Revisiting: Tales of the City

Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

Passing through SFO, when I was 12 or 14 years old, I have one startling image of fog rolling over the coastline hills and that fog cascading down into the bay. But I never spent time there until much later. Clouds spilling over the low range of care-worn hilltops.

I was 28 or 29 when I returned to San Francisco — as an industrial roadie; we drove all night across the desert, and up the valley with a van, packed over capacity, sleeping in shifts on the cartons of blank tapes in the back. That convention was near one terminus of the cable car. Drank coffee; ate Chinese; and we worked. Did not get to see much of the city, that time. Saw a lot of people.

I cannot seem to place when, but around the same time, those books were in mass market paperback. The cover art lured me in, and I read a first one out of sequence, eventually reading them all.

Since then, I think I have been through San Francisco and the Bay Area, maybe a dozen times?

There is some kind of magic, going back and rereading a book that had some sway, an impact. When I eventually sold off the collected works, I did not pause to think I would ever reference the material again. But next summer includes some San Francisco cultural arts, and I thought I would skim through, at least the first book.

Serialized, like it was, and the books presentation, each column was a standalone piece of about 500 words, if I recall. In the mass market trade edition, each story — each column — was two pages, four columns. Veracity is not assured. Big, comfortable, slightly stylized print. First published in 1978? That makes it near 39 years old? Don’t do the math.

Besides the topical narrative, what shaped me in my own work, as much as anything, was the serialized, episodic structure of the work. I’m thinking, it was 500 words at time. I might be off on that word count. With enough family and friends on the West Coast, and understanding the difference between Southern and Northern California, with an extra emphasis on the eccentric nature of the Bay Area itself, makes me feel at home in the story’s elements.

Revisiting: Tales of the City

Some point, maybe halfway through, I realized a connection to some other, highly stylized prose I was reading, again, about the same time, that first time. Density. The style can pack a lot of story, both narrative, plot, placement, and actions, then, the consequences of the action, quite a bit of material can be packed into a short chapter.

In the chapter, titled, The Diagnosis, a matron dies during the opera, Götterdämmerung – get it? Twilight of the gods? Anyone?

Revisiting: Tales of the City

“… we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.” Page 272.

Straight guy to a gay boyfriend.

Revisiting: Tales of the City

Life, death, rebirth. Gay and straight. Not that I care one bit about sexual orientation, just that the books helped pry open a mind that might’ve been a little more closed. In my case, simply from lack of education, and that’s what the books did, as much as anything, educate. Worlds I would never have known, otherwise.

Revisiting: Tales of the City

500 words a day, say, five days a week. I wonder if that was the nuts and bolts of the series. I got done rereading the first, paused, checked out the second, and read the first chapter. Then I dropped that copy of the text back in the digital check-in box. Engaging, entertaining, and substantial, sure, but not necessarily twin excavations I would like to undertake, in part, a bit of fractured childhood, then, college education and reading these all for the first time, maybe a little less than decade later.

If it was serialized, imagine it as each chapter had to stand alone, but also be part of a cohesive whole. Touching on what is now termed LGBT issues, pretty sure it was ahead of its time, back then. Glad I read the first, revisited what that was, and pulled back a thin layer of my own dirt to see what was under it. There is my own, frank acknowledgement that this was highly formative material in the mainstay of my current work. Episodic. Each week, in my case, has to stand alone. Part of a coherent whole? That, too.

Roots in newspaper-style, if not actual papers.

Finally, gay? Straight? Doesn’t much matter, really. Almost 40 years later, so much has changed yet so much remains.

Revisiting: Tales of the City

So it was also launched as a TV show, mini-series, short run, looks like, and I missed it. Then, too, I just checked out the first one from the San Antonio Library, and nestled in on a hot summer night.

Revisiting:

Tales of the City

Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin