They say we’re a town full of losers. They say we’re eccentric, eclectic—marginal. Maybe I’m exaggerating. But when somebody on the East Coast starts talking about a rivalry between New York and San Francisco the truth is they’re trying to shaft us. They’re saying they’re the best. They’re snobs. But I suppose we’re snobs, too. Here in San Francisco we’re proud to be the opposition. We’re glad to be living on what New Yorkers regard as the wrong coast, with the wrong publishers, galleries, reputations. We are what we are. And damn the rest of them. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m still flying the flag for the San Francisco Renaissance, all the poetry readings, mimeographed magazines, improvised galleries, experimental films.
Of course, I’m just kidding around here. Sort of kidding around. We weren’t—we aren’t—against East Coast success. Not really. Consider Mike, with his East Coast awards, still one of us. He’s the real deal, though some of his poems, beautiful as they are, are a little too muffled for my taste. I’ve said that to him—and he’s okay with it. He knows I think Partly Cloudy and Cooler is a great book. Mike is Indian, Indian from the subcontinent. He’s half Indian, to be precise. Father was some kind of import-export guy from Bombay. Met his mother in San Francisco. They went back to India. Then she bailed. Years ago, she appeared at a couple of Mike’s readings, around the time his poems were starting to pick up a following. She was much taller than Mike, noisily talking to all Mike’s friends, nothing like Mike. Mike, with his sharp features and small, dark hands, is probably at the Silver Spur right now, nursing his glass of vodka, two rocks, no twist. (Years ago I did some bartending.) He has a great head of hair, I’ll give him that, thick Indian hair. Still living on the floor of a Victorian in the Haight that he bought a dozen years ago when they were dirt cheap, the down payment from his first Guggenheim. He’s very proud of a group of small Rajput paintings, bought from Ray Lewis years ago, when Ray was just starting out, supplying Piranesi etchings of the sights of Rome to Nob Hill decorators but really into Indian miniatures, Islamic calligraphy, and other stuff he just thought was cool. “My Indian heritage,” Mike says, only half ironically, about those miniatures with the tiny figures bowing to each other.
Mike reappeared last week. There he was in the late afternoon, sitting at the far end of the bar at the Silver Spur. (I prefer a booth.) I happened to be in SF for a couple of days, printing a broadside for a poetry event in Bolinas. I was happy with the way it was going. I’d started to put it together, using a funky old set of Garamond type, all caps, but a couple of the vowels, the A and the E, were so worn they weren’t printing. I substituted a stark sans serif for those letters, and the result was kind of wonderful, the As and Es making a jazzy pattern weaving in and out around the Old World Garamond. Although I’m content and maybe more than content spending most of my time here in Marin, things do get slow. As long as I can avoid rush hour traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, I enjoy coming into the city to work on an interesting job, maybe hook up with some of the gang, sleep on the daybed in my shop—if it’s just for a few days. Anyway, I was taking a break from the Bolinas broadside. I went over to the Silver Spur. Sat with Mike. He’d just spent a week in New York on some sort of awards panel. He made some cryptic remarks about how badly best-selling novelists behave when it comes to distributing money among up-and-coming authors. I’m not sure exactly what he said. He speaks softly, not looking at you when he talks, facing forward on his barstool, elbows resting on the bar, so he’s a little hard to hear, even in the late afternoon, before any money’s been dropped in the jukebox.
But this isn’t about Mike; this is about Marcia, who also had some success back east. Of course Mike and Marcia knew each other. They both went back to Berkeley days. So do I. Marcia, with her dark bangs, was voluptuous or fat, depending on how you saw it. Zaftig is probably the word. If I hesitate it’s only because the Yiddish sounds a little odd, coming out of my formerly Protestant mouth. I was born a few hours south of here, in Carmel. My dad was an architect who’d trained in London; he’d grown up there but had the wanderlust, so he would say, and found his way to California. Anyway, Marcia was the leader of our college crew. She was bossy, sometimes overbearing, but I wonder if we would’ve ever had a party if Marcia hadn’t said, “Let’s have a party!” Mike, although he hung around with us, seemed a little too straight arrow. Always the diplomat. Marcia called him “the ambassador,” behind his back. She was catty like a schoolgirl, mean about the people she’d tossed out of the club or at least threatened to dump. Marcia and Mike bonded later, a few years after Berkeley, bored or maybe annoyed by what they regarded as the daydreamers among us. I guess I’m one of the dreamers.
Frankly I’m not always all that clear about the difference between what we were like in college and what we were like a little later—or now, twenty-some-odd years later. Did we think of Marcia as girlish back then, when she actually was a girl? And what of Jack (John to you) Johanson? I wonder if I’m confusing the Jack I knew back then with Jack a few years later. When we were still kids the moustache and the cowboy swagger looked a little camp. Marcia kidded that he’d woken up one morning and decided he was in some old Hollywood Western. I remember her saying that to his face. Now that he’s had some paintings hanging at the Museum of Modern Art, I guess people think the moustache—it’s developed the slightest touch of gray—looks old masterish. Marcia wouldn’t give him an inch. “Those paintings only hung at the Modern for a couple of months, the museum didn’t buy anything, so what’s the big deal?” Marcia liked to say it was Evelyn, Jack’s wife, who was the really talented painter. “Evelyn knew how to let loose,” I heard Marcia announce on more than one occasion. Of course Evelyn had stopped painting practically as soon as she met Jack. I wonder how many of her things Marcia ever actually saw. But Marcia had a point to make, not so much to put Evelyn up as to put Jack down.
As for me, I’m not good for much of anything except keeping the old printing press running. I still know how to improvise a new part when an old one breaks down. I’ve managed to keep my little enterprise more or less moving forward, getting out the magazine, Velocipede I call it, a couple of times a year, publishing a few books of somebody else’s poems, and then, once or twice, my own. I was just getting the press rolling when Marcia and I were together, a decade out of Berkeley. Since then I’ve made a living from it—barely. Marcia proofread the very first issue of Velocipede. She was terrific, a whiz when it came to straightening out grammatical messes. If we’d stuck together it might not have taken me another eighteen months to publish the second issue. But whatever it was that Marcia and I were up to back then, Marcia was too restless (or relentless) to really settle in with a guy she’d first slept with way back in senior year. I was okay with its being over, although it was a hassle finding a new place to live. I liked her, but she also got on my nerves. Then, flash forward, Marcia was back on our coast after her triumphant five or six years in New York, and suddenly Marcia and I had been shacked up for two years. Or I’d been shacked up with her, it was her house, after all. Her time in New York had come to an end, for reasons I never entirely understood. She could have stayed in Manhattan despite some career disappointments. If she had, I’m convinced she would’ve done damn well. Instead she chose to come back here and hang out with her old friends—despite all the bellyaching she’d done about San Francisco before she left and continued to do even after her return.
But I guess I should begin at the end, or at least the beginning of the end. Which means San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, officialdom incarnate, the full treatment: marble, red carpets, polished brass, everything academically symmetrical, twinkle twinkle of bright light refracted o cut crystal. “Oh shit,” had been my reaction when Marcia announced that we were going to see yet another farewell tour by Martha Graham, the old bag still dragging around the stage. The piece was called Cortege of Eagles. I think she quit dancing later that year. Easy for Marcia to say we should go see Martha Graham. She never learned to drive and expected me to find parking right in front of the Opera House: “You know how I hate to walk,” she liked to remind me.
“We’ve got comps,” was her reply to my, “Who wants to see Graham, anyway?” “It’ll be a goof,” she added, “a goof, Burt.” Marcia still got comps, lots of them. Even though she was no longer writing about books, plays, and art exhibitions, there were people who couldn’t quite believe it. So the publicists for writers, theaters, and museums kept writing and phoning, even offering to fly her back to New York to see this or that, once or twice mentioning a free trip to Europe. She’d get off the phone and growl at me. Whatever the project, her reaction was the same. “I’m sure it’ll be a fiasco. I’m going to hate it. And I don’t have the patience for any more hate. Which means I have nothing more to say. I’ve written the curmudgeon out of myself.” There was a lift in her voice as she explained herself to me. “I’m a changed woman,” she announced, only half sarcastically. She certainly didn’t mind that there were people who figured her career was going to flame up again, with the latest Broadway sensation receiving the full Marcia Lang treatment in The New Yorker or who knows where else.
So there I was, coming down the aisle at the Opera House after a quick pre-performance leak, slipping past rows of what back in college we’d called the squares, Pacific Heights professionals left and right, some of them still milling around in the aisles, making it harder to get by. Marcia was way up front, nothing but the best for Marcia. She was standing in the aisle, bent over Virginia Adams. Ginny, her long hair just beginning to turn gray—I think she was a few years older than us, maybe close to fifty—was in a Mexican muumuu, huge African beads hanging off her skinny neck. She was giving Marcia a fixed, concentrated look. Ginny just barely survives on some sad do-gooder part-time job. But the Opera House manager or assistant manager was one of our old Berkeley buddies. Back in 1949 or 1950 he’d directed a Pirandello that he claimed was a West Coast premiere. He gives Ginny a ticket when he can. “Poor Ginny,” Marcia whispered to me as the lights were going down, “she has aches and pains in every bone of that undernourished body of hers. She makes me glad I’m overweight. Wow. The old gang’s sure all here. They must have been having trouble selling seats, if Ginny got a freebie. Funny. We thought Martha was so important when we were in college, and now everybody’s here to watch her fall at on her face-lifted face. I really could write this up. Do a job on it.”
Heavy curtain up; the moaning of sentimental strings; lights rising on some wedges and rectangles of scenery, guys and girls, the guys practically naked save for bits and pieces of neo-Greek get-up. Something about gods and heroes, I got that, but I hadn’t had a chance to look at the program so couldn’t really make out who was who or what was what, aside from knowing that Graham was playing Hecuba and the Trojan War was ending and pretty much everybody was dead. Graham was there alright, an old lady pacing around the stage or sitting on a stool. I suppose the stool was designed by Noguchi, her longtime collaborator. She was rail thin, at least what you could see of her that wasn’t covered by a cape of blackest black, her black dyed hair topped by some kind of golden headdress that matched a golden snake winding up her arm. She wasn’t doing much, just ailing around with her arms and opening her mouth in what was either a pantomime of a shriek or a laugh, I wasn’t sure. I fell into a funk, thinking how much I hate Greek myths and tragedies. For some now incomprehensible reason, I’d enrolled in a semester of Ancient Greek at Berkeley, a nightmare that left me convinced not only that I’d never be able to learn a foreign language but also that I’d never again give a thought to Homer or Sophocles, whose words of wisdom, in pathetic little excerpts, I’d stumbled over in the textbook.
I looked around at our friends, scattered in the front of the orchestra. Ginny seemed mesmerized. Why not? Back in college she had carried around a dog-eared copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, a book that many years ago I dutifully opened only to conclude that it was mythopoetic crap. Ginny had gotten so carried away with the whole southwestern thing that she ended up living on a Navajo reservation for a couple of years. She’s still a sucker for myths and legends, so Cortege of Eagles, whatever the hell it was we were watching, was right up her alley. Mike, a couple of seats past her, was dozing. Smart man. A couple of seats away from him was Jack, the moustachioed cowboy now the moustachioed scholar, whispering in Evelyn’s ear. This isn’t supposed to be about me, but I do wonder why Evelyn never seemed to like me. Still doesn’t. On the rare occasions when I try to talk to her, she looks at me as if I’m something the cat dragged in and dropped on her spotless kitchen floor. What does she have to be so snotty about? Anyway, Evelyn appeared to be listening attentively to Jack, though her eyes remained glued to the stage. Then the applause started. Cortege of Eagles was over. What a relief. Evelyn, clapping respectfully, turned to talk to Jack.
“Honey, get me a champagne,” were the first words out of Marcia’s mouth. “I’ll be with the gang.” To my skeptical raised eyebrow, indicating the overpriced bar and the crush of people no doubt already there, she responded, “Oh, come on, honey, the tickets were free, we’ve gotta support the damn Opera House. And get one for Ginny, too, it’ll help with whatever it is that’s ailing her. She’s got a lot of ailments.” Off I went, though I do hate fighting the line at a bar. Fight I did, then back I came, pleased with myself to be managing the three glasses, handing them around as I arrived to the rat-a-tat-tat of conversation in the circle around Marcia, everybody more or less hanging onto one of the high little bar tables.
“I saw her in the forties,” this was Ginny, “the expression was so pure—it came totally through the body—totally abstract—no mugging, no cheap effects.”
“But can a body be pure?” That was Jack, bringing it around to himself. His drawings of nudes sprawled on the daybed in his studio were up in one of the few good galleries in town. Those drawings were still a little shocking. Some of our friends, who’d assumed that abstract art was all that any longer really mattered, were wondering if Jack’s nudes were radical or retro or if retro was the new radical.
“Well, Jack, your nudes aren’t pure.” That was Mike, his face fixed in his customary half smile, so you weren’t sure if he was being ironic or not.
“They’re certainly not meant to be ironic,” Jack returned, professorial, a little heated.
“Anyway,” Ginny pursued, ignoring the men, “all the mugging and eye rolling, it’s Martha betraying Martha.”
“You don’t like Greek Kabuki?” Mike pressed her, whether mocking or defending Martha it was hard to know. Or was it Ginny he meant to mock, in his laid-back way?
“Greek Kabuki. Right, Mike. That’s it.” This was Marcia. She was winding herself up. “You know what? I think I like the new old Martha better than the old new Martha. Wasn’t there always something fake about that expressive purity of hers? I mean, give me a break. In her dotage she’s let the old thespian dragon who was always in there come out—all the way out. She’s crazed, not with the role but the artifice of the role. Sure it’s schlock. It’s fabulous schlock. Like Sarah Bernhardt on her umpteenth tour, missing a leg or something.”
“Oh, Marcia,” Ginny jumped in, but then fell silent. So did the rest of us. Not that anybody agreed. But Marcia was beginning to sound like Marcia on the page, Marcia in those essays that both excited and infuriated her readers. And talk about schlock, surely there was something if not exactly schlocky then definitely sensationalist about Marcia’s way of eviscerating an artist or an event. Marcia was the higher schlock. Hadn’t Jack said that to Evelyn one night? Hadn’t Mike said it to Jack? Wasn’t Ginny suggesting it right now? There was something carnivalesque about Marcia’s intellectual riffs. But Marcia’s highhandedness could also be seductive. She was so damn definitive. Now she was looking around, assessing the damage, weighing her effect. Her champagne was nearly empty.
“Burt!” She turned to me with a strange look, grabbing my arm, a smidge of champagne dribbling across her dress as her arm flopped down and the plastic glass tipped over. “I better sit down.” She sat, nearly fell backward, onto a banquette, as a woman shoved closer to her husband to make room for Marcia, who was clearly in some kind of distress. And there Marcia was, slumped on the banquette, the plastic glass still gripped in her hand, her eyes rolled back. “Pamela!” It was Mike, turning to the young woman who had been at his side all the time, quiet while we talked. “She’s a doctor,” he explained. Figured. Mike likes competent women; they’re unperturbed when he sends them packing. She ripped open the front of Marcia’s dress, revealing a very expensive-looking lace bra. And began pounding. To no avail. Marcia, who some had predicted at the beginning of the 1960s would be the voice of the decade, author of two nonfiction books, Slummings and A Night at the Opera, dead at forty-five. And, of course, the irony, of the author of A Night at the Opera dying at the Opera House, not lost on the people who wrote the obituaries in The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle (where she’d once had a lousy job, so lousy they didn’t even mention it).
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From We Never Called it Frisco by Jed Perl. © 2026, Coffee House Press.
