I met Annemarie one day about noon in the Saloon, on upper Grant Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach. I had stopped by for a drink and to say hello to the bartender Joe/Auggie. Annemarie, who turned out to be one of the people living in the rooms upstairs, stopped in to check her mail.
I was attracted by her bright eyes and cheerfulness, so I asked if I could buy her a drink. She accepted a glass of wine, although I later learned that she almost never drinks because her liver is shot.
After we talked for a while she said that she had to go get lunch. I said, ``I haven't had lunch yet, would you like to come with me?'' and she said ``Sure.''
During lunch, I said that I was going over to Berkeley and she said, ``I used to live in Berkeley, but I haven't been over there in a long time,'' so I asked if she'd like to come over with me and she said, ``Sure.'' She said that she'd never been on BART!
I'd never met a woman before who said Yes to everything, and although she was certainly not young (in her late fifties, she eventually told me), she was still reasonably good looking and I found her very likable.
In Berkeley, I quickly stopped by the Math Department and printed out the latest revision of those chapters in my book which I'd been working on that week, and then we spent the rest of the day walking around Berkeley. We had dinner there and wound up coming back to San Francisco fairly late.
Unfortunately, despite saying Yes to everything else, her answer for sex was a very definite No. She was certainly not reticent about talking about an abundance of sex in her past, though. She had been one of the old beatniks (part of the Kerouac crowd), and later had traveled on the bus with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. She also told me about some sexual adventures with the Hell's Angels. And somewhere in between all this, she'd been a topless dancer for a few years.
Eventually she would let me read the manuscript of her autobiography, a large part of which consisted of extremely explicit descriptions of various sexual encounters. She told me that she had assumed that that would help sell the book and get people to read the other parts.
But now, she told me, she was adamantly celibate. ``If I let myself have any sex at all now, then I'll start having sex with everybody, and that's too dangerous, because of AIDS.''
Annemarie was dirt poor. She barely managed to pay the $100 per month rent on her room with the help of a job swamping the Saloon three nights a week. In a lot of ways she was fun and we spent quite a bit of time together. She never asked me for money, although she never turned down an offer of it. More often though, I just bought few things for her and took her out to dinner. We had somewhat different tastes in places to eat, but she never wanted to go anywhere very expensive.
She could be a pain in the ass to go to restaurants with, though, because she was so totally smoke phobic. It wasn't enough just to sit in the non-smoking section. She would insist on finding some obscure dark corner, usually completely out of sight of the rest of the restaurant, where she hoped that no smoke would reach her.
She once told me about being taken one night to dinner at the Beethoven, a reasonably pricey German restaurant on Powell Street in North Beach. (She had an incredible number of boy friends who would take her out to dinner and otherwise spend money on her.) And some guy in the restaurant kept smoking one cigarette after another. He was in the smoking section, but the smoke was still blowing over to her table. She got up and stood outside for a while, but after she came back in he lit another cigarette. Finally she went over and asked him if he could stop smoking long enough for her to finish her meal. To which he said, ``I'm in the smoking section, I have a right to smoke.''
``If you have a right to smoke then I have a right to spit,'' she said, and at that spat into his food.
``And so,'' Annemarie says, ``I guess I'm persona non grata at the Beethoven.''
My kind of girl, obviously.
February, 1995