Young Man in a Hurry

Chapter One

It's been three years since my father's death, and his stories, with their perfect beginnings, middles, and ends, come back to me at the oddest times. He was an intellectual who spent almost all his solitary hours reading. He didn't leave Hilary and me much in the way of an estate, but he did pass on his prized collection of novels, short stories, memoirs, tomes of history and poetry. He left us the Russian greats, the English greats, and, most proudly, the Irish greats. My luck, I've never been able to decipher a single classic of literature. Who would have guessed-certainly not my father-that his only son would be dyslexic. One of the struggles in my life is that my brain has trouble processing words on a page. If the text is too crowded, the story too woven, I lose track. My brain does better with nonfiction, but only if the words have room to breathe.

People curious about my lifelong jousting with a neurological disorder naturally wonder how it complicates my job. They might notice that in my speeches and press conferences I sometimes weigh down my sentences with words like iterative and demonstrable and contextualize and foundational. When I was in my early twenties, I found a dictionary that was typographically friendly and studied it front to back, as a way to command words that would show my facility with the English language. This was no doubt compensation for my peculiar wiring. Through hard work and persistence, I have overcome a lot of obstacles on the path to becoming a more confident public speaker, but I have yet to find comfort reading a typewritten speech. I can't manage the spatial tracking of looking down and up. It feels like vertigo. Reading from a teleprompter is easier only because the lines appear with plenty of space.

Dyslexia explains my compulsion to master every facet of policy and every number in the state budget and maybe even my fastidious note-taking and recordkeeping. In a banker's box filled with objects from my growing-up years, I can find my report cards from grammar school. "Gavin mixes up his letters," my third-grade teacher wrote. "His Ds are Bs. He can't read the alphabet." I couldn't say dress. It came out "bress." I couldn't say order. It came out "orer." By the fourth grade, I was taking speech-therapy classes after school. "Gavin can correctly pronounce S sounds in isolation in words but not in conversation. When he speaks, he substitutes TH for S." But year after year, the word dyslexia never showed up in my school records. The actual name of the affliction I suffered from remained a mystery to the school and to me.

I got through childhood by compartmentalizing the world. Because I did not have the words, so many of my experiences as a kid never got imprinted as memories. I didn't have the ease with language my sister had. The vividness with which Hilary can summon the past-it's almost as if she is the older sibling.

Storytelling and drinking ran together on the Newsom side of my family. They might as well have been Irish twins the way one prepared the ground for the other, the way one watched out for the other. Storytelling kept drinking from getting sloppy. Liquor transmuted into lore. If the stories were told well and repeated enough times to be firmly planted into the next generation, vice might yet be redeemed, or so believed my great-grandmother, Belinda Newsom, aka Belle, the dowager with snow-white hair whose trips around the rosary beads were all-day affairs.

To tell a good story, you had to live a good life, and to live a good life, you had to engage with worlds different from your own. In San Francisco, a foreign place could be found on the other side of the hill, so that a boy growing up in the Marina District in the late 1970s needed only to venture to North Beach or Chinatown or the Mission or the Fillmore to interact with people whose music, art, dress, food, scene, felt nearly like the occult. If you timed your adventure right and stayed open to its possibility, you might even come home with a story worth passing on. Even the friends you chose from your own station were selected in part because of the eccentricities they brought to the game. Pick them correctly, keep them for life, and they became the subjects of endless stories, too. Of course, no well yielded more storytelling than the family well, and no tale was told with more shine than the one that began with a knotty problem at city hall and ended with a greased palm.

My father's fascination with the theater of politics came to him, like the name William, through his father and his father's father. The first William, my great-grandfather, was an associate of A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy, who after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, when all the big banks had vanished, set up two planks on the Washington Street wharf to continue serving his customers. This first William Newsom, a man with a good sense of humor and a bad marriage, opened Giannini's branch at Twenty-ninth and Mission and extended his loans to common folk on a handshake. The fact that the Mission District was filled with Irish immigrants who needed a familiar touch made the branch an early model of community banking and my great-grandfather a trusted figure among his tribe. The Bank of Italy, replicating this community model, eventually became the Bank of America. It was said that my great-grandfather turned into a Democrat out of his compassion for the working man. He served as the San Francisco commissioner of public works, a member of the kitchen cabinet of Mayor James Rolph (later Governor Rolph), and then a builder who erected Commerce and Lowell High Schools.

His son William, my grandfather, saw the boom after World War II as his chance to build housing tracts that looked out to the bay. This turned him into the first wealthy member of the Newsom clan, but it didn't turn him into a Republican. He was a kingmaker, and the first king he helped make was Edmund "Pat" Brown. My grandfather, whose nickname was "the Boss," served as manager or treasurer for several of Brown's campaigns, from district attorney to attorney general to the thirty-second governor of California. He was one of the thinkers behind the throne, and the trust between the two men was such that Brown asked the Boss to be godfather to his daughter, Kathleen. And then, as such things happen, the two men had a falling-out over Governor Brown's refusal to appoint my grandfather to a board regulating the banking industry. As the Newsom version goes, this was because Governor Brown knew that my grandfather held views that would have brought the hammer down on bankers abusing the citizenry. The old pals parted ways and never talked again. Whenever Pat Brown needed to compare notes with my grandfather, he did so through my father, the third William, who happily played intermediary, if for no other reason than the material it might furnish for a story.

My father had literary ambitions as he pursued his bachelor's degree in French literature at the University of San Francisco. His dreams of a life of letters were not discouraged. In fact, they were nourished by his father, who once admonished him, "You leave the moneymaking to me and I'll leave the Shakespeare to you." By the mid-1950s, my father had determined that he didn't have the chops to be a writer. Was there a stab at a novel or a book of poems? A manuscript he squirreled away? He never said, and I've never found evidence of such. Clutching his degree in French literature and not sure what to do next with his life, he decided to pursue both law school and a master's degree in English. He attended Berkeley Law, left partway through, graduated from Stanford Law, and then stayed on campus to earn an MA in English, taking classes from Professor Newell Ford, an eminent Shelley scholar.

This is how my father found himself, in the late 1950s, "flat broke and alert to a modest financial opportunity which arose at the Palo Alto Mental Health Facility." In Dad's telling, the clinic was offering two hundred dollars a day for any brave soul willing to submit to experiments that Dr. Russel Lee was conducting with the drug LSD, which was barely known and still quite legal. My father accepted the offer to spend two days under the influence of the psychedelic, during which time he was prompted by the doctors to recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and other "tactile" verse and to document any relevant insights from the drug on a tape recorder.

It was not long thereafter that my father divined a fork in the road: a career teaching literature to college students or a career practicing the law. Out of no special ardor, he picked the latter. Where to hang his shingle? In pursuit of an answer, he scooped up his T. S. Eliot and William Blake and headed to Lake Tahoe, to the old Squaw Valley ski resort, which had played host to the 1960 Winter Olympics. This was the same resort that his father, thanks to that past friendship with Governor Brown, had been leasing for one dollar a year, a deal that Richard Nixon, running for governor against Brown, tried to turn into a scandal. There, beside the resort's swimming pool sometime in the summer of 1965, William Newsom III made the acquaintance of my mother, Tessa Menzies, a "tall brunette with long legs" and a wicked overhead tennis serve who had only recently graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco.

Tessa came from a family of brilliant and daring misfits who had carved new paths in botany and medicine and left-wing politics. Her father, Arthur Menzies, who had served in the army during World War II and endured a brutal captivity in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, was an expert in horticulture, especially California wildflowers. Among the family secrets was his decades-long battle with alcoholism and depression. His life of flora, it was said, wasn't enough to blot out the monsters of his wartime confinement. To the horror of my mother and her two sisters, he ended up committing suicide in his bedroom with a .38-caliber bullet to the head. He was fifty-seven years old and left behind no note. There's a four-acre botanical garden full of native plants in Golden Gate Park named after my grandfather Menzies, whose letters home from the war I keep in a black binder.

My mother's mother, Jean Addis Menzies, was a nurse and an actress who spoke French and Russian and founded an avant-garde theater group in San Francisco. She was said to bear an uncanny resemblance to Katharine Hepburn and went by the odd stage name of Trigger Addis. In the 1930s, when she was barely twenty, her socialist passion took her to Soviet Russia, where she mixed it up with other young American Reds. This was my grandma Jean who understood my childhood struggles with dyslexia like no one else in the family. She was the daughter of Dr. Thomas Addis Jr., a pioneer in kidney-disease research at Stanford University who conceived the so-called Addis count, a method to diagnose kidney function. My great-grandfather worked to devise a special diet for patients suffering from deadly forms of nephritis, especially Bright's disease. Dr. Addis was a tall and lanky Scotsman, which explained the tallness and lankiness of my mother and me, and he was said to be a man of great humility who smoked a pipe as he listened with much care and discernment. When he talked, he spoke in a near whisper. My great-grandfather's antifascist politics, however, were so fierce during the McCarthy era that the FBI suspected him of being a communist and tapped his phones.

I tried now and then to piece together our history, but it remained a narrative shot full of holes. When it came to her past, my mother was almost completely mute. There was no use probing her. She saw no need to revisit or share any part of it. My father, whose highest regard was reserved for literature and history and storytelling, tended to mythologize, if not sanitize, the family history of both sides. I'm not sure he believed that the messy truth of it was relevant or even interesting to me, that it served any purpose, or that I would derive any lessons from it for my own life. California was a grand stage of reinvention, a place where you whitewashed the past and painted afresh, and so it would be with his only son, he must have thought. In his defense, the kid I was gave him plenty of reason to believe that any such transmission of history was fated not to hold. This is not to say that later in my life, when I became a San Francisco supervisor and then the mayor of the city, I did not press him to give me more and he did not regale me with his best stories. And yet, looking back, I have the sense that he used his gift of gab and wit as a shield that would not allow me to peek deeper inside him to understand the ways family history had bent him and thus me.

Our past, it now seems to me, was all too painful for either of my parents to touch. In her deference to silence and secrets, my mother did not possess the language to delve into the complications and tragedies of her parents and grandparents, much less convey the story to me and my sister, Hilary. My mother lived an entire life never making sense of it to herself and believed to the day she died that this was okay. My father was harder to figure. He had the language in all its abundance. And yet the times he decided to share his stories with me, his telling of the past felt like the same performance over and over, a script all too familiar.

And so I am left to guess, among many other details, how all that Menzies and Addis family lore, English and Scottish to boot, got added to the Irish Newsoms. In their hasty courtship, did my mother find a way to reach inside herself and share her family history with my father? Did this then become the glue that bound them? My search for answers sooner or later led me to the transcript of a 2008 interview that historian Martin Meeker conducted with my father for UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Among the many colorful stories he passed on to the historian are glimpses into his infatuation with my mother. "I just fell for her," he said. "She was eighteen when we met and going to Chico State. She was nineteen when we married in 1966 and I was thirty-two. Scandalous."