City Lights

I stopped in at City Lights bookstore, as I usually do on trips to San Francisco. City Lights fills me with wonderful feelings of literary history and pride in America's independent publishing houses. This is one great bookstore. The store itself has expanded a bit and remade itself over the years, but it is still essentially the same warehouse it was when in opened on Columbus Avenue in North Beach back in 1953. Founder, owner and renowned Beat generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti still works here, although, despite my many visits, I have never seen him. That is, until this time.

I was upstairs at City Lights. The upper floor is a loft of sorts with walled offices to the front that look over the main floor below and a small oddly shaped room to the rear filled with books of poetry. I had the room to myself on this visit. I picked up a copy of “City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology” and browsed through it. The air was warm and musty. The light dim, despite the incandescent lamps and a window that looked out on dead space in an alleyway.

The quiet of the moment was broken by a sharp ratcheting of a door latch opening and closing. I looked over and saw an old man, gray hair and beard, wrestle with the hook on one of those “store personnel only beyond this point” chains. The man was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There are vintage photographs of Ferlinghetti everywhere in City Lights bookstore. No mistaking him.

Ferlinghetti walked right past as if he didn’t see me. In fairness, I purposely made myself small and stood out of the way. I briefly considered asking him to sign the anthology book I intended to purchase, but I am always wary of such invasions of privacy. They just seem wrong to me. Instead, I watched as Ferlinghetti shuffled slowly past. He is 88 years old now (I looked this up later) and impressively robust. Near the top of the steps, Ferlinghetti stopped and rearranged some postcards in the literary postcard rack. A few more steps and he stopped again to pick up a book that was lying backwards and upside down on the shelf. Did I do that? Before putting it back, Ferlinghetti, opened the book and read from its pages. It is amazing to me that this remarkable man, the last great Beat poet, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, friend and publisher to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Bob Dylan, was also a simple store clerk. Business is business after all.

Satisfied that everything was in order, Ferlinghetti walked slowly down the stairs. I listened as his feet made contact with each creaky wooden step. At the bottom of the staircase he stopped. There was a click. To save electricity, he turned the lights off for the upper floor. He turned the lights out on me! Before that thought could fully register in my mind, there was another click and the lights came back on. Ahh, so he had seen me, and remembered that I was up there. For one brief moment, Lawrence Ferlinghetti thought of me – only me and my need for light. Pretty cool. After that, I suspect, his thoughts turned to lunch.