Читать книгу Tosh - Tosh Berman - Страница 15

I have to assume that my crippling sense of vertigo started in San Francisco. As a three-year-old, I had a traumatic incident on the staircase leading to our apartment. I was on the steps petting my cat. According to my mom, a homeless woman came up the steps and tried to grab my cat out of my hands. I held on as she dragged me down the steps. My mom found me, after I screamed, at the bottom of the steps still holding onto my cat, but with my tooth penetrating my lip, which left a pool of blood. I have no memory of this, but what I do know is that I have a deep fear of staircases and heights. I couldn’t stand to be held upside down or lifted by another human being, aside from my parents when I was a child. For many years George Herms liked to grab me from behind to lift me, and I would scream bloody murder. He kept this up even when I was a teenager! I would get a feeling of vertigo or dizziness, like I was about to faint.

To me, San Francisco was a nightmarish city, not because of its citizens, but because of its architecture and the many hills that make up the dramatic visuals in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo (1958), which was filmed in the city around the time we lived there. To me, the great city of the Bay was a warped landscape played at 45 rpm. I feel that I’m the only person on the planet who had no choice but to come to terms with its landscape that way. The earth spins 1,040 miles per hour, and I could feel its movement under my feet. What others felt was delightful about San Francisco was a total horror show for me. I remember being frozen in my tracks just looking down Filbert Street, which is reportedly the steepest hill in the city.

WALLACE BERMAN / Tosh Berman, San Francisco, 1960

As a child, it wasn’t much of a problem, because usually an adult was either carrying me around or holding my hand, but as I grew older, my vertigo didn’t go away. To this day, in particular locations, I need to hold the hand of a fellow adult, particularly when going up and down staircases. Not all staircases, mind you, just ones that I perceive as grand or big. I am highly sensitive to the size of a staircase and how steep it is. If there is a banister attached to the wall, I can sometimes handle it by myself. The worst thing for me though is when someone is either going down or up the stairs and won’t move aside to let me pass. I can’t stand to be motionless on a staircase, even for 30 seconds. If I’m forced to walk in the middle of the stairs, it’s like a slow painful death to me. The bad part of it all is that people don’t realize what I’m going through, nor do they care. As a child, this was my first lesson about how people treat other people. San Francisco was the first urban city that I was made aware of due to a lot of cement pavements and a large multicultural population. As a baby, I knew our house in Beverly Glen, but the first time that I was conscious of being in an urban city was San Francisco.

Despite my crippling fears, San Francisco had a lot of things going for a child like me during the late 1950s. I remember the girl who worked at the bakery would give me a free cookie every time I passed that palace of sweetness, and I also recall rambling around City Lights Bookstore, a place where my father liked to go to browse. A Japanese American gentleman by the name of Shig Murao was the floor manager. Shig first came to attention internationally for being arrested for selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) to an undercover cop in 1957. Shig and my dad used to chit-chat while I wandered within and outside the store. City Lights was probably my first bookstore experience. I never got bored being there with my father because I could people-watch and enjoy the different shapes and colors of book covers. It may have been there that I discovered the physical pleasure of books outside our house, and that a bookstore is a sacred location.

I like how books feel, the texture of the pages, and the beauty of the print on the white page. Being enclosed in a room full of books always gives me a sense of ease and security. At that time, I didn’t have a preference for a type of book or even section. I was far too young to distinguish one type of volume from another. A few years later I became profoundly attached to the comic book sections in magazine stands and markets. City Lights didn’t have comic books. You had to be crafty to avoid the anger of the newsstand managers because they hated kids looking at the comics.

It sounds silly to describe San Francisco as exotic, but the city had new, sensual, and tasty smells, and the architecture was so different from Los Angeles. Even as a child, I got the feeling that the communities, especially North Beach, were compact in size and filled with people on the same wavelength as their surroundings. Los Angeles is always pop or rock ’n’ roll to me, but San Francisco is 1950s jazz and Italian opera music. This particular landscape is what I remember from entering a coffee shop or bar as a child. I was so young that the bartenders didn’t mind me being in the location because I was with my dad or both parents. I don’t remember North Beach being touristy or beatnik-crazy; it was just a cool, laidback but sophisticated neighborhood. I even picked that up as a child. I was taken with a view of another world, yet with warmth.

Since my father spent lots of time at North Beach, we often walked through Chinatown. Compared to the rest of San Francisco, Chinatown had level streets, so it was a comfort zone for me. There also seemed to be various red objects: red toys, red lanterns, and buildings with red signs. I found the color aesthetically pleasing. I don’t know whether my memory is playing tricks on me, or if the connection between the color red and China is clouding my consciousness, but that’s what I recall. Another thing I remember is a fake tin can of spinach with Popeye on it. It was in one of the gift shops in Chinatown. Why did that object exist in that neighborhood? My parents bought it for me on one of our walks. This image of Popeye was not my introduction to the character. I must have seen the comic strip in the newspaper or the animation on television. Louise Herms, who the family met at this time, looked just like Olive Oyl, Popeye’s sometimes girlfriend. Louise was beautiful, but to me so was Olive Oyl. Besides having innocent crushes on girls I went to kindergarten with, I also had a thing for animated female characters. Betty Boop was another fetish-like fascination for me. I couldn’t possibly have defined or understood sexuality, yet both characters struck a deep chord inside me that played for a long time afterward.

My parents also bought me a plastic sword from a Chinatown gift shop, and I enjoyed the fantasy of having an instrument of death in my hands. I would walk with my mom or my dad or both with the sword attached to my arm. I never really played with the sword at home; it was an object I wielded in public. Each face I saw on the street was another character in the story that was in my head. To this day, I have a tendency to look at people, both friend and stranger, and place them in a narrative of my own making.

My obsession with toy guns and knives started in San Francisco. I don’t know where I picked it up. My parents weren’t into weapons of any kind. I wasn’t brought up in an anti-gun culture, but a “no-gun” culture. I must have picked up this obsession from either the medium of comics or the small amount of time I spent in front of a TV screen. I have no memory of watching TV during the late ’50s. But somehow I got the idea of fighting bad people and knew that there was a constant struggle between “good and evil.” I became obsessed with fighting imaginary criminals. At the time I didn’t have the slightest idea what “good” or “evil” actually meant. I just knew that evil was bad, and that I was more attracted to the evil characters than the good ones. I took pity on the bad characters. They had to go to jail or, even worse, die.

WALLACE BERMAN / Robert Duncan, 1950s

At a neighborhood café near City Lights, I went up to a pair of police officers who were taking a lunch break. I was drawn to them because of their uniforms and, more significantly, I noticed they were wearing guns at their waists. One of the officers patted me on the head and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I told him I wanted to be an assassin. My parents, who overheard my comment to the officers, pretended they didn’t know me.

Another significant location for me in San Francisco was the home of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins. Robert and Jess had first editions of the entire Oz book series by L. Frank Baum. Over the years, they gave me a lot of their Oz books. I’ve rarely kept anything from that era, but I still have the books they gave me, which is amazing, considering how many times I’ve moved. Jess was a man of a few words. I never saw him in painting mode. I imagine for Jess it was just like going to an office to work, but once he was out of the office, he looked very much like—not the wife exactly, but the partner who didn’t share the “work” with the family after hours. I think he was the one that made the meals in the household. I remember going to dinner at their home numerous times, which were consistently fun for me because I was drawn to the books. Aside from trips to City Lights, these were probably the first occasions when I paid attention to bookshelves.

WALLACE BERMAN / Jess, Topanga Canyon, 1968

WALLACE BERMAN / Michael McClure, 1958, San Francisco

Jess, of course, was an excellent painter and collage artist. Even as a kid I was called to his work because there was something “comic book” about it, but not in the obvious sense, like Roy Lichtenstein. I feel he got the nature of the comic book or strip. One of his most eminent collages is his Tricky Cad (1954–59), a total cut-up of the Dick Tracy comic strip. He took all the images, dialogue, and text from the strip and re-imagined it in his peculiar fashion. Regardless of the fact that I was too young to fully grasp the work, I understood it as a child who loved comics. It’s fascinating to think how many artists in that era had an obsession with or were influenced by the comics medium. I found myself attracted to that aesthetic. I knew the difference between comic strips printed in the newspaper and artists who took that influence for their artwork. Even as a kid I had a thorough if instinctive understanding of low art and high art, even when the skills and the visuals were very close or in the same family.

My family was attracted to poets, and I think Robert Duncan was the first one I realized was an actual poet. He looked just like a poet to me. He had one angel eye that would wander, and he had the talent to communicate with almost anyone. His humor came off clearly, even to a kid like me. He was gossipy, yes, but with a sharp intelligence to his commentary. Robert and Jess were probably the first gay couple I was ever aware of. Not in a sexual or intimate sense: the fact that they shared a room was not something I was conscious of at the time. But they were clearly a couple, even to me as a child.

If Robert Duncan was my first impression of a poet, and what a poet sounds like, then Michael McClure was my prototype for the romantic poet. He would wear a chunky scarf as if it were naturally appended to his neck. This is not criticism but praise of his unique style, because Michael was (and is) an incredibly handsome man. My earliest memory of Michael is as a Monty Clift combined with just a touch of Brando’s The Wild One (1953). He never looked like a beat or a beatnik to me. His clothing and attitude and even his voice were a poetic 1950s attitude, and without a doubt, had dandified flourishes. When he read his poetry in public, or privately to my father, he had a way of pronouncing his words like they were sculptures. Each word seemed as if he were making an object positioned in front of his eyes or view. He has the ability to bring a physical, bodily presence to his poetry or words. Ghost Tantras (1964) is, I think, his masterpiece, which is him roaring like a lion. Of all the poets we knew at the time, he was the one most interested in sound. Years later, he worked with musicians, but I was always of the view that the music got in the way of his poetry. Just he alone and his voice are enough. I suspected that, somewhere in his past, Michael must have taken a diction class, because of the care with which he pronounced words.

Michael was not natural. There was something artificial in him, and I loved the dramatic aspect of his personality. I have a strong memory of dining with him and my parents at a traditional French restaurant, where he ordered the food for the entire table, including yours truly. What I wanted was a hamburger, but I wasn’t going to get it at that restaurant. Michael was by no means ordering such food for a table he was dining at. Everything he ordered was very much “grown-up” food, clearly unsuitable for an American kid like me. All I wanted was a piece of meat between two pieces of bread, and I was angry at him for not ordering such a plate for me. Instead, he ordered frog legs and snails. Imagine! Food for a tot.

WALLACE BERMAN / Untitled (Beard poster), 1967

Michael has a star-like quality. He had a flair no one else had, down to the scarf around his neck. To this day, when I look at a scarf or put one on, I picture Michael. Also, he’s one of those poets who know stagecraft. The majority of my dad’s poet friends didn’t have a commanding style before facing an audience, but I think Michael put a lot of thought into this. Even off-stage, he has a commanding personality. I don’t recall frivolous chit-chat with him. He saw the world at the time with an intense awareness. Some poets didn’t care how they were packaged, but Michael had a strong point of view regarding book covers, being in journals, and, of course, how his poetry was laid out on the page. I remember one time my Dad and Michael had a very intense discussion about a poster Wallace made for Michael’s play The Beard (1965). Michael didn’t like the poster at first, or maybe not at all, but at the end of the day, my father won the argument. Even though their discussion was heated, there was lots of respect between the two men, which made them good partners on a project together.