Forward by Stephen Elliott

MONDAY A JOURNAL OF POETRY, PROSE, AND ART

Fall 2000 coming out 2019 Founded 1999 San Francisco, California, USA

FORWARD by Stephen Elliott

I want to tell you a story, about San Francisco in the year 2000, and how unlikely everything was, and how we were surrounded by magic but couldn’t always have what was gorgeous and available in the world around us. I’m talking about the role of chance, or luck and a certain madness that inhabited the spoken word events and independent bookstores and dive bars at that time. I’m talking about, by extension, the people who had arrived in San Francisco in the 90s and thought they would be writers.

I was living in a studio on Folsom and 16th Street. That studio, if it still exists, probably rents for $6,000 a month now. But at the time it was the drop-off point for the prison bus. I was going to a lot of poetry readings where I would read my poems and also find ways to understand the world around me through the poetry of others. There was an incredible poetry scene happening, though I was too young, uneducated, and inexperienced (despite already being in my late 20s) to appreciate just how special the city was right then.

It was raining a lot. So it was probably June. I was in the habit of walking to the Peet’s on Market Street, where I would get my coffee and try to write poems. If I was a better poet maybe I would have worked in the Chinese food and donut shop downstairs, but I didn’t have that kind of talent. That was for people like Bucky Sinister, or some of the lovely people in this collection.

Anyway, it had been raining, and I arrived at the cafe with my pants soaked even though I carried an umbrella. So the next day I packed an extra pair of pants and figured if my pants got wet in the rain again I would just change in the bathroom. I don’t know the genesis of this particular inspiration. It wasn’t an idea I’d had before or since, really.

The next day it didn’t rain, at least not at first. It was cloudy, but nothing happened. Sometimes in San Francisco nothing does

happen. I arrived at the coffee shop and I got their largest coffee and a maple scone. Maybe it matters that this was before the “coffee craze.” Before Ritual Roasters kicked it off, followed by Blue Bottle, and Four Barrel took it to the next level. It was also before Starbucks was allowed to operate in San Francisco because of a deal with Peet’s where I guess they got all their secrets. I don’t remember. But Peet’s, at the time, could make the claim of being the best coffee in San Francisco. I mean there was Cafe Trieste in North Beach where Francis Coppola wrote the Godfather. And there was The Atlas and Muddy Waters, the two cafes where I would later write my best book, Happy Baby, between 2002 and 2004, zinging on Adderall back when that stuff really worked. But in the rainy summer of 2000, before the Adderall (which I was prescribed in late 2001), before the second dot com that would make the first dot com look like a small town Radio Shack, before Osama Bin Laden declared war on America and won, in my third summer in San Francisco, a city I ended up in randomly, that slowly opened its secrets to me in a way that guaranteed a certain success and a certain failure and kept me for 15 years despite all my best efforts to leave, in that rainy summer between teaching LSAT classes and writing catalogue descriptions for an (obviously defunct) website called Catalogs2Go, I went to Peet’s coffee in the morning and I tried to write poems. It was the day a miracle happened.

I was on a stool at the window counter, looking out onto Market Street. I might have been reading a book purchased from Books Inc. just down the street. I was in fact almost certainly reading Valencia by Michelle Tea. I was obsessed with that book and read it multiple times. But I might also have been reading Sorry We’re Close, by Tarin Towers, which came out the year before on ManicD Press, or Monkey Girl by Beth Lisick who I first saw opening for Lydia Lunch at the Paradise Lounge. Those were just some of the books I particularly loved by local poets that made the city, and life in it, understandable.

And then I farted.

It might have started to rain by this point but it hadn’t rained on the walk over so I was totally dry. I was 28 or 29 years old. And when I farted something happened that had never happened to me before. It might be Forward

something that happens to other people but it’s something we don’t talk about so I don’t actually know. I had an “accident.” I mean, I shat my pants. I sharted (and the existence of the word “sharted” makes me think it is more common than we acknowledge). It wasn’t something I had experience with or any reason to expect or prepare for. I mean, I was young. I had no idea what was coming in my life. I was healthy and I didn’t know what that meant either. But I did realize, almost immediately, the unlikeliness of this situation. It was my first time ever shitting my pants. It was also the first time in my entire life that I had packed an EXTRA PAIR OF PANTS. I’d had many weird times in my life. I’d spent a year homeless when I was 14. I’d hitchhiked from Chicago to California. I’d been a ski bum in Keystone Colorado and a barker for a live sex show in Amsterdam and a stripper in Boystown. But I had never experienced a miracle that I knew of. This was a miracle.

I wanted to lean over to tell the person next to me, “You’re not going to believe what just happened…” But I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t comfortable talking about poop. Even now, 47 years old, I don’t like to talk about poop. Maybe I should have bought a lottery ticket that day. Maybe if I had a cellphone I would have texted someone. But I was four years away from my first cell phone. This was another time.

They had a bathroom downstairs and I took off the pants I was wearing, washed them in the sink, put them in a plastic bag and then in my backpack. I cleaned myself then I put on the dry, clean pants I had brought with me just in case I’d gotten wet walking in the rain, and returned to my coffee, my maple scone, Valencia by Michelle Tea, and got on with what I vaguely thought of as my life calling. Maybe I wrote the poem in this collection.

The point of this story is obvious: Miracles happen. Times and places are unique in ways we rarely appreciate at the time. And they change in an instant. One day the world is open to anyone with enough money for a plane ticket, the next day deranged men fly planes into buildings with the wrong president in the White House and the

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world closes permanently and all those places you could conceivably have visited become places you will almost certainly never go, locked in an endless war between cultures that will almost certainly continue at least through my lifetime.

I would say, try to be happy at the time. Try to understand the incredible poetry that was happening in San Francisco in the Fall of 2000. The slams at Du Nord, the street poets in the Mission, the back room readings on Sunday night, Adobe books, the Golden Elephant, the Paradise Lounge, Hotel Utah. It was an incredibly fertile time to be a writer in San Francisco, as we can see by this journal, and by all the work that came since. San Francisco would dominate the literary environment of America for the next ten years, before succumbing to its current fate.

It’s rare to experience a miracle and know it the way I did that morning in Peet’s. I don’t know if I actually wrote anything that day. I know I stayed in the coffee shop and tried. Back then I tried every day to write something that made sense out of senselessness, a stanza or a paragraph that might illuminate an otherwise impenetrable world. My pants were dry and not full of shit. I had experienced something so unlikely that I should have known beyond doubt that anything was in fact possible.

Like this journal.