Despite change, San Francisco will always be a magical place. Just ask Hank Rosenfeld.
I moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, looking for the Beats. The poets and painters who founded that seminal arts movement here in the 1950s.
Oh well, couple of decades too late to the scene, but I had a Beat kind of job—I drove a taxi. One night, I drove some Europeans up Lombard Street. It was one AM, I was thinking there’d be a good tip in it, provided I wasn’t busted for taking on the “crookedest street in the world” from the wrong direction!
Another night, Gregory Corso fell into my backseat–holy goof poet pal of Kerouac and my other Beat heroes! Picture a late night, candlelit hovel off Columbus: there’s Corso tilting his big bottle of Tokay, yapping at Ginsy onstage: Mr. Allen Ginsberg! Poesy fans snapped their fingers back then because clapping might wake the neighbors living upstairs.
And now, I’ve got Corso in my cab. Driving down Guerrero Street we gab about baseball: the Oakland A’s were great in the 1970s—you could look it up! I’m all excited so when he gets out I do too, to tell him how much I loved his City Lights pocketbook poetry collection, and how my friends and I, we all wanted to be Beat, like him!