The 2020 West Coast Classic Beard and Moustache Championships were held in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I was asked by the SF team, Beards By The Bay, to be a judge, and couldn’t wait to get up there. It has been a few years since I’ve been The Golden City, which is a bit surprising to me since the city is only 6 hours away from my home in LA.
I knew it would be a quick weekend trip, nearly every moment filled with beard competition activities, and there wouldn’t be much time to site see, but the one place I knew I wanted to visit again, if I got the chance to step out, was the City Lights Bookstore. Home to the Beat Generation of the 50’s and 60’s.
As much as I love The Beats in general, my favorite is Jack Kerouac of “On the Road” fame. I guess that is somewhat expected and cliche, considering he was/is the poster boy of Beat writers, but the words of Ginsberg blotted with psychedelics, and Burroughs’ ideas injected with morphine, were a bit too out there for 15 year old me to wrap my head around (I refer you to the Kafka-esque rape of a young boy in “Naked Lunch”). Kerouacs’ passages about travel and brotherhood were a bit more accessible to my experience, comprehension, and personal desires for life up to that point.
I was inspired to pick up Jack’s opus in high school after learning about the countercultures of the 60’s, both political and social. I trudged through the first couple of chapters trying to grasp the style, descriptions, and jazz-like rhythms. Then it bit me. Bit me so hard I still haven’t been able loosen the grip of the literary jaws that clamped onto my soul when I read the passage: “Because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, those who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn, or see a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like Roman candles across the night.”
At that moment, I believed, subscribed, buckled up, and never looked in the rearview mirror as this hip Peter Pan led me on a journey through Beat Neverland; America.
Since that first trip as a sophomore, I’ve been on the road with Jack five times over the years because of how he perfectly describes the fervor and unbridled frenzy of youth. First, the spark of curiosity, then the discovery. Discovery of self, body, the world, and the human condition. The excitement of what’s out there, possibilities in spades, not knowing how you’ll get from point A to your final destination. Just knowing there is a way using nothing but the power of will and a few dollars.
For a kid like me, who felt stuck in small hometown muck, surrounded by those intent on keeping me neck deep in the thick molasses of their own inert lives, that quote BIT me, and invigorated me like no words had before. I get flashes of that electrified virgin invigoration every time I read that passage to this day.
So, I was gonna make sure I saw the “Beat Mecca” some time between the hugs, handshakes, and conversations waiting for me from my own Swiss Army knife of mad bearded friends converging in NorCal that weekend. All from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and mantras, with lives that spark their own shining fireworks in the night sky.
I don’t think they know they’re my personal madmen, my preferred brand of misfits. That I appreciate their pasts, and want to hear of their journey in life that led them to the very moment we greet each other and hang out over beers and time, making love-drunken vows of friendship and forever-brotherhood. That I have a slight envy for their relentless energy, and effortless coolness. They may not be cool to their own mirrors, but what they reflect sure is cool to me, and I couldn’t wait to see them.
So, a couple of my close bearded brethren and I hopped into my invisible low-rider hoop, George, and rolled up the coast to San Fran in search of brotherhood, beards, and beers.
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We emerged from the dragon mouth of Chinatown into North Beach, and strolled the slight incline north. At the corner of Columbus and Jack Kerouac Alley, is the infamous bookstore sitting squarely in the old red light district of San Francisco, surrounded by landmark bars and vintage burlesque joints, looking just like it did in the decades of b&w, and eventually full color, photos I’ve seen/studied since high school.
The City Lights Bookstore was founded by famed writer/poet/painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and partner Peter D. Martin. They opened its doors in 1953 as a “literary meeting place” for readers, authors, artists of all types to explore ideas and contemplate their own. It was the first all paperback bookstore in the nation, though eventually it would carry hardbacks as well.
Two years later, City Lights Publishers opened on the site, and launched the “Pocket Poet Series”. In 1956, the fourth publication on the new City Lights imprint was Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems”, which became a lightning rod for controversy. It was seized by authorities, but instead of arresting the author who was out of the country at the time, they arrested its publisher, Ferlinghetti, and charged him with peddling obscene material.
This may sound minor today, an “obscene” book, but because of this landmark First Amendment case, which he won being represented by the ACLU, a legal precedent was set for all future publications that protects controversial works with “redeeming social importance”. That decision would also be used as a building block in the future pornography showdown, The People vs Larry Flynt.
The infamy of the trial put a spotlight on the bookstore as a beacon for free thought and speech, and would continue to publish underground and controversial material. For example, in the 70’s, the punk rock/new wave magazine “Search & Destroy”, which eventually evolved into RE/SEARCH magazine, was founded in the basement. And in 2001, because of the fight for free speech in 1956, City Lights became a historical landmark, to stand forever as an emblem of good ol’ American freedoms.
We explored the store, stepping into the 3-story structure, walking through the fog of Beat ghosts, as well as the generations of spectres of their apostles, like myself, who have made a pilgrimage to glance its shelves. Passing by posters of Jack Kerouac in arms with road-brother Neal Cassady, a nude hippie era Allen Ginsberg, and signs of quotes and inspiration hand painted by founder Ferlinghetti, hanging over the stacks and along stairways, that look more like homemade political protest signs, than a page from a daily motivational quote calendar. Something tells me that was the intention.
We climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the “Poetry Room” where most of the beat literature can be found. Then down into the stacks located in the basement where the Beats used to meet and trade ideas, hiding from the eyes of their public, and the noise of strangers’ admiration.
I felt at home here in this store, much like I do around my own group of bearded “mad men”. A calmness and belonging I don’t feel often. No pretension that I’m a writer like the beatniks, or even aspire to be. But tapped into a peace within myself standing in the library-quiet walls that hold the world’s left-of-center ideas and possibilities organized from A – Z on shelves for easy reference, in the one place where it is okay, by law, to discover them, question, learn, and share my own hypothesis. Where I can stand, with the world, and am understood.
“The books there are a way to look at the world, to be in the world, or impact the world, or kind of understand the world.” – Paul Yamazaki; employee since 1970
