In Which We Was Girls Together

The Opposite of Lonely

by ARIANNA STERN

When I came back from my San Francisco spring break trip, I tried to imagine what it was that made me feel so elated the whole time I was there. The exact feeling that I had — one of exuberance, powerfulness, and confidence, almost a feeling of invincibility — I hadn’t felt since I was 18.

Zoey, my host on the trip, was my brother’s onetime girlfriend of eight years. From early on, I intuited that we were the same in some way. Both of us grew up in the same wealthy suburb, grateful for our education but alienated by the homogeneity, segregation, and isolation of our hometown. In high school, she and I ate noodles together, and I learned to say “sex worker,” and Zoey would say sage things like “It’s just like, part of growing up in the suburbs, being bored and assuming that everyone else is having more fun than you’re having.” We put a great deal of thought into D.I.Y. haircuts and the trajectory of Claire Danes’ acting career.

We considered writing “Vote for Nixon” in the sand, but thought better of it.Explaining a friendship like ours to someone outside of it poses a challenge, because pop culture mostly tells stories about women and men. In Toni Morrison’s Sula Nel laments the end of her life’s most important friendship when she says “We was girls together,” and despite my dissimilarity to Morrison’s characters, I knew just what Nel meant. I mourned for her.

There’s something about a friendship in which the other person knows the intimate details of your life and the content of your dreams and still believes that you belong in the life that you imagine for yourself, in spite of everything. The two of us did a lot of imagining. Zoey saw the interior of my childhood home before my parents made much money. She knew that it was dirty, dark, and old. Other kids rarely came to visit, and so I spent a lot of time alone, hoping to leave but not being able. Instead of physically leaving, the two of us dreamed a lot: about the day when I would be a published writer and she would be a chemist living in sunny California. Those are the best kind of friendships, where each friend dreams on behalf of the other.

little silver bugs crawl around the wet sand. They look like beads of mercury.My brother and Zoey broke up when I had just turned 20 and it was wordlessly understood that I couldn’t talk to her for a while, out of loyalty, or out of sensitivity, or out of cowardice. She once promised my brother that she would call me, but she never did. “I was pretty sure your whole family hated me,” she told him. In October I sent Zoey a terrifying email asking her if she wanted to talk again, and we did. And then it just kept happening, each time less frightening than the last.

This city sometimes looks like an easy level of SuperMario.

At first I attributed my joyfulness on the trip to the series of happy accidents that occurred while I was there. To be fair, there were many. Zoey and I ate free falafel pieces and creamy gelato, and drank coffee that got a little thick at the bottom, like caffeinated caramel (please create this, universe). I unexpectedly saw the Gerhard Richter painting from the cover of Daydream Nation at the MoMA and choked up at the first Kahlo piece I’ve ever seen in person. The night of their show, I met most of Neon Indian on a bench outside of a museum. I said hello and wished them good luck, and thought to myself, What are the odds that I would meet this specific group of tourists, as a tourist myself, in a city with over one million people? But San Francisco just seemed to work that way, producing a series of fortunate coincidences that cumulatively seemed a little magical. Strangers introduced themselves, the races were integrated, and even the panhandlers seemed more convincing when they said you were pretty.

It took me a while to realize that I was happy because I was living on borrowed optimism — Zoey’s — because she was still doing what she always did. She imagined that things would be good for me, she planned for it, and they were. Our adolescent sadness seemed like an ugly, abandoned thing, like an empty junk food wrapper left roadside. I thought of it only when I remembered why the two of us live this way, what my life was like when being an independently mobile 21-year-old writer — or what her life was like when being a PhD candidate in Berkeley — seemed like a distant, romantic fantasy. We dreamed a lot, for each other.

Arianna Stern is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"No Aloha" - The Breeders  (mp3)

"Impossible Love" -  Gigi (mp3)

"Local Joke" - Neon Indian (mp3)

"Wellington's Wednesdays" - The Weakerthans (mp3)

In Which Robert Creeley Heads West

Last Night

thoughts on san francisco, march-june 1956

by ROBERT CREELEY

There are lovely moments in the world when persons and place 'burn with a like heat,' as Olson would say. Who knows why, finally, except that some intuition or habir or simply coincidence has arranged that this shall be the case — and all those to be blessed, truly, will be present.

I felt that way, arriving in San Francisco in March of 1956. The city was humanly so beautiful, but that in fact would not have changed my mind in itself. I'd left Black Mountain just at the turn of the year, in real despair, with a marriage finally ended, separated from my three children, very confused as to how to support myself — and so I had headed west, for the first time, thinking to be rid of all 'easternisms' of my New England upbringing and habit.

I had friends living in New Mexico — a phenomenal place in its own right — and thought to settle there, but after a month or so I found myself restless, dependent, and in no sense clearer as to what might be my next move. A old friend and student from Black Mountain, Ed Dorn, was living in San Francisco, so that's where I headed — to see the Pacific Ocean, if nothing else.

ed dorn, 1977

I got there mid-afternoon, if I remember correctly. Ed and Helene gave me a whirlwind tour of the city, in their tiny Morris Minor, and we drank a lot in celebration. Ed told me that Rexroth had generously invited us to dinner but that he had to go to work at the Greyhound Bus Terminal at six. I in the meantime was getting drunker and drunker, and recall vomiting heavily in the street before going up to Rexroth's apartment. People had already eaten, but made no point of my late arrival. Later that same night, returning to the Dorns' apartment, I was charmed by the arrival of Allen Ginsberg at midnight (he got off work at the Greyhound Terminal at that hour) and we talked much of the night about writing and "Projective Verse" and his own interest in Kerouac and Burroughs.

jack kerouac

My information of the former was meager, but fascinating, i.e., Robert Duncan had told me that Kerouac was the man who had written a thousand pages in which the only apparent physical action was a neon sign, over a storefront, flashing off and on. Burroughs, in a story that had him confused with Jack, was said to have been asked at a party to demonstrate his expertise with revolvers by shooting an apple off the head of his wife. A gun was given him, he took aim and fired — and sadly killed her. His apocryphal remark was: I should never have used a 45. They always undershoot.

william burroughs

Rexroth's weekly evenings proved an intensive meeting ground. The Place, a great bar with genial host Leo and sometime bartender John Ryan, was another. One night Allen asked the Dorns and myself to meet him there after he got off work, so he could introduce us to Jack Kerouac, now back in the city. We got there early, and sat a small table in the front of that small space — and waited, peering about to try to figure out which one of the others might be Jack.

I was particularly drawn to a man who was sitting up against the back wall, on the way to the toilet, seemingly alone, sort of musing, with extraordinary eyes and a head that had somehow a larger than 'life size' intensity. When Allen came in, he asked us if we'd seen Jack, and we said, no — and then he pointed to this man I'd been watching, and said, there he is.

But we had little conversation that night, unhappily. Jack was pretty comatose from drinking, and when we all got back to the apartment he was sharing with Al Sublette to eat — the large steak, I remember, kept getting dropped on the floor in the process of being cooked — Jack passed out on a bed, and when I was delegated to wake him up, he regarded me with those extraordinary eyes and I felt like a didactic idiot.

creeley

Remembering now, it all tends to swirl. Great parties at Locke McCorkle's house out in Mill Valley — Allen and Peter charmingly dancing naked among a dense pack of clothed bodies, flowers at the prom! Jack and I sitting on the sidelines, shy, banging on upended pots and pans, 'keeping the beat.' Gary Snyder's wise old-young eyes, his centeredness and shyness also. Phil Whalen's, "Well Creeley, I hope you know what you're doing..." Visits to Mike McClure's with Ed — Ronnie Bladen upstairs in their undesignated commune. Mike practicing the trumpet (in the cellar?) — anyhow, blasts of sound, and talk of Pollock, energy. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, standing outside his great and initial City Lights Bookstore, asking me what living was like in Mallorca — cheap?

He'd had the care to review The Gold Diggers for the San Francisco Chronicle, and that was surely a first. Walking around the city with Allen and Phil, Allen reading us Howl, which he had in a big black binder notebook, each time we'd stop at a curb or in a cafe (Mike's — great Italian food) or just on a bench in the park.

Later I typed the stencils for a small 'edition' of that transforming poem — I was trying to get work and Martha Rexroth gave me the job, as I remember, Alenn had given her — prior to City Lights publication.

There were other dear friends of that time, James Broughton (an old friend of Duncan's), Kermit Sheets, Madeline Gleason. (Duncan himself was in Black Mountain, but his care that I should be at home in the city was so kind.) I'd go to them when I was exhausted, and that was frequently. I finally managed to get an apartment on Montgomery Street, though I never succeeded in living there. I did write some poems, though — on a huge typewriter Martha had got me. "Please", "The Bed", "Just Friends" (old Charlie Parker favorite), "She Went to Stay", "A Folk Song", and "Jack's Blues" among them.

One night I invited the gang over, like they say, and one of the company was a particularly ominous heavy, whose pleasure was turning school girls on (there were two with him) to heroin, and finally I got freaked. Peter Orlovsky, true angel, finally managed to clear the whole room of people, then paused himself at the door before leaving, to say, would you like me to turn off the light?

We talked endlessly, day and night. We rehearsed our senses of writing, possible publication, shop talk. Jack was not going to let the editors cut up On the Road the way they had The Town and the City — he was getting himself ready for Malcolm Cowley's impending visit, 'to talk it over,' which Jack rightly feared might be heavy-handed 'advice.'

Both Ed and I were asked a lot of questions about Olson and his "Projective Verse" — was it just more razzle-dazzle intellectualism? McClure and Whalen were particularly intrigued, and were at this time already in correspondence with him. Allen, as always, was alert to any information of process that might be of use.

So time went by — and it was so packed with things happening, it now seems strange to me it was just a short time — only three months. Came June, and I was restless again, and so headed back to New Mexico, with huge rocksack (I managed to get all my stuff and Martha's typewriter into somehow) and sleeping bag Jack had helped me locate in an army surplus store on Market Street. I still have them. The sleeping bag, in fact, is presently on the bed in the next room.

Why does that matter. At times it seems all we have of the human possibility, to keep the faith — though why an old sleeping bag and a primordial army issue rucksack now looking like a faded grey ghost should be the tokens, one must figure for oneself. Every time I drive cross country, in the underpowered battered VW I likewise hold on to, hitting those Kansas spaces (where Burroughs rightly remarked, one gets the fear), I think of Neal Cassady and that Pontiac he could wheel round corners as if on a turntable. Pure burning energy. Listening to fantastic "Bombay Express" Indian record of Locke's Neal flagging the train on through...

People give you life that way. Things you didn't think you knew or could so. Suddenly it's possible. Answers you never expected to come out of your own mouth. One time — after a night-long party at Locke's — people had variously come to rest either in the house at the bottom of the hill, great sloping ground of musky eucalyptus and grass, or else in the small cabin towards the top, kids and big people all together in one heap — Jack proposed he and I sleep outside just to dig that wild soft air and tender darkness. I woke in bright dazzling morning light, with Jack's face inches from mine, asking in mock sternness: Are you pure? To which I replied, as if for that moment in his mind, that's like asking water to be wet.

Buffalo, N.Y.

September 13th, 1974

"Flash" — Pharrell Williams ft. Usher (mp3)

"Cheat" — Pharrell Williams ft. the Dogg Pound (mp3)

"Announcement" — Pharrell Williams ft. Common (mp3)

"Still Got It For Cheap" — Pharrell Williams ft. The Clipse (mp3)