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kind of salt-less by comparison.
    Finally, when I was what we used to call educated I moved up to San Francisco for my tour of duty as an intellectual bohemian. I don’t remember all the places I lived in but they were many and they all had one thing in common, they were small and they were cheap. I remember a dark little attic on Powell Street. It was in the best tradition with unsheathed rafters and pigeons walking in and out of a small dormer window. Then there was a kind of cave in North Beach completely carpeted wall to wall with garlic. The rest, in my memory, were small pads whose only charm lay in cheapness.
    We of that period might, or should have been called the Unfortunate Generation because we didn’t have a Generation nor the sense to invent one. The Lost Generation, which preceded us, had become solvent and was no longer lost. The Beat Generation was far in the future. But we did have one thing they had. We were just as broke as they were, and we hated it just as much, and we gloried in it insofar as we were able. An acquaintance with money was fair game. We tried to trade our dubious talents for love and understanding and amazingly enough sometimes we succeeded. We pounded away at our deathless prose and even worse poetry, but if we had ever tried to read any of it aloud in a bar we would have been given the quickest A and C on record. Bars were for drinking, fighting, arguing and assignation, not poetry.
    But in other ways we didn’t let the side down. We lived on sardines and buns and doughnuts and coffee in the best tradition. Now and then we got sick and didn’t know that what we had was a touch of scurvy. . . . Meanwhile I walked the streets absorbing life, yearned passionately toward the sidewalk flower stands, made friends with some dubious characters and was rejected by others. I even took jobs without shame, for I was ever a maverick. I did common labor at which I was very good, tried door-to-door selling at which I was lousy, worked in department stores during holidays, never enough though to lose my standing as free spirit and enlightened bum.
    And what a place for it. My God! How beautiful it was and I knew then how beautiful. Saturday night with five silver dollars laughing and clapping their hands in your pocket. North Beach awakening with lights in a misty evening. Perhaps a girl with you, but if not then, surely later. Dinner at the Cafe Auvergne! I don’t remember its real name but I remember the long tables clad in white oilcloth, the heaped baskets of sour bread, the pots de chambre of beautiful soup du jour, then fish and meat, fruit, cheese, coffee, 40 cents. With wine, and that means lots of wine, 50 cents.
    And after dinner to the shining streets again with more wine to carry in your hand, superior wine not rot gut, a half gallon 38 cents. And then a night of Bacchic holiness, love perhaps behind a bush, and a streetcar ride to the Beach and lying breathless and dry-mouthed in the shelter of a rock while the fog-dancing dawn came up over you. How innocent we were and how clever, for we put up and took down our cynicisms like shutters.
    And then, hungover and happy, back to the secret room with narrow bed, straight chair, typewriter and naked electric bulb with two sheets of copy paper pinned around it to shield the eyes. In such places we learned our trade, or tried to. We had to. Jobs were hard to get. Magazines didn’t want our stories. Publishers were leery of first novels and rightly so. I wish they had been leerier of some of mine. No one ever offered me a job in advertising or motion pictures. I wonder whether I would have refused. I’ll never know, but I suspect that I would have jumped at it—temporarily, of course, as they all do. It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It’s a golden handcuff with the key thrown