There are a lot of dead poets in my life. Probably more dead than alive at this point since I don’t go to many poetry readings or workshops any more and mostly only read poetry by friends.
Rhett Stuart, Janice King, Marsha Campbell were all members of the Tenderloin Writer’s Workshop that took place at Central City Hospitality House in the 1990s and before me in the 80s when it was run by Robert Volbrecht. The workshop may still exist there with another facilitator though I haven’t been back in many years. Robert was a serious person who smoked and gave good comments. Janice and I smoked as well, along with others. It would have been a cloudy room if not for the high ceiling.
Mark Schwartz, a well known North Beach poet and open-mic host, never came to that workshop in my time but sometimes showed up at the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center (TREC) People’s Library where I volunteered. Dozens of others crossed my path over the years—many now deceased. I facilitated what I called the “Out of a Hat” writing workshop at TREC when it was in the old St. Boniface Neighborhood Center and later, when we were ousted, at the YMCA across the street.
This morning I thought of something that Marsha Campbell said in defense of me once when I was accused of being opinionated. She said, “A person without opinions lives without ideals.” That has helped me to have compassion for myself over the years.
Yesterday, I went to the city for breakfast with a friend followed by tennis with another friend. I did a bike/BART which is so much nicer than driving, if nothing else because I can get some reading time in, but also because I arrive more relaxed than when I lane split on my motorcycle all the way across the Bay Bridge arriving with a tight jaw and every nerve in my body set to react.
The city is strange for me now. It’s filled with nostalgia for the excitement and possibilities it held when I was younger but sadness for the people I know who have died, people I have lost touch with and regret for all the mistakes I made. If nothing else, life is messy.
I turned my electric bike off as I rode through the flatlands of the Mission district. Between breakfast and tennis I had three hours to kill. Memories associated with place popped up every few blocks.
Out of the six places I lived in San Francisco, only one was in the Mission—a second story flat that was leveled to make what is now the rear parking lot of Rainbow grocery. But I always had reasons to go to the Mission —parties, readings, friends, shopping, barhopping, art, books, Dolores Park near Mission Dolores for which the Mission district is named.
Rents have always been high in San Francisco. During my time from 1991 to 2002 I only lived two places by myself—my first nine months in a Tenderloin SRO hotel room and my last five years in a Tenderloin studio apartment.
Inflation-wise I don’t have a good sense if things are worse. That’s what you hear but then that’s what you heard thirty years ago too. The streets are as rough as I ever saw them in the TL.
By the time I left, I had golden handcuffs keeping me in my apartment. The rent was $650 — a hundred dollars more than when I moved in. But I was tired of the armor I had to put up when I stepped beyond the slamming iron gate of the building entrance. It wasn’t armor for fear of bodily injury, but psychic armor for my accosted senses. Actual violence was pretty rare for the amount of humanity that ambulated on this corridor of Hyde street. But I was tired of stepping over passed-out bodies, being body-blocked by prostitutes, being asked what choo need? by drug dealers, and seeing every imaginable kind of human waste.
Never mind there were often children skipping by, flower shops run by lovely people, the bustle of workers, delightful restaurant smells, access to busses and trains going every direction, my Buddha birds (pigeons) circling in the blue sky.
I was working as a substitute school teacher in Berkeley and it made sense to be across the bay. It made sense to take my opinionated self somewhere else and to start fresh.
I’m feeling a similar need now though I don’t think it’s necessary to move. I need a mental reboot. Maybe a long break from alcohol. Maybe a new job.
When I was fired from work at a bank in Ithaca, New York after graduating from the Hotel School, I spent a month or so collecting cans on the street. There is really nothing more I’d like to do but keep it simple. Not without ideals, but I’m a little tired of my own opinions right now.
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…and now a little so back Sunday
Here are some pictures from the fields of the ramshackle farmhouse in Denton, Texas where I lived for half of third grade and all of fourth and fifth. My summer trip of 2021 revealed that the house is not there anymore and most of the fields are part of a housing development that took its place.
Spotty West Goes East 