The Great Cafés: Caffé Trieste, San Francisco - Page 4

Now and then, sometimes someone has come into this café for a cup of coffee who has written something very important. The most important was Ginsberg himself, many times.

In the case of the Caffé Trieste, you can simply rely on the fact that all of the best writers of the San Francisco Beat Generation enjoyed conversations in this place. There were others. Francis Coppola wrote a good part of the first Godfather film here, on a yellow Olivetti.

Luciano Pavarotti sung here. Joe Rosenthal, who shot the famous picture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, was a regular. Jack Hirschman, the current poet laureate of San Francisco, can be seen here frequently. I myself introduced my son Brennan, when he was three, to Allen Ginsberg at the Trieste. Ginsberg offered him a cube of sugar. Later, I placed a few chapters of my novel My Father In The Night in the Trieste.

That afternoon in 1957, my brother Mike knew who Allen Ginsberg was, a fact that surely made him unique in the dental community. He's a writer himself now, and I'm sure that he took me to the Trieste because he was on some sort of literary pilgrimage. It may have been on that day that I decided to become a writer myself.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts. His latest novel is A Kiss For Señor Guevara.

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