The Search for Mardou Fox 

 From Alta Journal 

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I never expected to find her in this unlikely place, sitting on a fender of a car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street.” And yet, here she was. Lingering within the first few pages of a sleek black paperback, taking up space, “saying something extremely earnestly,” setting ideas afloat.

This was my first glimpse of Mardou Fox, one of a constellation of urban intellectuals dubbed “the subterraneans”—night dwellers, “ ‘hip without being slick…intelligent without being corny…they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.’ ”

I wasn’t sure where I’d wandered, but I locked into its frequency.

At the time, the early 1980s, I was a quiet yet intensely restless English major, working shifts as a bookstore clerk in a fading shopping mall in Los Angeles. One slow weeknight, my hand lingered over a stack of slim paperbacks on our to-be-shelved cart.

The 1981 Black Cat edition of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans featured a high-contrast black-and-white cover image offset by highlighter-yellow and green type. Beneath the title, bodies crowded together, suggesting a cellar-like setting.

I read on.

“Do you know this girl, the dark one?”

“Mardou?”

“That’s her name?”

The exchange both gave me pause and nudged me forward.

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