The Final Word
by Bruce Bellingham

I had a sense that both P.J. Corkery and I would ruefully smile when we saw the term “beloved” in the headline of P.J.’s obituary in the San Francisco Examiner last month.
I worked with P.J. for a few years on his column. I was his legman, as they used to say in Herb Caen’s era (that’s someone who runs around and collects the scoops) – and P.J. loved Caen era-errata – I was Corkery’s fact-checker, I was his editor, I was an idea-guy, an occasional composer of the prose. If there was any time left over – and that was rare – we were friendly. Those times were punctuated by his explosive temper – a drive for perfection on his part. Here’s an example: I’ll never mix up the use of “to don” or “to doff.” That’s what you do with your hat. I had my head doffed on a platter the next morning.
Ah, yes, as for beloved, there’s a point to this. I had written a little item about a longtime bookstore in Bernal Heights that had closed after many years. The e-mails, the phone calls all evoked the word “beloved.” I fell for it. I’d never been there. So I wrote beloved.
The next day, in the newspaper, it was printed, of course, as a beloved bookstore. Apparently, much of the neighborhood had agreed that it was not a beloved bookstore.
“By the way,” Corkery snarled at me. “There’s one of those elegiac gatherings at Moose’s today, Bellingham. Go cover it. Don’t bring me anything mawkish.”

“How do you feel about beloved?” I smirked,
He chuckled.

Down deep, Corkery was really nostalgic – romantic, even. But not sentimental. So he thought. He loved literature, particularly Irish lit, like Yeats, Donleavy. The collection of Flann O’Brien that he gave me I still treasure. I think back on those chats with great pleasure. It would amuse both Corkery and me how he’d surreptitiously attempt to slide little obscure Irishisms into the daily copy. It may have worked on occasion in Dublin or Boston or New York – but not San Francisco. There was a mischief about him. He loved the notion that he was a Harvard man who went to work for the National Inquirer all those years ago. Now, students throng to get those jobs.

Paul Jerome Corkery was not a heart easily opened, though he was insatiably curious about visiting other’s inner chambers. That’s not to say he wasn’t disarmingly charming and stunningly generous.

He was only 61 when he died of cancer at Stanford Hospital on Sept. 20. I never knew he was that ill, though we’d gone our separate ways in recent times. When we worked together, I knew he had diabetes. He never wanted to discuss it. P.J. said one Thanksgiving a few years ago that he had to go up to St. Francis Hospital to “get a little thing done” or something like that. I popped in to see him. I noticed they’d cut off his leg at the knee. He never mentioned it. “Would you like your morphine drip now?” the nurse cheerfully asked no one in particular, as she wheeled a large bag of something on a tripod.
“I’ll go first,” I said exuberantly.

“Let Bruce go first,” beamed P.J. He seemed to take this torment in stride, and not without a little amusement. That was extraordinary.

He left the Examiner, then I wrote over there for a year or so, then P.J. left a legacy of lore and legerdemain with Mayor Brown in a book called Basic Brown. They hit it off, well, famously.

P.J.’s knowledge of San Francisco was amazing – though he did not live here for as many years as you’d think. Perhaps he was a cosmic intelligence officer assigned to San Francisco from the beyond. Sometimes, in his office at the Examiner on Market & 6th or at his fave South Beach cafe, he’d quiz me on the names on the bars in the now long-vanished International Settlement before the Open City closed, and before your mother was born. I suspect Corkery channeled characters like Big Alma Spreckels and Jack London, covered the waterfront before there even was a Barbary Coast. Maybe San Francisco has the capacity to turn some unrepentant, curmudgeonly creatures into ethereal voices that rasp in the early morning fog: “Get the hell out of my way, make some room for the truly beloved!”

Now, there’s a thought.

Bruce Bellingham learned a lot of newspapering from P.J. Corkery, and for this he is very grateful. Write to Bruce at bruce@northsidesf.com.