In 1964, a number of young writers from New York joined the Spicer circle in San Francisco's North Beach. Because all had some college education and two of them came from Catholic homes, they became known as "the Jesuits." Andy Cole and Tom Wallace, both from Brooklyn Catholic backgrounds, came onto the scene. They were soon joined by Larry Kearney, also from Brooklyn.
Kearney had known Andy Cole at the State University of New York at Binghamton. There Kearney had become interested in the work of Duncan and Spicer from reading Don Allen's anthology, and from listening to the poets' recorded voices on the Evergreen LP "San Francisco Poets Reading," the companion record to the 1957 Evergreen Review issue of "The San Francisco Scene." He listened to it a lot when drunk - to Robert Duncan's oracular "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom," and Jack Spicer's insistent, edgy "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." Playing the record became sort of an obsession. And he was restless at school. He called Cole and Wallace, who were staying at the painter Nemi Frost's apartment at Grant and Union. There was no more room at that inn, but if he was really serious about coming, they promised to look for a place for the three of them. He hung up the phone, committed already.
The morning Kearney arrived in San Francisco he took a cab to North Beach and walked into the first bar he saw, an inconspicuous place in the middle of the block. As it happened, the bar was Gino & Carlo's. Larry checked into the Swiss-American Hotel, opposite Mike's Pool Parlor on Broadway; hung out with his Binghamton friends at Nemi's; tried a couple of the bars everyone talked about. Life was pleasant. At Nemi's he met the painter Tom Field, and the poets Stan Persky and Gary Snyder. Another poet, Joanne Kyger, lived across the hall. Larry had never seen apartments decorated so dramatically as these, with plants, pictures, and mirrors everywhere. He felt far from Brooklyn. Stan gave him a copy of the latest Open Space - he thought it arcane and somewhat frivolous: but within a few weeks his poems would be appearing in the next issues. He was being drawn into a world of poetry and bohemia for which Binghamton had not prepared him.
Then, one night in Gino's, he met Jack Spicer. Larry was sitting at a table by the jukebox when Jack came into the bar, talking with the printer Graham Mackintosh and two others, and Larry joined the conversation. Spicer was charming. The next day, after Larry learned who he had been talking to, his interest deepened. He was twenty-one years old.
After two weeks Larry moved, with Andy and Tom, into an apartment at 1156 Kearny Street - a grim place, but a handy location some two blocks from the Green Street bars. Larry first took a job repairing ovens in Daly City. Another job, at Architectural Models, on Brannan Street, south of Market, lasted three-and-one-half months.(1) The days were all the same: the drinking was pretty heavy, and the bars conveniently located. San Francisco was hot and hazy in April 1964. The gang spent a lot of time drinking on the roof of Nemi's building. "It took me awhile to get my balance," Larry remembered. "I don't know if I ever got it, to tell you the truth."
At Gino & Carlo's Spicer and Kearney developed "a funny relationship. Jack was capable of great intimacy, a kind of kids' thing of being understood at the level of the in-joke, the remark that means one thing to two people at the table, but something quite special to a third person at the table. He had a very expressive face and when he was talking to you he would project an intimate concern over what you were thinking or saying. He gave me a copy of Billy The Kid and said, 'I think you're ready for this now.'" Spicer told Larry that he, Spicer, had been the true winner of the Ingram-Merrill Award which earlier in the year had come to the financial rescue of the ailing poet Helen Adam, allowing her to leave North Beach for New York after fifteen years. He, Jack, in a grand act of pity for one even needier than himself, had had it "transferred" to Adam.(2) Kearney believed Jack and was suitably impressed by his generosity. But the fantasy spun by Spicer was not created solely to seduce Kearney: it was also a desperate man's dream of rescue from the poverty, humiliation, and excess that were plunging him closer and closer to the edge.
Soon baseball season was upon them, and Jack and the "Jesuits" took Nemi Frost to Candlestick Park for her first ballgame. Frost recalled:
Before we got to the ballpark, we had to drive miles out of the way to a certain deli where Jack got a certain submarine sandwich. I couldn't believe it. Right in the ballpark you can get beer and hot dogs, but Jack said, "You never want to eat that garbage at the ballpark. It's a - " I don't think they had the expression "ripoff" then, but you know...
So our seats are in the bleachers, right? We were the only white faces up there, or just about. Andy and Kearney and [Nemi's boyfriend] Tom Wallace. Then me and then Jack. And next to Jack were his famous …
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