A San Francisco Decline by D. Ohmans San Francisco! You were my home from 1968 to 1972, from 1975 to 1976, in 1979 and in 1982. Since I was born in '45, I gave you the heart of my twenties, and scattered years in my thirties. Now, beginning my forties, I find myself in a small town, avoiding, as Rilke said, your beauty which is the beginning of terror. There is much to recall from eight years of living. The point of remembering is to evoke the specific places and people of that extraordinary time. For the foreigner, for the citizen who never had the opportunity of experiencing that City, and for myself: one of those people, whose experiences were often solitary and unknown to you, the reader. I have lived in South America, in the Washington, D. C. area, in Pittsburgh and Wyoming. Perhaps there is something to say about these. I rode the buses, I lived normally. But in San Francisco one is part of an intense dream. You cannot avoid being a player in the movie, adding to her human history. It tires the mind. Yet always, it seemed, the weather was perfect, bright and sunny with cool ventilation from the hills. In every direction, the eyes are soothed by humane architectural shapes and colors which peaceable men have chosen to assemble. In September, 1963, I had landed for the first time at San Francisco International Airport, a fresh recruit for the four happy years of privilege at Stanford University. It must have been that fall that I first saw San Francisco. The City at that time had no Bank of America tower, no Transamerica pyramid and apparently not so many gays. Perhaps we jammed into our house sedan, the "Flying A," and rode to North Beach. Probably we had minestrone soup at Mike's Pool Hall on Broadway, and visited City Lights bookstore around the corner on Columbus. Later I was to repeat this routine with Gail Fleming or another young interest. Often I found myself a particle in one of the mass political- cultural events in Golden Gate Park. "Hippie Hill" or Kezar Stadium would fill to overflowing with liberated youth from the Haight Ashbury, the Peninsula and the East Bay, who would revel in the fact of free entertainment by the famous, such as my classmate David Harris. Or it might have been a protest march along Van Ness Avenue, culminating in a similar event at the Civic Center. The protests became a frequent and important part of my week ends. It was a remarkable way to rendezvous with old Stanford friends like Barbara Dudley, later head of the National Lawyers' Guild, to march along with them, to peruse with interest and little alienation the dozens of political and craft tables. After I graduated, I went back East on a whim, but by Christmas had returned to my new home town of San Francisco. When I first arrived, I found a little garden studio overlooking what is now Castro Village. The room was paneled, with a cute shower in the closet complete with a ship's porthole. My mongrel, Fred, and I stayed there, my sister Linda just down the hill in a Victorian on Sharon Street. I tried to cook pork chops according to recipe, but soon tired of the redundancy and began my decades of cereal and tortillas. My first job in San Francisco was delivering the Christmas mail. In 1967-68 this job had status as part of the counterculture, and I did my part by bringing up the mail on a motorscooter with my dog Fred aboard. One day a policeman stopped me for carrying a passenger without proper footrests, and struck me across the face with his ticket book when I accused him of interfering with delivery of the U.S. mail. In the late 60's the war in Vietnam was pre-eminent, and I began work as a volunteer draft counselor for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. The idea was that three or four appeals were permitted, each one cooling the draft board's ardor. After six months they suggested that I start an office up the Peninsula, but instead I joined a disastrous commune in East Palo Alto: we spent all our money. It was upon returning from that fiasco that the Julian Theatre took me aboard. Richard Reineccius and his wife Brenda, a dancer, had started a neighborhood theater in a large barn in a community center. My sister, a Headstart teacher, had met them there. They had been joined by the talented painter, actor and director Edgar Weinstock, and soon moved to new quarters at the summit of Potrero Hill. Potrero Hill, in southeastern San Francisco, was home to a large Russian community, as well as many artists and writers, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights. Journalists joked about its "incredibly deserted streets." Through the Julian Theatre I met Jim Forest, an Old Left veteran who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950's. He had bought a house and apartment high on Potrero Hill, on Kansas Street. Jim gave me a decent rent in this apartment and befriended me, paying me for house painting down the coast and entertaining me in Helsinki, where he later went with his new wife Lucy to work for the World Peace Council. Many low-budget renters in San Francisco had spectacular views, and I joined them. My apartment overlooked the entire skyline from the south. Richard gave me a long wooden door for a table, and then I could sit at my typewriter overlooking true splendor. In Jim's garage I found a mimeograph machine for my writings, and socialist textbooks to read. From the Julian Theatre I gained more than an apartment - there was community to replace my dwindling Stanford group. The Julian Theatre put on inexpensive productions, often followed by a dance with Don Santina's Irish rock band, "The Flying Column" or, "Red Dust." Just as there are seven hills, there are seven or eight such theater groups in San Francisco. Richard is an all-purpose artist with a tinkerer's aptitude, and I gradually found more work as his assistant. I painted signs, or climbed around on beams, hooking up lights, untangling extension cords. Richard also employed my to drive a stage truck, due to his job as an "organizer" for the city-funded Neighborhood Arts Program. I would unfold its massive wings in Dolores Park, say, and set up amplifiers for the entertainment of the day. Richard and Edgar alternated a directors of the various productions. My first role was as Horatio in Edgar's mixed media production of "Hamlet." It was staged as a rehearsal: I would be working the light board in view of the audience when Edgar, breaking from his King Claudius role, would call for me to fill in onstage. I also played in Edgar's version of Brecht's "The Measures Taken," done without props. As stage manager, I watched Edgar try but fail to produce the opera, "Beatrice and Benedict" in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. Meanwhile, Richard put on play after play for many years. I took on the identities of "The Good Soldier Schweik" and "The Story Teller from Flea Street." All things seem to end with a crash, and my place in the Julian was damaged by my use of grass just before a performance as the mad story teller. While acting with the Julian, I had to support myself. This I did by driving a school bus to the Sunshine School for handicapped children. That vocation too had been certified by the counterculture. The kids used to enjoy the speed at which I would take certain bumps. But when the mechanics set up a picket line, I refused to cross it and was fired. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in my favor, but I had moved on. I eventually began teaching English as a second language. I had classes of aged El Salvadoran women in the Mission District, and even a class in Chinatown. Progress was difficult to detect, but there was much friendly gratitude. At this point, a gathering crisis broke. I was well off, well paid for the few hours I worked, but began to wonder what in general I was doing. I had been getting more and more superstitious, and in those years liked to "run away" on long barefoot walks to the Shakespeare garden in Golden Gate Park, or across the Bay Bridge--a prohibited goal-- or up the Peninsula towards Palo Alto, a goal permitted yet harrowing to attain. Once I walked to the park wearing a blank orange sandwich board and once was lost on the Camino Real for two days. San Francisco is a tolerant city, and no one interfered to assist me. Finally anxiety about the draft, and family grief, drove me to flee to Canada, but in another story I was rejected there and after an interlude in Pittsburgh returned to San Francisco. I still felt that the City knew about me and would provide an enviable existence. I spent some weeks sharing an attic on Potrero Hill in an abandoned house. Jean and I had been fellow dissidents in some social worker training, and once we had taken LSD together. As a social worker I had lasted only a month, being shocked by the responsibilities they cannot meet, and embarrassed by my role during visits to housing projects. As for "acid," it made me perceive the skyline, the clouded window, my shoes, the traffic as toy-like and trivial. The fine Kansas Street apartment metamorphosed into an extremely thrifty little shack lower down the hill. My cat Ajax had run away from my sister. The new cottage was shared with Fred and a replacement cat, Black Dawn. For a while I contentedly rode my mo-ped to the Julian Theatre, sometimes to my classes at San Francisco State. I always had something to smoke on the table. A Finnish girlfriend spent the summer with me. One night I filled two balloons with grey paint, climbed a high ladder amidst spotlights and train whistles, and trashed an "Old Crow" billboard that obstructed my view. On another evening, walking Fred I was kicked by two drunk bikers. I had resumed my teaching job, so favorable was the labor market and Johnson's war on poverty. Yet a visit to the Fairmont Hotel by Nguyen Cao Ky ended that: I dressed in Vietnamese pyjamas, incinerated Vietnamese currency and "refused to disperse." My lawyer friend Armin Rosencranz of Inverness, who holds many Stanford friends together, soon got me out of jail. Mayor Alioto referred to the two dozen arrested as hoodlums, and my credential was later suspended. Because the cottage had two rooms, I made the mistake of advertising for a room-mate. A Malaysian graduate student appeared who, when we could not get along, was driven away. Soon I myself had to leave. I could not tolerate the oddity of being so abandoned to my own devices. I put Fred up for adoption and moved temporarily into the waterfront YMCA Hotel. My father, in the year he became ill, spent a night at that establishment, and was a good sport about it. Later in the year, I left San Francisco from the Knight rooming house for Washington, D. C. and my father in Bethesda. At some indeterminate point before this, I had discovered that pleasant rooming house on Valencia Street in the Mission District. I kept going back to the Knight Hotel, later the King. It was easy to arrive in San Francisco on the Greyhound bus, to board the city transit with my boxes and bags, to dismount at 18th and Valencia and within a few hours to be settled in another little green room with a sink and mirror, and now my hotplate. Sometimes I would have a piece of a view, and always I could climb a ladder off the fire escape to be on the roof in the midst of the welcoming Mission basin. Although I had had and was to have more comfortable dwellings, I usually felt content in the rooming house. Up and down the halls were a variety of hippies, hippie families, unemployed, immigrants and working poor. Sometimes a wino would be found hiding in the bathrooms, which were shared as was the pay phone. The managers were from India. The place was usually clean, and it seemed a relatively trouble-free way to have a good location. The donut shop, the Doggie Diner, the laundromat, and the buses, libraries and parks were all within easy reach. I myself was often unemployed, and it may be that being from the King Hotel had something to do with it. One of the characters whom I knew during those years was struck down by colitis in 1981, at the age of 37. He left a book of poems, in which there speaks an advocate of art, energy and a self-selected nobility. You will find there hints of his impressive philosophical and historical learning. This was Ernie Marusi, whom his parents (from the corporate elite) had named Raymond Travis, but who went by Ray, Trav, Ernie and even Bob. Ernie and I interacted as intellectuals. We had been fellow members of Beta Chi at Stanford, a fraternity that scorned fraternities. Subsequently we had tried to spurn bourgeois complacency, Ernie leading the way with his rejection of full-time employment. Ernie had even taken off a long period to simply read in a log cabin near Santa Cruz. We discussed my Nietzsche and his Kierkegaard with endless fervor. Ernie and I also played chess, both of us becoming quite serious in our interest, but only Ernie advancing to a respectable tournament standing. Ernie used to pick me up in his old Peugeot 403 and we would drive over to Henry Hooker's apartment for an evening of coffee, smoke and clocked games. I used to say that one joint would cost me a pawn. Or we would leave in the morning over the Golden Gate for the day at a small beach that Ernie had discovered. One day, in the early 70's, I received an important phone call from Ernie. I was living in the Knight Hotel, and Ernie had found a good apartment on Potrero Hill that he wanted to share. I did not hesitate, and for half a year, say, we shared company, Ernie's excellent spaghetti, chess and conversation. Like many relationships, it exploded, with chess as the devouring focus. Somehow, Ernie Marusi found his way to a new situation in New Hampshire, a girlfriend named Donna Hembley, and then on to New York City. I played chess not only with Ernie. The Mechanics' Institute is a private library and chess club of long standing in downtown San Francisco. Francia Friendlich, a Stanford classmate whom I met at the Julian Theatre, referred me to it. There, distinguished old gentlemen peruse the newspapers. Upstairs, dozens of chess tables are in use for long hours. The regulars at the Mechanics' Institute are probably retired or semi-unemployed: one old fellow who kept repeating "schon fertig" or "already ready," another whose favorite expression was "get out of here," and so on. Yet almost anyone there could outplay you and me at any speed, due partly to their vast experience, but also due to the intelligence of that self-selected group. Having thought I was exceptional, it was instructive to finish studying another book of games, then to visit the Mechanics' and be defeated by an apparent homeless hippie. Another institution that I got to know well was San Francisco State College, famous for Paul Goodman, protest riots and S. I. Hayakawa. I had enrolled in the Masters program in interdisciplinary social science, and stayed two years. I never got the M. A., though, and when I tried to re-enroll years later was refused. My first graduate paper had related springboard diving to social theory. My transcript reflected my disenchantment with an institution that contrasted so strongly with Stanford. Along the bare corridors of Cal State San Francisco, as it was later called, rewards went to the diligent, not to the critical. For my part, I studied very little, preferring to smoke my grass and to read my own selections. Yet I enjoyed the early morning rides through the long tunnel on the trolley to school, as it rocked to an fro and the driver himself seemed to be asleep. At San Francisco State I also had my first real library job--erasing and typing cards--which I found I enjoyed enough to become a librarian. And so the university did serve a school's function of leading me into a job. I left and stayed away for nearly three years. But after Watergate, I drove back to San Francisco in someone's Camaro with Marc Levine. Finally past the snows of Wyoming, Dan Wehmeier of Beta Chi put us up in a house on Stanyan Street that had been Edgar's. He was later to buy the old Victorian on Sharon, thus closing another strange circle. I soon settled in one of San Francisco's very habitable downtown ghettos, in a large apartment building on Octavia Street. There were three locked doors to go through to get into my rooms, with their fold- down bed and even a telephone. From the brother of Dave Calfee, my Washington rock-climbing friend, I bought a Czechoslovakian CZ motorcycle. Soon I was driving my bike along the freeway to Portola Junior High School in South San Francisco, where my job was to protect order and the property from all the vandal students. Portola was, however, on its last semester, and when summer arrived my only vocation was an unsought translation that I was doing. Meanwhile, however, I had discovered library science books in the famous San Francisco Public Library, and that science attracted me to the University of Pittsburgh. After receiving my MLS, I again grew tired of failing to flourish in the nation's capital, so one day I jumped the Greyhound back to San Francisco. The King Hotel was full, but I found a minuscule room around the corner on 16th Street. Upstairs was a poor individual who constantly shouted at his garbage. Out the window was a roof and a wall. The Job Service pointed me to a job in a special library next to the Transamerica pyramid: some special education consultants. Yet it only lasted two weeks. They said their government grant had not gone through, but perhaps it was my incredulity when my supervisor had told me that my first five hundred would go to her. I migrated across the bridge to Oakland where, from incredibly decrepit hotels, I joined hands in the Data Center's radical efforts. When I could not subsist as a volunteer, I returned to the King Hotel, and found work as a high school paraprofessional. It was my misfortune to run into a teachers' strike. This time, general resentment moved me to cross their lines, with predictable treatment when the strike finally ended. Discouraged, I left San Francisco again for the last time, but D. C. and Pittsburgh proved no better. I dragged my bags in stages on a piece of cardboard to the bus, and bought a ticket to San Francisco. By '82, rents had skyrocketed and I stayed again at the familiar and easy: King Hotel. But first, I spent a night at the charity of Casa Hispana, secreted there by the musician Santina. I had started as a Stanford student and now I was sleeping hiding on a linoleum floor. For a year I searched for employment, killing time in libraries, attending my German class at the Goethe Institute, and walking miles to save busfare. It occurred to me to move to Rock Springs, Wyoming, for as I explained to the instructor, my spirit was a desert. This is part of my overall story. It is the usual tale of the young man who goes to the city and finds not prosperity but the relentless rub of circumstances which grind him down. It may be also a story of pride and rebellion, with the implicit moral that they fail. But when I try to recall just how I felt, my tone at each stage along the way, I find an upward not a downward line. At birth I was very confused indeed, and was still confused when accepted by my friends in the Julian Theatre. After eight years in San Francisco's care, I felt about the world only slightly confused.