I Found City Lights, Ferlinghetti, and a Young Man Named Jack.
I never made it to City Lights Book Store until the 2011honeymoon of my second marriage. The ethereal lure of San Francisco’s iconic North Beach was then powerful enough to finally coax me there. As I foraged the upstairs nooks, I felt the creative energy of those Beat geniuses who preceded me. Some of those still lingering spirits felt quite familiar while others left me reeling with astonished disbelief.
Jimmy Pro, my photographer partner from Sydney, browsed into City Lights around 2005. He can browse with anybody, including your compulsive, shopping fiend wife and even the oft wandering de Tocqueville. Pro was well into his sixth strong hour there when he noticed the famous proprietor and poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, hunched over a counter top. Jimmy struck up a nervous rap as he inanely, incessantly addressed the 86 year old as “Mr. Ferlinghetti”.
Jimmy eventually offered up a personal tidbit, revealing that he taught poetry to teenagers at a high end, Sydney private academy. The great man then served up a spontaneous, intellectual kick straight to Jimmy’s groin when he opined, “I always strive to write poetry that doesn’t need to be taught!”
Jimmy was obviously too dumbstruck to be on top of his poetic game. Ferlinghetti was foremost a populist, egalitarian poet who forcefully eschewed academic interpretation. Poem 9 from his “Pictures Of The Gone World” pretty much tells his view: “Truth is not the secret of a few / yet / you would maybe think so / the way some / librarians / and cultural ambassadors and /especially museum directors / act.” Jimmy surely knew this, but the gravity of this amazing, chance encounter had iced him!
Now, a few years later, I was on my strict literary guard as I foraged my way upstairs, shooting multiple Nikon images of one of the most influential book stores in the world.
The narrow hallways and cramped reading rooms are a treasure. I gradually found myself alone in the third floor space pictured here. I picked up a worn paperback copy of Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur”, and tilted it up toward the window to better catch the incoming sunlight.
Suddenly, I detected movement rustling around down in the chair. I was astonished to see a handsome young man in a grimy fedora and a rumpled blue work shirt smiling curiously up at me. “Hi! I’m Jack”, he offered. “I sort of changed gears when I wrote that one”, he continued, motioning toward the worn volume in my hands. “Success is what we all want, but when it comes, sometimes we just can’t handle it!” Holy shit! I said, just to myself, Jimmy Pro got Ferlinghetti, but I browsed into Kerouac!
Then he was gone, and I was in a full scale twit! I staggered down several flights of stairs, only to notice that City Lights was strangely deserted. Even the cash register was untended. I burst out into the sunlit street, and I careened down a handy alley way.
I glanced straight up, half expecting to see either angels or ghosts! Instead, I glimpsed colorful Chinese laundry drying draped helter skelter on veranda railings far above me. I instinctively raised my camera and fired. The resulting imagery would eventually garner me front and back covers on The Phoenix, a lit magazine back home in North Carolina. Sometimes utter chaos produces stellar art! A graphically skilled faculty adviser later stretched my flying image around the whole damn journal!
I slowly calmed down and eventually stumbled into an adjacent North Beach watering hole. I ordered a cold Sierra Nevada and dialed up Young Dave in Boston on my cell.
He is an English prof at UMass and an expert on Kerouac. I gushed out the details of my City Lights encounter over a crackling cell connection. “Kerouac, though long dead, still gets around a bit in the literary scene,” Dave wryly observed. “For example, I have an unpublished draft of a novel entitled ‘Jack Kerouac’s Ghost’,” he cooed. As he launched into a wordy rap about his
would be tour de force, I learned that I had a cameo appearance in his surreal plot. Dave had cued me up as a chain smoking, disabled Vietnam vet languishing in a Mississippi nursing home. I was highly pissed at this mistreatment, but at least he spelled my name correctly.
In closing, Jimmy Pro, Young Dave, and I never ever browsed City Lights together. But we are forever linked to this literary citadel by the mysterious events that happened there amongst the nooks. Ferlinghetti surely seriously schooled an awestruck Jimmy! Kerouac might have actually dropped a fragment of a self review on me up on the third floor. But Young Dave definitely screwed me big time when he threw me a perverse literary crumb in “Kerouac’s Ghost”!
The least he could have done was to have me bedding a beautiful young nurse down in Mississippi. And I could be driving a muscle car!
