The first major gusts of the season tore through here last week, shutting down power and scattering trees, as if announcing the change. My thoughts turn again to Jesse, because this is the month in which he died.

Steven J. Bernstein, aka Jesse, was a writer, an ex-junkie, and a local celebrity in the Seattle poetry and music scene. He had an eclectic and improbable group of friends and fans, ranging from William S. Burroughs to Kurt Cobain, Oliver Stone, and me.

I met Jesse shortly after I moved to Seattle in 1982. It was a great time to be here; there was a quiet migration of people coming from all over the country. Like a bell going off, we answered the siren call of ferry rides and foggy mornings, cedar trees and strong hot coffee, Shorey’s books and cheap, cheap rents. The city was still under the radar, and we knew we had found a gem. 

We met at a Red Sky poetry reading, when that was the only game in town. If you were writing, it’s where you went to meet other poets and hear what they were doing, and to read your own work. They featured one or two readers, followed by an open mic. The readings were held on Sunday afternoons at the Soup and Salad cafe in the Market, a populist place with wooden tables, spicy soups, and a salty view of the bay. On rainy days the weeping clouds pressed right against the panes.

Jesse and I saw each other at parties or around town, and eventually, we became friends. I had a reading coming up, and he helped me get ready for it. So for a while we met in the basement of Elliott Bay Books and read each other’s work. He read my pieces thoughtfully, and the advice he gave was honest and insightful. Stop here, he would say. This is where the power is. Don’t make it easier for them, all tied up with a neat ending, like a bow. Just stop it here.

Eventually I got a job at an engineering firm near the Market, and he moved to an apartment a little further up the street. We ran into each other often at a new cafe that had just opened up.

 The Café Counter Intelligence was a tiny place, twice as long as it was wide. Tucked away on the second floor of the Sanitary Building, it was hard to find unless you knew it was there. It had one long counter, and a few tables near the high-arched windows overlooking the entrance to the Market. People never looked up from the street below. A few strategically placed mirrors made the whole place seem bigger. It might take a few visits to see it, but the words Counter Intelligence were spelled out in white tiles along the blue counter.

The cafe was owned by a woman named Briz, who could give the squirrel a run for his money in the rant department. Briz could go on for hours about how much she hated the restaurant business, and people in general—all the while serving excellent food cooked up on Bunsen burners (really), and making us all feel funny, and smart, and welcome. She made the best espresso in town when that was (relatively) harder to find. She threw a Christmas party for the regulars that to this day is one of the best parties I ever went to, everyone spilling out into the halls.  Her boyfriend was Charlie Krafft, an artist, and his paintings hung along the walls.

I sought solace and lunch there almost every day. Jesse was often there too, drinking an Americano—(espresso with hot water added; Briz didn’t do drip coffee). He’d tell us story after story. He loved to try to shock us. We made each other laugh. He was also getting semi-famous.  He had become friends with William S. Burroughs after writing him a letter. He was doing a lot of readings, opening for bands like Soundgarden and TAD. He was known for his unflinching and confrontational performances; he dared you to look away.

I didn’t see it the night he read with a live mouse in his mouth (I would have hated that), but one night when the Blasters were in town I saw him read at a gallery in Pioneer Square. The other performers were Dave Alvin and Gary Heffern. There were only about twenty of us there, mostly musicians and other writers. It felt like a private party.

Jesse went first. He read a piece called “Face,” a story about his childhood that covered contracting polio, dropping out in the 8^th grade, taking refuge in storm sewers in L.A. and being hospitalized for the first of many times. I have never seen someone so naked on a stage, fully clothed. When it was over, silence filled the room like an inert gas that would explode if we exhaled. I couldn’t tell you a thing about what the others read, but I do remember feeling sorry that they had to follow him; no one really could.

One day at the cafe, he told me that he could feel it in his bones if heroin was nearby, a physical presence he could sense like a dog and follow to its source. There were whole blocks on Capitol Hill he had to avoid, the pull was so strong. It surprised me, the hold it still had on him. He’d been straight and sober the whole time I’d known him, never saw him with anything stronger than cigarettes and coffee.

 He had tattoos, and big black glasses with thick lenses that made him look like a slightly off-kilter chemistry student, or Buddy Holly gone very, very bad. His fingers were nicotine-stained. Across his knuckles, LIVE was written on one hand and DEAD on the other, tattoos he’d etched on himself with a pen. He wrote on a typewriter, and could talk paper and ribbons for hours. He rolled his own cigarettes, and every once in a while, I’d smoke one with him. He was fascinated by medicine, and loved to swap hospital stories, though we knew he’d always win.

Over time we lost track of each other. I ran into him one night at the Virginia Inn. I had taken my friend Bill there, a college friend who’d become a doctor and was in town for a meeting. Jesse joined us at our table. He was thrilled that Bill was a doctor, and peppered him with questions. Bill was impressed that he knew Burroughs, and hung on every story. They fell so deep into mutual enthrallment that I got bored, ready to leave long before they were. It turned out to be the last time I saw Jesse.

 I learned that he died by reading about it in the Seattle Times. On October 22, 1991, Jesse committed suicide, by stabbing himself in the throat three times. I saw the words on the page, but I had to read them a few times for it to sink in. On the furthermost tip of the Olympic Peninsula, a few weeks shy of turning 41, he stabbed himself in the throat three times.

By then I didn’t know anyone who knew him well, so I couldn’t ask what had happened, how he had gotten to that point. Anything was possible.

 Just before Christmas that year, I saw him in a dream. We were in a hospital, and he was being wheeled on a gurney down the hall. He sat up as he passed by, glad to see me. He was a little surprised to be dead, but he he’d been diagnosed with AIDS, and didn’t know what else to do.

I woke relieved, grateful to know what had happened. I don’t know if it is true, but the dream felt like a gift.

 The Café Counter Intelligence closed in 1996. Briz followed through on her perpetual threat to sell it and move to St. Bart’s, where she met the French man of her dreams, or so I heard. The cafe was reincarnated as Matt’s at the Market, and became wildly successful. Last year they completely remodeled, expanding into the space next door. They saved the tiles from the counter, though, and hung them like art on the new walls.

“…There has always been something wrong with my face. “Look in the mirror, Steve,” my mother said, holding me up so I could see my face. “See? There’s Stevie!”

    The little ears stick out. That’s the first thing I noticed: the two ears.…"

—from “Face” by Steven J. Bernstein

 Jesse’s legacy lives on, through his books and recordings, and in websites maintained by his family and friends. In 2003, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. My favorite collection of his is More Noise Please, published by Left Bank Books.