There was a time I was part of almost every bad idea in The City. If I didn’t come up with the idea, I was trying to bankroll it, or my best friends were at the heart of it. From death-dealing clouds of alternative energy parrots to the posse of Part-time Jobs, I was connected. But of all my crimes, the first on the list was a local felony, the one at the center of all others: I was pushing forty in San Francisco and I’d made nothing of myself.

Median rents were up to a kidney, and still the hungriest among us said, “No problem, I have two.” Soon you’d pay with your heart, fulfilling Tony Bennet’s Aztec blood prophecy. A subdivision sign on the bridge would say “Welcome to San Francisco, a Golden Gated Community.” I didn’t care, provided I could find a way to stay on the right side of the gate.

The poets had a particularly hard time of it. I don’t mean real poets, I mean my poets, the loose coalition of 20-somethings who hustled the streets of North Beach, impersonating bygone Beats for tourists. They called themselves Beats Alive, pooled their tips, drank them away, and were proof that every declining American cultural moment trends toward the theme park. History in the making was going to associate Beats with a headphone brand, not poetry, and the now to be theme parked in the hereafter was tech.

By the time I met them, the Beats Alive were already on life support. Hassled for permits by SFPD, dodging tabs at Vesuvios, and abused for sport by the hideous devotees of the Beat Museum, they were down to a Ginsberg, a Kerouac, and a Brautigan. You couldn’t even mention Corso’s name. They practically had a hit out on their Corso because Corso took a crash course in Ruby on Rails and was pulling down an $80K salary at a startup.

“Hustler, be like Spicer.”

This was Brautigan. His real name was Randall. He wore the boots, the vest, the glasses, the love beads, the cowboy hat, and the blonde wig. We met up in Washington Square Park to wait for the others to hang it up for the day. His battered copy of Trout Fishing in America lay on the grass.

“Serious,” he said. “Be our Spicer. You even look like him.”

“You mean I’m old,” I said.

“And you’ve got that big moon head.”

I handed him the brown-bagged wine.

“Since when is looking like the poet a pre-requisite for the job?”

“What, I gotta be Bob Kaufman because I’m black? Nobody’s heard of Kaufman. You try and make ends playing Kaufman.”

“Me as white Kaufman would go over worse than you as black Brautigan.”

Randall took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, making him more Randall-like. “I like Brautigan. Even if his glasses are killing me.”

I said: “Trout Fishing in America was like the rap game meme of its day.”

Randall scratched under his blonde wig.

“Man you’ve got to stop saying dumb shit like that.”

Far as I knew, the only thing Randall legitimately shared with Brautigan was a love of Japanese porno. On the corner across from Mario’s, an SFO bombing conspiracist handed out pamphlets insisting 4/09 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.

“I saw the best minds of my generation recruited by headhunters / funded, hoodied, pimping the social graph at dawn…”

A young Ginsberg’s head emerged from behind the Ben Franklin statue. Kenny looked the part— the full lips, the eyes corralled by the thick black-frame glasses— but his voice was all wrong, tinged with Texarkana twang. When his curbside Howl got up to speed he sounded like a cattle auctioneer.

Kenny pushed his Ginsberg frames into his hair and rubbed his temples. They couldn’t afford quality costume glasses, so they were going steadily blind off prescription-strength thrift store scores.

Kenny suspected I’d poached their Corso for the coding job, even fronted him for the crash course. He was right, though I denied it. I had been a little desperate. Once, headhunting had been easy money, especially when you surrounded yourself with young networks. Young was the unspoken resource, not talent. But eventually the big companies agreed to a no-poaching policy and things got tighter. Now what I’d made was running out. I’d tied up a lot of cash in my dark horse genius, Roop, and there was the not inconsiderable pinball budget to keep Anna Zollman happy, but I’ll get to them.

“Where’s Kerouac?” I asked. Rhetorical question. Their Kerouac, aka Carlos, was always on his way, always late. Randall unscrewed the wine and dropped the solo cups on the grass.

“I think Carlos lost his place.”

“How do you lose a laundry room with a cot for $500 a month?” I asked.

“Turns into a ‘junior studio with a futon’ for a grand,” Randall said. He pulled a strand of blond hair from between his lips and poured the wine.

I raised my red cup: “Gentlemen, it will be a sad day when Kerouac has to commute to North Beach from Fruitvale.”

We left the bottle’s dregs for tardy Carlos. A storm cloud of parrots dragged their cacophony between the spires of Saints Peter & Paul Church and I thought of Roop’s new project. Our sun faded behind the first fingers of high fog.

“I wanted to run an idea by you guys,” I said.

Randall leaned back on his elbows. “Shit, here it comes.”

“Wait, wait,” Kenny said. “Is it a disruptive idea? You do realize we’re in a 7x7 disruptive innovation zone.”

I was used to this, but this time it was going to be different. I spotted Kerouac jaywalking in front of a MUNI bus, so I decided to wait. In retrospect, I don’t know what made me think they were right for the work. Maybe I needed people who already put on disguises to survive. Desperate poet impersonators who would be willing to hijack tech company shuttles and ransom the employees back to the companies. Renewable, scalable headhunting.

“Well if it isn’t my mad ones,” Kerouac said and stooped for the wine.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

He tipped the bottle back, chugged it down, and stifled a belch.

“Traffic.”