City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [43]
The magazine moved out to San Francisco and I went along for the ride. I hired some old friends of mine. Stan, my first lover, became the production director and stage-managed the difficult transition from East to West Coast and from one magazine to four. The printers we contracted in California had never done a big job beyond the telephone book. The idea of producing a weekly magazine with four-color illustrations staggered them. In those days before computers everything still had to be set in type and the photos had to be carefully inserted into the copy. Color correction, proofreading, binding, stapling—every process took hours upon hours and we would work late into the night.
Although I’d written book reviews for magazines, I’d never been on the staff of a weekly. I loved it because it was exciting and relentless. An idea, good or bad, was realized in just a few days. No expense was spared. In a year we spent sixteen million dollars, a fortune back then.
I lived in a charming little house behind a house on Russian Hill with Stan. By that point he’d fallen for a willful ex-marine drug addict back in New York who was obsessed with him. Jerry and Stan were on the phone every day, and Stan was always planning his frequent rendezvous with Jerry back in New York or Los Angeles or some other city.
Our house was ravishing with its little garden full of fuchsia and its Japanese interior and vast panoramic views of the bay, San Quentin prison, and Mount Tamalpais in the distance. In the mornings the bay would be cold and fogbound, but by noon the mists had burned off and the city was suddenly warm. But every neighborhood, it seemed, had its own microclimate. The hills were so steep that cars had to be parked with their wheels turned into the curb lest they start rolling away. The trolley cables were always humming hollowly under the street, like thick metallic arteries pumping and singing in a body on life support.
At the time, San Francisco was almost bucolic. The beatnik era was over, though the City Lights bookstore was still flourishing. Italian immigrants were everywhere. My watch repairman was Italian and I’d speak to him in his language. Pastry shops offered big cannoli covered with red and green sprinkles. On Telegraph Hill an old Italian restaurant had booths for ladies with doors that closed, a holdover from the period just after the earthquake. Hundreds of vagrants were in the Tenderloin, attracted by the good weather and the liberal public-welfare laws in California. San Francisco was not then a rich city, not as it would become after the start-up of the high-tech industry. Rents were cheap but salaries were correspondingly low. Educated young people with Ph.D.’s in art history were willing to work for two dollars an hour as checkout clerks at the supermarket. Of course rich retired people had moved in from all over the West because it was a beautiful and cultured metropolis with Victorian houses. It was also the financial center of the West. There was a harbor but it had missed out on the recent containerization revolution and lost business to other ports such as Seattle.
To us New Yorkers, San Francisco seemed eerily quiet, the streets empty, the lights doused after ten o’clock, the restaurants full of health food and skinny, blond hippie waiters on tranquilizers. The air seemed thin, as if we were high up instead of at sea level. The light was as delicate as a blonde’s eyelids—and just as defenseless. We would wander through the Golden Gate Park and look at all the plants we couldn’t name, the splendid exotic flowers that seemed too tropical for this chilly climate. We were heavy-smoking, grimy, soiled, fast-talking, and abrupt, and everyone out here seemed weirdly characterless and “nice,” as if they were newly hatched. Climbing a hill would leave us winded.
The famous gay