The Man Who Tells Stories

Frank Walters
June 7, 2011
A draft: Part 1 of a 4-part nonfiction essay called "The Shadow of Assisi"

The Man Who Tells Stories

I begin by walking down Market Street toward The Embarcadero and pass a man wearing a sandwich sign advertising men’s suits. He is about fifty, white, of medium height and build, with a face that sparkles of intelligence. But we make eye contact and the façade comes down. He is handing out flyers to passers-by, but at the slightest sign of rejection he quickly jerks back, as if he’s suddenly noticed how filthy his hands are. A pale blush rises to his cheeks. I’m not sure why. We don’t know each other, but he seems to sense my inquisitiveness. Why is he here, doing this? What was he doing before? Is there a Microsoft paystub somewhere, some painful reminder of a lucrative past life gone irrevocably awry, tucked away in a drawer with the abandoned Stanford sweatshirt and the now useless white tie and cufflinks? He looks away as if he has heard my questions.

I turn left onto Montgomery Street and enter the gray canyonland of the Financial District. Under the canopy to the main door of the Transamerica Tower, I talk with two earnest college students who are passing out leaflets for the San Francisco affiliate of Planned Parenthood. “PPGG [Planned Parenthood Golden Gate] was dropped by the national organization last year,” one of them, a dark-haired woman in leggings and Converse high tops, tells me. “But we still need to provide services to thousands of poor women. No one hears their voices. No one speaks for them.” Her eyes grow moist and flare with anger. I describe the situation in Alabama, where I live, the high incidence of unwed teenage pregnancies, almost all of them carried to full term and delivered in the wasteland of a hastily-arranged marriage, an outcome viewed by clergy and lay alike as a seawall against the swell of liberal immorality. Her companion, a man wearing cargo pants and a golf shirt with PPGG sewn over the left pocket, asks me if I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. I assent and give them five dollars.

I walk up Bush Street to Grant Street, the main thoroughfare through Chinatown. A few doors past Dragon Gate there is a shop bulging with Asian curiosities run by two Italian men who could be brothers, where I buy four small porcelain jewelry cases with dragon inlays for my wife. When I tell one of them where I’m from, he offers an exaggerated display of sympathy. “They let us out once in a while,” I joke. “Good football teams,” he says. He subtracts five dollars from the original price of twenty, adding that he really doesn’t know how much he paid for the cases. “So much junk here, you know? Who can keep track? Maybe I pay more than fifteen, maybe less. Who knows?” He shrugs and slaps my shoulder: “For the wife in Alabama,” he says. “She’s pretty, right?” “And Italian,” I add. I leave with an odd sort of Alabama feeling, like I’ve been thief and victim in the same transaction.

All along Grant I slip through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students, homeless, some pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags. I cut over to Stockton, which crosses Broadway in the heart of North Beach. I’m now well away from the skyscrapers of downtown and their cold, permanent shadows. I thread my way among sidewalk cafes and in and out of the sunlight cast by the low buildings and trees. It is Monday, my third day in San Francisco, in late May. The temperature is only in the mid-fifties, the afternoon is brightly sunlit, and I’ve worked up a light sweat. But a stiff breeze, which threatens to blow away my baseball cap, has chilled me. My destination is the storied hairpins of Lombard Street, but when I stop at Washington Square for a water break, I discover that I’ve missed the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, a block over at Columbus and Valejo. I’ll have to backtrack, but for the moment I’m content to sit on a bench and warm myself in the sun.

Before me lies the expansive east face of Russian Hill, covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes. Across Filbert Street, which forms the northern boundary of the Square, loom the ivory cathedral spires of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. The Square emanates its own cathedral aura. A full city block in size, it is ringed by cypress and poplar trees, and in the center sits a stand of poplars, an altar in the expansive nave of lawn, which is circumferenced by an asphalt path along which walkers can trace pilgrim-fashion the precise outline of a pear. Not far from where I sit is the statue of that old Deist Benjamin Franklin, beside whom Richard Brautigan and an unnamed female companion posed for the cover of Trout Fishing in America. It is a rambling and troubled story, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, but there is nothing I can discern in this bucolic garden, San Francisco’s Gethsemane, to prompt depression, unless it is the ghosts of the Beat Poets who in mystical tantric verse chronicled the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach more than half a century ago.

I’d read on Wikipedia that somewhere on the grounds of the shrine is a small replica of the Papal Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, the original of which overlooks the green Umbrian wine country where St. Francis was raised. Since then I’ve wanted to see it, for a reason that I admit combines my eye for absurd juxtapositions and a recently acquired interest in architecture. The juxtaposition can be found a block down the hill, at the corner of Columbus and Broadway. This is the site of The Condor Club, where history was made on the night of June 16, 1964, when a stripper named Carol Doda bared her breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers. By this act alone she became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment. She called her act the “Topless Swim Dance.” Five years later she added bottomless to her resume. A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.” She has no doubt inspired, toward different ends, millions of pubescent girls and boys. She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented when the State of California honored her with an historical marker (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the entrance to the club to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.

What brings me to the Shrine is not the ancient quarrel between the permanent and the momentary, however. Stone and flesh will turn to dust in the end; that we know. No, what brings me here is a question that has nagged me since my first visit to San Francisco four months ago. Why do we build so ornately, with conscious attention to style and ornament, well beyond the functional need for protection from the elements and predators? It seems like such a hopelessly simplistic question—it’s like asking why we write poetry, why we cook for taste and presentation—that I’m embarrassed to raise it. But if you listen to the question closely, shift the emphasis just so, you’ll hear the voice of the inquisitor, whose question is delivered as a final judgment. In fact, the question is insidiously ambiguous, a thinly disguised command that we strip the ornamentation from our lives and all the possibilities for meaning it promises. The French architect Le Corbusier once called the “styles,” by which he meant the decorative features characteristic of Victorian architecture, “a lie,” and in place of the styles he proposed the “the mass-production house.” He thought the “House-Machine,” as he chillingly called it, superior not only as functional architecture, but as a better way of organizing modern life, healthier to the soul and body. The “styles” were the devil’s own noxious emissions, to be expunged like a disease. That is what I’m thinking about at the moment, scribbling in my notebook on a park bench. The desire for simplicity, which is a legitimate aesthetics, has been overtaken by a call for simpleness. Simplicity, which I find in the clear, sharp lines of a poem by W. S. Merwin, can isolate a truth and make it an object suitable for contemplation, a departure point for comprehending the complexity of the whole through its parts. The merely simple substitutes a phrase for an idea and tries to crush thought under the boulder of its ubiquity. Put simply, it expresses the fear of context and connection, the always possible new arising out of the old, and so tries to reduce the house, the written word, the drawing, tonight’s dinner to the bare minimum needed to keep us dry, to pass on some item of information, to show us what something looks like, to fuel us for another seven or eight hours of a gray and torpid existence.

I make a half-hearted attempt to render Saints Peter and Paul in pencil, but settle for a photograph on my phone. I can easily lose my train of thought, so I continue writing. Joseph Campbell was right: we can gauge the priorities of a culture by the relative prominence of its buildings: cathedrals in the Middle Ages, fifty-story office buildings in modern cities, football stadiums on college campuses. Architecture since the ancients has been the art by which we anchor ourselves to the earth and aspire to the heavens. Its purpose as shelter reminds us that our time on earth is short; nature will catch up with us sooner or later. Its achievement as art communicates our desire for immortality; we reach skyward for the permanent and immutable. Our bodies will crumble to dust, but we believe that marble will outlive rhyme. We build structures to enclose us, but in almost all cases we build larger than our bodies need. Vanity plays a part in this, no doubt, but there is also something in us that exceeds our own body’s physical limitations, and it needs room to stretch. Yet the paradoxical effect of standing in these enlarged spaces, the cathedrals, museums, hotel lobbies, concert halls, parliamentary chambers, which we don’t want to admit, is to feel diminished. Perhaps this is the answer to the question. Somewhere in the expansive volume of this shrine, I imagine that I’ll find a smaller church, small enough to fit on a tabletop, light enough to carry, as weighty as the soul’s transgressions, and a bit more comforting for this reason, a structure that will stand in counterpoint to the engorged and ephemeral object of veneration down the street. At any rate, from the Shrine it will be an easy jog back to Stockton and a turn north to Lombard Street. As an added bonus, there’s an Italian bakery en route, and a friend has admonished me not to pass it without buying some cream puffs.

I sling my backpack over a shoulder and go back the way I came. There is no missing it. When I reach Columbus and Green, the Transamerica Tower, center of the international banking order, poised like a spaceship for takeoff, is pinioned to the earth half a mile dead ahead. The twin alabaster spires of the shrine, elevated against a blue sky above a row of houses, reach skyward to the source of a different kind of wealth. I walk around the outside looking for an entrance to the grounds, but the gate to a narrow walkway leading to the back is padlocked. It is after 4:00 pm, and the shrine’s doors will be locked at 5:00 pm. Perhaps what I’m looking for is inside. I remove my baseball cap and climb the stairs to the main entrance and open the door.

The Parish of St. Francis was established on this site on June 12, 1859. Five days later the first parochial Mass in California was celebrated, possibly by the Blessed Junipero Serra, a Franciscan of the Mission Dolores, in a small wooden shack built by soldiers from the Presidio. Not long after, a larger adobe structure replaced the wooden shanty, but attending to the spiritual needs of San Francisco’s Catholic population, swelled daily by the Gold Rush, was more than a small mission church could handle. On October 2, 1859, parishioners laid the cornerstone of the building I am standing in now, and on March 17, 1860, the new church was formally dedicated. God’s thunderbolts may be tests of strength and faith or the wildly inaccurate tosses of a malicious and capricious will, but in either case the Shrine has seen its travails. The earthquake of 1906 badly damaged the building, as it did so many others below Russian and Nob Hills. The basic structure survived, but the brick exterior, spires and all, was scorched by the conflagration that followed. Everything inside the church was destroyed by fire. It would take engineers months to determine that the building could be saved and that the roof and floor were structurally sound enough to be supported by steel girders. The interior was rebuilt from scratch, with murals done by a migrant Italian painter named Luigi Brusatori and his students, sometime between 1912 and 1921. The rebuilt church was dedicated on March 2, 1919. In 1992, three years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, citing low attendance and seismic unsoundness, closed St. Francis, along with eight other churches, and earmarked it for demolition. The parish headquarters was relocated to the nearby Saints Peter and Paul, but in 1998, at the urging of prominent local Catholics, the building was reopened as a shrine to St. Francis, the only one of its kind outside Assisi. As of 2005, it still stood in need of a 3.8 million dollar seismic upgrade. That same year, something that more than one San Francisco Catholic has called a miracle began to take shape.

Once the echo of the closing door fades, I am surrounded by white columns which rise to white archivolts which are crowned by white arches that reach to a white ceiling that tapers to a point that extends endlessly upward into the great celestial vault of eternal whiteness. Without realizing it, I am craning my neck to look up, which has the double effect of making me feel small against the white vastness above me but a part of it as well. I have always loved old Catholic churches and cathedrals for their spaciousness, for their high vaulted ceilings and great arches and endlessly deep chancels--the newer ones being too modern with their sharp angles and low ceilings and minimalist, postmodern statues of Christ--because they encourage me to look up and so promote the belief that heaven is far larger and more accommodating than even the most liberal Christian can imagine, and because they echo the voices of the past as numerous as Whitman’s multitudes. If the intention of the architect of St. Francis was to represent the experience of passing from life through death to heaven, the journey from the colors and shapes of this world to the blazing white of the next, from the muted tones (the reddish-brown of the carpet, the dark brown of the pews) of the earth to the purity of the sky, then he has not disappointed.

I walk down the center aisle to the steps leading to the chancel. The architecture of every Catholic Church is the sum of its bricks and mortar, of the history written and painted on its walls, and of the carefully laid out geography of worship. Decades ago, when a communion rail separated the chancel from the nave, and the priest distributed the communion wafer directly to the communicant’s tongue, I would stand beside him, robed in a white surplice, and hold the brass paten to catch any wayward hosts that might otherwise fall to the floor. In those days he said the Mass in Latin at the sanctuary altar, his back to the congregation. In the wake of Vatican II the communion rails are mostly gone, and the priest conducts Mass in the vernacular at an altar located near the front of the chancel, facing the congregation. The only vestige of the old medieval geography that remains, besides the sanctuary, are the four or five steps that elevate the chancel, whose care is seen to by the rector, above the nave, the responsibility of the parish laity.

The Shrine of St. Francis reflects these changes, of course. No communion rail, and the main altar, draped in white linen and stationed forward of the sanctuary, is reached by five steps from the nave. The sanctuary altar sits under a ribbed dome, each rib projecting upward to a point from the top of an arch. Within the five arches, framed by columns, are murals, the center one of which shows Francis, who bore the stigmata, at the foot of Christ on the Cross. It is, of course, an imaginative representation of Francis’ devotion, but I notice that Christ’s arm is freed from the crossbeam and draped over Francis’ shoulder in a fatherly gesture. Francis has his arms around Christ’s waist, supporting him, which takes the dead weight of Christ’s body off the other hand, still nailed fast to the beam. Other murals depict moments in Francis’s life: he receives the stigmata above the side altar dedicated to him; he preaches to the birds at the right hand of the dying Christ; he dies attended by friars and seraphim. At the back of the church, overlooking the east aisle, the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ child, receives the prayers of Francis. But the crowning achievements of this church of achievements are the statues, of which I count ten. There is, of course, St. Francis; also St. Clare, Assisi’s lesser-known saint; St. Ann and her teenage daughter, Mary, the mother of Jesus; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception; Our Lady of the Perpetual Miracle; St. Joseph and the Child; The Pieta, a heart-rending study in a mother’s grief; St. Rita of Cascia; St. Therese of Lisieux; and the saint whose own sickliness and poverty made him a friend of the sick and the poor, Anthony of Padua. The church was empty when I entered. Now it is filled.

It is almost five, and I have not found the basilica.

I exit the church and turn left on Valejo Street and walk under the long, late afternoon shadows of trees, across the street from a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, an old haunt of the Beat Poets. When I reach the corner at Grant, I am stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.” In truth, I cannot be certain now that these were his exact words; there was a tree and a mother’s dress. One sentence follows another, a litany of recollections that seem random and private. “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.” “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.” There is nonsense and lucidity. His mother again. I have read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses. He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a poet, which perhaps reinforces my impression. He wears a tattered brown jacket and gray pants, worn work boots, and his generally unkempt appearance is in keeping with the street. His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age. He sits on the sidewalk, back against the adobe wall, and I listen to him, and he never acknowledges my existence. Next to him are a small backpack and a paper bag, and spread out before him are pictures—they appear to be photographs, though from where I stand it is hard to tell. There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no cup with bills stuffed into it, no sign with prices. He speaks on, weaves stories that have an origin and that I want to believe have a destination. I have been told that he might have come from money and lives off a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly gives away. The sun peeks through the trees, and shadows play across his lined face. In it I see pain and years, or simply nothing more than the long wear of life.

Across the street at the café, I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice. He motions for me to set them down next to him without breaking stride. “Do we step on what we can’t see?” I ask him if he has a name, but except for a slight pause in his delivery, as if I’ve stepped on a fellow-actor’s lines, he does not acknowledge me. He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning, hunger. Love? Beauty? I suspect that he’ll forget me as soon as I leave. He appears to have become utterly lost within himself.