The Days of Wine and Sharks, Vol. 1

Part the First

The day starts blearily enough as I stumble out of bed when the alarm rings at five. Shower. Shave. Throw the last few things in the bag. I’ve already decided on the music for the car on the way to the airport—Warren Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya. The music you listen to at the start of the trip is essential—choose poorly, and you could find yourself surrounded by wild pygmy natives, ready to take your head. LKY’s title track, with its “requiescat in pace, that’s all she wrote” refrain, seems appropriate.

Airport. Zip right through security, head to find myself some breakfast. Omelets make me believe that there may indeed be a higher power behind this planet. Strong coffee. Good. The day is starting out well.

Flight is for the most part uneventful. I have my requisite aisle seat, with one guy sitting to my right. He needs to get up at one point and I move to get out of the way, but he says “I can step over.” Before I can protest, this guy is stepping over me and essentially giving me a three-second lapdance.

Horrific.

I read Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth on the plane. It’s all about the place I’m headed,the Farallon Islands and their annual shark congregation. The place has a fascinating history that includes egg mafias, mysterious skeletons and ghostly apparitions, along with thousands upon thousands of great white sharks, sea lions and birds. Great book, but by the end of it, you’re pretty sure that Casey would be an endlessly annoying person to be around. She becomes hopelessly involved with her story, to the detriment of everyone involved.

I eventually play the in-flight trivia game. I don’t do so well the first round, but my second round, not only do I win, I get the highest score of anyone on the plane of any round. Advantage: me.

Plane lands in San Francisco and I find my luggage before heading for BART. I take the train to the closest stop to my hotel and promptly walk four blocks in the wrong direction. I catch my mistake and turn around. The upside of this detour is that I’m 99 percent sure I walked by Mike Nesmith. There’s a lot of construction as I make my way along Columbus, meaning there’s a lot of crossing back and forth along the street. I’m trying not to stop and stare too much along the way, but I’m taken with the city pretty quickly.

It’s a big city that doesn’t feel clogged, something that’s become all too apparent about Atlanta lately. It feels like there’s room to breathe here. Even walking around the financial district in the middle of a weekday, the vibe doesn’t feel crunched or dirty. It feels livable.

I find where I’m staying, Hotel Boheme, without much trouble. My room’s not ready yet, but I leave my bag and ask Charles, the front desk guy, where I can find some lunch. The area where I’m staying straddles the line between Little Italy and Chinatown. He recommends a place called House, an Asian fusion restaurant. Charles is right on the money, as I have some wasabi noodles with roast pork that are just what I need. I walk around the neighborhood a bit. Lots of Chinese restaurants and strip clubs. I’m home?

Head back to the hotel to check in. Charles tells me the room I’m in was where Allen Ginsberg used to like to stay. I spend about 10 minutes trying to think of a “starving, hysterical, naked” joke, and decide the hell with it. Hotel Boheme is a really cool, old school hotel with only 15 rooms. I’m given a key to my room and to the front door of the hotel, actual metal keys, which is nicely reassuring in an age of plastic keycards. Every evening from 6-10 they set out sherry in the lobby for an evening cordial. It’s a pretty wonderful place to stay, and I’m glad I shelled out the extra 50 bucks for the night.

At the same time, there’s a little bit of a creepiness behind it. The history here is palpable, almost so much that it feels trapped in time a bit. I fully expect to see a ghost floating down the hall at some point. I read an interview with Billy Bob Thornton once where he described having a phobia about antique furniture. I’m starting to understand what he meant, I think. But the idea that we’re all so used to bland experiences that we’re petrified of something real is horrifying, so I put the weight of the hotel out of my head and appreciate it for what it is.

I get into my room and doze for a bit. I’ve got Doug Sahm’s (look him up) San Francisco songs playing in my head as I drift off. After my nap, I change clothes and head out for a bit. I’m staying just down the street from the City Lights bookstore, where the Beat movement had its genesis. Incredibly cool to wander around inside and soak up some of the history. I pick up a couple of books, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolanto which is a staff pick and fits in nicely with my efforts to read more authors who aren’t American or British, and The Yage Letters Redux, by Burroughs and Ginsberg.

I step next door to Vesuvio. About three seconds after I walk in, I know that this would be my regular bar if I lived in San Francisco. Long bar, cool art up on the walls, absinthe(!) behind the bar, and friendly people. Also, they open at 6 am. I grab a seat at the bar and watch baseball for a while, talking with a couple of the regulars. The bartender gives me a couple of dinner suggestions, and tells me I really can’t go wrong in the neighborhood.

I don’t know what it is about certain bars. I’m never as comfortable as I am sitting on a barstool in a dark room. The “third place” (look it up) is where I’ve always gravitated, where I’m in my element. When you're in the right bar, you pick up slices of everyone’s life, you’re a part of a communion or a nameless sacrament. Traveling alone carries with it a pretty natural feeling of alienation (or maybe I just carry that natural feeling of alienation), but it’s something that melts away however briefly between those walls. I fall in love with waitresses and bartendresses pretty easily, and I think it's part of the sense of belonging I feel when I walk into a bar (with a priest and a rabbi), even one I’ve never been to before.

The bartender’s right about the neighborhood, as it turns out. I end up sticking my head into a no-name Italian place and grab a slice of pizza, which tastes like a little bit of heaven. I wander for a bit into a couple of seedy blocks, realize I probably have “tourist” written across my face and head towards The Beat Museum. I’m a little unsold at first, as the first room you enter is the gift shop. But it’s only $5 to go into the museum proper, so I take my shot. I’m glad I did. It’s a thorough re-telling of the movement, with some way cool artifacts, including Neal Cassady’s shirt and Ginsberg’s old pipe organ (slang). There’s even an exhibit that addresses the lack of women in the movement, something that some females I know have quite understandably said kept them at arm’s length from the Beats. I settle into the movie room at the end of the tour for a bit, then grab a copy of Howl and head out on my way.

I’ve been back and forth on the Beats as an influence on my own writing. I took to Kerouac and Bukowski pretty easily, but Burroughs and Ginsberg took me longer to wrap my head around. Ginsberg was pretty easily explainable, since I’ve always had a little bit of a block when it comes to poetry. For Burroughs, it took a while to get myself into the fractured mindset that his stuff requires. Maybe I wasn’t broken enough to appreciate it before, but it feels like I am now. One thing I’ve discovered is that their works tend to be malleable enough to still feel fresh and current, rather than purely being reflections of the time. There’s a trick to being of your time and place while also being of any time and place. I need to figure out what that is.

I stop by my hotel, intending to drop off a couple of books and go back out, maybe to the Condor, the city’s oldest strip club, purely for historical purposes of course. But I lie down for a minute and everything gets dark for the night.