From WannaBeat, by David Polonoff:

The third time I moved to San Francisco, it finally took. It was the last year of Gerald Ford and the second season of Saturday Night Live. I had somehow discovered how to hang on, if only just barely.

I stayed with Rex at first. He was the last of our crowd to still be in San Francisco. He was living in the Haight across the Panhandle from the main drag. Hard to know how long I stayed there. I wasn’t all that welcome. Rex was just starting in with Lou, whom I’d met in Portland. A fierce feminist there and by reputation from earlier, I was shocked that she had taken up with Rex, who I knew to be an arch male chauvinist and unabashed pussy hound. But it didn’t seem like she shared that knowledge … and whatever inklings she had of it she decided to blame on me. Any of the drinking and carousing that ensued at Rex’s place and a series of neighborhood dives was due in her mind to my bad influence. She wanted me gone.

The opportunity came soon enough. Dean, a romantic icon of our left-wing college circle, a lapsed country boy who knew everything about herbs and magic mushrooms, quoted Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle like scripture and thrived on his name’s association with the apostolic line of rebel loners from Dean Moriarty to James Dean, was leaving town for a few weeks to visit his family in Pennsylvania. He needed someone to sublet his place and keep his bike messenger job warm for him. Within a few weeks of my arrival, I was living in a studio apartment in North Beach, beatnik progenitor of all hipster neighborhoods, and riding a one-speed bike up and down the hills of San Francisco.

Warp Speed Messenger Service was headquartered south of Market Street, in the squalid industrial section years away from its reincarnation as the gentrified SOMA district. We had to go there in the morning to pick up our bicycles and walkie-talkies and bring them back at night. In the interim, we picked up packages and envelopes at one office and dropped them off at another, usually further uphill. Then we reported in on our walkie-talkies to the dispatcher, who sent us off on another run. The hills in the financial district were pretty steep. I’m not quite sure how I did it or how I got used to riding in the traffic. But I did love it: the feeling of the sun and my breath and my freedom. I loved walking into sedate offices sweaty and physical from my ride, bringing the face of labor into the domain of bloodless capital, displaying my proletarian triumph to the surrogates of my rejected upward mobility. I loved the exhaustion I felt at night in the small apartment just off Columbus, hearing the echoes of bohemian longing in the voices of passersby.

I started working out an idea for a TV show about bike messengers. Maybe for the Streets of San Francisco, which was big at that moment. The bike messenger hero had a past. He’d been a student radical … he’d done something and was hiding out … as a bike messenger … he delivers a package to an office where his ex-girlfriend is now a lawyer … they hook up … and commit some kind of crime … a heist? No, steal some incriminating documents…

I twisted this story backwards and forwards as I struggled my way up California Street and coasted down Pine, imagining the first-person camera as it captured the downhill elation and the traffic-dodging thrill … and never set a word of it down. I loved the new feeling in my body of strength and grace and economy of motion. And then Dean returned.

I needed a new place to live. I guess that’s when I moved into a hotel on Broadway; I don’t remember its name. A lot of the North Beach hangers on and characters of the moment lived there. I say “of the moment” because there was a time when hanging out “on the Beach” was a noble occupation. The ’50s, of course. But even in the ’60s, there was the hungry i, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, later Richard Brautigan and always City Lights Bookstore maintaining the dignity of literacy through the psychedelic onslaught. But my neighbors were just layabouts, potheads and junkies; aimless and shell-shocked, not really doing anything but living cheaply and hitting the bars at night.

The window looked out over Broadway, full of restaurants, bars and rip-off topless joints, the noise from which crescendoed from dinnertime to a climactic last call, followed by a denouement of car screeches and drunken shouts. I liked the romance of it all: the bare light bulb, the cotlike single bed, the flimsy single-locked door you could see the light under. There was a sink on the wall but no bathroom — that was down the hall. Each room offered a table on which the occupant might pile, according to their proclivity, a hot plate, six-pack, rolling papers, bong, works-and-spoon or, in my case, a Remington typewriter and a jumble of papers covered with the unpunctuated verbiage that I called my “stream of drivel.”

I had decided that I was supposed to be a writer. After years of agonizing over what I should be doing, what I might become, what was important, what could give life meaning, I had decided that the asking of these questions was in fact what I was supposed to do. The search for a calling was my calling. And the documentation thereof would be my vocation. So, I started to write everything down as it was happening (or soon thereafter), to capture experience as I was having it. Only, I wasn’t a very good typist, so I spent almost as much time going back over my automatic writing, trying to figure out what I’d typed and penciling it in. The other problem was that to capture experience, you need to be having it. There is only so much time you can spend writing about sitting at your table, listening to the sounds from outside, chasing the random thoughts and associations running through your brain. I started heading out, notebook in hand.