Other Work IX
From a lined piece of paper:
During my interviews with Pete Douglas, he frequently described the beatniks who lived at Princeton.
I tried to track them down.
First, I contacted Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. To my surprise, he replied, giving me the name and number of one of the beatniks who had lived in Princeton. Some people who knew these beatniks warned me to be careful.
But it was exciting to play the role of detective.
The address Ferlinghetti gave me was on Grant Avenue in the heart of the North Beach district. I imagined that Michael Bowen lived in a delipidated building; cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles scattered on the floor.
The Grant Avenue address was partly a clothing store run by a Chinese lady. I was confused until I saw the row of mailboxes near the windows. Michael Bowen, the beatnik who had once lived in Princeton, rented a mailbox here.
I wasn’t going to meet him after all. If I wanted to contact him, I’d have to leave a note in his mailbox. I was greatly disappointed.
I stood around for awhile but when the Chinese lady eyed me suspicously, I decided to write a note and leave it in Bowen’s mailbox.
A week later Michael Bowen called me at home.
Names that came up during that strange phone conversation included the poet, Alan Ginsberg, San Francisco attorney Marvin Lewis and the “Frisco Kid.”
Bowen was the driving force between the Human Be-In in the Haight-Asbury. He talked about Timothy Leary. About Princeton, he said Marvin Lewis could give me a perceptive picture of the beatnik life in Princeton. I made an appointment with Lewis, famous for defending a woman who claimed an accident on the cable car turned her into a nynphomaniac.