This an extremely charming book about a woman's adventures in the sexual (and drug) underground of Northern California, especially San Francisco, during the Seventies (1973-78).
This book reminded me a whole lot of Diane di Prima's book Memoires of a Beatnik. Like di Prima, the author self-identifies as a poet. I originally suspected that this book also ressembles di Prima's in that a large amount of fiction is mixed into an essentially factual background, however I have since been told by email from Bana Witt that all the experiences recounted actually happened. For this reason, I am going to distinguish between ``the narrator'' -- i.e. the protagonist of this first-person narrative -- and ``the author.''
Aside from the very genuine purient interest of this book, it is also quite enjoyable because of the author's absolute genius at producing interesting sentences and interesting paragraphs. Mostly I'm going to simply quote some passages from the book, because for me to summarize or paraphrase would be to do the author's words an injustice.
The book opens with the narrator in San Francisco in 1974, nineteen years old, discovering the possibility of acting in porno films.
I was riding the 7 Haight bus to my massage job downtown when I sat down next to a thin friendly blonde girl. She was on her way to the clap clinic. She said she had clap of the throat. She might have gotten it from a girl she had worked with on a porno film. I had never met anyone who'd done porn before, or even seen any for that matter. She said she was working for these really nice guys called the Mitchell Brothers and told me to just call their theatre if I wanted to work.The narrator's first role is in a film called Hot Nazis. She plays a lesbian Jew.
The crew applauded our first scene. Then Artie [Mitchell] (in retrospect I know it was Artie) asked me if I would fuck the dog. It boggled my mind. I wanted to be a trooper, but the dog! I declined, and Virginia attempted to get the dog aroused. The dog growled. They left him alone.
The narrator proceeds to fuck her way through the San Francisco sex scene.
When I was twenty-two I made up a list of everyone I could recall having had sex with. It was nearly two hundred people in length. Only two of them were real tricks, everything else was in films or for recreation.
However the narrator was certainly no stranger to sexual adventures at the time she met the Mitchell brothers at the age of 19. She had come to San Francisco from Santa Cruz, where she had been heavily into both sex and drugs. In 1974, the author says, Santa Cruz had more dope dealers per capita than any other place on the west coast.
As men go, dope dealers were my forte. In a room of a hundred people, the dope dealers would spot me like neon. I probably had a casual ``I'll do anything for dope'' look that couldn't really be defined unless that was where you specialized.A visit to a doctor for a medical exam in Santa Cruz results in a good supply of both drugs and sex.Drug etiquette was taught to me by the people who turned me on to drugs. Never act astonished by any quantity of money or product. Never ask for more until after the third date. Never put any away for later. The women rudest around drugs always seemed to come from Southern California.
We went over my complex medical history and he seemed uncommonly friendly for a new doctor. He wrote up an order for blood work, then he asked, ``Do you like drugs?''What a silly question. ``Yes,'' I quickly replied.
``Quaaludes?'' he asked, and a smile filled my face. He asked me if the address on my chart was correct, and could he come visit the following night?
I was shocked shitless. In my long history of doctors no one had ever hit on me.
He came over the following night with amyl nitrate ampules, a bottle full of pharmaceutical cocaine, and quaaludes. And to top it off, he was outstanding in bed (or maybe the drugs were). It was really fun. I saw him every month or two for several years [he moved to San Francisco about the same time that Bana did] and the nights were consistently outrageous and ecstatic.
On her arrival in San Francisco, the narrator starts working in a massage parlor, attending a school for massage in order to be legal.
It took about three weeks to save up enough money to get my first apartment. It was on Oak Street in the Haight-Ashbury district. I was the only white woman in the building. The second time I was raped was in that building by a neighbor. The first time had been in Fresno while hitchhiking.
At massage school, the narrator meets a San Francisco drag queen, and later gets to know several of the female impersonators who worked at Finnochio's [on Broadway, extremely popular at that time]. She becomes especially enamoured of one named Eduardo.
He not only had several lovers, he had a husband too. I knew there was no way around the husband so I decided to seduce both of them and did. I think Eduardo thought being with a girl was about as kinky as he could get. We would have all night three-ways with quaaludes and amyl nitrate and dildos, and I was always the center. It was like being the central object in a religious rite.The narrator's involvement with Eduardo lasts for well over a year.
I have to say our most classic evening was at the opening of Sodom and Gomorrah at the Mitchell Brothers. I'd done extra footage for the film, which were simply insertion shots, so parts of me were in the film, but not my face.... For me, the party was like a film clip. I was totally dissociated because I'd done too much coke as usual and could hardly talk. Later I lost Eduardo. I found out that a number of other women had lost their dates too. I heard rumours that he was in the men's room giving blow jobs.Later, Eduardo gets married to Bana's friend Patty.I went into the men's room and there he was on his knees in his red satin dress, sucking off a man in a suit. I tried to be cool, but I was livid. We had a fight in the entrance to the theatre. He played the fiery Latin bitch perfectly and told me he'd never speak to me again if I left. I got a ride from a man whose car had been dented by a camel in the film.
After they'd been married for a while, they established a working relationship. He still went to the baths once a week and had lovers. She was monogamous except with women and when she was tricking. They had normal day jobs, but several times a year they would go to Mexico City and turn tricks for a few weeks with extremely wealthy men. They would come back with lots of money.
The Mitchell Brothers started a new feature in their theatre: the Ultra Room, where customers could look through little windows and watch women performing explicit sexual acts.
We started the show with three women in the room. We would flirt and kiss and hump each other, rapidly getting more and more bold until we were screaming and carrying on like mad women. I was on my period and Joanne gave me head. It wasn't pretty.Another of Bana's boy friends was named Alfonso.Here's what made it even more memorable: Herb Caen had come to the O'Farrell that night. He brought a member of the Rockefeller clan, who had to go outside to throw up after watching us. I'm sure it was better to do than to see. The next day Caen said in his column that the show was the most disgusting thing he'd ever seen. Business tripled.
He was into speed and Gurdjieff, and had been through three weeks of Arica training. Arica was a very elitist method of attempting enlightenment. He had a sugar daddy who paid for it. He told me a lot about Arica. He had done the drug Kitamine with them. I think it is the only drug I have never tried.
One of the main centers for alternative sexuality in San Francisco in those days before AIDS were the bathhouses.
I remember when the baths were big and you would hear unbelievable tales from the gays of sex and drugs and fantasy enactment. The bathhouses were a second home for many. A safe, warm, sexual place where you could spend the day or the night and get unlimited quantities of sex.Most of the San Francisco bathhouses were for gay males. Only rarely did a woman manage to sneak in. But the Sutro Baths, on Valencia Street, started a policy of allowing women in on Sunday nights.
The sauna was on the floor below and the room was always very warm, and there were some beautiful gay guys at first who just wanted to experiment with girls. They were so sweet and so into making sure I had a good time. On the nights when it was only women, it was like going to Girl Scouts. We'd sit around and sing after friendly anonymous sex.Later on, the Sutro Baths would be regularly open to all genders.
I did my first public poetry reading at the Sutro Baths on Folsom. It wasn't a place that usually did that sort of thing. I wore a black lace corselet and black high heels. I was insulted because everyone wanted to fuck me instead of listening to my poems. It was fourteen years before I would read poetry again in public.
The author makes no attempt to present the chapters in chronological order. Mostly the chapters on Bana's family and childhood are at the end of the book, but intermixed with them are some more incidents from her time as an adult in San Francisco.
Here she talks about losing her virginity at age 14.
When we went to bed, Lumpy decided to take the plunge and have sex. It was very difficult for him as I was so tight but he managed to do something though I really didn't care. I liked him so much I was willing to go along with anything. He asked me if I came and I asked him what that meant, and I said I was sure nothing like that had happened. I liked the attention.
The last chapter in the book seems to mark an end to the narrator's time in the sexual underground. She describes her third year in San Francisco as her ``Thorazine year,'' when she went to Langley Porter Hospital for psychiatric care, after her first suicide attempt, then lived for a while in the San Juaquin Valley with a friend of her sister's named Kermit.
Kermit and I would talk about life and porno films, and he'd tell me about William Blake and Robert Graves. He knew mythology and had read more than I could imagine. Things that I found tremendously boring, he found fascinating and made them fascinating to listen to. I couldn't believe he didn't want to fuck me.
Then she returns to San Francisco and, for one thing, she begins learning to play the recorder, finding a teacher who is willing to take as long with her as it might take.
He could have taught an autistic child. And maybe he did. And it was slow going. I managed about one note a week and could not grasp the concept of time signature. I would cry if I hit a wrong note. He would stop and tell me a story. And we would try again.Her music teacher is also the owner of a small computer documentation firm in Brisbane, and starts teaching her a little about computers. Eventually the narrator goes to work for his firm, and after about six months becomes the naive user for testing the manual the company had was writing for a little computer company in Cupertino called Apple. In about the 1978, the narrator visits Apple for the first time.These were not only music lessons. They were my first attempt to break out of the cyclic despondancy that I seemed unable to shake. No amount of shrinks' couches could have replaced the simple consistent discipline involved in learning something so hopelessly beautiful, so totally the opposite of all I had been doing.
They were just moving into their first big offices. I met this really nice energetic hippie guy named Steve Jobs.... I became employee number 49 at Apple Computer.
And that's the last we're told of Bana Witt. However the inside cover of the book lists two more books by her: Compass in an Armored Car, and Eight for Artie. I don't know whether they're poetry or prose, but I'll certainly be looking for them.