Washington Square San Francisco

Well, I did my walk. Left the St. Francis at 6:00 on Wednesday, walked up Geary to Polk. Sidetracked up Leavenworth to look in the front door of the apartment building I thought I used to live in with my new baby in 1979 and then realized later I was a block short on the hill. We were in a 5th floor apartment- below Sutter there was a building that only four floors, but it had a street level door that led to a courtyard where I had parked the motorcycle, it looked like it, but walking up the hill one more block, I found the the real building. It looked a whole better than the first one. I recall sitting out on the front step one morning at 8:00 am, overwhelmed by the whole thing. - my wife and new baby upstairs not yet awake- and I was home from work to sleep after a graveyard shift. -All feeling was - my god how do I deal with this- but I got up and went in. We should have stayed right there. I had a cat that would sleep on my desk while I wrote. And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. His name was Herbie (Named after Herbert Gold) Anyway, It is all gone and it will never come again and I've lost more than I've gained and I walked on. I always walked on. I would leave them and walk and walk and come back at 4:00 am on my nights off and they never knew where I went or what I saw. Still kinda of that way. There is this little place at Washington Square on the corner across the street from the park. Its way before you get to City Lights or all the tourist restaurants and has always been a neighborhood place- for 20-30 years and it used to have great onion rings. I sat outside like I had never ever left and had beer and fish and chips and onion rings and watched the group gather on the corner above me- all friends and smokers and dopers who collected there. They were drinking beer from the place, but they couldn't go in because they were smoking. All late 20s- early 30s and all going off somewhere else afterward.
Then City Lights- found a book of a dialogue between Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder- DVD in the back- some kind of documentary that I had never heard of. This was just before I was ready to sweep all the books off the table and storm out. (I've been rejected maybe 5 times by City Lights- without them even looking at the material)   The saving grace was finding the book- but as I was looking at it on the floor, a young couple- two guys came in and the one guy was saying- you have to read the book- it will tell you all about me and San Francisco- it was "On The Road" - they were downstairs buying the book as I was buying mine and I laid a hand on the shoulder of the young unread lover and told him it was a really good book.So I walked on. Chinatown at 9:00 pm on a Wednesday night.