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San Francisco Adventures
and some that only began here.
by Elihu Blotnick
("Fascinating and Frightening" Pacific Historian,
referring to the first book in this series.)
Photo-Stories
(fiction/non-fiction)
160 pgs
hardcover
minimum bid: 20k
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The Book -
more stories and imagery from Elihu Blotnick, both fiction and non, in
his pursuit of the visual novel.
Author - Elihu Blotnick: short stories in Scanlan’s and San Francisco; poetry: Russian Hill (California Street 1983) Mysterious Mr Blot (California Street 1979); photography: Saltwater Flats (BBM Associates l975) reviewed by The New York Times as “Powerful and very personal images of contemporary America”
Marketing - An audio release by the author, and possible exhibit tie-ins should help considerably.Packaging - Firefall Literary, an arm of Firefallmedia, can also finalize the design of the book, in consultation with the publisher.
Publication Date - Spring, fall, or any season - in conjunction with an audio release.
Delivery Date - With auction, or three months after contract.
Story One (One of 10 true stories)
Woody Allen: a reminiscence
I don’t remember him at all. He says he walked me to school and that my mother paid him a dollar a week. She isn’t sure she remembers him either. I told him that. He looked crushed. “I remember her,” he said glumly.
He wrote to me at Ramparts, when the magazine existed. He knew the name of the street where I grew up. He asked if I were the same Elihu Blot...? I wrote back: Yes, I was the same Elihu, I had to be, was he the same Woody Allen?
I went to see him. He said he lived across the street.
Across the street were the Spiros, an austere, alone
couple with kind white hair. During the winter, ivy whiskered their stucco house. To the east, during the summer, a soft hedge, leafy and cool, hid their side yard from view.
To the west, a long driveway separated the Spiros from the house next door. That house is still a mystery to me. In fact, it’s almost missing in my memory. Short, boxy and dark, the house pushed out, close to the sidewalk. I don’t think I was ever inside. I lived diagonally opposite the house for ten years. Woody Allen only lived there for one. That is, if he lived on Chester Street in Long Beach, New York, at all.
A sand-bar island half-a-mile wide and eight miles
long, Long Beach then was a city of 23,000, with a thriving amusement park that ran along the boardwalk, facing the open sea. (Once or twice a year, on the clearest days, at two o’clock on the horizon, you can see Sandy Hook, New Jersey.) Still, there was an old submarine tower, snails at low tide to fit the palm of my hand, and distant airplanes having their first sight of land.
(Coney Island surrounds you. Long Beach sends you wandering. During the summer the resident population triples.)
My mother does remember having someone walk me to school in the first or second grade. The school was two-and-a-half blocks away. To get there, I had to pass the barbershop on the corner, where the drunks hung out, the rush of the railroad station, the wooden steps climbing the city hall clock tower, the police station, a bramble patch, that a classmate threw me into, and a flat string of stores or houses, depending on whether I went the front or back way.
Even before I began school, I knew the route as far as the police station. Several times I ran away on my rocking horse. It had wheels. Each time the police found me they bought me ice cream. I began going there directly, instead of waiting to be found.
The gauntlet of drunks was the most frightening part of the trip. The cement around them was always dark with fresh spit. I walked fast watching my step. The barber inside the shop waved his scissors-arm wildly and talked to the pink elephants he saw on his wall.
Actually, roving dogs were equally frightening. A gray and brown German shepherd once leaped at me and ripped off my coat buttons, as his paws slid down my chest.
I guess Woody Allen experienced the same things. With or without me, he walked the same route. At the end of it, the three-story school stretched from corner to corner, like a prison wall. It wasn’t till after I graduated, that I learned how to climb that wall, all the way to the roof.
I wonder if Woody Allen had to pull me along, and what he remembers. Of course, he wasn’t Woody Allen then.
During the six years I walked to school I came to know which corners had storm drains, which walls were the best for pitching bubble-gum cards, and where on the railroad tracks I could find unburned flares. I suspect I wouldn’t have gotten to school at all, had someone not walked me. Still, I don’t remember anyone. (Perhaps Woody Allem didn’t attend childhood.)
I don’t remember him on my block either. He really must have been a sleeper. In fact, for a long time, I thought he did his best acting as a baked potato. My friend Rutabagas R. likes him though and regrets the time she saw him on the street and didn’t plant herself at his side. He’s often in her dreams, as an extra.
There were sixteen other children on the block who
I do remember, as I started a club and made everyone pay a dime each in dues, in return for which they got to see my bug collection and make things out of the soft clay I dug up from deep holes in my back yard.
The club dissolved in factions. There were many, formed around who was allowed to play in the street, or who had a television, or around a game of punch ball. The rivalries sometimes went on for weeks. During that time the missing tooth on the block was always the dark house, diagonally opposite.
Once I waited outside on the porch, while my mother went in. I learned to hate geraniums then and the waxy acid smell of the small red flowers, in the planter box. Yet, on the far side of the house, running the length of the foundation, I kneeled and smelled fresh mint every spring. (It didn’t grow anywhere else nearby.) Oddly I’ve the sense that whenever I was with the mint, I shouldn’t have been.
Perhaps my sense of trespassing isn’t so strange. A heavy darkness filled the house. People were shapes in the gloom. They stayed inside even when the door was open, as if to escape was impossible.
I remember something more. It’s only a shadowy sense of two older boys running away from the house, leaping in mid-stride, blurred, but turned and looking behind them, as if caught and aware of it and yet more desparate than ever to get away.
Neither of the boys reminds me of Woody Allen, yet each also shaped his life to dreams.
When I met him, in the three-story stage outer-office
of his producers, amidst a maze of couches, he asked what he could do for me. “Nothing. What can I do for you?” I answered, and told him that I assumed he wrote to me for help with publicity on the West Coast. This was 1970. Yes, he said, my agent tells me I’m banned from Rolling Stone. I told him his turn would come, he’d be on the cover soon enough, and indeed he was. I also mentioned that radical Ramparts wanted me to ask him for money, but I didn’t think it appropriate, as his politics were so contrary. That’s true, he said, I’m an anarchist. And then a phone call came for him, from a girlfriend, and he drifted dreamily away.
I thought we were very much like two cars on the
lower level (of a bridge), drifting slowly past each other at high speed, and glimpsing each other, isolated, framed, in the muted interior light of our time.
Memory itself is like that, but still nowhere could I find him in mine.
Later I went back to look at his house and saw a stunted suburban dream, built in someone else’s yard, when the town after World War ll skidded, into congestion.
Now the house is gone, the street too. A giant supermarket covers the area. Whether Woody’s house is buried under the canned corn or the frozen peas, I’ve no idea. The area’s been remapped. City Hall was torn down too. The school was sold for condominiums. I could have bought my old classroom to live in. Only the railroad station’s been restored, but not the drunks that still come through.
My mother’s gone too, and with her the vague memory of a poor family with a lot of children, who rented the mystery house one year, but she never could recall their name or anything else about them.
Years afterward I read a story by Woody Allen in the New Yorker, in which the protagonist, aging, learns that he’s lost his earlier friends, for one reason or another: “and then there was Blotnick, who was turned in by his mother.”
I guess that makes us even. Still I don’t remember him.
That I live in San Francisco these days isn’t the reason. Down the street, for a long while, in front of a mom-and-pop delicatessen, there was a bench painted brightly, “Woody Allen Sat Here.” I encounter endless reminders of his cinematic presence also. And now that he’s publicly trying to live his dreams as reality, there’s no escape. Which reminds me, Rutabagas thinks that Woody Allen thinks that all literature is a bagel with its brains blown out.
Still, I wish I could remember something of Woody Allen himself. I can’t, not even a splinter.
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