Baby Beatniks

I guess it was December 1958 when I first read Dharma Bums, standing in the aisle of the Hillsdale Bookstore in suburban San Mateo, California. I was supposed to be shopping for a Christmas present for my mother. Instead, I was having a vision of riding a boxcar up the California coast with an old hobo saint, then taking a wild ride in a convertible driven by a way-out blonde high on bennies (whatever they were) all the way to Grant Avenue, North Beach to meet my friends, drinking wine and shouting poetry. While shoppers reached past me to grab a copy of Dr. Zhivago, I discovered there was a better way to live.

Although Dharma Bums purported to be a novel, you could tell it was written by a guy who had really done all these things and he was just writing down what had actually happened.

And I decided, in an instant, that I was going to do those things too. Or something very like them. I had found my calling. I was 16. I just joined the Beat Generation.

You can bet my Mom was really pleased with such an interesting Christmas present. I wasn't sure if she would be, but, after all, she was interested in spiritual subjects, and Dharma Bums had Buddhism in it. And besides, it was an expensive hardcover book and I needed to read it thirty-eight more times right away, so it would be handy to have it in the house.

I spent the spring of my Senior year working my way through the canon: On the Road, The Subterraneans (when Leo lost Mardou at the end I threw the paperback across the room against the wall mad that life should be so sad and bitter and that the one you loved would always leave in the end), then Howl, the best poem I ever read – it had Beats in it - then Gregory Corso's Gasoline (with its incendiary red and white color scheme in the Pocket Poets series), then Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind so great, so easy to understand.

“The dog trots freely in the streets.”

Like me! I'm gonna be that dog!

then Beatitude Magazine, then the Abomunist Manifesto – by then I was hip, man. I was Beat.

And you know the beauty part? All this was happening just twenty miles away, in my hometown: golden San Francisco. A world of love and adventure and smoking pot and beautiful beatnik girls in black leotards and heavy eye makeup and big poetry and jazz sessions in brick cellars of North Beach. It was all twenty miles away just waiting for me.

Did that beat San Mateo High School? Or would I rather go to the record hop and ask Missy Brown to dance the bop to a Frankie Avalon song?

Let me think.. .I know - I would rather, much rather, incredibly rather be Beat.

One day I was sitting in geometry reading Coney Island of the Mind when I noticed a guy a couple of rows over had some curly hairs on his chin. Could he be growing a goatee?

I thought I was the only Beat at San Mateo High School.

The cool guy's name was Dave DePalma. I started talking to him after class and he knew all about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and his older sister was listening to cool jazz and had sides by all the big West Coast jazz artists – Bud Shank and Jimmy Giuffre and the Modern Jazz Quartet. He invited me over to his house after school to listen to his sister's record collection. Pretty soon we were hanging out together.

DePalm's dad had once built a playhouse for the kids in their backyard and we turned into The Pad. We had a single mattress and a rickety couch. My Mom donated one of her paintings. We had a radio so we could listen to KJAZ all night. Best of all, Palm scored a beat up Royal typewriter somewhere. I could let myself into their backyard at any hour of the night and a light would be on in The Pad -- Palm up thinking cool and crazy thoughts to the sound of Miles Davis. We wrote beat poems and I smoked my pipe (why did I think beats smoked pipes, I wonder?) and when we got hungry we could just head into the DePalma's kitchen for 2:00 AM feasts of French bread and salami.

I wish all my history wasn't in storage out in California. I still have one of those poems. It's called “Find This in a Typewriter”. But I found it when I was cleaning out Dad's house after he died. Stuck in a little notebook under a dresser in my old bedroom. Dust and mouse droppings and “Find this in a typewriter”.

You know, I talked to Palm the other night. He's a bigshot in San Mateo now. He has a successful gardening business. We stay in touch. There's a bond between us that nothing can take away – we were young and beat together in San Francisco. And, as we talk, the years fall away and it's like we're twenty years old again laughing and jiving. Here's to you, man.

From time to time I'm going to tell some stories of our adventures together in the Golden City of our youth.