Toni and I had long known one another as part of the North Beach bar scene. Then we suddenly became close. I tell that story in my novel. But we are the only two people in the novel who carry our own real names there. Some of the other characters come from some combination of people I’ve known. Others are more closely linked to particular people. (In all cases, the story is the thing and the people I’ve known stirred together in various ways to create the story.) But for Toni and me, I wanted to bring out what we each were in ourselves, to each other, and to the story. And it seemed to me to bring a kind of artificiality into my imagination to make up different names in our cases.
Toni was Toni in North Beach well before I started hanging out there. When I came, there were, of course, already many Bob’s around. I quickly became Rainier Bob because Rainier Ale was my regular drink.
Over the years, including for some years after Toni’s death, I wrote poems about her. I’m going to give here two of them. “Bloodweed”, which is included in Milarepa, was the first, and I think it remained Toni’s favorite. The other is “Small Hours in San Francisco”. “Small Hours” was also written not so very long after Toni and I became close. The illustration came much later. After Toni’s death, an artist who had known both of us gave me a large pastel drawing of Toni done on brown wrapping paper. It seems Toni had posed for it at an informal working session of North Beach artists. I took a picture of it and used a graphics program to put in the fog.
