It didn’t matter that most everyone had walked out of the reading, or that I hadn’t known how to reply to Allen Ginsberg, or that William Burroughs couldn’t have been bothered to say a word to me or anyone else at dinner. They were two of the most legendary figures of the twentieth century, and I had spent an evening with them. I had made an important discovery, too: they were only people. We all were. And some of us were also artists, or trying to be artists. Everything was happening on a continuum, I saw, and I allowed myself to believe that night that maybe I would be next, that perhaps a bit of magic dust had floated my way, off the stiff shoulders of these two old men.
I still had the signed copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems on my bookshelf in the Haight. It had survived the ’89 quake, when my bookshelf toppled over, crashing into my dresser, sending my books in every direction. Ginsberg had signed the book, his childish inscription the only evidence that still remained of my evening with the Beats.
San Francisco Camerawork Gallery was located just south of Market Street in a former warehouse boasting floor-to-ceiling windows, creaky hardwood floors, and a freight elevator that could carry a crowd, twenty at a time, two floors up to the opening reception.
I’d spent nearly twenty-four hours installing my piece, breaking for a short nap on the gallery couch sometime before dawn, and afterward heading to the airport to retrieve my parents. Now my mother stood paralyzed in my installation room while my father peeked in from the door, as if afraid to enter.
I picked up a plastic cup of wine and took in the rest of the exhibition, mostly innovative photographs of the artists’ interpretations of the show’s theme, which was family. On one wall, enormous color murals of family beach scenes offset a black-and-white triptych of an African American family posed in front of their church. My piece was the only installation work.
“Good work, Franny,” said Anthony Aziz, the gallery board member who had proposed my piece for the show. “Powerful stuff. I spent thirty minutes with your piece—longest I’ve ever spent with a video installation.”
I’d met Anthony when he was a graduate student in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Later, he’d teamed up with Sammy Cucher, a friend of mine from the New Genres Department, to form the collaborative artist team Aziz+Cucher.
Glancing across the crowded gallery, I thanked Anthony for including me in the show. I noticed a line forming at the entrance to my room. “I think my parents are hogging all the space,” I said. “God, maybe I should take them out for dinner.”
Just then, Anthony, always so well groomed and composed, shot an alarmed look in the direction of my room. “You’re kidding, right?” He stared at me. “Your parents are here? How are they . . . going to, you know, react?”
I had the sudden sensation of waking up out of a dream. After so much insight in the editing suite, I’d somehow gone completely numb again in those remaining weeks before the exhibition, focused as I was on the formal and technical aspects of the piece. I’d done an even cleaner edit and hired a technical assistant to help me with the wiring of the piece in the gallery. Alone in the editing room, I’d been overcome with horror at my family’s collective dissociation from its own demise, only then to end up feeling nothing at all. I’d forgotten that stark epiphany, bottled it up as I’d always done, creating an emotional debt to be paid later.
“It’s nothing they don’t already know,” I told Anthony, more evenly than I felt now. “They lived it, right?”
He gave me a concerned look. “It’s just . . . your brothers’ monologues are so honest, you know? Everyone makes statements you’d imagine might be . . . just a little too painful for the others to hear.”
“I guess that’s my role in the family: can opener for the can of worms!” But I wondered if I’d opened something I shouldn’t have.
Anthony laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “Anyway, good luck,” he said. “And keep going, you hear me?”
I listened to every tape until it repeated,” said my mother. “I stood right next to the TV screens so I could hear everything.”
“Not me,” said my father gruffly. “Stick with photography, Frances. That’s my advice.”
My parents were staying at the Stanyan Park Hotel in the Haight, just across from Golden Gate Park. It was one of the many ways in which they still operated as a couple, traveling together, staying at the same hotel.
I took Fell Street from Zuni, where we’d had dinner, up to the Haight. A crowd had gathered in the Panhandle, en circling a string of bongo players as they danced wildly to the discordant rhythms. With all the whirling tie-dye and dreadlocks, the scene had the feel of a Grateful Dead concert. I turned to my mother in the front seat. “Did you hear Charlie say he wants to come home for Christmas this year?”
“I heard that,” she said tentatively. “He looks like the devil, though, doesn’t he? He’s not taking good care of himself.”
“He’s a goddamn drunk!” trumpeted my father from the backseat.
I turned left onto Stanyan Street. The cherry-blossom trees in the park were flowering, the grass underneath them covered in pale-pink petals. The drifters and street people had gathered into clusters, some wrapped in old blankets, talking amiably in the last of the April light. The rough, red skin of these homeless people reminded me, of course, of Charlie.
“It’s his last stop,” I said.
“Whose?” asked my mother.
Lifting Off
FRISK BOTTLE, 1995