Ferlinghetti & Me.

The Poet’s Chair, at City Lights Books in SF.

I never met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but I did sit in his worn rocking chair — “the Poet’s Chair,” as it was inscribed — upstairs in San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, which Ferlinghetti co-founded nearly 70 years ago.

I sat in his seat and looked around at the stack of books that embraced him every day, holding his newest work, a novel entitled “Little Boy” on my lap, published just in time for his 100th birthday, two years ago this month.

I had just completed a book tour for my own memoir, “Tightrope,” in the year I turned 70, and wanted some of Ferlinghetti’s longevity as a writer to seep up through his chair, up through my butt, and keep me writing for the next 30 years.

His books of populist poetry, Coney Island of the Mind, Pictures of the Gone World, and A Far Rockaway of the Heart, appealed to me by their approachable names, and revealed to me the depths of my own unapproachable despair which I hid well from others behind a smile, outward optimism and good grooming. Ferlinghetti saw me for who I was.

So when I learned that at 100 years old, he had written a novel about his boyhood, and his life, I rushed to his book store to buy his book, sit in his chair, soak up his spirit, and start reading right there — on the very spot where Ferlinghetti wrote and read for hours without end. I hoped he would not appear, necessitating an…