WannaBeat (ePub)

Set against the backdrop of a generation awakening from its countercultural dreams to the realities of a materialistic society, WannaBeat is an incisive and provocative story about yearning for authenticity in the face of an increasingly artificial reality.

Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described "stream of drivel" into an Important Novel. As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs ... and an affordable place to crash.

Clinging to his idealism in a world of upward mobility and status seeking while worrying about his accomplished brother's life-threatening illness, Philip scribbles his way across San Francisco bohemia in search of collaborators in a new Beat movement as he tries to win the heart of the cocaine-fueled hostess at the trendy restaurant where he is a dishwasher. Failing that, Philip throws himself into the SF punk rock scene, joining the crowds pogoing at the Mabuhay and befriending some of the infamous bands that play there.

Yet even this newfound comradeship in rebelliousness cannot thwart his economic reality: on the verge of eviction from his writer's garret, Philip must decide if his struggle to "resist the system" is a heroic quest ... or a ruse to avoid facing his inescapable place within it.

Critical praise for WannaBeat:

This riveting book joins George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Henry Miller's The Paris Years on the shelf of the timeless call of bohemia to fascinated young dreamers.
—Andrei Codrescu, editor of The Stiffest of the Corpse (City Lights)

Attention all Kerouac/Beat Generation fans: BEFORE you try to move to San Francisco's North Beach, Read This Book first! Then, all bets are off!

—V. Vale, RE/Search and Search & Destroy founder

Having begun my San Francisco experience in Mrs. Vasquez's rooming house after coming here to attend SFAI, and "walking in the same shoes" as the author, I can attest to the veracity of these tales.
—Marian Wallace, RE/Search

David Polonoff came to San Francisco in the '70s seeking trace elements of the Beatniks. He found them mingled among the early incursion of punk, the beginnings of tech, the final vestiges of the hippies and the art-mad crowd that filled North Beach during those halcyon days of the Cockettes, Tubes, Mabuhay Gardens and a thousand crazed visionaries. He vividly captures a decadent, delicious and deranged time and place — some of the same territory visited by Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad.
—Joel Selvin, author and journalist (San Francisco Chronicle)

I moved to SF in 1976, so David Polonoff's take on post-Beat/Hippie San Francisco in that time is familiar. While fictional, WannaBeat is excellent social history, a portrait of a city that was still a sanctuary for anti-materialism. With cameos and visits to the Mabuhay Gardens, the Magic Theater, the Hooker's Ball, the Keystone Korner, and Henry's Hunan ... it's a rich memoir of a very special place, where dreams flowered, even if they didn't always come true.
—Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip