Ishmael in San Francisco

Let’s tell a tale of a writer. We shall call him Ishmael. Like his father before him he dwells in the hinterlands of San Francisco, North Beach if you ask me to be precise, a rather seedy and sordid part of town, nudity and booze galore at the strip clubs that line Broadway – where Ishmael lived, in a residential hotel above Showgirls Cabaret – and more Italian restaurants than anyone really needs.

Ishmael settled on a favorite bar, a comfortable haunt on Columbus Avenue with a lush literary history. It was here, at this bar with its warm wood panels and lush low lighting from Tiffany lamps, that Ishmael called home when the four small walls of his hotel room threatened to crush him. Ishmael did his writing at the bar, his reading at the bar, production work, when he had it, would be done at the bar (there was a 12 week period when Ishmael wrote and produced an infomercial for a world famous sex toy manufacturer) – everything he did in his day he did at the bar. And he drank at the bar. Of course.

“Ishmael,” his doctor said one day, clutching a lab report in his hairy hands. “Don’t you have anyone who wants to see you live to a ripe old age?”

“Why would you ask such a vague question?” Ishmael squirmed on the cold white exam table.

“Because if you don’t quit drinking now you’ll be dead by the time you’re fifty-one.”

Ishmael, it has been said, leaped down from the table and shook the doctor’s hand while profusely thanking him.

“For what?”

“You just gave me three years. I thought for sure I’d be dead in a month, the way that I’ve been feeling lately.”

Ishmael did, however, give up his beloved beer. He still drank, but never beer.

One day, after becoming a permanent fixture at the saloon he so cherished, he was asked if he wanted a job, a doorman job.

For the next several months “Good evening, may I see some I.D.?” would become his mantra night after night four nights a week. Other key phrases were “The men’s room is downstairs, ladies is upstairs” and “No, really, honestly, sir, I think the bartender is right; you’ve had enough to drink tonight. Now let’s take a little walk outside, okay?”

He was shivering in the cold outside the bar one night when they – the bar managers, that is – approached him. They wanted to know if he would be daring enough to rely on his skills as a writer to put together a James Joyce celebration the bar was planning. Ishmael accepted. For eight weeks he studied Joyce until he was speaking like a true Dubliner. He created a production of live theater, with actors reading from brief selections of Joyce, selections that were carefully redacted from the original text and then pasted together in a manner that suggested linear narrative. Or something like that. And the show was a resounding success, wildly exceeding everyone’s expectations, including the audience who must have believed they were coming to a hear a cold, austere lecture with somber readings, instead of an entertaining show that played more like old time radio theater.

Ishmael sure was a hit that night. Everyone wanted to praise him, buy him a drink, offer a hug and a handshake.

“All I really did,” Ishmael boasted bashfully, “was bring a writer’s eye to the material, cutting and hacking away at the material until it resembled something lucid.”

Lots of talk of that sort was bounced about all night. But the next night it was business as usual and Ishmael was back working the door, frisking for identification of proof of age. On these slow nights, when he stands on the hard pavement and stares down the street at the Trans-America Pyramid, the cold beating through his arthritic body even though he is wearing three layers of clothing, the numbing effects of a painkiller and a shot of rye refusing to comply with his pain-wracked body and soul – it was on these nights.

It was on these nights that he truly missed the great white whale.