This is chapter excerpted from my upcoming childhood memoir Fossil Hill Ridge. As I was writing about the lost world of childhood the sudden demise of a dear friend intruded and sparked some meditations on memory, place, and loss. It links up to an earlier chapter in which I surveyed the landscape of the first 25 years of my life from the top of Russian Hill in San Francisco, from which you can see the bookstore where I worked for some years as a young man, the Mabuhay Gardens where my band played and I practiced the art of punk rock in high school, all the way to Mount Diablo, beneath which I grew from childhood to adolescence.
J
I’ve trudged halfway across San Francisco this afternoon, swimming against a current of grief, and come back to my favorite lookout atop Russian Hill once again seeking inspiration in the fugitive memories of childhood. But, proving how hard it is to catch lightning in a bottle twice, gardeners are at work this morning on my familiar patch of grass, so I’ve been forced to find another spot to sit and write further down the hill. Now I’m sitting on the Vallejo Street steps beneath a shade tree. From here there’s a sneakier, less panoramic view of the city than one has from my usual perch on the lawn above. I can only see a swatch of the bay out toward Alcatraz and Angel Island, between a high-rise apartment building blocking my view of Telegraph Hill and the upward slope of Russian Hill at my back. This disappointment, today, after such a long walk to get here, feels like an insult heaped upon a rather fresh injury.
It’s hazy today, Springtime having come and complicated our brisk San Francisco winter with moisture and wind, making it one of those days my friend who grew up in the Midwest and came to live in San Francisco after college always characterizes as “both too hot and too cold—at the same damn time!” For most of my walk over here I’ve been sweating in my black sweater and thin-lapelled, nineteen-sixties blazer, but I feel a chill creeping over me now with every gust of wind coming off the bay and blowing between our famous hills.
I’m a little ashamed that these last few chapters have fallen into mostly straightforward narrative, naming people, making generalizations, and recounting events as if I could possess them with a fictional narrator’s certainty. That wasn’t my intention when I began writing these sketches of my earliest recollections—I really wanted to capture the feel of those half-faded mental images, smells, textures, and sounds exactly as diaphanous, uncertain, and incomplete as their traces are in my mind. For they lie at the very edge of my first impressions of the world around me, the first tentative traces of my consciousness. For we’re not at all as certain of our own pasts as we are of the imaginary realities we create for our fictional characters in short stories and novels.
It must be something about the solidity of language itself that’s led me to fall into these traditional forms, something about the certainty of black ink on a white page and the rigidity of English grammar that’s made my recitation of these events and the people involved more and more clear, more and more of a re-visitation—as one perspicacious member of my writers’ group has called them—than the pure re-living of the tenuous impressions in all of their nebulous slipping in and out of my mind’s eye’s recorded visions.
I’m also disappointed right now in the six dollar cappuccino I picked up on the way here. It tastes like its plastic lid, the espresso is weak, and its milk smells vaguely rancid. In only a few weeks I’ll be back home in Italy and this moment too will be nearly as fuzzy, or slippery, or seemingly imagined, as the long-ago images and impressions I hold of the lost world of my childhood. (Still, I know that the more I rewrite these scenes, the sharper and crisper I will make the words that describe them.)
As with every book I write, I’m vaguely disappointed if I don’t revolutionize writing itself in it, if I don’t manage to pull the rug out from under the reader, surprising and opening their eyes to a whole new way of thinking. Today, in 2021, beneath the weight of so much literary tradition, this is a daunting task. Perhaps I’ve never been up to it. Still, writing has been for me the one thing I’ve found wholly worth living for, and it’s kept me going all these years through failed romances, poor paying jobs, and disappointment after disappointment.
A fortuneteller once told my mother that one of her children would be famous. Since neither my sister nor brothers sought fame in any discernible way I always assumed that I would be the one. But time is growing short now as I move into my sixties. I wonder why I’m surprised that a professional seer lied?
The shadowy subtext here, the thing I’ve put off now for two and half pages from telling you, is my grief over the death last week of my dear friend, fellow writer, and tireless publisher of talented unknowns, J De Salvo.
I think I’ve come here today, without consciously thinking about it, because a couple of summers ago J and I met on the little lawn here atop Russian Hill. We read aloud to each other, sharing some writing we’d just done from our respective notebooks, drank a couple of beers, as we always did whenever we were together, and wallowed for a few hours in our literary love affair. J, more than anyone I’ve ever known, understood me and my dedication to pushing literature forward and changing writing as the world knows it. I’m missing him terribly today, wishing that visiting this spot where we once met could somehow call him back into existence.
Everywhere I go in this town now reminds me of one of our walks together, every park has become a place where J and I sat at one time or another rolling cigarettes, drinking beer, and reading our works–in-progress to each other, arguing about the value of various books and authors, or the alternative bands we loved. Almost every corner of San Francisco is marked by a memory I have of walking and sitting with him, but the promise that these meetings have always held for the next is now forever locked behind the door of Poe’s raven’s oft repeated pronouncement—nevermore will I walk and talk with J De Salvo in this city so full of him and me and my stockpile of memories.
One day I, too, will be gone, but San Francisco will abide, I trust, and hopefully its streets will ring with some of the words I’ve contributed to the literature of this city in the heads of those who survive me, just as the words of Dashiel Hammett, Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Kathy Acker, Gina Berriault, Jack Hirschman, and William Taylor Jr. ring in mine. We’re unimportant as names or individuals really, but hopefully we too abide somewhere in the words that we write as the conduits of impression, thought, and literature, the word-hoard that the old Anglo-Saxon poets called it, the voice of our species and the recited history of our brief sojourn on the planet.
But I came here not to write about J, but rather to get on with the topography of the landscape of childhood. Today I meant to trek into the foothills of Mount Diablo again, or maybe take you on a walk through downtown Walnut Creek as it was all those years ago when, through my incessant peregrinations, I came to own it, or to explore the two hollows of houses on either side of Fossil Hill Ridge as they were in the 1970s when I first began my childish explorations of these places now mostly lost to time and incessant change.
The natural landscapes I knew as a child appear unchanging in the words I use to describe them. Those ubiquitous California hills dotted with dusky-green oak trees, the rocky and shady creek beds between them, the trails down the ravines and along the hilltops, the tall weeds and their sharp stickers always in your socks, the wheat grass—green in the winter and amber dry, straw-gold for the rest of the year—the occasional groups of cows protected by a threatening bull, the weathered wooden posts of half obliterated corrals, the rusted barbed wire still clinging to a semi-collapsed cattle pen, a BB gun shooting gallery made of a row of unconnected fence posts out behind my elementary school…
All of these things remain the same, in words, as they were when I was a child, yet the banks of the hillsides have eroded, the creeks have deepened their paths, trees have died, collapsed under their own weight, and new seedlings sprouted and grown to replace them in that slow transformation to which the Earth is heir.
But the natural landscape, even if it appears unchanging on the page, is only as sharp or vague as the words I use to describe it. To write “an oak tree” is not to see a specific trunk, a particular set of twisting branches, the unique bouquet of leaves decorating them, or the leathery contours of their bark, the patches of dirt and ponderous cows lolling beneath them. To write “a creek bed,” or “the rolling hills,” is not to see the exact curvature, the rocks and trees upon them, the pathway through or over them, nor the precise twist and turn, flaw or perfection of these topographical features. Words hardly do justice to the natural world it seems to me today, having lost a bulwark of my faith in literature in the form of my friend J.
Words are so much more precise when they describe man-made things, especially the mass-produced objects with which we’re all so familiar. Words act as signposts at best, reminders of things already familiar, wholly inadequate to take us into the unknown or to retrieve the semi-forgotten moments of the past. Or perhaps they’re only capable of shaping and re-imagining the world in our own image. Maybe the lost landscape of my childhood is clearer to you, the reader, than it is to me, thanks to the words I’ve used here to describe it.
If I can’t trust the world not to change, people not to die, or even the clarity of my own memories, I suppose the words are the only thing I can trust—however transitory they, too, are in an evolving universe born in catastrophe and ever expanding toward new cataclysms we can’t possibly imagine.
I look up from this notebook and see a container ship sliding silently across the bay. I chart its progress through the slice of blue sea visible between the high-rise across the street and the swanky neo-Gothic house terraced into the hillside to my right. The damp springtime haze is graying the blues of both the sky and the bay, obscuring the horizon that would normally present a visible boundary between the two. Like all things seen in the distance, especially on such a hazy day, the container ship looks like an apparition floating on the ether, an unmoored freighter crossing a blanket of gray on its way to the Port of Oakland, the city where my friend died alone on an SRO bed. It seems that I was the last of his friends to see him alive. Only the other day we met in a grungy Mission Street bar, drank a couple of stouts on the patio out back in the sun, talked books, and, despite the current pandemic, I gave him a big hug when we said goodbye. It was probably his last.
Today I write against a wall of grief, reaffirming life with every word, in the imaginary wake of all the words that J De Salvo would have written if only he’d made it through that night. This is, I now realize, what I consider writing to be: the cry of our human consciousness against the haze rising from the ocean and obscuring all the clear boundaries between things, the desire to somehow create a self beyond egotism that, having witnessed, attests to the ability of language to resist the natural way of things to fog over, grow dim, and vanish forever into the mist of forgetfulness.
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