Charles Willeford lives!

In San Francisco today, we have pot clubs, gay marriage, protesters that occasionally shut down the entire city, and a rich-kid, gelled-hair mayor straight off a TV screen who has been known to wash homeless people’s feet. Is it not fair to ask where, in all this, is the Great San Francisco Novel of our times to make sense of it? While we’re waiting, here’s a neighborhood by neighborhood look at the down and out, the criminal, and the political city as portrayed in some lesser-known great – and not so great – San Francisco novels throughout the City’s history.

1. McTeague by Frank Norris (1899)
Location: Polk Street

In this less famous classic by the author of the Great California Novel, The Octopus, San Francisco is a squalid and disappointed city of unhappy strivers, the physical embodiment of the get-rich-quick values of the Gold Rush. Life is simple and pleasant enough for the slow-witted, dentist McTeague, but he aches with the longing to one day replace his modest sign that reads “Dental Parlors” with a huge, shining, gilded molar with two beautiful prongs. In the city just a couple generations out of the Sierra gold mines, however, the gold has run dry, and with a painstaking, Zola-esque Realism, Norris depicts the whole neighborhood seen from McTeague’s window, slowly going mad from wanting more money. When McTeague loses his practice for lack of a proper license, he rashly kills his miserly wife for her savings and makes a desperate escape, fittingly, back into the foothills of mining country, where he finally meets his memorable end in an abrupt Twilight Zone-like twist of fate that illustrates, literally, Norris’ central theme, that a man can’t live only for himself.

2. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter (1964)
Location: Mid-Market Street
This lonely and sad, but occasionally sweet novel follows Jack Levitt from an Eastern Oregon orphanage to the old dive 24-hour pool halls and dirty hotel rooms of a 1950’s San Francisco, that is still haunted by the ghostly memory of the promise of The West. The frontier is all gone, though, and the novels’ restless young pool hustlers and small time thieves can only shuttle aimlessly back and forth in the new remote control city, like the 8 Ball, waiting to fall. “You didn’t go to jail for what you did,” Jack observes, “You went because they caught hold of you and didn’t know what else to do”. Unremittingly dark throughout, Hard Rain’s few bright spots, like Jack’s unexpected redemption in the form of a brief prison romance with the black pool shark, Billy, shine powerfully. Full of lyrical evocations of a lost, working class SF, Hard Rain Falling, also contains possibly the best two-page drunken celebration of cheap, corny, vulgar, un-cleaned-up Market Street ever set in print.

3. PICK-UP by Charles Willeford (1967)
Location: Powell Street
“This isn’t our world, Helen. We aren’t going to beat it by drinking and yet the only way we can possibly face it is by drinking.”
In this tour de force of alcoholic despair, failed painter turned fry cook, Harry Jordan, works only to drink. When Helen Meredith, a lovely, but dangerously aimless fellow juicer, walks into the dive where Harry works, sparks fly and Harry hangs up his apron and walks out on the job with Helen on his arm. They head straight to the bar –and then another and another– as their chance meeting sends two lives already on the skids, spiraling ever quicker down to their end. Harry and Helen each turn out to be exactly what the other needs to find the courage, not to get their lives on track, but to finally kill themselves. “We’re going away, aren’t we, Harry?” Helen asks, as Harry turns on the gas and closes the window. “Alright, Harry. I’m ready.”
A heartbreakingly real and sympathetic picture of lives utterly without hope, the taut prose of this Willeford classic pulls Harry and Helen along to what seems like an inevitable suicide pact, only to throw in some surprises along the way, right to the book’s brilliant last line that so completely alters the meaning of the entire book that you want to read the whole thing again.

4. The Night Action by Bruce Douglas Reeves (1966)
Location: North Beach
“Invade the nudie clubs and pleasure pads of today’s young seekers, a swinging generation gone morally broke and cashing in for KICKS” drools the back cover of this paperback, 60’s pulp shocker with literary pretensions. In Night Action San Francisco is a city “too busy, too cold”, where each day’s paper lists another suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge and where “the fog seemed to issue from the hearts of men and women in the streets.” No wonder the book’s North Beach pleasure seekers spend all their time getting wasted in bars on Broadway, putting down the squares, and trying to get it on with Becky, the girl who dances, nude but wrapped in cellophane, each night at The Dill Pickle. Reeves’ SF is as grim as Willeford’s, but Night Action’s amoral and privileged hipsters are far less compelling than the drunks in Pick-Up. Not surprisingly, Reeves finally punishes his tiresome and irritating main characters by forcing them to marry each other and raise a kid, but not before Rob Roy can threaten one last poignant dash for freedom: “Maybe I’ll go away – away for good. I’ll go to New York and join a mime troupe!”

5. What Now My Love? By Floyd Salas (1969)
Location: The Haight
When his teenage girlfriend takes him along to score acid at Sam, the big-time dealer’s place, street smart Miles finds the scene to be a major bummer: Armed bikers guard the stash while a grinning, stoned mother feeds acid to her baby. “Something had changed in the Hash last summer. Love Street’ had turned out to be an underworld complete with murder for gain.” Suddenly, the narcs bust in, a cop gets shot and Miles and company narrowly escape and head for the border in a sort-of joyless and paranoid On The Road in reverse. Ex-boxer turned hardboiled novelist Salas skillfully creates an atmosphere of complete futility and dread, and the hippies’ inability to escape a laughably melodramatic ending to their long run is never once in doubt. When a battle between the long-haired gringos and the locals leaves the girl dead and the car wrecked on the side of the road in Baja, tough guy Miles decides that its time for him – and maybe a whole generation – to go home and face the music:
“I’m not going to run anymore. Besides, I’ve got to do something with her body”.
Sam said, “Hey man, you’re really suffering,” and reached down and grabbed my shoulder.
“Don’t sweat it. It’ll go away” I said. “Give me a match and I’ll light up a joint.”

6. The Boys in Blue by Phil Andros (1970)
Location: 850 Bryant
“The kids called us pigs, but if they could only understand what was going through the minds of some of us…” Originally titled San Francisco Hustler, this blissfully trashy pulp porn is the second of a paperback series that follows the adventures of the hot, young hustler Andros as he cheerfully “manage(s) to make a good living (being) passed from one wealthy fruit to another.” In this follow up to Stud, Phil fucks a cop in LA and likes it – so much that he comes back to SF and joins the SFPD! When he goes to 850 Bryant to apply for the job, a cop obediently sucks him off in the bathroom and the well traveled hustler approves of the Hall of Justice’s blowjob ambience: “In only one other place, the airport at Copenhagen, had I seen stalls that went clear to the floor.” Andros’ take on authority is hardly subversive –he plays sex slave to his cop lover and then turns around and rousts fellow queers from Golden Gate Park and makes them pay him for sex in uniform. On the other hand, the book is a deliriously un-PC and unashamed celebration of the joys of straight-up fucking, anytime and anyplace, and certainly contains something to offend everyone! Sample quote: “Man, lookit dat! A white honkey pig bein’ fucked inna ass by another honkey!”

7. One Foot Off The Gutter by Peter Plate (1995)
Location: The Mission

In San Francisco, “every day is real estate,” says Irish cop, Coddy,“and everyone has their place in it.” Coddy and his veteran partner, Bellamy, know their place too well, as a pair of homeless cops working out of Mission Station, and living out of their squad car. Up and down the grimy, mid-90’s Mission, they drive – past Bill’s Whirl-O-Mat, the 7 Coins of Gold, the Purple Heart Thrift Store and other Mission landmarks of yesteryear– protecting the property of “the citizens” from “the assholes” and looking for a home of their own among the neighborhood’s abundant abandoned buildings. Coddy, at last, finds his dream squat at 21st and Folsom, but the boarded-up Victorian is ALREADY squatted by a teenage gunman and his girlfriend, who spend their days in the house, fucking on a mattress piled high with cash from their recent armed robbery of the old Rainbow Grocery on Mission Street. The masterwork of Plate’s Mission Quartet, Gutter anticipates the Mission District dot-com real estate frenzy to follow in a city where, 100 years after McTeague, the dreams of the smalltime strivers who are pitted against each other still have life or death consequences. In this often deadpan hilarious novel, he also imagines the first Mission yuppies’ encounter with the particular charms of Mission living:
“Before Patsy moved to the city, she had never encountered a pigeon with less than two legs. Nowadays, she frequently saw one-legged brutes hobbling along 21st Street … (or) a legless pigeon dragging itself over the pavement in a macabre dance of bravado and pathos, using its wings to navigate the asphalt…”

8. Prelude to a Scream by Jim Nisbet (1997)
Locations: Panhandle Park, Bernal Heights
In this shlocky, but memorably creepy thriller, Nisbet takes the cutthroat capitalism of the dot com era one step further toward its logical conclusion. If the homes of the working poor can be stolen from them, why not their BODY PARTS? Down and out Stanley Ahearn wakes up hungover and in pain in Panhandle Park, one morning, and finds that he is missing his kidney! Remembering nothing, he embarks on a harrowing journey to try to find out who stole it. The kidney, of course, has been displaced to Oakland, but Ahearn will have to do battle with a gang of rich doctors turned organ thieves to get it back. Nisbet plays it for gore, never quite delivering on the Kafka-esque potential of Ahearn’s search, but at the same time portrays the city itself as a vast shadowy conspiracy that literally harvests the poor.

9. The Ultimate Rush by Joe Quirk (1998)
Locations: The Financial District, Nob Hill
Dude! Remember when bike messengers were the coolest? Like, when Puck was on MTV’s Real World and hot messenger babes were starring in William Gibson novels? Unfortunately, Quirk’s novel arrived slightly too late for the 15 minutes of messenger fame, so hero, Chet Griffin, has to do double time as a messenger AND computer hacker, and he has to do his deliveries on rollerblades! Whoa… Like, Prelude to a Scream, this klunky thriller depicts a post-modern San Francisco where real power is hidden, corporate, faceless, and above the law. Griffin, the fastest messenger at his company, is a just a cog in the wheel of this multi-national machine until he makes the mistake of simply looking inside the envelope to see the secret contents he has to rush from the top of Sacramento Street to 5th and Mission everyday. Suddenly, Griffin is in an incomprehensible battle with the Chinese Mafia, featuring rides on the front of BART trains, escapes into Nob Hill sewer tunnels, and Montgomery Street shootouts. Hard to follow, but eager to please, like a veteran messenger telling drunken war stories at The Wall, Rush lets the good guy not only win, but retire and marry his blue-haired, skateboarding, girlfriend, Ho, the bad-ass singer of the all-girl metal band, Spit. Dude!