San Francisco Dreamin’ a Long Way From Home : The Fragrance of Coffee and Patchouli Has Wafted Far From the Golden Gate

SAN FRANCISCO â€”  In Milwaukee, a few years ago, if you tired of the beer and sausage, you could head down to the Benjamin 2 Cafe and find offbeat, guitar-toting chess players and the kind of coffee that made San Francisco’s North Beach what we think it is.

Or you could head for the Coffee Trader and enter upon a scene of sufficient natural wood, health salads, fancy blends, cheese and long-limbed, tennis-playing young laid-backs to dry your tears of San Francisco homesickness.

In my home town of Cleveland, the Paris of northeastern Ohio, San Francisco has firm roots. The little Bohemia around Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry is North Beach, Haight-Ashbury and 16th & Valencia all rolled into one living crossroads.

The art theater sometimes shows X-rated movies and sometimes no movies at all, but it’s where you can usually count on midnight performances of films-to-recite-along-with. Arabica is a coffee house like the Puccini.

Hopeful Booksellers

Just as in San Francisco, the bookstores tend to fade away; but just as in San Francisco, a hopeful bookseller is born every day. At Shaker Square there’s another bookstore, another Arabica, another movie house, various art galleries, and street-strolling under friendly brown skies.

We needn’t discuss how the California Dreamin’, beat and hip style infected New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. But Vence in southern France? The San Francisco cafe there is called Feelings and features “American Fish� with cognac sauce, “Feelings Tacos� and “Blueberries Lamb.�

The dessert special is “un Brownie,� which is described as gateau chocolat Chantilly, and I urged the proprietor to add “Les Twinkies� to his menu. An electric organ plays that old San Francisco jazz. The people there love San Francisco, but an electric organ? Sometimes they don’t get it exactly right. San Francisco is not a roller rink.

In Martinique, too, a few years ago I came upon a California cafe on the shores of the Caribbean. My rental car came to a screeching halt on the winding road among carnivorous red flowers when I saw swirly Fillmore posters. The proprietor said he had spent the best minutes of his life in Sausalito.

Foreign Legion

The next year, when I again visited Martinique, the new proprietor was a German veteran of the French Foreign Legion, but the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead tapes were still in place. “Union Square! Lefty O’Doul’s! Levi’s 501 button jeans!� breathed the brave Teutonic former legionnaire.

The San Francisco state-of-mind spread like the smell of patchouli during the beatnik and hippie periods, although the image of Westering, the Gold Rush, the Sydney ducks, the Barbary Coast and International Settlement, the Black Cat saloon gave traditional substance to the aroma.

It wasn’t just the hills around here; it was also the alleys reminiscent of a walled medieval town. Lurking and funning were always part of the style. The Summer of Love, the Aquarian Age and the youth explosion sewed the label “Made in San Francisco� on the world’s pants.

Even before glasnost, there were youth cafes in Moscow where wide-rumped folks went to do the tveest in their counterfeit Levis. In Toronto, the memory of Swingin’ London, which is only a memory in London, and Swingin’ San Francisco, which endures as a transmogrified myth nearly everywhere, has given the former Hogtown a blush of pleasure.

Tie-Dyed Clothes

Among worried upward mobiles at colleges and universities, the San Francisco mystique is a frequent elective. Health foods are served as an option in dorm meal programs. A person who wears tie-dyed clothes is likely to be a tenured professor, but at UC Davis a young man sidled up to me with a precious secret to share. In a lowered voice he whispered, “Pssst! I listen to Bob Dylan, too!�

Sometimes even San Francisco seems to be in the business of imitating itself. One Saturday afternoon in May I visited the bandstand in Golden Gate Park, where Big Brother and the Holding Company was performing a free concert. Greenpeace was involved. The new Janis Joplin (Mark II; double mufflers) sang out her heart to “save the dolphins,� but the unmentioned point was that she had a heart to sing out. The voice was strong and passionate, lacking only the last desperate, ruined-monument croak of Joplin at the end of her life.

Aboriginal Hippies

At first glance, these seemed to be aboriginal hippies swaying in the sun. Was that patchouli in the air? Was that Paul Krassner sniffing it? But many in the crowd looked like burnouts and bikers, not the veterans of the old Panhandle concerts but their grandchildren. A boy in red, high-topped tennis shoes gave me a peace sign. “How are you today?�

“Good,� I said.

“It’s a good day to be good,� he said, pronouncing good in the turned-on, groovy, three-syllable manner, goo-oo-ood, and his girlfriend in her laces and thongs beamed at him, beamed at me, beamed in general.

A huge potbellied man with a bear tattoo on his furry back, a bear and a lady chasing each other in the underbrush, glared at me. He was sloped over his bike. A Hell’s Angel jacket hung from the handlebars. At approximately 300 pounds, he didn’t fear someone would run off with his jacket.

Chocolate George

At first I was uncomfortable under his scrutiny, but then someone pointed a camera at him and he went into his camera mode, as still as an icon upon his saddle, mirrored sunglasses planted amid the grizzle of face, impassive, eager to be of use, helping the photographer.

He, too, was enacting an image of San Francisco, this time the San Francisco Hell’s Angels, even if he was from Oakland. He remembers Chocolate George, the Angel who used to drink his chocolate milk on Page until a speeding car at an intersection in the Haight ended his chocolate habit and his enriched life.

When we’re here, we’re just here. The Potrero Hill neighborhood that includes the San Francisco Thai Barbecue, the Goat Hill Pizza, that Greek place with the good food and the endless name ending in - opolous, the Fifties coffee shop with antique Coke signs and jukebox--it’s just another typical outcropping of the San Francisco spirit, a mixture of innovation, ethnicity and nostalgia.

The Breatharian

That’s where I meet the breatharian, sometimes a writer, who can teach me to live without eating. (I doubt I have the intestinal fortitude or chlorophyll for it.)

In San Francisco, we can turn in any direction, take any bus and we’re there. In Los Angeles, I drive to the Sunset Strip, or to Hugo’s in West Hollywood, or to Venice in search of area code 415.

At Hugo’s they tend to be pouring over scripts instead of manuscripts, but the air of expectancy and salads, that dream of salvation through dreamland, puts me into the proper procedures of reference.

And in Paris I climb Montparnasse toward the Aubergine, a vegetarian restaurant, where I find Alan Ginsberg tinkling his little bells and singing a Buddhist country rock song. I’m still home.