Monday Night With Saroyan

Monday night I switched off the TV, put on a Chet Baker record, and lay back on the sofa to read. Do you know what I picked up? William Saroyan. I’m sure he was on my mind because of our upcoming trip to San Francisco. All I know is that I felt drawn to his stories again. I found my copy of The Assyrian on the top shelf and inside I had left a slip of paper where I left off last year or the year before. Then I leaned back into the cushions and read two stories, “The Theological Student” and “The Plot.”

What is it about his voice and his subject matter? Tales of growing up in Fresno, stories of his boyhood and his Armenian family, the uncles, brothers, and cousins. Then there are other stories about his days as a penniless writer in San Francisco, pecking away on a typewriter in his room on Carl Street, and whiling away the hours in the bars South of Market.

In 2016, I made a pilgrimage to 348 Carl St. in San Francisco, where William Saroyan wrote The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.

There is a rhythm to his sentences. Something about the cadence, a particular sense of flow. I know I’m drawn to the warmth and the humor of these stories. But there is also a directness that can be unnerving. He doesn’t flinch or cushion the blow when he wants to take us somewhere dark. I’m thinking of “The Daring Young Man” and that down on his luck kid who starves to death. Or the slurs and disdain of the schoolteacher in “The Theological Student.”

Monday night with Saroyan gave me the same feeling as encountering an old friend. You are familiar with many of the anecdotes, but you just like being in his presence. He is good company. He is a raconteur. There is an edge to some of his humor. You never quite know where the evening with lead.

This is all I really wanted to tell you about: my latest encounter with William Saroyan. And this is why I love having a library. It doesn’t matter if you’re already reading three or four other books. When you have an urge to pull down William Saroyan or Ray Bradbury, you can do so. You read a few stories and then add the book to the stack on your nightstand. And when you’ve had your fill, you put it away again.

I’m glad I had the time to reacquaint myself with this old friend Monday night. The book is still on the nightstand. I read another few pages before bed last night. Maybe I’ll even take Saroyan back to San Francisco next week.

The Bookstores in My Mind

“Aardvark Book Store Sleeping Cat” by Lynn Friedman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There is a San Francisco that lives in your memory, composed of places that don’t exist anymore.

I want to tell you about Limelight Books, the film and theatre bookshop where I used to buy screenplays and works about favorite film directors—Scorsese, Godard, Kurosawa and Kubrick–when I was a teenager in the eighties and wanted nothing more than to go to film school and be a movie director. I googled Limelight Books this morning, knowing that this small bookstore on Market must be long gone. It was indeed. I’m sure I’ve even looked this up before.

Sometimes you hope that you’re wrong. You hit the Search key and imagine that you might find evidence that the place is open again, maybe in another location, but still there, waiting for your return. But I have to be content with going back in my mind.

I can still remember dropping to a knee in a narrow aisle to check the bottom shelves while owner Roy talked to customers or took a phone order. I remember buying a bound, photocopied facsimile of the Vertigo shooting script and walking it up to the register. I remember reading that script on a sunny Saturday afternoon when I was fifteen, stretched out on the sofa in the small back room of our flat in the Castro where my sister kept her hanging ferns.

The unpleasant surprise this morning was learning that Aardvark Books on Church Street closed for good just a few months ago. I’m so glad that my wife and I were able to stop in last time we visited San Francisco. It was the last bookstore we visited on that trip, which also included long afternoons browsing at Green Apple and City Lights.

“Aardvark Books, Church Street, San Francisco” by Mark Pritchard is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

That winter day in 2017 was one of our last outings in the City before flying home to Austin. We were waiting for the 22 Fillmore at Church and Market and I happened to notice that Aardvark was open. We ducked inside to look around. How many times did I visit Aardvark when I was in my teens and early twenties? How many hours did I spend there, while their bookstore cat snoozed in the front window? I loved those narrow aisles of leaning, tightly packed used books. There were always discoveries awaiting me on these shelves. Their stock was unique—not the same stuff you would stumble across at any Half Price Books, but old clothbound books and paperbacks from people who lived in the neighborhood, books that might have lived with their owners for many years, books cherished, read and reread.

Now when I go back home, twenty years after moving away, I always like to pick up books related to San Francisco and its history. On that last visit to Aardvark Books in 2017, I remember finding an autographed copy of local author Barnaby Conrad’s memoir Name Dropping: Tales from My San Francisco Nightclub about his years running jazz club and hot spot El Matador. It was a book full of colorful anecdotes about Conrad’s encounters with all of the celebrities who used to come into his place in the fifties and sixties—Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Duke Ellington, and Noel Coward—a snapshot of social San Francisco at midcentury.

Look at me. I get lost on a tangent about a book purchased at Aardvark when I wanted to eulogize the place itself. At least I have memories of favorite books purchased at Aardvark over the years. Do you do this, too? Can you look at your shelves and remember where you bought some of the books that have moved with you year after year, the ones that survive weeding and downsizing when you need to pack up and move?

The most important artifacts are the gateway books, the volumes that marked the start of a lifelong affair with a certain author or subject matter. My favorite Chekhov biography by Ernest Simmons came from Aardvark Books. I still have this trade paperback on my Chekhov shelf—I think it may have been the first Chekhov book I ever bought, when I first fell into the world of his stories by working my way through a copy of The Essential Tales of Chekhov borrowed from the old main library near Civic Center sometime in the mid-nineties. If I scanned my shelves right now, I know I would find other volumes picked up at Aardvark or Limelight—in fact, I still have that Vertigo script! 

The books on my shelves are like fragments of pottery from an archeological site. They come from a particular place and time. They tell a story about who I once was.