Carver’s Dog

7:50 PM, June 8, 2007. Rodger Jacobs Outside Vesuvio.

Photo snapped by Klieger, without my knowledge, using an Olympus FE230/X790. Sure would like to get a print of this, considering that there are only a small handful of photographs of me in existence. I despise having my picture taken — no, I don’t believe a camera lens steals your soul — so the only good images of me are candid images like this.

A Tuesday night poetry reading at the Beat Museum

Squeezed into a hard gray folding chair and

I’m not drunk enough for this shit but a friend is reading so I have to attend

A young man steps to the mike, yellow-blonde hair, barely old enough to shave

His hand trembles as he recites from the white sheet of looseleaf notebook paper

History is mystery, he reads

And our myths grow longer every night

Dramatic pause and the paper is folded, signifying the end

Polite applause

I’m thinking, that’s all you’ve got?

That’s it?

Paul Valery approached it with more poignance when he said

All history is nothing but myth …

each moment fades each moment

into the realm of the imaginary

Of course there’s always Sherwood Anderson who wrote:

The true history of life

is but a history of moments

Perhaps I just read too much

Which leads me to expect the same from those who want me to

Respect their written words

On The Road

If I had a motherfucking dollar, I told Gregg

For every asshole, usually some twenty-something prick, who came into this bar carrying that book

Tattered paperbacks, sometimes, all dog-eared and shit

They’ll order a beer, usually a Hefeweizen, and sit in one of the corner windows and studiously plunge into their copy of On The Road, a pen clutched in one hand so they can abruptly mark the passage that just leaped off the page

They look up from the book and contemplate the nothingness before their eyes

Sudden enlightenment

Sudden bullshit is more like it

If I had a dollar, I told Greg, for every one of those self-conscious assholes who pass through these doors every day

Then I would be on the road

North Beach a half-buried memory

Rudely stirred awake by stray items found in unpacked moving boxes

A business card

La Parrilla Grill, a fast food joint

Where Broadway and Columbus intersect

Holding up the corner between City Lights Books and Wells Fargo

Charbroiled chicken lacking in taste

Boiled corn on the cob wrapped in greasy aluminum foil

Corn tortillas free of moisture, also hidden in foil

The poor man’s El Pollo Loco, without the flavor, good for a quick bite between beers

Captain Cool told me once that he used to buy buckets of La Parrilla chicken

To feed the starving poets of North Beach

I’ll tell you about Captain Cool another day

Al Wiggins knew a lot about baseball

And jazz

I’ve been told there’s a symbiosis between baseball and jazz

But I don’t know what it is

Or how to find it

One Tuesday afternoon at Vesuvio

With a Giants game on the TV above the bar

A 13-inning showdown with the New York Yankees

The Giants were about to snap an eight-game losing streak

With a 6-5 win over the Yankees

Al looked into his martini glass and said to me and the bartender

The bartender’s name was Andy

Nice kid, 28 or 29, I don’t remember

Shaved head

Loved baseball with a passion and his other passion was playing drums

Professionally

A jazz drummer

I’m sure he understood the intersection of jazz and baseball but he never shared it with me

So Al looks into his martini glass and says to me and Andy

Baseball is not about winning

It is about losing

It is about teaching young men the importance and inevitability, he said

Of losing