Journal of a Naked Poet - V

The Sixties were important and seminal, in some ways life-changing, for me. The decade started out with my decision to leave the Jesuit novitiate. After a couple of years at San Diego City College, I moved to San Francisco. At the beginning of 1964 I got a studio apartment in the Tenderloin with a bed that unfolded out of the wall. It cost seventy dollars a month, and had steam heat. I moved there mainly for health reasons (the flat on Andover had unvented gas wall heaters that filled the place with humidity, and I had visions of ending up with TB, like my grandmothers brothers in Ireland had). That studio apartment reminds me of the song from My Fair Lady, "All I want is a room somewhere, with one great, enormous chair--oh wouldn't it be loverly . . ." I had that enormous chair, and it was exceedingly comfortable. The neighborhood, though, was another story. On Easter Sunday, 1964, I stepped out of my apartment building to see a man lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. He had been stabbed by another man, in a fight over a floozy from one of the bars across the street, The Round Table and The Square Chair. Another man was killed in my building. After that, the frail and  emphysemad old apartment manager from Chula Vista had to give up that job. He was replaced by a man from Tennessee who liked to sit on the front steps of the building with a shotgun across his lap. That settled things down.

For some reason, I must have thought I needed to be exposed to the seamy side of life. The neighborhood was full of prostitutes, boozers, and transvestites. The police constantly busted the hookers, especially the transvestites, but did little to make the neighborhood safe.

It was in that Tenderloin apartment that I first read TALES OF THE BAAL SHEM TOV, and TALES OF THE HASIDIM, vols. 1 and 2. This was formative for my spiritual outlook. I had a poster of Chagall's "Rabbi of Vitebsk" on the wall. I drew a large, decorative "shalom" (the Shin looked like a boat) on the shade that covered the unsightly light well.

At that time I was teaching English at the Berlitz school in San Francisco. One of my students, Miss Matsushita, was the daughter of the owner of the largest electrical company in Japan. It rankled me that she would soon be entering the University of California. I knew exactly how much English she could speak, since I was teaching her, and she was in no way ready. It was her father's money, and nothing else, that would get her in. I had always intended to go to Cal myself, and was certain that I would be admitted, though I had little in the way of funds. I decided to apply.

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.