So you wake up and it's glorious sunshine and you walk across the Golden Gate bridge and the skyline of San Francisco glitters in one direction and the bright orange cables of the bridge stretch out in front of you and the bay spreads out beneath you. Even dropping your sunglasses over the edge and into the water cannot detract from the fact that this really is the most beautiful of cities.
And then it's on to a bar to celebrate this fact with a gin and tonic. Specs, where the beat poets used to hang out, is down an alley in North Beach, surrounded by strip joints, bookshops and Italian restaurants. And I thought I had the Americans sussed out. But here I was in San Francisco, where everyone either belongs to a bookclub or is a writer. Even the doorman told me about his novel, although he also said "I started a Jack Kerouac once but threw it across the room after two pages."
The man sitting next to me at the bar was reading a book of short stories by Sam Shepherd, and he said things like "George Bush is so stupid" and he had a sense of humour and, goddammit, he was mighty fine-looking too. And we talked about literature and San Francisco and it turned out he lived in the Haight which was on my list of areas to check out. And the barman overheard and said: "You could wake up at his house and see the Haight in the morning," and, well, it would have been rude not to after that. So we established that he was joking about the tattoo of an American eagle bearing a machine gun on his back and headed to some bars in the Haight, and though I only meant to stay for one it was obvious after a few pints that the barman had been right.
His apartment was up one of San Francisco's many hills and the back porch overlooked the Golden Gate bridge, or so he said, but it was foggy so I had to take his word for it and the next morning I rose before the fog so I never found out.
What's an English graduate with a slight hangover and some left-over teenage angst to do on a Sunday morning but drink coffee and read Howl by Allen Ginsberg, bought at the City Lights bookstore where the banner outside reads "Dissent is not un-American". Then on to Vesuvio on Jack Kerouac Alley where the sign says "Beware pickpockets and loose women". They serve a drink called the Jack Kerouac which is tequila, rum, orange juice, cranberry juice and a squeeze of lime, though the barman told me that a real Jack Kerouac drink would be three bottles of wine in an alleyway.
In Vesuvio I read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which I bought in a bookshop where the sign says "Shoplifters will be killed and eaten". In the book Miles Archer is killed near a road which I have walked down several times in the past week, where steam really does rise from the grates in the middle of the road, and I thought to myself once again, what a wonderful city. What a wonderful city even though alcohol is banned outside and smoking is banned inside, and though I don't much like beer and I don't smoke, I am offended on behalf of all those people who would love to enjoy a pint and a cigarette at the same time, and I wondered if I moved here would I take up smoking just to protest as, after all, dissent is not un-American.
In Monterey I bought John Steinbeck's Cannery Row in a shop on Cannery Row and basked in the sunshine and pretentiousness of it all. "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream," wrote Steinbeck. The canneries are long closed so there is no longer any stink, just amazing views of the ocean where sea otters, seals and sealions laze on the rocks. A short boat ride away, the whales looked on as a school of maybe 50 dolphins raced alongside our boat.
And then to Kalisa'a, formerly La Ida, where Eddie in Cannery Row works as a part-time barman, and I stopped for a cup of tea and a cookie before heading to Pacific Grove, where in a wood five minutes from the ocean thousands of black and red Monarch butterflies go to mate. All of which more than made up for having to spend a week in Las Vegas.
