One Year of Living Above San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities, contemplating jazz..."

These words are an outcast's national treasure, the Holy Grail for too-sensitive wanderers, and biblical verse for the unrepentant salvation seekers. These words written on my newly rented apartment wall have been placed there by the hand of Allen Ginsberg.

*****

I saw the banner flapping before I noticed the store itself. Perennial winds whipped the nylon, making the sound of a clapping audience of one. The crisp white letters stood in marked contrast to the navy background of material. A smile of familiarity tugged at my mouth as I recognized Pablo Neruda's words: "Tyranny cuts off the singer's head, but the voice from the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of people." For a city that didn't expect my arrival, that banner proffered "welcome home" to me.

I left the fatigue that draped me from driving some 3,000 odd miles across country in my 1986 Volvo Wagon, as I climbed out of it - charged and alive. Every cell sat up. Every molecule hummed. I felt it from my unpolished toes to the ends of my blond, waist-length dreadlocks: I was witnessing something holy. My hand flew to my mouth, covering my unadulterated excitement; then it made its way up to wipe the rogue tear starting to roll down my cheek. Metal bracelets clanged on my arm, startling me, reminding me to breathe. Hesitantly, shyly, peeking around the corner, I saw the sign I had seen in books and knew to expect - Kerouac Alley. Graffiti colored the brick wall with electric blues and yellows, misspelling Neal Cassady's name. I laughed with child-like delight, as if I ran into an old friend I didn't expect to see. And in a way, they were. I grabbed the door handle of 261 Columbus Avenue with my cold, and yet damp, hand and walked into the only triangular building in San Francisco. Plinking chimes bounced off the glass and announced my arrival to those within.

*****

As I often do these days upon waking, I scan the room from my stained, near concave mattress through one half-open eye. Unable to commit to being awake, yet unable to drag myself wholeheartedly from sleep. I look for passed out love-refugees from the night before; broken glass or sticky, spilled wine on the floor that is drying into a crust; I tally the bruises and damage inflicted to my legs while stumbling home.My deliberately bohemian excess of nothing life is an offering, a proverbial nod of the head to him. I merely wade and splash, too afraid of drowning, while he had plunged himself headfirst into the inky waters. Afraid of the freedoms being outright crazy allowed, cohabitating with the air Allen Ginsberg once breathed was as bold as I could be.

*****

"Do you guys have that book about crystals...and healing...and chakras? You know, that book..." asked an unfamiliar looking man. The fanny pack, hairy man-toes on display in sandals, and popped up collar of a polo shirt
just did not fit here.

Kiki, the chess playing savant, part time fire dancer, and world champion thumb wrestler, placed a pack of matches as a makeshift bookmark in her book. "Absolutely not, sir," she said with her voice that sounded like Sissy Spacek after inhaling helium - unexpected for a fifty-year and some change, six-foot-tall woman. Although, like all of us, Kiki was not actually employed by the bookstore, but she was the oldest among us and we deferred to her for answers to potential book buyer's questions.

She failed to mention that this pioneer of independent bookstores not only didn't carry New Age books, but also rejected self-help, children's stories, sci-fi and romance novels too. Elitism is only unkind when it doesn't include you.

"Where would you suggest I go?" asked Fanny Pack Guy.

Kiki unfurled her lanky, spaghetti noodle frame from her rose upholstered overstuffed chair and stood up from the long wooden table we gathered around each day to word binge with books we took from the shelves but never bought. Gouges, pen marks, and grooves from pointy vegetarian elbows gave life and personality to the oak. Kiki quickly scanned the three floors of books precariously crammed, wedged with a shoehorn, and all but staple gunned to make them fit on shelves so bowed that they appeared to be grinning. She glanced with intent at the sign by the register, "A Literary Meeting Place Since 1953." Kiki looked in the eyes of this everyman, this Willy Lowman of book buyers, and invited him in. She valiantly attempted to resuscitate him, to breathe life back into Fanny Pack Guy.

"This is City Lights Book Store," she affirmed, with a one-shoulder shrug. "Why would you go anywhere else?"

The plinking of chimes as he maneuvered around us and out the front door told us he had his reasons.

I surveyed the room, wanted to understand what Fanny Pack Guy couldn't see or see past. There were the motley, regular characters assembled: One-Eyed Gus, Tweaker Tim, the Knitting Lady, and JoJo Granola. We were the disheveled, the uncertain, the cast-offs, and the squares pegs in round holes. This haphazard family created itself, not out of any lack of biological families, but of wanting to belong to people who did not equate genetics as a hostage situation of obligated shininess. To belong to people who didn't want to belong. A common law family of self-sustaining dreamers, each of us chasing something so hard and fast that we were continually breathless and gasping.

My eyes traveled up to the third floor, where my 12x12 foot apartment resided in the middle of the poetry section, jutting out from nowhere. It was intended as a supply closet, but bucked convention and became a residence for unemployed writers who longed to transcend into self-emancipated sojourners. They had met here, made friends, made lovers, and made history. My tiny abode, the walls dripping with words of those who had lived there long before me - Ginsberg, Kerouac, Diane DiPrima, Daisy Zamora, William Carlos Williams, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself. Ancient Catholic bubbas adorned their homes with crucifixes, blessed alms, and Jesus pictures; the Beats used words as protection.

*****

This is that room. The room where Ginsberg howled, bellowing for understanding, using words like shanks to cut through 1950's stagnancy. The room where he loved bearded, burly men and smooth, shiny boys, negotiated for a kiss or a caress, daring to roar in a time that stifled and shushed. This is the room where William Burroughs plotted
suicide pacts, shook his clenched fist to the ceiling and chanted, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" when Kerouac waxed triumphantly about learning to drive a stick. More tales and adventures were created and discovered here than glitter stars in the cosmos. More wine and young men were consumed here than in any bath house in the Mission District. This is that room. The one with the tattered wallpaper made of every beatnik's silent shattered dreams of high school football fame and inevitable relegation to black turtlenecks, thick glasses, and manic clutching of individuality. The room that housed broken hearts draped in an opiate cloud of forgetful regret. The room in which thin lizards of light snaked through the blinds, illuminating a word here and a word there, daring and taunting an interpretation of meaning like a blind man throwing the I Ching and demanding clarity. This is that room.