanted to see. I'd pass through the rainbow tunnel at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, through marvelous Marin, through long gone Sonoma County, to Cloverdale where the invisible green curtain parts and California’s last wild country begins, that mysterious vastness of the Coast Range, those thousands of Edenic little valleys that lie between the Sacramento Valley and the Pacific, those miles of mountains and meadows now being sprinkled with gentle people building new lives in eccentric houses they built themselves. We'd drive on through Cloverdale and turn west towards the ocean, me and my odd crew of adult drop-outs and juvenile criminals, and on into the Anderson Valley where the air was clean, the scenery spectacular, land was cheap, and you didn’t see a cop or a crook unless you called the former or were the latter.

We didn’t know we were in a long tradition of outlaws and mavericks to populate the Northcoast, a tradition that had begun 150 years earlier when the long, lean, lethal sons of Missouri had begun drifting into the vast unsettled land defined by the Sacramento River to the east, the Sisikyou mountains to the north, San Francisco Bay to the south, the Pacific Ocean to the west, all that vast bounty the native peoples had lived contentedly on all those centuries until 1850.

While our staggering collective raised junior crooks on a leased ranch south of Boonville, many of our contemporaries grew pot and threw themselves into great naked piles at solstice boogies at places like the Rainbow commune above Philo, first among Mendocino County’s burgeoning collectives, a place Timothy Leary tellingly described as “one of the most successful, upscale hippie communes in the country.” Upscale is the keyword here, and can be read as insolence and an oblivious class privilege as expressed by the communard who'd defecate in paper bags he'd leave as gifts in the cars that picked him up hitchhiking. The collective’s many other graduates, after a few years of trust-funded rural indulgence in what might be called decadence if their sex and drug bingeing had been conducted more elegantly, more stylishly than slob grunts and casual couplings, re-entered straight society to start-up prudent “alternative” newspapers, run their dubious friends for public office, and to generally begin accumulating the political power they have today on the Northcoast in the me-first-but-love-me politics of the Democratic Party. They all turned out to be as timid, as ultimately conventional as everything they claimed to oppose,

* * *

I'd been living in a condemned building, teeming with deadbeats, which I more or less managed for Coldwell-Banker in exchange for free rent. It was at Sacramento and Stockton on the Chinatown end of the Stockton tunnel which emitted a round-the-clock cacophony of honking horns, yobs testing their echo voices, the occasional terrified scream. There was a gas station down below and between it and my crumbling building was a nicely-maintained little garden bungalow occupied by a man described by Herb Caen as “man about town, Mathew Kelly.” 

There were mornings when I could look out my kitchen window and watch the dapper Kelly unwrapping a fresh shirt as he prepared for another low intensity day of calls to his broker, lunch at Jack’s, a cab ride on up the hill for drinks with Herb, Wilkes and Cyril. I envied him, not so much for his money and his social circle but for his daily fresh shirts, and the expensive bouquets of flowers I could see on his tables. I wondered why Kelly lived there; not that it was an unattractive little house, but it was placed at the mouth of the tunnel and the adjoining gas station and their perpetually toxic stew of noise and vehicle fumes.

In 1769 there had been an Indian sweat lodge, a temescal, at the foot of what became Sacramento Street, and in 1873, the original Grizzly Adams brought his 1500 pound Griz. Samson. to star in Adams's animal menagerie in Leidsdorff Street. since downgraded to Leidsdorff Alley. One day the beast “got out of his cage and took possession of the lower part of the city” before he was trapped in a livery stable and recaptured. It’s 2007; there’s a sign in an apartment window in the 106 block of Clement that says, “Return the Presidio to the Mukema Ohlone Nation,” the long gone occupants of the 1769 temescal on Sacramento Street. If the ghost dancers were right. all the Mukema Ohlones have to do is wait a few more years and we'll be gone and they'll be back amid the ruins, and a thousand years from now an Ohlone paleo-seismologist will be scratching his head over the ruins of old San Francisco. 

One hundred and sixty years after the Ohlone’s temescal, where Sacramento Street runs into the bay, my Sacramento Street menagerie included a large family of industrious gypsies whose men sold transmissions and other hefty car parts out of their living room while their women sold camellias at Fisherman’s Wharf. “How ya doin’ today. boss?” the men would greet me. “You need a differential maybe? “The Gypsies paid their rent in cash, like everyone else in the building, the whole crew off the books except for the booking logs.

When I'd fled north for Mendocino, the Vietnam war raged on and on, and amphetamine, heroin, the criminals who sold it, and random homicidal maniacs had taken over the city streets. I’d go north, I thought, a hundred miles north, up into redwood country, up 101 until it was so rural I couldn’t see anybody except the people I wanted to see. I'd pass through the rainbow tunnel at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, through marvelous Marin, through long gone Sonoma County, to Cloverdale where the invisible green curtain parts and California’s last wild country begins, that mysterious vastness of the Coast Range, those thousands of Edenic little valleys that lie between the Sacramento Valley and the Pacific, those miles of mountains and meadows now being sprinkled with gentle people building new lives in eccentric houses they built themselves. We'd drive on through Cloverdale and turn west towards the ocean, me and my odd crew of adult drop-outs and juvenile criminals, and on into the Anderson Valley where the air was clean, the scenery spectacular, land was cheap, and you didn’t see a cop or a crook unless you called the former or were the latter.

We didn’t know we were in a long tradition of outlaws and mavericks to populate the Northcoast, a tradition that had begun 150 years earlier when the long, lean, lethal sons of Missouri had begun drifting into the vast unsettled land defined by the Sacramento River to the east, the Sisikyou mountains to the north, San Francisco Bay to the south, the Pacific Ocean to the west, all that vast bounty the native peoples had lived contentedly on all those centuries until 1850.

While our staggering collective raised junior crooks on a leased ranch south of Boonville, many of our contemporaries grew pot and threw themselves into great naked piles at solstice boogies at places like the Rainbow commune above Philo, first among Mendocino County’s burgeoning collectives, a place Timothy Leary tellingly described as “one of the most successful, upscale hippie communes in the country.” Upscale is the keyword here, and can be read as insolence and an oblivious class privilege as expressed by the communard who'd defecate in paper bags he'd leave as gifts in the cars that picked him up hitchhiking. The collective’s many other graduates, after a few years of trust-funded rural indulgence in what might be called decadence if their sex and drug bingeing had been conducted more elegantly, more stylishly than slob grunts and casual couplings, re-entered straight society to start-up prudent “alternative” newspapers, run their dubious friends for public office, and to generally begin accumulating the political power they have today on the Northcoast in the me-first-but-love-me politics of the Democratic Party. They all turned out to be as timid, as ultimately conventional as everything they claimed to oppose.