Oofty Goofty and the Poet of North Beach

                                   

                                     Frank Walters

Oofty Goofty once played Romeo opposite Big Bertha’s Juliet.  This happened sometime in the 1880s, at the Bella Union Theater on Kearny Street in Chinatown.  Before that he was the Wild Man of Borneo.  He smeared himself in tar and covered himself in horsehair, then climbed into a cage that someone locked behind him, clamped a big hunk of raw meat between his teeth, and jumped up and down yelling “Oofty Goofty Oofty Goofty” while animal blood ran down his chin.  He did this everyday down on Market Street until he got sick and lost his job.  The doctors labored for days to remove the tar and horsehair, but they gave up.  Then they carried him to the roof of the Receivers Hospital and left him there to die.  But Oofty Goofty was one tough motherfucker.  While he lay there delivering up his lamentations to the San Francisco sky, some unnamed benefactor poured a bucket of paint solvent on him.  This saved his life, and then he came down from the roof like Moses from the mountain to tread the boards as a Shakespearean actor.  It was a short career.  It began a little after sunset and ended before midnight of the same day.

You can probably tell by now that here was a man who knew he wanted to be in the entertainment business, but who hadn’t quite figured out the exact nature of his calling.  The cage, the stage: he was like a moon in search of a planet.  One night he got thrown out of a saloon up on the Barbary Coast.  It’s said that when he picked himself up from the cobblestones, he found his calling the minute he realized he didn’t feel any pain.  It was like the heavens had opened up and an angel had come down and read to him from the Big Book of Careers in Entertainment.  “Thou shalt submit thyself to the abuse perpetrated upon thee by others,” the angel said.  And so for the next few years Oofty Goofty walked all over San Francisco carrying a walking stick and a baseball bat.  He would approach one of the good citizens of the city, hand him the stick and the bat, and stand stoically in one spot, waiting for the perplexed passerby to do his worst.  For a dime he could beat Oofty Goofty with the walking stick.  For a quarter he got one, good swing with the baseball bat.  The destitute weren’t forgotten, either.  For a nickel they could kick him between the legs.  Oofty Goofty’s career ended when the Heavyweight Champion of the World, John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy they called him, hit him in the back with the bat so hard that he broke three of his vertebrae.  From then on Oofty Goofty was a broken man.  He spent the rest of his life out of work, walking with a painful limp, one of San Francisco’s homeless.  Within a few years he was dead.

Stories like this are how you know you’re in North Beach.

It used to be you could come here on a Saturday night, when it was called the Barbary Coast, get shitfaced on rum and opium, catch a burlesque show, and wake up the next morning in the bottom of a ship, chained to the timbers, bound for Hong Kong or Shanghai.  Knock back a few, smoke a bowl, get laid, take a boat ride.  It was a rough place, crawling with wild men and wild women from just about everywhere.  One chronicler, Albert Evans, in 1871, called the Barbary Coast “the maelstrom of vice and iniquity, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity.”  A contemporary of Evans, Benjamin Lloyd, wrote that 

The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.

Lloyd must have spent a lot of time there.  But these were Oofty Goofty’s people, his audience, his natural constituency, and they loved him, and he loved them.  But they’re mostly all gone now, and I feel a kind of sadness in that.

What I’m looking for is evidence that Oofty Goofty’s world hasn’t all gone away.  I’ve just made the long climb up Grant Street, through Chinatown, and have turned on to Columbus, the main thoroughfare through North Beach, into the teeth of a stiff, cold breeze.  The sun, just past noon, provides some warmth, but I’ve worked up a light sweat in four miles of walking.  Behind me is the city’s Financial District, all steel and glass and cutthroat Mad Men deals that may be the only legacy the Barbary Coast has left.  The most prominent building I’m leaving behind is the Trans America Tower, the tapering pyramid featured in the commercials.  It looks like a missile poised for takeoff, potent, explosive, but when I look back at it, all I see is an inert, dull-pointed needle stuck permanently in delayed countdown.  Ahead of me is the nineteenth century, quaint, touristy, trendy, the Victorian Age sucked through YouTube like a raspberry through a straw.  I walk through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students.  More of them are sitting at tables outside of cafes and coffee shops tapping into iPhones and laptops and draining lattes and mochas.
Some things never change.  The homeless weave among the hurrying mass like dark splotches on a chest x-ray.  Some are pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags.  The way they fill the volume of the urban world, scavenge cigarette butts from the gutter, bend over head-first into dumpsters, all legs and buttocks in the air, relieve themselves in public: this can be unsettling.  It exposes my own vulnerability to a cutting inward gaze.  I walk right through them.  I tune them out.  I try to talk to them, drawing suspicious gazes from people sitting at the outdoor cafes.  They bear the scars of numerous beatings, but there isn’t a baseball bat in sight.  I walk past the Victorian Bakery on Stockton Street and a man approaches me.  He’s tall, lanky, sports a few days’ growth of beard, an animal look in his eyes.  He looks like he hasn’t slept in a bed in days, but there’s a Bluetooth device in his ear.  When he passes me, I hear him say, “If you don’t give me half of what’s in your savings account by tomorrow, I’ll kill your fuckin’ wife.”  A woman sitting outside the bakery drops her strawberry Danish on the sidewalk.  It lies there, split open like a gutted rabbit.

Literally, the Barbary Coast is gone.  Landfill has extended the original shoreline half a mile into the bay, a highly dubious bit of geological finagling, as the 1989 Loma Prima earthquake demonstrated, to create some additional acreage of expensive real estate.  Families promenade on the streets.  The city’s affluent buy and rent and shop and dine at prices that are instructive of the limits of a third mate’s wages.  Poetry sails forth from upper rooms.  (In fact, I’m about to pass City Lights, where Ginsberg read Howl.)  Genteel nightlife abounds.  It is generally agreed that the 1906 earthquake is responsible for this tepid state of affairs.   In the decade following, the city government, the police department, civic leaders, and The San Francisco Examiner conspired to clean up the district, and by the 1920s almost nothing distinctly Barbary about the area remained.  Riot yielded to order.  Debauchery succumbed to domestication.  Hell yawned, bored.  An age had passed.

There are two stops I want to make.

 The first is Washington Square Park, which sits at the base of Russian Hill, whose eastern face is covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes.   On the western edge of the park is the statue of that old Deist, Benjamin Franklin.  It was here that Richard Brautigan posed with Michaela Le Grand for the cover of Trout Fishing in America.  And it’s the setting for Brautigan’s story of Trout Fishing in America Shorty, the “legless, screaming middle-aged wino,” he calls him, who would wheel himself over to the statue, wine bottle clutched in one hand, and drink until he passed out and fell out of his chair, face first in the grass, Ben Franklin looming above him like a scowling iron cloud.  Trout Fishing in America is a brilliant, rambling, and troubled book, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, after he had been beaten into submission by the baseball bat of the Me Generation’s indifference.  In it lurk the ghosts of the Beat Poets of a decade earlier, when times were flush, who chronicled in mystical tantric verse the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach.  The best of Brautigan’s generation got old, drank too much, got the clap, and turned the music over to the hair bands.

The second is a stretch of Columbus Street between Valejo and Broadway, in front of an art store.  This is the best place to observe two more vestiges of the Barbary Coast.  Directly across the street is the Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi, originally a parish church founded in 1859.  Its twin ivory spires float above the trees and a row of Victorian houses against a blue sky, reaching upward to the source of a different kind of wealth from that down the street.  A block over, to my right, where Columbus intersects Broadway, sits the infamous Condor Club, which opened in 1964 but occupies an eyesore of a building that’s been in existence since the 1870s.  There’s one way to measure the distance between the shrine and the club: I could throw a softball, even with my arthritic shoulder, from one building to the other.  But this is the Barbary Coast, and what happened at the Condor Club seems oddly appropriate, even in the vicinity of the shrine.  On the night of June 19, 1964, a stripper named Carol Doda bared her enormous breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers.  It was a Friday night, start of a summer weekend, and by this act alone the redoubtable Ms. Doda became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment.  (Five years later she went bottomless.)  A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.”  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 anyway when no less an authority than the State of California honored her with a plaque (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the club’s entrance to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.

I cross the street and walk down Valejo, past the shrine, through shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, my destination Telegraph Hill.  Across the street there’s a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, where Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti took their coffee.  When I reach the corner at Grant, I’m stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.”  In truth, I cannot say for certain that these are his exact words.  There is a tree and a mother’s dress, and he speaks in a low, almost inaudible, tone.  One sentence follows another, a random and private litany of recollections.  “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.”  “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.”  There is nonsense and lucidity.  He recalls the corrupting influence of money.  His mother again.  I’ve 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 distracted and bedazzled poet.  He sits on the pavement, back against the brick wall of the shrine, his legs stretched out in front of him.  He wears a tattered brown jacket, spotted with dirt and spills, torn, gray pants and shredded work boots.  And he has the unshowered look and smell of the street life.  His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age.  The lines in his face, the crow’s feet, furrows above his eyes, a pocked, crooked nose that looks like it had been broken: I’m guessing sixties.  I listen to him, but he seems oblivious to my presence.  Next to him are a backpack and a canvas Wal-Mart bag, and spread out around him like satellites are 5 by 7 photographs of San Francisco.  There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no dollar bills stuffed into a cup, no sign with prices.  He weaves tales that might have an origin but might not, and that have no destination.  I have been told that he might have come from a moneyed family and that there is a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly squanders.

At the café I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice and bring them back to him.  Without interrupting himself, he motions for me to set them down next to him.  “Do we step on what we can’t see?”, but this is not asked of me.  I ask him if he has a name, but except for a momentary pause in his delivery, he doesn’t acknowledge me.  I’m not even here.  He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning.  Hunger?  Love?  Beauty?   The sunlight comes through the trees, and shadows play across his craggy face.  In it I see pain and years, or possibly nothing more than the long weary toil of life against time’s walking stick and baseball bat.

Two days later, I was walking up Market Street.  I had forgotten about him.  But when I passed the Starbuck’s at Eddie Street, I saw him.  He was sitting at a table by the window, the same clothes, the same bags, the same photographs.  Opened before him was a journal.  He was lost in thought, writing.