Harlan Bailey (1945-2022):
The Bait Shop
by Jamie Jobb
Despite his uncanny way of introducing himself when he stepped on stage alone, Harlan Bailey was no public outcast, no forgotten footnote of civic cross-pollination. Indeed, he was a uniquely solid citizen – an outspoken ancient mariner who knew his knots, and would not hesitate to teach someone else how to tie them.
Our hometown, Martinez California, truly lost a cultural treasure with Harlan’s passing from his short battle with cancer two days after the annual Fourth-of-July parade. He was our sole fisher poet and a seasoned commercial fisherman who spent five decades harvesting sockeye salmon in set-nets out of Graveyard Point on Bristol Bay, Alaska. As the salmon run peaked in July, Harlan never saw these Main Street parades; but if you saw him on a day when he was being rye, he’d tell you he had “other fish to fry”.
It was gruesome work, and as Harlan wrote: “The Coast Guard was not his friend.”
Harlan learned the ropes and knots of commercial fishing in San Francisco Bay from his Uncle Louis who ran a popular bait-and-tackle-and-coffee-shop in Rodeo California at the downtown crossroads of that former East Bay commercial fishing hub. Like an outback Texas livestock feed store, Uncle Louie’s Bait Shop was were locals met to gather the news up and down San Francisco’s East Bay Shoreline.
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Text and the scribbled word
Harlan Parks Bailey II was a unique fellow – a lively, well-read yet shy extrovert, a curious man of thunderous humor and lightning insights: everybody’s best friend. While his father grew up in hardscrabble West Texas, his mother was Italian-American from a California fishing village. A quick study with keen eyes and ears, Harlan had his own peculiar way with words. His pen forged a mighty hook.
While not truly a “poet”, Harlan was more than a bawdy bar-room raconteur. Yet, his audience considered him a backwoods sage … a Will Rogers, a Mark Twain. A sapient observer of the moment, a word-chef tossing salads of far-flung facts harvested from far-flung places. One main truth of Harlan’s life: he named his Chihuahua “Puccini”, which, of course, is the long-form of “Pooch” … a befitting name for an obedient master who was half Italian and tended to observe the world through operatic lenses ...
An avid reader, Harlan could often be found quoting Kesey, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Hemingway, Ferlinghetti. Harlan helped me frame Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea” as an absurd amateur sport-fisherman’s opinion of commercial fishing. That shows in Act I, Scene One of my play “Joe Fish Ties the Knot” which can be found elsewhere on these pages.
I could not have concocted the dialogue below without long and deep chats with Harlan about how true fishermen made their living off the Martinez Shoreline. In this scene from the play, brothers Joe and Mike Pescatori are waiting on their set-nets off the Monterey Clipper, Rosalia; Mike is reading a book.
JOE (can’t read cover): What’sit … ?
MIKE: “The Old Man and The Sea” – Listen to this: (reads) “Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? (pause) I am sure he would because he is young and strong. (pause) Also, his father was a fisherman.”
JOE: Bull … shit.
MIKE (reads): “A fish won’t get in trouble if she keeps her mouth shut.” unquote – East Coast sportfishin’ dandy! Ernest Hemin'way don’t know beans from buckshot about fishin’ for a livin’. (pause) Spend all day to catch one fish? We’d starve on Hemin'way’s boat.
JOE: DiMaggios got crab pots. (beat) Fisherman’s Wharf.
MIKE: Gave up gillnets when they left Pittsburg.
JOE: Hemin'way can’t make a livin’ on the water. Everything rots.
MIKE: Hell, he’s just a writer. From Cuba! What the hell’s he know – cigars?
JOE: Beach bum. A Pescatori don’t fish for sport.
I could not have written any of those words without the keen presence and inspired input of Harlan Bailey. In his own writing, Harlan left it all hang on the page, but he was reluctant to read his own words in public. He would rattle around a stage shaking his fistful of pages, losing his place, stammering in the moment to make a point. Like Lenny Bruce.
You can see it all in his early videos, which I shot at the local library and an art center known as ARTU4iA. While he was alive, Harlan didn’t want me to post them. But now that he can offer no objection, they’re here on line, all the time – a dozen videos in this playlist:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAakX6a7lwFSG8j838nZMySAteztiB9rU
Chief among those videos is the performance captured in the video still-photo above, when Harlan went solo on stage to tell his tales of the “Urban Fishery” he knew as San Francisco Bay.
For more than a decade Harlan was a featured reader at the annual Fisher Poets gathering in Astoria Oregon. Here he is reading in 2019 at the Astoria Brewing Company:
(15 minutes, 52 seconds)
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Harlan’s passing was marked by a two-part ceremony at Saint Catherine of Siena on Castro Street and the Sportsman Club down by the Shoreline at Grangers Wharf.
The Saint Catherine’s ceremony began right on time, as it was conducted directly under the town’s primary “Big Ben” clock tower bells. It seems I only spend time in this fine church after people I’ve known have died. Harlan’s service was a traditional Funeral Mass … a full liturgical rite, with acclamation and verse. The greeting with call and response. Lots of people saying “Praise be to God.” And “Lord, hear our prayer.” Plenty of Bible readings with a responsorial Psalm. Then The Homily. The Lord’s Prayer. Holy Communion. Final Commendation. The Song of Farewell.
But the Sportsman Club was a venue worthy of its own reward, and certainly a place that would not besmirch the church. After all someone might want to read Harlan’s “Shithouse Mouse” or “Fuck You, Dad.” Those titles sprang unfiltered, straight from the author’s mouth -- so the twain of an open reading of Harlan’s work could never be met in a catholic church.
At the Sportsmans Club, two long rows of tables were set for a pasta and salad all-you-can-eat. More than a few friends recalled how Harlan could effortlessly gather an audience around him, pack his corn-cob pipe, and start to read. Fittingly, the remembrances began when Harlan’s daughter, herself a commercial fisher, read his “Urban Fishery”.
Not unlike Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone or Gamble Rogers’ Lake Oklawaha, Harlan Bailey’s Graveyard Point was an outlandish place where characters brewed their own particular brand of horse sense. Harlan said his short stories were inhabited by “a congress of lunatics” or “a caucus of gibbering sociopaths” or “a gaggle of gathering white male livestock”.
Those would be the denizens of Graveyard Point, characters like Drinking Darryl who raps a catholic liturgy about The Pious Brothers. Or Jimmy the Scotsman who wants everyone to wonder what’s hiding under his kilt. Or Larry Two-Time, who always repeats the last phrase you just said.
“Larry’s verbal tics are pretty civil compared to some of the stuff that comes out of my mouth,” Harlan admits on the page,“I love that guy!”
After Harlan’s daughter read her dad’s words, I got up and started ranting like Harlan, up and down the aisle between tables of folks eating. I waved an imaginary fistful of papers and stammered about how Harlan used to present himself on stage until I talked him into taking solo performance classes at the Marsh in San Francisco.
I waved my arms and sputtered: “People said Harlan stuttered but I know that’s not true. My wife is a speech specialist and she says it’s not stuttering.” I was flying blind in front of this audience. "I forgot what she said it was, but we know Harlan didn't stutter."
I only knew I had to keep ranting and finally end up at the front of the room, where I turned, paused, planted my feet solidly on the floor and said without moving:
“So we spent nine weeks going back and forth to San Francisco, working on his delivery … and that’s where Harlan Bailey learned how to stand and deliver!”
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Harlan’s passing inspired several other speakers as well as essays from his friends and neighbors in Martinez. Here’s a small sampling:
Bailey and Becall
by Christopher Benson
(friend and pianoman)
Bailey and Bacall: In my opinion, and no doubt ONLY my opinion, Harlan and Lauren had something in common. This is not a long story, but it starts long ago (in the 1970s) and you’ll need a little background.
I studied mathematics at Manchester University in England, taking three degrees in the subject. I was also in a local Manchester band (not a very good one) at the same time. I wasn't into university politics at all, but an odd sequence of events led to me being appointed as replacement to the elected position of Entertainments Secretary for the Students’ Union. I only agreed to take the job as a temporary replacement. My only qualification was that I'd been around for a while, I was on my third degree by then. I had also been in a band that had played the Students’ Union once.
So against all odds and my personal wishes, I had the task of hiring the bands that played at the University each week. Of course "temporary" turned into a year until the next scheduled election, and I hired quite a few bands during that time, including Dire Straits and Supertramp, both unknown at the time.
Meanwhile in America, Lauren Bacall had just finished writing one of her several auto-biographies. Compared with the usual Hollywood actress fluff, it was an intellectual tower of world literature, and her publisher decided a planned book-signing tour should kick-off with a couple of British universities to "set the right intellectual tone". That autobiography focused on the time after she became a widow upon Humphrey Bogart's death, so even the book title was a clever triple pun: "By Myself".
To cut to the chase, I hired Lauren Bacall to a book-signing gig in 1978. And in the last second of an international conference call, I asked if she could attend a dinner with a few literary professors afterwards. I felt really foolish as the words came spouting out of my mouth. But to my continued amazement, she said yes.
So on a dismally rainy November night in Manchester, and in a group of six people, I had dinner with Lauren Bacall. She was 32 years older than me, but she still "had it".
I sat next to her. She spent the whole time asking me what precisely I was working on in my mathematics Ph.D. I told her some of the basics of Numerical Analysis and tried to switch to more mundane matters like what an American notices as different when visiting England. But she kept returning to Numerical Analysis and was obviously genuinely interested in expanding the horizons of her knowledge.
And it was THAT characteristic that she shared with Harlan Bailey. BOTH of them had a thirst for knowledge that enabled each to converse enthusiastically about what YOU were interested in. I only ever saw that in two people: Bailey and Bacall.
* * *
A Rare Abalone
by Dean McLeod
(friend and fellow author)
Harlan Bailey was one of the most sensitive -- yet crusty -- friends I had for ten years in Martinez. Like a rare abalone he protected a very tender heart.
He was the first interview for my book “Images of America: BayPoint”.
He introduced me (an outlander) to a fascinating cast of local characters. His reading was extensive and he was one of most intellectual guys I know. We had many talks about life and the world.
His split life between fishing and Martinez guided his emotions through the year. After he returned from the Alaska fishery, we’d always like to take a road trip. We went on several; he’d show me places and people he knew around Suisun Bay.
I will never forget him. Fair winds and following seas, Harlan.
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A Life on the Water
by Scott Hildula
(friend and fellow writer)
I’ve known fishermen and I’ve known poets, but only in Harlan Bailey have I seen the twain meet with such sweet memories and prose of a life well-lived, waiting on god’s bounty to fill the nets.
Although I knew Harlan for only a handful of years, I enjoyed his quiet embrace of curmudgeonly contemplation.
Last time we met, we spoke of the afterlife even though neither of us knew then that his time on this mortal coil was ending soon.
He had the depth of thought, and contemplation, that comes from a life on the water where one is confronted by the vicissitudes and spell-binding nature of fish, water and wind. I picture Harlan now with seasoned, strong hands, strong pain-free body, and a faint breeze off the water - warm sunlight on his face - watching the nets fill.
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Cartwheel Galaxy as see by Webb Telescope, 2022
Bellatrix from Orion
by Beth Rainsford
(friend and sidewalk astronomer)
It’s taken me a while to write this. I suppose I don’t want to say goodbye.
I will always remember Harlan as I’ve placed him in the Orion constellation with the star Bellatrix, the 26th brightest star in our night sky – a massive, young blue-white star, seven times the mass of our sun. Bellatrix is one of the four celestial navigational stars in Orion.
I remember Harlan and Julian telling stories about fishing in Alaska – sorry I never got to go to see his fishing site in Bristol Bay. I remember Harlan talking about his family he loved so much and deeply cared about their welfare, his walks with Kathie, his love of his children.
He was a generous, dependable friend I loved and do miss. He will always have my unconditional positive regard. I hope one day to join him as he navigates the galaxy.
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Quoting Harlan Bailey
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National Geographic photographer Corey Arnold has a magnificent webpage dedicated to his keen photographs taken in and around the abandoned cannery village of Graveyard Point. Corey, himself a fisherman, captures in pictures what Harlan harvests in words.
See:http://coreyfishes.com/albums/graveyard-point/
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Single-Handed Sailor
by Mark Knopfler
Little gypsy moth, she's all tied down
She quiver in the wind and the light
She's just a lying there, silent in pain
He lean on the tourist rail
A mother and her baby and the college of war
In the concrete graves
You never wanna fight against the river law
Nobody rules the waves
The single-handed sailor goes sailing
Sailing away in the dark
He's up on the bridge on the self-same night
The mariner of dry dock land
Two in the morning but there's one green light
And a man on a barge of sand
But he just shouts, "Hey man, what you call this thing?"
He could have said "Pride of London"
Yeah, the single-handed sailor goes sailing
Sailing away in the dark