BERMAN / Tosh Berman, San Francisco, 1960
As a child, it wasn’t much of a problem, because usually an adult was either carrying me around or holding my hand, but as I grew older, my vertigo didn’t go away. To this day, in particular locations, I need to hold the hand of a fellow adult, particularly when going up and down staircases. Not all staircases, mind you, just ones that I perceive as grand or big. I am highly sensitive to the size of a staircase and how steep it is. If there is a banister attached to the wall, I can sometimes handle it by myself. The worst thing for me though is when someone is either going down or up the stairs and won’t move aside to let me pass. I can’t stand to be motionless on a staircase, even for 30 seconds. If I’m forced to walk in the middle of the stairs, it’s like a slow painful death to me. The bad part of it all is that people don’t realize what I’m going through, nor do they care. As a child, this was my first lesson about how people treat other people. San Francisco was the first urban city that I was made aware of due to a lot of cement pavements and a large multicultural population. As a baby, I knew our house in Beverly Glen, but the first time that I was conscious of being in an urban city was San Francisco.
Despite my crippling fears, San Francisco had a lot of things going for a child like me during the late 1950s. I remember the girl who worked at the bakery would give me a free cookie every time I passed that palace of sweetness, and I also recall rambling around City Lights Bookstore, a place where my father liked to go to browse. A Japanese American gentleman by the name of Shig Murao was the floor manager. Shig first came to attention internationally for being arrested for selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) to an undercover cop in 1957. Shig and my dad used to chit-chat while I wandered within and outside the store. City Lights was probably my first bookstore experience. I never got bored being there with my father because I could people-watch and enjoy the different shapes and colors of book covers. It may have been there that I discovered the physical pleasure of books outside our house, and that a bookstore is a sacred location.
I like how books feel, the texture of the pages, and the beauty of the print on the white page. Being enclosed in a room full of books always gives me a sense of ease and security. At that time, I didn’t have a preference for a type of book or even section. I was far too young to distinguish one type of volume from another. A few years later I became profoundly attached to the comic book sections in magazine stands and markets. City Lights didn’t have comic books. You had to be crafty to avoid the anger of the newsstand managers because they hated kids looking at the comics.
It sounds silly to describe San Francisco as exotic, but the city had new, sensual, and tasty smells, and the architecture was so different from Los Angeles. Even as a child, I got the feeling that the communities, especially North Beach, were compact in size and filled with people on the same wavelength as their surroundings. Los Angeles is always pop or rock ’n’ roll to me, but San Francisco is 1950s jazz and Italian opera music. This particular landscape is what I remember from entering a coffee shop or bar as a child. I was so young that the bartenders didn’t mind me being in the location because I was with my dad or both parents. I don’t remember North Beach being touristy or beatnik-crazy; it was just a cool, laidback but sophisticated neighborhood. I even picked that up as a child. I was taken with a view of another world, yet with warmth.
Since my father spent lots of time at North Beach, we often walked through Chinatown. Compared to the rest of San Francisco, Chinatown had level streets, so it was a comfort zone for me. There also seemed to be various red objects: red toys, red lanterns, and buildings with red signs. I found the color aesthetically pleasing. I don’t know whether my memory is playing tricks on me, or if the connection between the color red and China is clouding my consciousness, but that’s what I recall. Another thing I remember is a fake tin can of spinach with Popeye on it. It was in one of the gift shops in Chinatown. Why did that object exist in that neighborhood? My parents bought it for me on one of our walks. This image of Popeye was not my introduction to the character. I must have seen the comic strip in the newspaper or the animation on television. Louise Herms, who the family met at this time, looked just like Olive Oyl, Popeye’s sometimes girlfriend. Louise was beautiful, but to me so was Olive Oyl. Besides having innocent crushes on girls I went to kindergarten with, I also had a thing for animated female characters. Betty Boop was another fetish-like fascination for me. I couldn’t possibly have defined or understood sexuality, yet both characters struck a deep chord inside me that played for a long time afterward.
My parents also bought me a plastic sword from a Chinatown gift shop, and I enjoyed the fantasy of having an instrument of death in my hands. I would walk with my mom or my dad or both with the sword attached to my arm. I never really played with the sword at home; it was an object I wielded in public. Each face I saw on the street was another character in the story that was in my head. To this day, I have a tendency to look at people, both friend and stranger, and place them in a narrative of my own making.
My obsession with toy guns and knives started in San Francisco. I don’t know where I picked it up. My parents weren’t into weapons of any kind. I wasn’t brought up in an anti-gun culture, but a “no-gun” culture. I must have picked up this obsession from either the medium of comics or the small amount of time I spent in front of a TV screen. I have no memory of watching TV during the late ’50s. But somehow I got the idea of fighting bad people and knew that there was a constant struggle between “good and evil.” I became obsessed with fighting imaginary criminals. At the time I didn’t have the slightest idea what “good” or “evil” actually meant. I just knew that evil was bad, and that I was more attracted to the evil characters than the good ones. I took pity on the bad characters. They had to go to jail or, even worse, die.
WALLACE BERMAN / Robert Duncan, 1950s
At a neighborhood café near City Lights, I went up to a pair of police officers who were taking a lunch break. I was drawn to them because of their uniforms and, more significantly, I noticed they were wearing guns at their waists. One of the officers patted me on the head and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I told him I wanted to be an assassin. My parents, who overheard my comment to the officers, pretended they didn’t know me.
Another significant location for me in San Francisco was the home of Robert Duncan and Jess Collins. Robert and Jess had first editions of the entire Oz book series by L. Frank Baum. Over the years, they gave me a lot of their Oz books. I’ve rarely kept anything from that era, but I still have the books they gave me, which is amazing, considering how many times I’ve moved. Jess was a man of a few words. I never saw him in painting mode. I imagine for Jess it was just like going to an office to work, but once he was out of the office, he looked very much like—not the wife exactly, but the partner who didn’t share the “work” with the family after hours. I think he was the one that made the meals in the household. I remember going to dinner at their home numerous times, which were consistently fun for me because I was drawn to the books. Aside from trips to City Lights, these were probably the first occasions when I paid attention to bookshelves.
WALLACE BERMAN / Jess, Topanga Canyon, 1968
WALLACE BERMAN / Michael McClure, 1958, San Francisco
Jess, of course, was an excellent painter and collage artist. Even as a kid I was called to his work because there was something “comic book” about it, but not in the obvious sense, like Roy Lichtenstein. I feel he got the nature of the comic book or strip. One of his most eminent collages is his Tricky Cad (1954–59), a total cut-up of the Dick Tracy comic strip. He took all the images, dialogue, and text from the strip and re-imagined it in his peculiar fashion. Regardless of the fact that I was too young
