records of Bismilla Kahn and Ravi Shankar. He even went with a young girlfriend to the great “Be In” in Golden Gate Park where Timothy Leary told his acolytes to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” But all this was only mildly fascinating to him.
The historian in him could not succumb to the shallow, often silly revolutionary rhetoric he heard all around; he could only laugh quietly at the dining table Marxism of his friends who seemed to know nothing personally of the working man. And he watched in horror when those he loved destroyed their peace of mind utterly, if not their very brains, with powerful hallucinogens.
But he learned from all this; he learned as he sought to understand. And the great psychedelic love of color and pattern, of Eastern music and design had its inevitable influence on his esthetics. Years later, he would maintain that the great sixties revolution in consciousness had benefited every person in the nation-that the renovation of old houses, the creation of gorgeous public buildings with flower-filled plazas and parks, the erection even of the modern shopping malls with marble floors, fountains, and flower beds-all this directly stemmed from those crucial years when the hippies of the Haight Ashbury had hung ferns in the windows of their flats and draped their junk furniture with brilliantly colored Indian bedspreads, when the girls had fixed the proverbial flowers in their free-flowing tresses, and the men had discarded their drab clothes for shirts of bright colors and had let their hair grow full and long.
There was never any doubt in his mind that this period of turmoil and mass drug taking and wild music had borne directly on his career. All over the nation young couples turned their backs on the square little houses of the modem suburbs and, with a new love of texture and detail and varied forms, turned their attention to the gracious old homes of the inner city. San Francisco had such houses beyond count.
Michael had perpetually a waiting list of eager customers. Great Expectations could renovate, restore, build from scratch. Soon he had projects going all over town. He loved nothing better than to walk into a broken-down, moldy Victorian on Divisadero Street and say, “Yeah, I can give you a palazzo here in six months.” His work won awards. He became famous for the beautiful and detailed drawings he could make. He undertook some projects without architectural guidance at all. All his dreams were coming true.
He was thirty-two when he acquired a vintage town house on Liberty Street, restored it inside and out, providing apartments for his mother and his aunt, and there he lived on the top floor, with a view of the downtown lights, in exactly the style he’d always wanted. The books, the lace curtains, the piano, the fine antiques-he possessed all these things. He built a great hillside deck where he could sit and drink up the fickle northern California sun. The eternal fog of the oceanfront frequently burned off before it reached the hills of his district. And so he had captured-it seemed-not only the luxury and refinement he’d glimpsed those many years ago in the South, but a little of the warmth and sunshine he so fondly remembered.
By the age of thirty-five he was a self-made man and an educated one. He had netted and socked away his first million in a portfolio of municipal bonds. He loved San Francisco because he felt that it had given him everything he ever wanted.
Though Michael had invented himself as many a person has done in California, creating a style perfectly in tune with the style of so many other self-invented people, he was always partly that tough kid from the Irish Channel who had grown up using a piece of bread to push his peas onto his fork.
He never entirely erased his harsh accent, and sometimes when he was dealing with workmen on the job, he would slip back into it entirely. He never lost some of his crude habits or ideas either, and he understood that about himself.
His way of dealing with all this was perfect for California. He simply let it show. After all, it was only part of him. He thought nothing of saying “Where’s the meat and potatoes?” when he walked into some fancy nouvelle cuisine restaurant (he did actually like meat and potatoes a lot and ate them whenever it was possible, to the exclusion of other things), or of letting his Camel cigarette hang on his lip when he talked, just the way his father had always done.
And he got along with his liberal friends principally because he did not bother to argue with them, and while they were shouting at each other over pitchers of beer about foreign countries where they had never been and would never go, he was drawing pictures of houses on napkins.
When he did share his ideas, it was in a highly abstract way, from a remove, for he felt like an outsider in California really, an outsider in the American twentieth century. And he wasn’t the least bit surprised that nobody paid much attention to him.
But whatever the politics involved, he always connected most truly with those who were passionate as he was-craftsmen, artists, musicians, people who went about in the grip of obsession. And an amazing number of his friends and lovers were Russian-American Jews. They really seemed to understand his overall desire to live a meaningful life, to intervene in the world-even if in a very small way-with his visions. He had dreams of building his own great houses; of transforming whole city blocks, of developing whole enclaves of cafes, bookstores, bed-and- breakfast inns within old San Francisco neighborhoods.
Now and then, especially after his mother died, he’d think about the past in New Orleans, which seemed ever more otherworldly and fantastical. People in California thought they were free, but how conformist they were, he reasoned. Why, everybody coming from Kansas and Detroit and New York just reached for the same liberal ideas, the same styles of thinking, dressing, feeling. In fact, sometimes the conformity was downright laughable. Friends really said things like “Isn’t that the one we’re boycotting this week?” and “Aren’t we supposed to be against that?”
Back home, he had left a city of bigots perhaps, but it was also a city of characters. He could hear the old Irish Channel storytellers in his head, his grandfather telling about how he’d snuck into the Germans’ church once when he was a boy just to hear what German Latin sounded like. And how in the days of Grandma Gelfand Curry- the one German ancestor in the entire tribe-they’d baptized the babies in St. Mary’s to make her happy and then snuck them over to St. Alphonsus to be baptized again and right and proper in the Irish church, the same priest presiding patiently at both ceremonies.
What characters his uncles had been, those old men who died one by one as he was growing up. He could still hear them talking about swimming the Mississippi back and forth (which nobody did in Michael’s day) and diving off the warehouses when they were drunk, of tying big paddles to the pedals of their bikes to try to make them work in the water.
Everything had been a tale, it seemed. Talk could fill the summer night of Cousin Jamie Joe Curry in Algiers who became such a religious fanatic they had to chain him to a post all day long, and of Uncle Timothy who went nuts from the Linotype ink so that he stuffed all the cracks around the doors and windows with newspapers and spent his time cutting out thousands and thousands of paper dolls.
And what about beautiful Aunt Lelia, who had loved the Italian boy when she was young and never knew till she was old and dried up that her brothers had beaten him up one night and driven him out of the Irish Channel. No dagos for them. All her long life mourning for that boy. She had turned the supper table over in a rage when they told her.
Even some of the nuns had had fabulous stories to tell-old ones like Sister Bridget Marie who had substituted for two weeks when Michael was in the eighth grade, a really sweet little sister who still had an Irish brogue. She didn’t teach them a thing. She just told them tales about the Irish Ghost of Petticoat Loose, and witches-witches, can you believe it! – in the Garden District.
And some of the best talk in those times had been merely talk of life itself-of how it was to bottle your own beer, to live with only two oil lamps in a house, and how they’d had to fill the portable bathtub on Friday night so everybody could take a bath before the living room fireplace. Just life. Laundry boiling over a wood fire in the backyard, water from cisterns covered with green moss. Mosquito netting tucked in tight before you went to sleep. Things now probably utterly forgotten.
It would come back to him in the oddest flashes. He’d remember the smell of the linen napkins when his grandmother ironed them before putting them in the deep drawers of the walnut sideboard. He’d remember the taste of crab gumbo with crackers and beer; the scary sound of the drums at the Mardi Gras parades. He’d see the ice man rushing up the back steps, the giant block of ice on his padded shoulder. And over and over those marvelous voices, which had seemed so coarse then, but seemed now to be possessed of a rich vocabulary, a flare for the dramatic phrase, a sheer love of language.
Tales of great fires, and the famous streetcar labor riots, and the cotton loaders who had screwed the bales into the holds of the ships with giant iron screws, singing as they worked, in the days before the cotton
