Thursday, February 03, 2005

Refresher

What the hell.  I had a tough night last night and I’m having a tough morning this morning.  I don’t feel well, in a way that’s difficult to describe or even put my finger on.  I have more work waiting for me downtown than I’ll be able to finish in a month, and anomie has taken up residence between my temples.  That means it’s time for me to go back in my mind to a place that felt pretty much the opposite, to see if I can revive some vestage of how I felt when I was there....

I’d taken Friday off work for a personal project that I’d been looking forward to for years.  By 3 pm I had finished it up and found myself in Jackson Square on a sunny pre-weekend afternoon; a few blocks’ walk past quaint 19th century brickface galleries and offices led me to Columbus Avenue, the broad boulevard that cuts diagonally from the Transamerica Pyramid all the way through North Beach, a busy street of bright colors, weathered wood and delicious smells.  I headed northwest past the Brewing Company to a shabby door in a freshly-painted old edifice on the corner of Columbus and Kerouac - Vesuvio, the bar where it all began, the beat generation and west coast mod, old skool meets midcentury with the ‘80s and later locked out on the doorstep until they’re mature enough to behave themselves.  There I settled down and let it all settle in - hard bop on the jukebox, hand drawn signs behind the bar, hand-painted art covering the tall pale luminous walls reaching up to the balcony seats overhead; the only light filtering in through small windows festooned with eclectic sayings and stickers, dark wood and worn leather sucking up those delicate photons in rich thirsty draughts, the shadows warm and comforting in proportion to their depth.  The barkeep , a worldworn yet spritely woman with short grey hair and a lithe figure, tended to my needs - a pint of Anchor, the hometown favorite - with gracious alacrity, and then brought me into a conversation with the only other patron at the bar, a fellow visiting from Ohio, and we three spoke about organic farming, the Cuban economy, suburban sociology and architecture.... with my second beer I switched barstools and found myself next to a fellow traveller who’d just come in, on a visit from her home in Sao Paulo, a city that dwarfs many countries; we discussed molecular biology and Edward Gorey, philosophical honesty and the creative process.... as she spoke I watched the rubyred light reflecting off the barback mirror through the bottles of bourbon and cognac and calvados; I breathed deeply of hops and vapors and old leather and friendly dust and my eyes relaxed in their sockets and my brow let itself unravel and relax.... and I thought, or felt, from a warm place floating embryonically but knowingly inside myself: if Keroac hadn’t been here and written it all up 50 years ago, I’d have to do it myself.  And then I did anyway. 

One image stands out in particular: the mens’ room in the basement, a small shabby dark place, the archetypical beerhall pissoir; it featured, as so many such places do, a vending machine on the wall that dispensed diverse condoms, “ticklers” and other latex devices intended to be unfurled upon one’s turgidity, variously for self-protection, “her pleasure,” or, it can only be assumed, a cheap laugh.  Scrawled on the dirty varnished steel near the slot where the products were to be delivered to the clamoring pubic, were the plaintive words of a dissatisfied customer: “This gum tastes funny.”

Well that sort of worked - I feel moderately less like crap.  I’ll get the dog out and pull on my clothes, dump my lunch in my saq and hie my ass to the bus, let the bus hie my ass to the office, and I’ll read this again on another screen, one that typically confronts me with bone-dry applications and spreadsheets, as my telephone rings with the pleas and plights of others paid to endure them and not the friends and family I cherish, and maybe once I’m there this will sink in a little deeper.  For now, I think this is as relaxed as I’m going to get.  Thanks for sharing a drink with me this morning.  Next time, you’re buying.