I’m not sure what caused me to look him up, what train of thought got me to google his name on a quiet Sunday morning, but there he was, toothless with wild white hair surrounded by pigeons on a park bench in San Francisco. The chin gave him away.

I met John Ratliff when I arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1978 after a tumultuous spring in New York City. I moved into the spare bedroom of a friend’s apartment on Greenwich Street on the edge of North Beach at the bottom of Russian Hill. A foam mattress on a board propped up on cinder blocks and a desk that I found on the street and painted white. I’d arrived with a suitcase of summer clothes, a big mistake in San Francisco in June, and found work two nights a week at a Latino disco on Union Square, and two nights at Mumm’s, a posh private club owned by several of the 49ers. Days were spent at the Caffe Trieste. I’d stumble out of bed in the mornings, throw on some clothes and make my way down the hill to the first cappuccino of the day. It soon became clear who the regulars were. John was one of them. I think he took an interest after seeing me there every morning with my notebook. He was a poet and we became friends. He lived with a girlfriend in North Beach and had been a journalist and documentary filmmaker. There was a vague story about a wife and kids somewhere in the midwest, but mornings at the Trieste were about the present: what you were thinking, writing or reading, the day’s headlines strewn across the tables. Cafe life was a bit like hitchhiking, moments in time infused with the rush of caffeine and no expectation of context or continuity.

I spent most mornings with John during the six months I lived in San Francisco, though I couldn’t tell you where he went when he walked out the doors of the Trieste in the afternoons. I went for a windy ride on the back of his motorcycle once, and there was the time he confessed, with guilt and some embarrassment, that he lived on government disability for a mental health condition. I assumed at the time that the guilt was because he had pulled off some kind of scam. He self-published his poetry which he xeroxed and distributed in the neighborhood. He was older than I was, tall with a shy, midwestern vibe and a distinctive jawline. He dropped romantic hints from time to time. He was never pushy or overbearing, but I had the feeling that if I’d been interested, something might have happened.

This morning, for whatever reason, I googled “John Ratliff – San Francisco,” and found this:

Homeless Poet and Bird Lover, John ‘Swan’ Ratliff, Back On the Street

Swan Song: John Ratliff, ‘Lone Star Swan,’ Dies at 81…

Revisiting ‘Lone Star Swan,’ The Birdman of 16th Street BART

Birdman, wiseman, crazyman, street poet, rescuer of pigeons. Photos of him on the blue park bench at 16th and Mission are unrecognizable, except for the chin, which I looked at and thought, well maybe… He wears a bandana around his white, wiry hair and holds a gray pigeon in his hands. There’s his daily page of poems, called “The Rag,” and a picture of him typing on a manual typewriter in the doorway of the Adobe Bookstore on 16th Street, his home until the bookstore moved away. There’s a video of him talking about how “pigeons are ancient wizards that decided to reincarnate without hands so they couldn’t be put to work.” The video is part of a documentary on schizophrenia made by his friend. In the film, his wife and children talk about being held hostage on a farm for two weeks without food, and in the next breath, about how much they love and miss him. “It’s not his fault,” they insist, “it’s the disease.” In the old black and white photos of John with his family, I recognize him immediately, the tall lanky frame, wire rim glasses and the wide, angular jaw.

He would have just gotten divorced when I met him in 1978. He’d had more than one episode by then, though the big slide would come later. At the time, he was just another quirky person living on the edge in North Beach at the close of the 70s. In one of the articles, there’s a poem he wrote for his children about winter snow. It sounds familiar. I wonder if I have a copy in a box somewhere in the garage.