Saturday, March 04, 2006

 

Ned came to visit San Francisco in the winter of 2002.
My bandmates and I asked him to write up a little something to read
during our set at the Hotel Utah. Early in the morning, he and I went to
North Beach, where we sat in the North End Caffe, drank gallons of coffee,
sat with our notebooks and wrote as the hustle and bustle of the city passed us by.

That weekend, he read the following as our band played behind him.


Cliff House
San Francisco 02.22.02

Somewhere on a once fashionable coastline now choked with smog and
strewn with cigarette filters and dented cans, a boy walks up a crumbling stone staircase reaching up
to a decaying hotel built high on a rocky cliff
where Adirondack chairs lay broken and rotting on the terrace
where a bird’s carcass lay suspended in the dark briny stew of the swimming pool,
where the rusting metal skeletons break through the hotel’s cracked walls
and where a door streaked with dirt and time stands ajar,
the lock pried open and inside the rooms of the old penny arcade exposed,
empty save the dusty crates, the damp rubble scattered on the wooden planks and a
ripped canvas tarp nailed to the wall

the boy kneels spotting a crumpled slip of paper yellowed by the years and
delicately draws it from the trash and broken glass
and under the dingy blue light reads the heading which bares the name of
a long forgotten bohemian fortuneteller and below a fragment from the smeared horoscope reading
“makes you easy game for imposters,”

He rises first startled as a punching bag bell clangs
and then amazed as the oil lamps spark and flame
and a player piano strikes up a ragtime waltz,
a bowler hat and cane take shape on a walnut hook,
the life-sized Drunken Sailor in a glass case doubling over with resounding laughter that fills the rooms
already heavy with the smells of cotton candy and caramel corn,
and the shadowy outlines of the peep shows, the shooting galleries and the Chinese pinball games appear
as if struggling to materialize once again out of the distant past

outside under now cloudless skies potted palm trees luxuriously drooping over the whitewashed walls and
a ghostly man with a waxed mustache and wearing a swimming suit with shoulder straps puffs out his chest,
sucking in his stomach and putting his fists to his hips as a photographer disappears
under the camera drape and the flash powder exploding in the pan

The boy turning back as the punching bag bell rings again and the moment passes,
the oil lamps dimming and the piano notes dissolving into the musty air,
the arcade games bleeding back into another time with grainy disintegration
and the crates appearing again stacked in the dark corners
now there was only the strip of fortune, yellowed, damp and obscure

the boy standing at the shattered railing of the terrace looking down on the dreary sea and sky
and vaguely hoping to lift some curse as he releases the paper,
watching as it catches in the current and carries over the retaining wall and into the rocks below
lost now among beer bottles and Styrofoam cups,
gazing down now on the dusky beach where a man sits alone in front of a little fire bending and sputtering in the wind
and the boy strains to hear somewhere below the din of the crashing surf the haunted laughter of the Drunken Sailor still hovering in the cold misty air


- Ned Foskey

posted by Hog 7:31 AM