Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 1 The Flat on Clementina T he fog crept off San Francisco Bay and into the warren of narrow streets in San Francisco’s South of Market district. I glanced into the oversized rearview mirror outside the window of my pickup truck parked by the crumbling curb. “End Cle- mentina” was reflected back at me from the corner street sign. I peered out the windshield. The building beckoned me from across the street. There it sat, shrouded in afternoon fog. Chunks of its cement-gray stucco façade had fallen away. It beckoned me like the gap-tooth grin of a two-bit hustler. What a Dump. When Bette Davis uttered her famous epithet in the 1949 film Beyond the Forest, she hadn’t seen the flat I had just leased near Folsom Street, in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., on May 1, 1976. The derelict structure I had bound myself to stood at 766 Clementina, an alley-like street one block north of Folsom, in a district of the City known as South of Market, South of the Slot— for the cable car slot that used to run down Market Street—or sometimes just Folsom. South of Market in the 1970s was composed of various inter- locking communities. There were pre-World War II rundown residential buildings usually composed of two or three flats. These low-rent, often absentee landlord buildings, lined the secondary alley-streets and were home to the Resident-People who lived there. Mom-and-pop corner grocery stores and cheap diners were scattered throughout this grid of grungy structures. Rumor had it these streets were named for the Gold Rush good-time gals like Dore, Minna, and Natoma. It was an area that Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, who directed the rebuilding of Paris during the 19th -century, would have razed. Then there was a mixture of small light industrial businesses, Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 2Jim Stewart such as a sandblasting machine shop, a scrap gold-and-silver recovery plant, or a redwood knickknack factory that wholesaled souvenirs to the National Parks. Most of these small businesses were located on the secondary alleys, some on major streets. Along the thoroughfares, such as Howard, Folsom, and Harrison, there were starting to be seen a few trendy to-the-trade outlets, featur- ing such items as display mannequins, industrial office furniture, or high-tech lighting. These were most often housed in former warehouses. They were interspersed with buildings that still were warehouses. Here worked the Day-People. Most left before dark. Also along the thoroughfares, especially Folsom Street, were leather bars and bathhouses that catered to that sense of naughty danger sought by men who came into the district after dark. They were the Night-People. Threaded throughout this entire grid in both non-gentrified warehouse lofts and walk-up rundown flats were not-quite-yet-discovered-artists. They were mostly male and attracted to the masculine sense of blue-collar-place. And yes, they were also attracted to the cheap rent and the easy sex. The place I leased was in an Edwardian-style post-earth- quake/fire building. It was the entire top floor of a stacked two- flat. Sometime in the 1930s the outside had been resurfaced with cement stucco applied over chicken wire. By 1976 the chicken wire had lost a quarter of its stucco skin. The flat had been vacated in a hurry. Piles of dirty clothes and discarded junk littered the seven rooms on the second floor. An old refrigerator was filled with rotting hamburger, rancid rice, and at least four generations of cockroaches. Windows were cracked and painted shut. Large chunks of plaster had fallen away reveal- ing aging wooden lath. Both inside and out, the building looked abandoned. What a dump! I stared at the lease I had just signed for the top-floor flat: $150 a month. What a steal! When I first moved to San Francisco, October 1, 1975, I lived with Jack Fritscher, a great friend, who had “sponsored” me to the City by introducing me to his circle of friends and the most interesting bars and bathhouses I could imagine. As a carpenter- in-residence, I turned his cellar into a bedroom and all-purpose Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues3 playroom. On March 1, 1976, I moved into the Castro, San Fran- cisco’s expanding gay neighborhood. I shared an apartment on Noe Street with Sheldon Kovalski, an expat from Brooklyn, who had recently relocated up to San Francisco from Los Angeles. That apartment was within walking distance of 18th and Castro Streets. Sheldon soon left and moved in with a lover. I couldn’t afford the place by myself. I had to be out by the end of the month. I wasn’t sure where to look for another place. In early April, 1976, I drove out to Lands End. It was a wild place then, out by the Pacific, southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would later be tamed and developed as a National Recreation Area, but back in the day, it was visited mostly by adventurous men who went there for nude sunbathing and sex. Prides of once-domestic cats that had become inconvenient for their owners were dumped there to live free. It was a good place to watch the tides and think about life and the future or to con- template which of the hot raw hunks on the beach there might follow you behind the rocks for a private session. I had been wandering most of that afternoon on trails that were natural, carved out by hikers rather than the Parks and Rec- reation Department. The area seemed abandoned. Native vegeta- tion reclaimed old cellars and foundations of long-demolished shacks. It could be dangerous there, what with the feral cats, wild men, and nude sunbathers. There were also predatory hustlers out for whatever they could get. I spent the afternoon admiring the wildlife, the Pacific, and wondering where I was going to live. I returned to Merrie Way Road where I had parked my pickup. Before I reached the parking lot, I noticed an extremely muscular man wearing army pants and an army cap. It was the old-style cap, the kind that seemed to snap to attention and make you think of either the young Fidel Castro or the French Foreign Legion. Or both. Its shirtless wearer was pissing against a tree. I followed suit against a tree near his. He nodded acknowledge- ment of my presence and a smile broke his bearded face. His blue eyes joined his grin. I had just met Bill Essex. After trading afternoon quickies in a nearby acacia copse, I followed Bill’s mustard-yellow van to the Café Flore on Market Street. The café was near my soon-to-be-vacated apartment on Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 4Jim Stewart Noe Street. I had been by the funky place several times before but had never stopped there. “You’ve been here before?” I asked Bill as we entered the café. It had the look of an elegantly scruffy greenhouse abandoned decades ago and only recently turned into a shabby chic café. Plants were everywhere. Ferns hanging from the ceiling competed with huge pots filled with rubber plants and ficus. Well-worn folding chairs and tiny tables that looked like immigrants from the cafés of Paris formed intricate patterns on the uneven floor through which waiters wound their way. Non-obtrusive disco music—was there ever such a thing?—could be felt as much as heard just above the din of diners. “Yeah, I’ve been here before. A couple of years ago when they first opened,” Bill said, as we waited for a table. Seated, our drink and food orders taken, we entered the ten- tative world of conversation that often seems awkward after sex with a stranger. “I’m looking for a place to live,” I said. “I have to get out of my place up the street here at the end of the month. I don’t suppose you know of any place that’s cheap, do you?” “As a matter of fact I do,” Bill said. “A friend of mine, David Hurles, lives on Clementina Street. I sometimes stay with him when I come up from Pomona. He said there’s been a For Rent sign on the place across the street for six weeks or better.” “Where’s Clementina?” “South of Market, near Folsom.” “What’s it look like?” “It’s a dump. I don’t know what the rent is but it can’t be much the way the building looks.” “I want to see it. Is there a phone number to call?” There was. Bill drove me over to Clementina Street after we finished at Café Flore. He was right. It was pretty run down. I copied down the landlord’s name, Clarence, and his phone num- ber. It wouldn’t hurt to find out how much the rent was and what it looked like inside. Maybe inside it wasn’t as bad as outside. David Hurles’ place was across the street. Bill Essex evidently had known him for some time. We went over and knocked. He was home. Hurles had just started a new mail-order photo and Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues5 audio tape business, Old Reliable. “I figured people will feel they can trust a place called Old Reliable. Don’t you think it sounds like it has been around forever; that you wouldn’t be ripped off by Old Reliable?” Hurles asked. “I’ve never been ripped off by my old reliable,” Bill Essex said. We all laughed as Bill spread his legs and leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head so we could get a better view as his old reliable thickened in his army-surplus pants. “How long have you been living here?” I said. “What’s it like living in the Folsom area?” “Jim’s thinking of moving South of Market. He got the num- ber for that place across the street,” Bill said. “I like it here. Chuck Arnett lives just above me, you know. I sometimes hear him. He’s quite a sexual athlete.” Chuck Arnett worked at the Ambush, a bar on Harrison Street. Lean and quiet, in his 40s, he indeed had the look of a sexual athlete. “So you feel safe here?” I pressed David. I had always felt safe visiting the bars and baths in the Folsom. The neighborhood here seemed quite different, however, than either Noe Street or 25th Street where I had lived with Jack Fritscher and David Sparrow. “I feel as safe here as anywhere,” David Hurles said. I caught a brief exchange of slight smiles between him and Bill Essex. Only later would I understand the significance of that exchange. David Hurles often picked up ex-cons and other marginal men for sex and photos. It was how he built Old Reliable. That night Bill and I picked up where we had left off under the piss-trees out by Lands End. I had my first snort of cocaine. I took a series of photos of Bill in the shower. I concentrated on the superb musculature of his body. Although Pumping Iron, the bodybuilding photo book published a few years earlier, had been a hit with gay men, few gays at that time worked out and developed their bodies the way Bill did. I got a great shot of Bill emerging from the shower. Despite his prematurely bald head and dark beard, with his college football-player body and broad infectious grin, he looked the epitome of the All-American Boy. In the background of the photo, hung over the toilet tank, was a framed picture of another Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 6Jim Stewart American icon, the Marlboro Man. In the morning, Bill left to return to Pomona, near Los Angeles, where he was working on a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Cal Poly. Before the summer was over, Bill too had heard the siren call of the City and moved north to San Francisco. Without realizing it, I had laid the foundations for my life as a photographer South of Market. I would move into the dump on Clementina. David Hurles would lend me an extensive mail- ing list for a photo mail-order business. And I had taken the first photos of Bill Essex. He would prove to be the top model for my Keyhole Studios mail-order business. The first thing I wanted to do after leasing the flat on Clemen- tina, before I moved in or took one load of garbage to the dump, was take pictures. They would function as “before” pictures in contrast to whatever “after” pictures I might take once I had rescued the place. They would not be Architectural Digest-style “before” pictures. I wanted the flat to first function as a dan- gerous-abandoned-wrong-side-of-the-tracks place, for suggestive blue-collar sexual fantasy photos. These first photos would be self-portraits. My only prop was a used yellow hardhat I found in a thrift store. The pictures would entice viewers to enter at their own risk. Don’t try this at home. You can try it here, however. It was a personal performance piece. Pure theater. High-contrast black-and-white photos. It was the 1970s. It was Art. The series included one of me, naked, wearing a hard hat, and sitting in an old clawfoot tub; Man Ray surrealism South of Market. Another photo in the series allowed the viewer to voy- euristically observe the naked hardhat exhibitionist through the narrow opening of a nearly closed door to a room filled with trash. I spent an entire Sunday afternoon in the flat by myself, setting up floodlights, positioning the tripod, and arranging the camera angles. I would focus on the spot where I would be, set the timer for the delayed shutter speed, then quickly pose for my own Nikon. The afternoon sunlight, streaming through the streaked filth on the cracked windows, provided a new interpretation of the Venetian-blind-shadow-ladder-across-the-room technique, long a favorite of mine in the old film noir classics of the 1940s. It was Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues7 San Francisco South of Market. It was 1976. When I finished I was exhausted. The creative energy I had put into the photo shoot had peaked in a total body climax. I packed my camera and equipment into the cab of the pickup truck, locked the door to the flat, and headed over to Harrison Street and the Ambush for a cold longneck beer and the camara- derie the place provided. I got a beer at the bar and started up the stairway to the second floor. At the top of the stairs a man behind the counter in the leather shop looked up. “Hi,” I nodded as I rounded the landing and came up the last couple of steps. “Hi.” He nodded back. “It smells good up here,” I said. “It’s all the leather and poppers.” I laughed and inhaled deeply. “I’m Jim Stewart,” I said, offer- ing my hand. He had a firm grip. Just as I was letting go, his hand slowly collapsed into an elongated fist not much bigger around than the butt-end of a beer bottle. “Chuck Arnett.” “I know,” I said. “I’m moving into the place across the street from you on Clementina.” “I know,” he countered with a shy grin. My eyebrows arched in question marks. “David Hurles.” This master artist of the leather scene, whose mural of manly men in the Toolbox bar had been published in the June 26, 1964, issue of Life magazine, when I was still an undergrad, smiled up at me revealing the whites of his eyes beneath their brown irises. Although in his late 40s, he still had the hard lean look of the dancer I’d heard he’d once been in New York. He wore a close- clipped mustache and chinstrap beard. His still-dark hair was cut short, military style. A longsleeved khaki shirt, worn Levis, and a black leather vest complemented his tight body. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow to display sinewy, nearly hairless forearms decorated with fading long-ago tattoos. His nails were clipped short. As I watched, he finished a stylized ink doodle. It covered Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 8Jim Stewart the lower half of a cardboard back from a yellow legal tablet. The doodle was of a well-filled condom. He folded the cardboard in half and set it on the counter. Next to the drawing of the used rubber it read “Scum Bags Three for $1.00.” “I like that sign,” I said. “Can I buy it?” “It’s not for sale.” He must have seen the disappointment in my eyes. He reached into the waste basket at the end of the counter and pulled out a cardstock ad for the Ambush. It had been printed with a script of the word Ambush and an Arnett drawing of leathermen’s heads. There was a whole stack of them next to the cash register. He laid it on the counter. I looked at it questioningly. “Turn it over,” he said softly. I turned it over. On the back of the card were preliminary doodles of several used rubbers, each slightly different. Scum Bags was drawn in a couple of different scripts. Arnett made a little mark in the corner that looked like some stylized zodiac sign. “It’s yours,” he said as he slid it across the counter top toward me. As I picked it up, I noticed a stain of some sort on the left side of the card. It spread across the drawings of the unrolled prophylactics. Probably spilled beer, I thought. I put it carefully in the inside pocket of my brown leather Harley jacket. I had just acquired my first original Chuck Arnett. Removing the piles of dirty clothes, assorted junk and broken furniture that had been left behind in the Clementina flat was daunting. Thank God for heavy-duty yard waste bags and my pickup truck. There was a dump just out of the City in South San Francisco. Going there proved an adventure. Since I was not a professional trash hauler, most of the guys at the weigh-in station waved me through at no charge. My load looked light compared to the big-guy trash haulers and dumpsters that frequented the place. As a bonus, I was directed to an area for household trash, not raw garbage. I love trash. What a treasure trove. Leftover building scrapes were often available. These went back to the flat for future Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues9 use. One trip netted enough two-by-fours and two-by-sixes to build a small deck for potted plants in the lightwell off the middle room. Another time I found sheets of heavy plate glass. One was used as replacement glass for the original front entrance door. Another was sandblasted by a neighbor and used in a light table I built to view photo negatives. Going to the dump was like going to the thrift store. Some- times you hit paydirt, sometimes you didn’t. Finally the small trash was gone from the flat. The cockroach- infested refrigerator and grease-encrusted stove remained. Among the tools I had brought with me to California was a hand dolly for wheeling light loads. It would work fine for getting the appliances down the long flight of stairs. Once on the recessed porch, I could load them into the bed of the pickup. I strapped the refrigerator to the hand dolly with clothesline rope I had bought for a different purpose. The cockroaches and rotting food remained inside. By fancy footwork I was able to get the bulky load out of the kitchen, down the hall, down two steps onto the landing, and started down the long flight of stairs. There were skids on the back of the dolly that would slide over the edge of the steps. I was halfway down when I heard the front door open. The mass of the refrigerator prevented me from seeing who it was. “You need a hand there?” “Yeah, thanks.” Who the hell was that? “I brought over some ceramic tile for the bathroom.” It was Clarence, the landlord. I wondered what sort of tile he brought for the bathroom floor. I pictured titty-pink squares with a gold scroll around the edge. He had said he would provide all the supplies for the renovation. A buddy of his was a building contractor with lots of leftovers. I would supply the labor. It was part of the deal. It was why my rent was only $150 a month. “I can’t see very well where I’m headed with this thing,” I said. “Can you help me guide it toward the front door?” I felt the old refrigerator shift slightly as Clarence gently guided it toward the door and out onto the recessed front porch. I let it pivot down as the weight slowly shifted until it was resting on the stoop. “What are you going to do with it?” Clarence asked.Next >