Frank the poet.

While living in San Francisco in 1978 and '79, I had a friend, don't know what happened to him, who made his living designing boilers. He designed boilers for apartment buildings, for heating, and for various kinds of industry. I'm not certain what was the biggest one he ever designed, but he seemed to like the bigger ones.  

He found his job humorous. In fact he found practically everything humorous, in some inscrutable way. (He wasn't into self-analysis.)  He was also a poet. He wrote long, complex poems, which I couldn't make head nor tails of, but they looked impressive, and he was an insider at the City Lights Bookstore.   

He lived on Geary Street, near Chinatown and he was a third generation Irish San Franciscan.  I had a whole crew of these Gold Rush descendant Irishman friends who I met partly by accident, by running into them in the neighborhood, where I lived in a piss-in-the sink hotel owned by Hindus.  

I say partly because I am half Irish-Wasp cross, and looked more that way than Montenegren, at least when I was younger and thinner, and these Irishmen, several of them cops and firemen, thought I was one of them.  

Frank knew North Beach as well as anybody.  He took me around to the Jazz Clubs, where I met one of his good friends, Horace Silver.  He also told me, and here I'll have to pussy foot around a little, we were both former drunks, about a day he spend sharing a gallon of Gallo Pisano [sp.] with Richard Brautigan. They had found a nice comfortable empty abandoned apartment in Chinatown, off Grant St., and were settling in, when there was a minor earthquake tremor which caused the floors and walls to wobble.  Brautigan panicked, and Frank sat down on the floor and leaned up against the wall, and said, "Com'on over here and lean against the wall, it's the safest place."  Frank leered and chuckled when he told me this. He seemed to know I'd get the joke. He had the standard San Fran Local's view of earthquakes, which amounted to a very hearty fatalism. 

I suppose as one drunk to another we were both familiar with the tendency to take foolish risks easily but reasonable risks fearfully. And I expect that is why when my sister read my previous post, she was concerned that I was being too revealing concerning something in my history which I referred to somewhere as abuse, which I surmised may have contributed to my preferred drug of choice in the Sixties. So I should make it clear that I'm not Blogging here for the purpose of dumping my damaged psych on you for the purpose of illustrating how I put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Let's just say that like most people, I wasn't able to avoid some hard knocks in the process of aging.

My main purpose in advertising for myself is in convincing The Other, whomever and whatever will listen to me, that my combination of voyeurism and fascination with narrative has been put to some good use through my habit of writing things down.