The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  Gary had been living for this moment. Our handy-dandy road atlas had a chart listing the speed limits of the various states. Next to Nevada it said only “Reasonable and proper.” It was cold out there, and there was snow off the road, but the asphalt itself was straight, flat, and bone-dry. “Hoo boy, lets boogie!” And boogie we did. That Impala was a sweet little item, and Gary put his foot through the floor and got her up to 120. “Gary,” I said, the voice of sweet reason and propriety, “don’t you think a hundred will do?” He grumbled a little, but moderation prevailed and we scooted on past Elko at a stately 100 miles per hour. Splat! A lump of reddish-gray goop appeared on the windshield. “What the fuck was that?” Gary yelled.

  “It’s a bird,” said Andrew.

  “Yeah sure. It’s a plane, it’s Superman.”

  “No, really,” Andrew explained. “The road gets hot from the sun and they stand on it to get warm.”

  Sure enough, there were flocks of them now. At our approach, they would take off, but we were moving too fast for all of them to get out of the way. Splat! Splat! It was getting hard to see the road. “Fuck ’em,” Gary grunted through clenched teeth. “We’ve gotta make time! When it gets too bad, we’ll scrape ’em off.” Splat.

  “We” turned out to be me. Gary was the driver; Andrew was a guest of sorts; and Red Chief refused, point blank: “Oh no you don’t! Slow down, and you’ll stop hitting them. I’m in no hurry.” So from time to time we would pull over to the side of the road, and I would trundle out, ice scraper in hand, to peel ten pounds of bird porridge off the windshield. Everybody else in the car seemed to think this a perfect division of labor. Be that as it may, we were in Reno in five hours.

  In Reno, a mere five more hours short of San Francisco and blessed surcease, the word came down: Route 80 over the Donner Pass was closed to vehicles without tire chains. This was the last straw. We were just about broke again, since the unscheduled stop in Salt Lake had used up our motel money. We could just barely afford some gas and a bite to eat, and that was it. Of course, Gary could phone Triple-A again and ask them to wire us the money to buy a set of chains—it was certainly a legitimate expense—but the money would not get to us until tomorrow, and in the meantime where would we sleep? Gary and I looked pointedly at Red Chief, who we knew still had some cash reserves. “We can sleep in the car,” he quoted, with a big evil smile. “It’s warm in Nevada.” I did not kill him.

  I suppose I should admit that, while A.K. was something of a skinflint, he was no freeloader. When a collective expenditure was necessary, he ponied up like a mensch. If worst had come to worst, he would probably have shelled out for a cheap room in a squalid motor court—I think. But at least to my sleep-deprived mind, it seemed as if there was another way out. “Guys,” I said, “we have nothing to lose. Here we are, in the gambling capital of the United States, with twenty bucks between us. Let’s see if we can parlay that into some kind of grubstake for the rest of the trip.” Not my sharpest reasoning perhaps, but to a bunch of young louts of the male persuasion it seemed the soul of judiciousness.

  Reno in those days was even more of a stockman’s town than it is now. Cattle kings and cowboys—Andrew knew the town well—Indians off the nearby reservation, Basque sheepherders, and at this time of year, very few tourists. There was no “strip.” The casinos were all downtown. If you did not care for your luck in one joint, you just walked across the street. We chose Harold’s, mostly because I had heard of them: they used to circulate matchbooks all over the country with a cartoon of a naked guy in a high hat, walking around in a barrel. The caption read: “I was there.” On the basis of my acknowledged (by me) blackjack expertise, I was to be custodian of the treasury. Amazingly, the cards ran well. Betting no more than a buck at a time (all small bets were in silver dollars), it took me less than an hour to amass forty dollars in winnings. Time to redistribute. We divvied up the money, and Gary and Andrew went off to find their own tables. Red Chief stuck by my elbow, offering advice. By now he was calling me “Doc,” and refused to budge an inch. Betting such small amounts, it takes a long time to make any kind of money, but the cards still liked me and I persisted. Then a voice hissed in my ear: “Stand on sixteen, Doc. The dealer’s gonna bust.” I stood. The dealer busted. I had not won enough yet to see us on our way, but I was getting close, and A.K. was driving me nuts. I handed him a couple of silver dollars. “Here, kid,” I said nastily. “Go get yourself an ice cream cone.” He made a face at me and took off. Ten minutes later, while I was sweating over a possible five-card Charlie, he reappeared. “Here,” he said, displaying a hat full of silver dollars. “There’s more in my pockets. Let’s get out of here, this place bores the shit out of me.”

  We rounded up our coconspirators, one of whom had also come out a winner, turned our clinkers into bills at the cashiers cage (except for A.K., who liked his hat full of silver), and went our way rejoicing. As we were leaving, I stuck my hand into my pocket and discovered a last silver dollar I had overlooked. What the hell; I dropped it into a slot machine by the door, and hit a goddamn jackpot. Not of Red Chief proportions, mind you, with bells and whistles, but another forty bucks or so. We were rich! Let the good times roll!

  Now we could afford tire chains, food, gas, and a cheap room in a squalid motor court. We proceeded to do all of the above. We gorged ourselves festively that night in the dining room of a Basque boardinghouse. All you could eat for five bucks a head, and they kept our water glasses—A.K.’s included—filled with some of the most awful sour wine I have ever tasted. What the hell did we know from wine? We loved it. And so, merrily, to bed.

  Next morning, somewhat subdued (oh God, that wine . . . ) but with skid chains duly in place, we proceeded up and over Donner Pass, through the Sierras and some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. There was plenty of snow on the ground, but the day was glorious and the road was fine. Our morale was improving. Coming down into the foothills, someone said happily, “Open the windows, it’s stifling in here.” I did so, and received a blast of warm, moist, and vegetal Pacific air that was pure bliss. An hour later we spotted our first palm tree.

  9

  California

  Rolling down through the Coast Range and over the Bay Bridge into Frisco14 was a new approach for me, and a bit of a comedown. My previous arrival, floating in under the Golden Gate, had been incomparably more dramatic. Still, right then it looked like the promised land. Gary dropped me off in North Beach, which was still the beat capital of the West Coast, albeit in sad decline from its glory days of a few years past.

  This habit of showing up just in time to miss an incandescence seems to be a signature trait of mine. I am like a bellwether: “Uh-oh, here comes Van Ronk. The party must be over.” There have been a couple of exceptions, but when people burble at me, “Oh what a colorful life you’ve led!” I am tempted to tell them, “Look, I’ve known people who were busted with Emma Goldman, worked the riverboats with Louis Armstrong, beat Marcel Duchamp at chess, bunked with Bix, hopped freights with Joe Hill, and shot grouse with Leon Trotsky. That’s colorful.” On the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that when Pericles hit Athens, everybody told him: “Boy! You should have been here last year, the joint was really jumping.” You takes what you can get.

  In any case, there I was, standing outside the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in North Beach. I had heard through the grapevine that this was where “all the haps were going down,” but on entering I was quickly informed that the place, an innocuous coffeehouse, had recently been raided by the cops.

  This was 1959, and the city’s raffishness had not yet been commodified. The cutesy boutiques and hipsey-poo restaurants that currently blight the whole peninsula were still ten years off. Ghirardelli Square was known for a derelict chocolate factory, Chinatown was a neighborhood where Chinese people lived, and Fisherman’s Wharf was a fisherman’s wharf. The petite bourgeoisie’s unerring homing instinct for kitsch would change all that, but as yet the campaign to make B
ohemia safe—and salable—had not begun. Still, the preconditions for the campaign ahead were falling into place. A kind of demographic slum clearance—“Drive the riff-raff out of North Beach”—had begun. Or as we put it at the time, “The heat was on.”15

  The heat took the form of harassment by the cops of anybody who looked like a “weirdo,” accompanied by the occasional beating, and the aforementioned raid on the bagel shop. All of this was done to the tune of a strident crusade against “beatniks”—the word had only recently been minted by Herb Caen of the Chronicle, bless him—in the gutter press. Until that damned word came along, nobody noticed us, or if they did it was just “those kids.” We had all the freedom anonymity could bestow—a lovely state of affairs.

  What had started the current crackdown was an incident that occurred a week or two before I arrived. Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, an outstanding example of the poet-hustler type this country seems to make a specialty of (back east we had Ted Joans), had been running a series of bogus “rent parties,” charging the clydes at the door and selling them drinks. At one of these wingdings, somebody got very drunk and fell—or, some said, was pushed—off the roof. The resultant “Splat heard ’round the world” triggered a Kulturkampf locally and, within a year or two, nationally that would simmer and flair up from time to time over the next decade.

  The upshot of all this was that I was forced more or less to avoid North Beach during my stay in SF. Most of the time, I stayed with my old IWW fellow worker Al Graham in the Mission District or crashed with some college kids across the bay in Berkeley. The only scene in North Beach that attracted me was Pierre Delattre’s Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue. Pierre, an Episcopalian priest, had somehow conned his superiors into funding an apostolate to the freaks. It was a storefront operation, with a big room cluttered with chairs, tables, and cast-off sofas facing the street, and a couple of small rooms in the back where Pierre slept and hosted wine-swilling poker sessions every now and then. (That boy was my kind of missionary.) Besides the free spaghetti dinners every Friday night, the mission had other appeals as a hangout: the connection with Holy Mother Church rendered it, we imagined, pig-proof, and in my case it was also a source of income. On one or two occasions, Pierre produced store concerts for me on a pass-the-hat basis. I split the billing and the take with Paul Schoenwetter, a fine frailing banjoist and fellow member of the Folksingers Guild who was also rattling around Frisco with no money and nothing much to do.

  Across the bay in Berkeley, I was hanging around Barry Olivier’s place, the Barrel. Barry gave me a gig after I helped him unload a truck full of furniture—a somewhat unusual technique for getting onstage, but it worked fine. He also set up a couple of blues guitar workshops, which brought in a few dollars more, and meanwhile I honed my poker sharkery on the wallets of a bunch of UC students who could no more hold their liquor than they could resist drawing to an inside straight.

  Compared to my situation in New York, I was performing quite a bit. I met and heard Mimi Baez for the first time at a late-night show at KPFA (one of the first “highbrow” FM radio stations), and sang there a few times myself.16 I also seized the opportunity to consort with Jesse Fuller, “The Lone Cat,” twelve-string guitarist extraordinaire, one-man band, and composer of “San Francisco Bay Blues.” Jesse, like most of the rest of us, could not make a living from his music, so he was running a shoe-shine parlor on Telegraph Avenue, just over the city line in Oakland. (I think he might have been doing a little policy action on the side, as well.) In full musical harness, he provided quite a visual: along with his big twelve-string guitar, he wore a double rack around his neck with a kazoo on the upper tier and a harmonica below it. With his left foot, he operated a high-hat cymbal, and with his right he deftly tapped out a bass line on five treadles that he had hooked up to one of the damnedest musical contraptions I have ever seen. It was a piano box with five strings on it, and each treadle activated a felt-tipped piano hammer that struck one of the strings with a satisfying boom. This was his own invention, which he called a “footdella,” and it was amazing how much bass he could play with just those five notes. To manage this intricate task, however, he had to remove his right shoe and sock. As I say, quite a visual.

  Jesse did not keep the whole rig around the shop, but the guitar was always there, and when I stopped by, we would pick and sing a few songs, mostly blues. He taught me “San Francisco Bay,” which I love but have never performed (both Jesse and Jack Elliott did it better than I ever could), and for a while I did his versions of “Linin’ Track” and “Hanging Around a Skin Game.” Business was pretty slow, and Jesse seemed happy for some company. He was a relentless self-promoter, and he loved to talk almost as much as he liked to perform. He especially enjoyed reminiscing about his days in Hollywood back in the 1920s, where he worked as a film extra and was taken up by Doug Fairbanks Sr. He used to perform at the monumental bashes Fairbanks and Mary Pickford threw at Pickfair, their Xanadu in the Hollywood Hills. It all sounded marvelously corrupt.

  Jesse had gained a measure of local renown back in 1948, when Leadbelly appeared on a San Francisco radio program and proclaimed himself, as he was wont to do, “the king of the twelve-string guitarists of the world.” Jesse picked up the telephone, called the station, and let out a squawk of rage: “Who is this bum? I’m the king of the twelve-string guitar, and if you put me on the air, I’ll prove it.” They did, and he did. Ten years later the memory still rankled. When I told a friend of his that I was going over to Oakland to visit with him, she warned me: “Don’t mention Leadbelly.”

  Jesse was a gold mine of songs, and he painstakingly wrote down all the lyrics he knew in a series of school composition books. He let me look through one of them, and if I asked about a tune, he would pick up the guitar and run through it for me. Not a bad way to learn. He also kept a stock of the ten-inch LPs he had made for a local label called World Song, and he happily sold me one for five bucks.

  Another person I was seeing pretty regularly was my old friend (personal) and nemesis (political) Bogdan Denitch, “the mad Montenegrin.” Like his sidekick Mike Harrington, he had become mesmerized by the utopian notion that if enough socialists joined the Democratic Party, they could use their influence to move it to the left—a textbook example of what the sociologist C. Wright Mills used to call “crackpot realism.” I held, and still do, that the only way you can influence such gentry is with the backing of a mob of screaming peasants brandishing pruning hooks. Sure enough, the Socialist Party followed Bogdan’s logic, merged into the “Democracy,” and vanished from the face of the earth—while my cothinkers and I went on to become the mighty political force we are today . . .

  Although their supporters in YPSL were a sorry assortment of junior bureaucrats and ward-heelers manqué, Bogdan and Mike were born bohemians. Temperamentally we had all belonged to the hell-raising faction that convened regularly at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in the Village, and since Bogdan had recently relocated to Berkeley, he took some time off from his job as a tool-and-die maker to show me a bit of the locale. Wonder of wonders, he actually owned a car, so we could motor down the coast to Moro Bay or over the bridge to Sausalito, where I would drink in the scenery, among other things. I am pretty sure it was Bogdan who introduced me to the No Name bar, later the scene of many fondly remembered debaucheries.

  Despite all this fossicking around the periphery, my main focus was San Francisco itself. I loved its pastel-painted, bay-windowed wooden houses, the hills, the wet-wool fogs, the whole romantic concatenation—hell, I even loved those Mickey Mouse cable cars. Moreover, and a big plus for me, Frisco was a place where lefties could really feel at home. In those days, it was still a working-class town and, since the general strike of 1934 (which I heard a lot about), a union town to boot. The joint was fully outfitted with hot and cold running Reds of every imaginable persuasion.

  Along with the more organized and solemn factions, anarchists and Wobblies were thick on the ground. The
house where I crashed in the Mission District was a veritable hotbed of anarchism and free love—or anyway of anarchism. 17 Al Graham, our boniface, was a deep-dyed Wobbly with a penchant for direct action and an exuberant passion for organizing absolutely everybody and everything—he had recently been popped on Cape Cod for trying to organize the lobstermen, or maybe it was the lobsters. Tom Condit, ex-marine, libertarian socialist, and that rara-est of avises, a native Californian, was a walking encyclopedia of arcane social history, obscure political facts (I remember with special joy his disquisition on the Somali Youth League and its struggle for “Somalia irredenta”), and good, cheap restaurants in the Bay Area. Tom and I also haunted every low-stakes poker game we could find, and we made out pretty good sometimes.

  Phil Melman, who lived elsewhere but always seemed to be around, was the real article: an old old Wobbly. Phil was sixty-five, and the terror and delight of the hip community, careening around the city on a big old Harley, scattering pedestrians like startled chickens and playing roller coaster on the steepest hills he could find. I used to go out with him, riding pillion—some people never learn—and I remember shouting in his ear: “Phil! Phil! Take it easy! You’re going to get us killed!” He did neither.

  With this cast of characters, one would think the action would be thick and fast, but as it happened, life was pretty tranquil. Al did keep a gun under his pillow, and Tom and I kept hiding it for fear that a postman or meter reader’s early morning knock would set him off—in his A.M. daze, Al might see the uniform, mistake the guy for a cop, and start blazing away, thinking it was the Paris Commune or something. Admittedly, this was pretty far-fetched, but we enjoyed getting his goat. It never took him more than a minute or two to find it anyway.