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the country acting like characters out of On The Road. It took about six years to get published, and he really was writing about an earlier scene-Ginsberg was already gone when I came here-but they were associating our ear, the people in North Beach in the late Fifties, with Kerouac, while we were really a post-Kerouac era. Philip Whalen says that if a "beat generation" existed, it was really Kerouac and his friends in New York in the late Forties.

If you really want to know what North Beach was like then, if they will take to you, some weeknight when there are no tourists around, about midnite, go into a couple of the hardcore bars: Gino and Carlo's on Green Street or the 1232 Club on Grant Avenue, where survivors still come around; they were there before the publicity hit in the Fifties and are still there now after it's over. You might meet Bob Miller, who was drinking buddy of Kerouac's or Jack Micheline, the greatest unknown poet in America except among the underground (his first book of poetry had an introduction by Kerouac); the legendary sax player Bob Seider, who was the symbol of North Beach then (ask him about the night he outblew Sonny Rollins at the Jazz workshops)/

And then there is Sheila Albany, who lived with Allen Ginsberg in 1951, when he first came out here from Mexico. Byron Hunt, an artist, introduced her in Vesuvio's to this nice young man who had just come to town. Sheila at that time was working in advertising at the Emporium. She asked her boss if they could get a job for Allen, and although there was nothing at the Emporium, they eventually got him a job as a market researcher for Town Oller Associates.

In Allen Ginsberg in America, by Janet Kramer, the only mention of Sheila is "a girl who lived with Ginsberg." Barbara Gravelle of Intersection, a Center for arts and religion in North Beach, is doing a book on North Beach women of that period. She had sone lengthy taped interviews with Sheila. When her book is published it will do much to reveal the influence Sheila had upon Howl and Ginsberg.

Artist Robert LaVigne had pained a beautiful nude portrait of Peter Orlovsky. When Allen saw it, he fell in love with Peter on sight, though LaVigne was still involved with Orlovsky. Sheila says Allen went to a panel of psychiatrists at Langley-Porter because he didn't trust the consensus of just one--he wanted to find out if he were really a homosexual or not. They told him he was, and he should live the way he wanted to be, a homosexual and a poet.

One day, Sheila came home and found Ginsberg in bed with Orlovsky. She nearly jumped out the window. She was in a rage. Petter and Allen then moved into the Hotel Wentley. That was the end of the relationship.

She typed the first draft of Howl (which she lost) and sometimes when Ginsberg comes to town he offers her more money, unable to believe she really lost it. She was a major influence; certain passages she influences, other passages were about her, yet Ginsberg remains silent about her influence.

Or talk to Dino the bartender at the Washington Square Bar and Grill, who grew up and had been in North Beach all his life, or Shig, who really does know more than anyone else, although he might not appreciate me sending all you people there.

Take along a flashlight, so finally you can look underneath the fire-police call box outside 1398 Grant Avenue where the Bagel Shop was. One time it was painted red, white, and blue with "fuzz is our friend" on it until the unfriendly fuzz removed it, but underneath it in the cement, if you look hard enough, is a fitting epitaph still inscribed: "A square is a square is a square."

As for me, I am going to try to kick North Beach and, like Voltaire's Candide, cultivate my garden.

Mark Green is a prominent photographer in San Francisco and was a bartender at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in the vintage years of the Beach.

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I'll always remember, for instance, the first time I scored in the head at the Caffe Trieste. I mean really scored. I'd just come up from Sur, balling in Sur, balling on the way up in the back of a '59 Buick, paper-bag-wrapped bottle of Muscatel in the front seat, smoking a jay, two chicks in the back seat and one (or was it two?) in the truck, just soaking up the energy from that old transcendental popper they called the road, as in On the Road, balling as soon as we hit the San Mateo-San Francisco county line, thinking about balling in relation to the conquest of American literature in the last thirty three years by a bunch of fags and pussies, when someone on the set (in the car, that is) mentioned the Caffe Trieste and how nice it would be to cop a cap(cappuccino, of course) before getting aback to the pad and down to some serious balling. Well, we pulled up to the Trieste, checked for heat, fuzz, pigs, laws, The Man and federales, and moved right into the scene. Back into the scene, I mean. When you've been on the set as long as I have you know you've never left. I felt good, even a little paranoid. I knew the men's room in the Trieste would be clean, that I was back on the clean scene, the set, the last clean thing in the heart of the vast and mysterious country we call America, as it struggles with the beauty, truth and convenience of revolt in North Beach.

When I think of the Trieste I can't help remembering the first cappuccino I scored in Mexico. Ah, Mexico! A country of tough men and docile women twirling in the vast and mysterious heart of its native soul, Mexico would be a beautiful place if the Mexicans would get their shit together. First time I copped a cap in Mexico I pulled up in front of the Cafe Huevos de Maricon in Mazatlan, there on the malecon between the eraser factory and the enchilada works. The Huevos de Maricon is simple, just the everyday peasant foods, the truthful and beautiful food the Mexican (in his Indian ignorance) endures every day. Cappuccino was there, hilariously misspelled, between Hamburguesas Estilo Aspen and Pollo Frito a la Cuno. The face owner, a paranoid half-Indian name Juan, just down from the mountains, with the look of a thirty-day burro-back journey into the crazy soul of simple, vast and mysterious Mexican reality, came over with his hand on the butt of his .38 Super, over there where Mexicans carry their pieces, in the crotch of that mysterious and vast Mexican reality.

Well to make a long story short, I told Juan to bring me a cappuccino and a napoleon, or some croissants, or "one of those little honey things, with the flaky pastry," as we call them back on the set in North Beach. And, with typical Mexican treachery, Juan brought me a chicken with mole sauce. Naturally I didn't want to look like a gringo, so I checked for the heat, made sure the place was clean of fags, and swallowed the hot, rich, truthful, beautiful, simple, crazy, vast and mysterious mole. Couple of hours later, strolling on the malecon watching the gringos check each other out, and remembering the sense of loss I first experienced when I realized how difficult it is to remember women's names after you ball the, I appreciated the value, on the scene, of a clean and accessible potty, I mean shitter.
-The Pisco Kid