Aging Hustler

Call me Jake. Jake McBride, aging hustler from San Francisco, here in Weimar because it's the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1999, and I want to end my century with a bang--or two. Filing copy back to Barry Rothberg, editor of EYE 5, the best alternative weekly in the Bay Area (we say!). My weekly column was dubbed "Just Jake" by Barry, some say as a preemptive defense against law suits coming from my free-wheeling style, others because "just jake" means both "absolutely O.K." as well as a standing demurrer against pieces that misfire or fire only too exactly on the stuffed shirts who run the Bay.

Only my closest friends know "Jake" is short for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the bizarre result of my Irish Catholic father, Aloysius Mark McBride, having met my French Communist mother at an Armistice party in the "red suburb" of Paris known as Ivry-sur-Seine. It was my dad's first fuck ever, and it apparently took, as unskilled as the Old Masturbator must have been, since I was born nine months to the day, on 11 August 1919, in the Richmond District of San Francisco where he was a mail man.

His gamin wife, Zoe Renaud, would have preferred that he be more a male man, but what the hell: he still sired three more children--Francois Marie (l92l), Denis Diderot (l923), and Donatien-Alphonse-Francois (l925), named, as you've already surmised, after icons of the French Revolution. Since the nuns at Star of the Sea elementary school would hardly have put up with such onomastic agnosticism, we quickly devised "cover" nicknames--Jake, Volly, Diddy, and Daffy (somehow I don't think Sister Marie Bernadette, O.P., the little Ur Fascist who ran the Star like a Gauleiter, would have liked a good Catholic child named after the Marquis de Sade.)

Looking back one Thanksgiving dinner many decades later, we decided that Zoe had finally given up on making her sack time civilized with her frustratingly premature ejaculator by fantasizing him as the wicked Marquis. That plot obviously didn't work because shortly after Daffy was born, she split down to Big Sur with the psychologist living next door who loved (anybody and everybody). There they loved more or less happily almost ever after. The four of us were happy about the split because it got us out of the Richmond summers when the fog failed to cool us off.

My detour to Weimar began on the press tour in Stockholm, the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1998, when a snooty art critic from Leipzig snarled, "Ach, Weimar ist ein Katastrophe". He elaborated by saying that ten years of Nazism (it was the capital of the first German state to go for Hitler, where he tried out his demagogic tactics from the balcony of the Hotel Elefant as early as 1924) and forty more of the German Democratic Republic had left the so-called "spiritual center of Germany" (Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Nietzche, van de Velde, and Gropius all lived there.) in a state of terminal decay. How, he blustered, could this "village" of a mere 60,000 ever follow the Swedish metropolis? Sucking up to his Swedish hosts.

The disaster of Salonika as CultCap, he predicted, would be repeated. Well, that aroused my American underdog spirit. I remembered the Weimar Republic from European History 101, and as an architectural groupie I had always wanted to see where the Bauhaus got started. Here was my chance. I took a long, lovely detour back to San Francisco via Copenhagen, Lubeck, Hamburg, Berlin, and Dessau to the so-called Athens on the Ilm. How I love European cities, each with a fascinating history behind its unique repertory of facades.

I walked from the Hauptbahnhof to the Marktplatz in 20 minutes. It was a nightmare: everything was either falling down or in the midst of rehabilitation. Capital of Culture? More like Capital of Chaos! Perhaps that snooty art critic was right. I have never seen such a non-step mess. I was about to strategically retreat to the train for a fast express to Frankfurt Flughafen for a non-stop to SFO when I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a gorgeous red sandstone Jugendstil building at the end of Schillerstrasse. Yikes. As I scrutinized it more closely I discovered that it was the Deutsche Bank.

And luckily I noticed on the main door the logo of Weimar as the Cultural Capital, a cool blue package begging to be unwrapped. A typed notice announced that the Press Bureau was on the second floor. Eureka! After a little confusion because our second floors are their first floors, I was greeted by a young man with a black T-shirt and a pony tail. The T-shirt said SALVE, and the press rep said "SALVE!" as well. I had just had my first lesson in Goethe Speak. That was what the old egghead used for "Howdy!", a verbal tick he picked on those two years in Italy which turned him from a Hessean hick into a Thuringian intellectual.

"Guten Tag," I began, "Ich bin Jake McBride, ein freie Journalist von San Francisco". The young man grinned and replied, "I'm Christian Gerecke from Weimar. What can I do for you?"

"Heh, begin by explaining where you learned to speak such good English?"

"I spent my junior year in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur and Orville Wright High School, and I've been flying high ever since. What brings you here?"

"Well, I was just at the press tour of Stockholm as the Cultural Capital of Europe this year, and a snooty art critic from Leipzig pooh-poohed the idea of Weimar ever doing a good job as a CC. My curiosity was piqued. I hate snotty art critics, and I love underdogs. So here I am. I write a weekly column for "EYE 5", an alternative paper in San Francisco, and I wanted to write about your doings next year. I thought I'd get a sneak peek on my way back to the Bay."

"What's an alternative paper?"

"It's an 'alternative' to the mainline media, which more and more have had to avoid controversial topics--to attract audiences back from television and to keep advertisers happy. It started with the Village Voice in New York's Greenwich Village, but now there are such papers in every city in America. They're free, usually appear on Wednesday to maximize advertising for weekend pleasures."

"Do they have big circulations?"

"Some do and some don’t. There are several such alternatives in the Bay Area--for gays, for rockers, for older types, for various places in the Bay--from San Jose to San Rafael. Ours is aimed at the aging Boomers, the kind who like jazz concerts and Monet exhibitions. The paper's name is a pun on the Interstate that runs from San Diego to Vancouver, Washington, Interstate 5. "Eye 5" keeps its eye out for whatever might interest such readers."

"And do you think your eye will reach as far as Weimar?"

"Heh, my weekly column,"Just Jake", covers everything--if it interests me. But I must tell you after walking from the train station I started to conclude that the Leipzig snob was right. It's a non-stop mess."

"Well, that's the reason the city, state and Federal Republic have pitched in with almost a billion Deutschmarks to give the city a face lift. Officially it's to celebrate the 250th birthday of Goethe, our most important writer. But the real reason is to prove to Ossies and Wessies alike that the former GDR can catch up."

"Ossie, Wessie?"

"Ossie comes from OstDeutschland, the former GDR. Wessie from West Germany. There's a kind of covert cold war going on between the O's and the W's since the Fall of the Wall. The O's think they're being colonized by the W's -since the Wende (the change) big jobs at factories, museums and universities have been going disproportionately to "invaders" from the West. But pish posh, let's go eat a good dinner and I'll fill you in on the details. A few blocks away is the Residenz, across from the Schloss. Our infrastructure may be a mess, but our chefs are still on track."

I've gotten even with my mama by naming my three children after great American writers: Walt Whitman McBride (1949), Emily Dickinson McBride (1951) and Herman Melville McBride (1953). That was O.K. with my literary bride, Catherine Fitzpatrick, whom I met in the American Lit section of the University of San Francisco Library. She lived up on the hill in the women's college where we committed secret mortal sins by sneaking into her not well enough guarded dorm room.

There must be a very low rung in hell for fornicators who waited for the nuns to leave for chapel for evening prayers before sneaking into bed. Wally was conceived on such a foray, forcing Kate to drop out of graduate school while I worked on a Ph.D. across the Bay in Berkeley.

(This a fragment of a fiction-in-progress.)