North Beach Poetry Crawl

Jul.29.2007 7:46pm  
Click HERE to see an accompanying article…

Took the train in to San Francisco today, got off after a good read and ride, swung my bag over my shoulder and took off down Montgomery.
Directions took me far but not quite to my destination, upon discovering I had no idea where I was or where I was going, I wandered & climbed up flights and flights of cement steps higher and higher through lush colorful gardens and the patios of residences. Once at the top, I realized I was headed the correct direction and soon found myself at Cafe Trieste. I wanted to take a seat but couldn’t find a chair, with all the ancient bohemians in sweaters and strange hats gesturing and discussing over long-drank espressos and coffees, plates of food scraped clean. I circled the block only to find my way to Columbus street and City Lights book store, and read a page or two of Howl in the poetry reading room after climbing a flight of wooden stairs with pictures of the Beat generation authors on the wall of the hallway, all of them photographed standing in front of City Lights.
I wandered down Jack Kerouac alley after contemplating having a drink or two at Vesuvio where Kerouac himself used to hang out, and writing a few pages in my sketchbook journal.
Pretty lovely day.

Under Gray Gloomy Sky

Took the bus around town today, on my own, exploring and finding my way around to where I want to go. Getting better every day at getting around this new place, and coexisting with my Saint Ben.
Started the day out at Howard’s watching Saint Ben get inked.
Went to work with him, and poked around shelves of beautiful amazing books, snuck sly glances at him in a totally different environment from what I’m used to seeing (Geminis can be such different people in different places, even the most ordinary of places are places where a new facet may shine…)
Caught the 8 to downtown, went roaming around the Library and read the latest issue of ReadyMade and Psychology Today.
Caught the 4 to SRJC

Where next?
I ask myself this question ten times a day. I like where it takes me.

Halloween Swim Team

After a four hour trip to Pleasanton that was cut shorter than the travel time by way, I needed something to shake the gloom.

Brokeness seemingly our specialty, and we’d spent all but our last few dollars on a few meals out and a 12 pack of Pilsner Urquell, the very last few dollars taking us home on a bus from a few towns away where we’d gone exploring for a day after I sat in on band practice with Tight Bikes.

Like every day promises, Saint Ben’s cell phone is ringing constantly before we even get home, and it turns out to be a band from LA we’ve never met or heard of before that Armando, our amazing bike riding, pot smoking, story unravelling photographer friend had found at Aroma Roasters earlier.

They need a show tonight.

“They are called Halloween Swim Team” he tells me after he hangs up, I’m assembling dinner in the kitchen, and I know I am giving him the blankest look after he explains that they are “electronic” like “Kraftwerk”, which is amazing to me but not really enough for me to give a rat’s ass, but Saint Ben is like Santa Rosa’s very own Ambassador to Music, his passion, charity, and knowledge of the local music scene expansive if not never-ending.

Eventually it is decided that they should play either the cemetery or the town square downtown, which is eventually narrowed down to downtown, and we know perfectly well our guerilla impromptu concert could get us fined at the very least. We’re walking briskly towards the downtown gazebo where our little spontaneous music stunt is to happen apparently by generator, and I think about how we’d b crazy enough to spend a night in jail with an indie electro band from LA we’ve just met, and how much I’d not like a run in with the city’s finest today. It is funny that I was thinking this as Ben was finishing his last invitation phone calls probably with Jimmy, and we round the corner to find the lights of SRPD and our buddies are totally already talking to the cops. Fuck.

Eventually, after a lot more awkward and nervous waiting our friends all group together at one end of the park, apparently unfazed by the run in. I look around at our cohorts and find them all mostly to be of the colorful graphic tees and skinny jeans lot, one of them wearing a funny hat made funnier partly by the odd tassell and partly by how lanky he is, and it seems to suit him nicely.

A round of introductions and some pleading later Ben and Jimmy who arrived on his fixed gear moments earlier are going through their phone books trying to find anywhere for these guys to play. Eventually Jimmy says “Fuck it” and they all pile into a van and Jimmy takes off on bike, and we all unload into Jimmy’s studio apartment for an impromptu concert. It isn’t far from fitting a band inside a shoebox. It works, and the two keyboards one gadget guy trio launches into the best set we could have imagined to result in this crazy night. By the end of the 20 minute set the night feels close to an end and we all shake hands and part ways.

the vert & the bleus

Jimmy came into Big Lots while I was buying the green pomegranite tea I wanted there, and we meandered back to my humble overinhabitated abode, and he tinkered with is little gameboy thing, cellphone, and whatever other fun gadgets he had tucked into his bike messenger bag while I cooked and ate unsalted unbuttered white rice with uncooked unadulterated joyus cubes of tofu with a cup of my new tea.

We kicked rocks shortly thereafter and he wheeled his fixed gear through blocks and blocks twisting, turning, right, right, left, zigzagging to the little studio hole where he lives, and we sat and ate popcorn.

Xandra slipped on a sweater and we all slipped into their patchwork beater stickerified with letter stickers and headed off to unknown directions and destinations through the bowels of suburbia and back again, trees flickering past windows to the beat of Crystal Castles, which is joyus synthetic nintendo tunes that make me feel like we live in a mario game with lego trees and plastic manufactured scenery.

When we arrive at Food Maxx my telephone summons me and it’s Saint again, missing me and sad and I ooze disgusting nothings and niceities at him to the dismay of whoever else may be listening, but love is like that, so I tell him that I’m hugging him until his spleen goes squishy.

Eventually Jimmy must take his amazing ladyfriend home since she’s ill and they drop me off with a stolen giant candybar as a parting gift and whoosh away in a trail of Crystal Castles bloop bleep blips.

Phoenix

I’ve had a day to recover after the metal fest Tight Bikes played, put on by close friend of Saint Ben’s (Howard). Hangover long dissintegrated, although I feel few things can banish the feelings left over from seven straight hours of drinking Lagunitas beer, smoking 27’s, and eating overly processed food. let’s not forget those remanat feelings also, of having been clotheslined by a 6′4″ solid mass of inebriated metalhead, throwing me off my feet entirely, only to be picked up by a very converned friend of Saint Ben’s (Thank you, both of you) that scraped me up like beer-infused metal roadkill from a highway.

Tonight’s Phoenix show promises to be really interesting, the crowd predicted to be half scenie-weenie types, regular underaged kids of the Phoenix, and some large portion die hard metal fans for Wolves In The Throne Room. I’m personally very excited to see The Better To See You With, they are an interesting project from Portland.

*      *      *

 

The show was amazing, highlight for me being Wolves In The Throne Room and their stunning use of a fog machine. Smoke makes me strangely happy.

Being unable to see Tight Bikes play and being essentially on corner time as Merch Girl at the merch booth blew pretty hard.

The madman and the stage

Back to the Boogie Room.

We waited and waited and I tried to read and smoke a cigarette to leave Saint Ben to his nervous gestures, restless attempts at napping between hectic planning phonecalls. Fifteen minute delay, thirty, another thirty…

Eventually upon arriving we pull up to find none of the other bands had arrived yet and the crowd was rather small.

And lo and behold as I stand in my enormous boots and peer through navy smudged eyelids with my hands stuffed deep in my pockets amongst the scattered eclectic crowd, Neil is one of the first to walk up. His dreaded head and scrawny gait is recognizable immediately although he is a mere shadow in the distance.

He walks up and graces us with the shorterst conversation we should hope for and the dread has passed and he informs us that he was going to throw stuff as soon as Tight Bikes started playing.

Midwife started playing after the van pulled through the narrow gravel road between house and lot (paved entirely in tanbark, I later found out) and some of the denizens of the commune yelled not to run over the cat, as the animals roam like wild, minding their own business, kittens pouncing on whatever they find in the grassy mounds in front of the shack.

Midwife, as it turned out, played some subgenre of Noise, an immense but pleasing racket coming from a guitarist in a green dress, although he was not as noticable as the man tinkering with various electronics who, in the process of making these seemingly random sounds was also screaming, stripping out of his clothes, large stomach coming over the top of his red cotton briefs before he put on what seemed to be a vintage dress fit for a grandmother, and began crawing over various tall pieces of equipment on the floor until he was flopped over some of it like a fish in a dress, nearly touching the ceiling.

The set was over quickly and the crowd stepped outside until Planets were ready to start. When people began to pile back in to the small wooden shack again, on the floor space a white screen was set up in front of which a man head to toe in a white body leotard and hood stood with a bass guitar wtih a clear transparent body, and another man similarly attired behind an entirely white drum set. As the music began, colorful images and video clips of all sorts were projected over them.

Tight Bikes set up after that… The energy in the room was completely changed before the set began, probably due to the how many people were personal friends. As the set started the energy level kicked up and the audience participation rose, snapping out of whatevertrance they were in when they stood still for two fantastic spectacles before.

My energy was renewed, sparkling static excitement running through my heart, on edge waiting for the set to begin as Saint Ben paced back and forth past the edges of the audience in front of me, sided to side. When the music began, and his energy rose to explode it was clear that there were to be no dissapointments here. He ran into the audience, bounding, screaming. Jumping, flailing, flying, thin limbs spreading across the air in front of the enthused audience, covering every morsel of free space in front of the crowd from the couches on either side through the crowd to the back of the room, before going on a romp rounding the floor on the back of Armando, which ended up on a couch while he’s being beaten by Neil. But he prevails in lifting himself up again and continues to writhe both on his feet and on the floor at a few occasions.

Audience members thrashed around, break dancing included.

Once the set ends Saint Ben declared that he had to lie down, and after downing some lavender water from a tiny handled cup from the table outside the shack, he collapses onto a couchin the back of the shack by the door, before Vitamin Piss begins to set up.

The singer for Vitamin Piss began testing the mic by doing Tom Waits impressions, speacking back to the music of Tom Waits that had been playing between sets throughout the night, but soon after the set began, it was time to leave for home.

Preshow time

 My amazing gemini other half significant other is nervously trying to nap in our little bed in our little hole before his show tonight.

I’m dolled up in navy eyeshadow and blue liner and excited about seeing my Saint Ben roll around, thrash like a crazy mother fucker, and scream into a microphone in front of the eclectic crowd a place like The Boogie Room promises to have in the audience.

part two

We decide to go to the supermarket a fifteen minute walk away despite how terribly worn I feel.

“Dude, we have to go buy razors” but he resists and makes ultimatums that we feel we have to negotiate with, and says he is just going to stay put until we come back. Like a spider caught under a glass I feel like I’m grasping for any exit. Eventually he is offered a pair of boxers which he wears atop his head as a bandanna and decides to roll messily a cigarette from a packet of tobacco produced from the depths of his backpack, brown crumbles of tobacco leaf tumbling out the ends, over the edge of the book on his lap and into the crevices of the couch, and the sight and waiting oare both excruciating in their own right.

We all exit and I feel tension in the air that sets my whole body on edge, but our friend seems entirely unaware as he steps in front of yet another car in thewinding suburbia walk. I don’t een notice the talking, if there is any more and he zig zags from in and out the street, ten feet in front of us or ten feet behind and I lean in and whisper to Saint Ben to take the longest way, to tire the fucker out. As he’s clipped by the side mirror of a car my voice inside my head laughs a little at the minimal karmic payback and wishes he’d get run over, which of course eventually he does come close to.

We round the block and street lights come into view, a gas station, and I wonder if he’d even think of the fact that we could buy razors there and long to push him into oncoming traffic to rid ourselves of his hectic yammering presense.

I become aware that I’ve had to take a mad piss since two hours ago when we met this guy. Approaching a diner we both decide we must run inside and go. I feel desperate crossing through the aisles and Saint Ben says something to me before I go in, and upon exiting the ladies room I’m informed that the dude left, but despite the relief I suspect our little journeyisn’t about oer. A waitress with a friendly face points at a well obscured booth upon recognizing Saint Ben and we sit.

Plotting this, we neglect the water at the edge of the table and tip two dollars. Saint Ben calls our buddy and asks where he ran off to and he says to meet him across the street from where we are.

We feel almost ready to execute a less than solid plan when in walks our boxer-headed buddy, straight past our booth completely unaware, and right into the bathroom.

We book it out of there like our lives depend on it, and down the next two blocks.

a taste of local color

Sitting among crowds of other local coffeehouse regulars surrounded by a rough sampling of the city’s culture got to be enough, and we donned our hoods and stuffed cold hands into sweater pockets once again, and braved the cold for the trek through downtown.

Darkened and lit by streetlights and the red yellow green of traffic lights, we’d made it almost home when we hit the stoplight before a local fast food joint, and watched a scrawny shaded form with a backpack cross the parking lot, meander around outside, peer in windows and finally piss on a wall. By the time we were halfway past the parking lot it was determined by Saint Ben thatthis myterious loiterer who was walking past the drive through now, was Neil. We call his cell, and follow him around the back of the Taco Bell.

Approaching around the side of the building I get my first glimpse of the guy described interestingly enough to peak my curiousity.

He says he’s dressed as a certain recently deceased actor and when he turns around to the sound of his name, I realize he has his face smeared with white makuep, lips smudged from ear to ear and eyes blackened out.

“Oh, you are dressed as the Joker” and after a few words Neil exclaims in a rich british accent that he is Heath Ledger, and that he isn’t really dead and that the press is after him because they might have caught on, and that he must change his name, and that he’d only faked his death to piss off his wife and scare his family.

The accent continues as he relays the information that he got free smokes, his brother is twenty years older than him and hasn’t been laid in four years, and a melange of fiction and reality that is strange enough to be just as well a lie.

We cross the street between two stoplights and he breaks out into a full run with the both of us trailing behind him in a state of complete amused bewilderment, and he leaves a pack of cigarettes spilt across pavement and a stack of fluttering fliers in his wake, and Saint Ben picks them up. Neil tucks them into his army coat with cut off sleeves.

In the light of the liqour storehis eyes are of an underterminable color, intelligent and caluculating, and his words are non stop, his accent finally wearing off as he flicks back and forth between fiction, reality, fiction, reality. He talks fast and all we can do is listen because it’s intriquing, we can’t quite tell if he is insane or perfectly alright and making it up. I look at him, and get a full scrutinizing view finally of this guy, and he has white paint stuck in his dreadlocks, which are past shoulder length and some of them knotted together awkwardly with rubber bands. His face is round, and might even be attractive under all the greasy paint. His shirt is dirty and torn under the cut off army coat, and his pants are practically painted on, they are so tight. He generally looks homeless, insane, and cool  all at once.

With plans to meet up again a tthe supermarket, Saint Ben and I head off down the street for food and enter the yellow gloom of Safeway.

Selecting food we see our new accomplice cross the store and as we are heading to check out it is decided for us that we are buying him orange tilt, so we go grab four of them and get the fuck out.

“Let’s find somewhere to go. Let’s get out of here, where can we go? We need to find somewhere to drink this, come on, let’s go. Here, here… a bus stop, here let’s stop and drink it here, where’s the tilt, give it to me” he leads us to a bus stop and we drop our bags, and down some of the sugar free caffine alcoholic hybrid drink in the cover of a bus stop, and although I feel a little uneasy, I just want to go along for the ride, and so I listen to him tell the rest of his stories.

He’s chain smoking Camel 100’s like there is no tomorrow, and his voice is loud as he talks about his famous musician girlfriend, Peaches, and how he told Shakira that she sucks, eventually decides I’m Peaches’s twin because we apparently are exactly alike. Everything that Saint Ben says about me is likened to Peaches.

Peering at us through lenseless black rimmed glasses and shaking his wild dreaded knotted head at us, he tells us more and more, building on to what may or may not be real that hey may or may not believe in, until he runs out into the middle of the street at an oncoming car. He crouches low in the headlights as they stop in front of him and he jumps maniacally, waving. Saint Ben laughs. After a few more rounds of this same old shit, he starts saying things frantically.

“Everyone is dialling 911 right now, everyone is calling the cops, they are coming to look for me, we have to get out of here”

“Come on, let’s get out of here, everyone is calling 911. Where can we go? Let’s get out of here”

Somehow this becomes our house that we are going to.Through brush and parkinglots we walk towards home, and his conversation monopolizes the air as he switches between reality and blatant lies, builidng onto his stories. At this point I realize I have no idea how old he is, and in a way he is ageless under makeup, claiming that he is 17 and claiming that he is 24 in the same sentence. His uncle is Kurt Cobain. He saw NIN at age six. He has to remind us of everything because we are hallucinating and inebriated, he’s on chapter five of writing it all down. He is homeless, he says, but he lives close to here, in fact. He was concieved in an orgy involving Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Manson.

When we get to our house, we go in through the front door of the house, and he runs and perches on his “captain’s chair” where he’s never been before but insists that he always sits in when he comes over. He’s talking loud loud loud on and on and on. He must call Peaches, he is talking to Jesus on the phone, he needs a midol now because he is on his period, three of them. Now Now Now.

He must listen to grindcore,loudly, right now, so we head up stairs with our food leaving him behind in the kitchen while he finishes up his phone call. Eventually when he follows us up the stairs, he comes up with a room mate’s bong in his hand, sets it on the minifridge.

With words falling out of his mouth like rapid fire, we end up on the porch, he’s chain smoking cigarettes again, and he’s dancing maniacally to NIN, the random crap around his neck on a rope clinking together, his dreads flying everywhere. He turns up the volume too loud, despite it all, and eventually after two or three CD changes that are so urgent to him, he decides that Saint Ben needs to put on makeup.

“Shave, shave your face and put on makeup. I want you to look just like me. Don’t you think this is a good idea? You don’t, I can tell by the look on your face. Shut up, nobody cares what you think. Do his makeup like mine only better”

And he wants us to go in the bathroom, and lock the door. So we do, because suddenly we feel like we are in a hostage situation of some sort, held up by a crazy transient friend with no ability to say  no. Saint Ben seems to not be able to get us out of this, and after we lock the door I look at him and whisper “You have no razers left, we have to go to buy some.” and he says “What?” and I say “Come on, we have to get him out of here” so while the loon was probably digging through all of our worldly posessions and taking whatever he could find from us, I started planning.

I peek out the door, and Neil is nowhere in sight. Our upstair’s neighbor’s room is open for some reason, and I peer in to make sure he isn’t poking around in there, and find him instead, pissing off the top of the stairs through the slats in the balcony.

{to be continued}

The Birthday Party

I don’t know if I’m the captor or captive living inside a small room far removed from the clausterphobic small town I call my natural habitat tucked away between two even smaller more anonymous rich white towns in the East Bay.

Our feet pounded the sidewalks in unison down a shadowed suburbia street and my thoughts are soaring with my eyes roaming the pieces of night sky visible through the trees that throw shadows down across avenue after avenue. Left, right, another turn down another road I’ve never seen before, until we come to the crossroads we’re looking for but the lights are out and nobody is home. Four figures perched on sidewalk’s edge and a dog on a rope are emanating smoke, and I hear the familiar banter of members to a specific wandering population drifting across the street. A word with these kindly fellows and a scratch of the dog’s head and we’re off again minus the four we left, two riding off and the others swigging cheap beer from packs and smoking hand rolled cigarettes from well worn patched vest pockets.

If it weren’t for the houses we’d be in a jungle with all the shadows and silhouettes of trees flanking us on either side obscuring lamp light from our path.

Crossing town through suburbia and parkinglots, we find ourselves who we’ve been seeking at the jangle of a liquor store door. Throwing ourselves into the back of our friend’s classic red VW we grin madly in the dark through blasting music keeping our heads down as the car turns down roads we can’t see anything but lamps lit against powerline slashed night sky until it grinds to a stop on gravel driveway and we pull ourselves out and up again. A small building against emptyness, lit porch, and cars, cars. A bounding howling dog greets us and we walk into a small room of instruments and oil paints and brushes, scattered across carpet in an organized mess.

Off again after a short stay, our company, a small woman with wrapped hair in a kerchief and cut off pants with dark happy eyes named Summer askes me where I’m from. “Pleasanton” I say. And she replies with something along the lines of asking whether or not it has a lot of foliage there. Her rounder quiet bearded companion takes the wheel and we take off in a different nondescript mid nineties car this time, to the edges of town. All the roads blend together in a meaningless middle of nowhere way until we take a sudden random turn and we are here.

Here seems to be a shack in the middle of nowhere, whether I was expecting it or not, with a couch parked in front facing the door to the dilapidated wooden structure amidst a commune of farms and land where cats and dogs alike are pets but seem to roam about with their own sense of purpose.

Hip hop hits, a strange thing to imagine such a crowd of scraggely folks wrapped in shadow and encased in layers of patched natural fabrics, studded jackets and fraying sweaters to be dancing to, but it is blaring from the small shack.

The strange collective of people meander in and out of the shack and around a fire blazing fueled by scraps of wood and surrounded by stumps, a recliner, and a few old chairs. Girls in miniskirts and dramatically uneven uncombed coifs shake what they have on tall rocks, grass lumps and the top of random chairs, sip beer from cans produced from the various cars in the lot, and loiter in clumps of people in front of the shack. We sist awhile before abandoning our warm spot by the fire as anonymous foreigners to this eccentric clique around the fire to our long trek home.

Hands stuffed deep in sweatshirt pockets we wander homeward through cuontry back roads past sparsely placed streetlights and a lonely bus stop, through a ghetto, and across town for five miles on foot until the lights of Denny’s come into view. We stagger in and devour two cups of coffee, hot chocolate, and a plate of food and begin wandering back through five mor emiles of city scenery that passes too slowly for any comfort through eyes too tired for recognition or any remembering. I barely recall the steps fo the back porch up to the hole we call our room, and I sprawl into a tight bed and fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.