Working Class Writer I

An Oneiric Summons....

WORKING CLASS WRITER

I didn’t discover I was working class until I wasn’t. In Pacific Heights no less. The fact I had grown up in the fable that was San Francisco meant class consciousness was foreign, alien, outside the pale. A classless society. Such was the egalitarian ethos of those years—almost everyone in the same socioeconomic boat—that it didn’t cross our minds to envy those better off up the hill, much less adopt a serrated edge to the 1950s prole lockstep.

The Left Coast soldiered on without the working class, too busy reaping the windfall of a prosperity long denied. A washing machine! Television! A house! Thank you Bank Of America. The revolution of rising expectations was revolution enough. Blue-collar San Francisco had achieved the great good place, and for a halcyon time it was possible to believe that “the White City with its eleven mystical hills” (Kerouac) was a place apart, sui generis, a Mediterranean city-state favored by the fog-bound Pacific. Almost paradise.

The “thick” culture of a thriving working man’s town meant the entire City was your playground. The only Stay Out sign was at Lands End, a veritable invitation to risk life and limb gamboling on the edge of the socked-in cliffside.

Of course, there was Pacific Heights and Sea Cliff and St. Francis Woods, but even those bosky enclaves were regarded as part and parcel of The City. Herb Caen was on duty to bemuse us with life inside the blue-blood bell jar. The moneyed folkways of The Peninsula and Luxe Marin were also so much local color found in his daily column. A breviary, of the civic religion, much in evidence in those days of going downtown in your Sunday best.

At Searsville Lake and Marin Town and Country Club you could day trip outside the SAD Zone, to get a glimpse of the Golden State, basking poolside, the reverie of the good life on display just long enough to realize it’s well out of your reach, nothing to get exercised about. There was enough California to go around. There were only twelve million of us then.

At Berkeley I realized military service was not for the hirsuted antiwar student body, though NROTC was still going strong. I fell in with fellow veterans, most of whom had been In Country. My best friend, a native American from San Diego, had stepped on a punji stick and so served out the rest of his tour in South Korea, where he made E-6 and read the Russian Classics. Veterans For Peace was an impressive group, to say the least, and for a time we were the big men on campus, the Administration couldn’t go out of their way to accommodate us and the plateglass revolutionaries couldn’t think to avoid us. Gangway Che and Mao. Operation Chaos provocateur too. One NROTC Building that didn’t go up in flames (it was torched in the mid-80s).

Only after a too vivid dream out of 50s live tv drama, HM take a bow, the 25 year old manque heeded the call and became a mendicant, a writer manque in search of a pot to piss in. First stop in the new vocation was the top-floor of an elegant house on Clay and Broderick. A lawyer’s house, “messily” divorcing, ergo a cheap room with a view of the street corner. I too was out of a marriage, too precocious by half. So I took up residence in the Café Vagabando at Sacramento and Presidio and wracked my brain for something to impart to paper. Many cappuccinos later I was still drawing a blank. Jack London I was not. The dream of being a writer was one thing, the summons too oneiric by half, the grubby reality something else. Enter Les Galloway, a story I have told in San Francisco Writer. Cleaning the several apartments he owned just below Twin Peaks saved my life.

In PacHeights the ton of bricks fell, hit rock bottom, and that I was a prole after all, nothing to show for the manque but the mendicancy. I had to get out of a Manhattanizing San Fran and get to the Big Apple before the gravy train that was the New Journalism left the station. SF was no longer a blue-collar town, but in memory-hole transition to the next big thing. America’s Favorite City. Downtown was now levis accessible.

The way to the big time was through the small time. Eugene, Oregon, here I come! I could have read Bernard Malamud’s A New Life and saved myself the trouble. One hundred dollars in my pocket I arrived in Eugene in September 1973, determined to cease floundering and find my man-of-letters footing for real. A windfall of free food stamps and a room for 60/month in a shared three story house a mile from campus (free heat courtesy of a sawdust furnace) and a fruitless job search and a last-ditch bus to sodden Portland (thirty-five dollars in my pocket) and an in extremis week on a houseboat on the Willamette River and a heavy snowfall outside Ashland as the November night quickly descends and it looks like the shivering hitchhiker, ten dollars to his name, has run out of luck severely, stuck under an overpass, I-5 shutdown in a whiteout, what now O word-drunk one? Not a fucking idea. Snowed all right.