EMPEROR NORTON, sitting atop a soft mammary hill, overlooks his world, his work.  Below houses crowd steeply on the hillsides, jostling each other so as not to topple into the bay.  Rickety wooden houses jutting like teeth or like myriad scales on the back of the numbered (666) beast Leviathan.  He looks over the houses at the bay, at Yerba Buena Island.  “Good grass,” he says. He stands, leaning on a friendly boulder, and yawps over the rooftops of his city-state:  “Hello! Keep it up—all the good work!  Let industry and commerce flourish!  I’m tired, and I’m going to rest up here.”  People moving on the mud or brick streets below are tiny, infinitesimal—mites on the whale’s rounded backbone.  None turns to heed Norton’s shout.  It is just as well.  Norton pulls his cap over his eyes, snuggles on the uphill side of the boulder and sleeps in the soft spring sunshine.  Norton’s in his heaven—all’s right with the Empire of the Two Americas.

Through the dirty pince-nez of history this old man is nobody, a meaningless derelict statistic—one of thousands of vagrants washed ashore on the golden tide of ’49.  The streets are thronged with sourdoughs, grizzly-bearded and reeking of confined body odors and bad whiskey, ready to recite an Iliad of fabulous found and lost fortunes in California’s misted hills.  The better class of citizenry worries about this surplus of antique heroes, but time is tolling them away every day.  Winter fogs bring catarrh and ague, benevolent outbreaks of typhus and influenza in shantytown to cull the crop.  Old age waits patiently, too.

Yet this man existed for a blip in time, a little spark-gap of American history—Joshua A. Norton, sir, at your service.  Portly and composed as (say) Achilleus, obvious old-soldier type, apart from the tatters of uniform he still affects (cap, striped trousers, corroded saber).  San Francisco, in this centennial year of 1876 is a city, I’ll remind you, cosmopolitan as ancient Alexandria, with tame Chinese and Irish for exotics, sailors stumping broken-hipped off tall ships, waterfront dives where opium is smoked, the call of the East out there where the sun goes down, troublesome scents of frangipani or bougainvillea wafting on spring storm-winds.  Lash yourselves to the mast, men, or the sirens will call you overboard!

Joshua A. Norton has heard these sirens call, he has gone with them and returned to tell of translucent deep-sea light, fantastic growths choking the fathoms.  His eyes whirl madly, but that is a familiar stigma on this farthest edge of the new found land.  Emperor Norton I is his working title in the provisional empire he drafted from this lunatic wilderness—uniting all thirty-three states and Mexico under his protection.  Norton I the Protector of the West he hopes the books will call him.  He scribbles countless memoranda in a little leather book, keeping tabs for posterity.  Someday the world will know it all, when he lies in a stately marble catafalque, grander than that upstart Bonaparte’s bonebottle.

A shrill distant whistle wakes Norton on this particular spring afternoon, and he rises, stretching grandly, looking about in surprise—where is his retinue, his coach, his steed?  Nothing but thistle, broomgrass and fireweed on the hilltop, a lone jay swooping through it raucously.  Ah, that will suffice for an imperial bugle-brandisher.  Norton straightens the bill of his cap with a little salute to the bird:  off you go now, carry on, as you were, at ease, men.  Norton squints down across the city again.  It is a factory whistle that spoke, reminding him of the iron wheels of industry grinding for him, tons of manufactured goods spewing from workshops, endless import-export flowing along the rickety wharves.  Every ship that passes his Golden Gate is blessed by him.  A busy job, that, tiresome ship-blessing.  He tries to read the details of Yerba Buena’s lush shape, but it eludes him.  The bay winks in his eye with sparkles from a gentle swell.  An idea forms inside Norton’s grey eagle eye.  With one broken congress gaiter propped on the boulder, chin in hand, Norton stares at the waterway.

                                                                        2.

JOSHUA A. NORTON was—in his former epiphany—a merchant-adventurer and salesman, as righteous as you or I.  Money flowed in and out of his fingers, he danced mad Midas jigs on the tables of Western stock exchanges.  Goods for miners., comestibles and wearables, a flow of solid merchandise and speculative securities, or money printed on paper staked against putative mountains of gold waiting beyond the San Francisco Bay.  The world would say he lost his wits when his paper empire vanished.  Bankrupt, they call it—rupture of the bank, hernia of the money.  Perhaps this is why he limps.  Or is there a pirate’s moldy pistol-ball lodged near a hip-socket?  An old wound, sir (“wound” here rhyming with “found”)—but think not of it.  Only twinges when I see the market reports.  A veteran of the death-struggle with the regiments of Economic Man.

One day Norton sent a hand-written proclamation to the Bulletin, a superior sort of frontier newspaper.  It was his declaration of empire, in which he assumed his (true) royal name, NORTON I, EMPEROR OF THE UNITED STATES.  The year was 1859, a good year for someone to take charge of things.  In this proclamation he sensibly outlined his purpose, to “cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.”  This thought was perhaps more outrageous than his assumption of power.  We are, after all, used to people grabbing political spoils, but we stone utopians on sight.

Norton’s experience with stocks and bonds did not, alas, teach him.  Upon assuming the (invisible) throne, he forthwith issued bits of paper which caused the citizens of San Francisco to chuckle and to tip the old vagabond a handful of change or a few of the paper dollars that were now replacing the old gold.  It worked, Norton’s paper scheme, where his original, authentic and judicially sane ventures into bonds and stocks had been truest madness.  Laughing gently under his kingly ruffle of beard, Norton made free with his city.  He passed out cabinet posts liberally, made pronouncements and ate at the best restaurants without paying.  He had a reserved seat at the theatres, and audiences always rose respectfully when Norton I entered.  In his room he worked on scraps of music paper to compose a fitting anthem for the Empire, to be played at his appearance.  He was unable to proceed beyond the introductory flourish of cornets and horns, which quite intoxicated him. 

                                                                        3.

NORTON RUBBED his beard contemplatively.  The island in the bay was a green fortress or a stranded ship festooned with tropical life.  There was the mainland.  Between them the chasm of Golden Gate gaped into the ocean.  A sidewheel packet labored across it while he watched, black smoke chuffing from its stack, a string of port flags rippling in the breeze.  A vision formed in his mind, a princely revelation:  LET THERE BE A BRIDGE!  Norton doffed his old campaign hat, polished the verdigris-fouled brass bandsman’s lyre on its crown.  Then he tossed it high into the bright sky, hollering, “Whooooopeeee!”

Descending the hill, Norton hummed his fanfare.  He would have to finish the dratted thing for the bridge-opening ceremonies.  It would be just the touch, an imperial brass band marching across the graceful arch of the bridge. Its music thin but brave above the ocean, startling deaf seagulls.  “I should have known,” Norton said to a passerby, a stumpy fellow in a black tailcoat, with a large wen on his nose.  “I should have divined it as an omen.”  He gestured broadly at his home, the roominghouse before which they stood.  “Don’t you see it, sir?  Are you a dunce?”

“See what?”  Surly rogue.  Morbid in appearance and voice, doubtless an undertaker or a pickpocket or a discharged major-domo.

On the wind-swung board above the steps shaky lettering read EUREKA LODGING HOUSE.  The citizen shook his head and turned away with a glare.  A mean, watery blue eye.  Beware the evil eye, Norton.  He went into the tipsy clapboard building, still humming his imperial march. He felt linked through history, through certain mystical bonds of transmogrification, with Anaximander, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Demosthenes, Aristotle.  “I speak, therefore I am!” he shouted at Mrs. Dunfinny, who was holystoning the hallway behind the steep stairs.  “I become a god!” he called hollowly down the stairwell as he reached his room.  Mrs. Dunfinny tittered and crossed herself.  Norton, staunch Mason, had never realized she was Irish Catholic even when he saw her carrying her rosary off to dawn Mass.  Such petty details are beneath potentates.  “We are featherless bipeds,” he said as he opened his door.

In his room he woke his dog, a strange low-slung crossbreed animal named Hannibal.  He was very old, cinnamon-colored, with a perpetual wet smell.  One eye was glazed with cataract, and he was mute.  But he lived on stoically for Norton I.  I am my master’s dog at Kew.  Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?  Norton fed Hannibal from a bag of scraps he kept hanging on a string outside the window.  Sometimes birds attacked it.  Norton’s dog ate while Norton sat on the spring-broken iron bed and watched it.  He loved the processes of life—ingestion, digestion, excretion.  Everything flows, like the eternal sea through the esophagus of the Golden Gate.  Like words that burbled from Norton’s lips:  “We got ’em now, Hannibal,” he said.  The dog shuddered as it ate, ripples of nerve under the loose old skin, like a man shouldering his way into a heavy overcoat. Hannibal turned and regarded Norton with his one shiny eye—removing the malign spell of the jackdaw-man in the street.  Then Norton lept up and shouted, “Hats!  My hats, Hannibal—it’s time for them!”

A contemporary witness reported Norton I’s hat-mania or –fetish in detail:  “There were many hats.  There was first an old stove-pipe hat resting side by side with a little plaster cast of himself on the table.  Directly above, hanging in a row on the wall, were three more—the first a derby hat.  Next to this hung an old army cap bound with red lace, and next in line a regulation army hat, also trimmed with red, and which had apparently once adorned the cranium of a martial bandmaster, as attested by the lyre which graced its front.”

He removed his bandmaster’s hat and donned the stovepipe, assuming a mournful, Lincolnesque expression.  Marching to the window, he looked out on the narrow alleyway.  An old black man was pushing a large two-wheeled cart, picking through rubbish heaps as he meandered.  “You are free,” Norton said to him through the glass, making benedictory gestures.  “I emancipate you in the name of the Empire.”

Then he fitted the derby and imagined a cigar in one corner of his mouth.  “I’ll buy you out, Mr. Fisk.  And you, Mr. Gould, may go to hell.  The coins all bear my physiognomy, gentlemen, which means they are ipso facto and de jure mine!”

Next he assumed the army hat and carefully unsheathed his old dress sword.  “Charge!” he yelled softly at the furthest wall.  “Don’t sell till you see the whites of their eyes!  Norton expects every broker to do his duty.  Damn the torpedoes, sir.  I have only begun to fight!”  Panting, Norton sat again on the bed and fitted the sword into its cracked scabbard.  Once the blade had seized up, and he had drenched it with watchmaker’s oil to free it, so now the scabbard reeked of fish and the sea, ancient whale-breath.

“We are tired, Hannibal,” Norton said after he had hung the hats up neatly and slung the sword from its pegs.  “We will catch a short nap.  Guard yonder postern, hey?”  The old dog limped over and lay halfway under the bed, his usual cavern of repose, and slept as hard as his master.

                                                                        4.

NORTON AT A MEETING:  on the gaslit stage of a lecture hall, with sundry dignitaries of the Lyceum of Self-Culture.  Masses of men and women lusting after knowledge.  Norton cast a Rosicrucian eye from the platform.  The moderator droned about the topic of the evening—Free Love.  “All love is free,” Norton interrupted.  He rose, straightened his jacket, refastened an errant brass button.  The sword clanked against the rostrum as he stepped to it.  The moderator stepped aside.  Deep humility in the Presence.  Norton cleared his throat.  Respectful, waiting silence throughout the cavernous hall.  Once a minstrel-theatre—Tambo and Bones danced on these worn boards.  Norton considered singing a few verses of “The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed.”

“I am here to tell you that eighty-two percent of all infants born in this great land of America are destroyed.  Yes, destroyed!”  Deeper silence.  An old woman in the front row, gaping, eyeglasses glinting defensively:  “I didn’t do it!”  “Take twenty-five square miles of land,” he continued.  “Let it rain on that land twenty-four hours.”  He made a surveyor’s gesture followed by a raining gesture. “Then turn every one of those drops of water into a baby.  How many babies would there be?”  Silent consternation.  Norton looked around, breathing sternly.  Well—how many?”  Still no answer.  They were in it together, a conspiracy of silence.  He had heard of it before.  Someone whispered or giggled in the back rows.  “I heard that!  Speak up—how many?”

Great disgust wandered across Norton’s features.  He rapped his knuckles sharply on the podium.  “Come, come—we’re civilized people here.  Someone tell me how many poor, helpless infants that would total.”  A generalized rustle but no living voice.

Norton turned in military fashion, picked up his cap, adjusted it on his head, descended from the platform and strode up the aisle and out of the hall, like a great fish swimming certainly through an ocean of silence. “Fools,” he whispered to himself when he reached an empty street.

                                                                        5.

PRANKSTERS sometimes followed Norton, taunted him faintly from shadowed doorways, sent him telegrams signed with the names of foreign potentates and dignitaries—Disraeli, Parnell, the great Tsar, Victoria Regina.  Fools’ gold—iron pyrites—is as good as the real mack-eye to a blind man.  Norton kept his papers jumbled in a deal table drawer, with spare monies, unsigned Norton bonds, sundry proposals of a civic character.  He addressed a small crowd in a city park on a moist summer afternoon:  “I have a secret, citizens,” he announced.  “You shall have it whether you will or no.  But not today.  Today we are here to observe the fresh green grass and the blue skies and to ponder why Nature has mixed these seemingly incompatible hues so freely on her generous palette.”

The discourse consumed the afternoon, and most of the crowd left.  One man remaining bought a bond for $1.25.  But his two-bit coin proved a slug when Norton examined it in his room.  The old feeling of being cheated, the world’s goat, seized him, for a moment.  Then he went to the window and looked into the dim alleyway.  If he were not so hemmed in he could see the bay and Yerba Buena and the open, waiting gateway for his bridge.  But he had matters to settle, policies to initiate.  He had another letter to send to the German newspapers concerning Herr Bismarck’s latest military decrees.  He concurred with the iron chancellor’s ideas, and it was Norton I’s bounden duty to publish such concord between fellow rulers.  But he had his nightly meal to prepare—this evening just a sandwich to share with Hannibal.  Poor brute was older and sicker than ever.  What would happen to Hannibal if something happened to Norton I?  He found a scrap of foolscap and drafted a tiny proclamation that Hannibal (therein named the Emperor’s favored companion) should in perpetuity be supported and succored by the people of the Empire of the Two Americas.  Norton wondered what was happening in Mexico at the moment.  News was hard to come by. But it was late, and sleep arrived with the moon, a summer moon like a golden seal for the proclamation.  Hannibal whimpered in his sleep, and Norton soothed him.

                                                                        6.

NORTON POSING for a portrait:  in the studio of his friend, the Emperor standing before a stock portrait scene, a flat canvas daubed with a painting of woodlands and mountains by a prentice hand.  The photographer, as bemused as Norton, a man named Eadweard Muybridge, known to initiates as Helios.   Sungod, bewitched by light and by the magic of chemicals and glass plates, intrigued by the persistent fact of motion.  In a day when cameras were as heavy and imposing as howitzers, when exposures were measured in minutes, he dreamed of capturing on film fleeting motion.  “I will find a way, your highness,” he said as Norton fidgeted.  “I will discover how to record it all—walking, running, leaping in the air.  I have conducted experiments.  I am well on my way to exposing the great secret.”

“Can you depict me walking in the air?” Norton asked.  A superb gesture.  The perfect godlike portrait.  “Can you capture me walking in the air across the Golden Gate, say two hundred feet above the waves?”

Muybridge ran his hands through his thick hair, twitched his mustache.  “No.  That is magic, and I deal only in science.”

“Ah, yes—I have heard of it,” Norton said.  “I understand that electricity is now a science.  In my youth it was a magic demonstrated by mesmerists, phrenologists, spiritualists who summoned up gobs of ectoplasm to tell you things you already knew.”

“This is all wrong—the light, that foolish flat,” Muybridge said.  “Let us go out into the streets.  That is where the portrait of Norton should be made.  In the midst of his empire.”  Muybridge began dismantling his bulky camera.

Outside they met a man standing dejectedly beside the curb, staring at his bicycle.  Not a modern safety bicycle nor one of the gargantuan wheels, either, but a go-devil like a grown-up’s toy.  It had a bent rim on the back wheel.  The man let Norton examine it, and the Emperor straddled it.

“I could go everywhere with one of these,” he said wistfully.  “Across on the ferry to Richmond.  Or on my own bridge, at the head of the band . . . ”  While he spoke, his eyes remote with vision, Muybridge snapped the shutter.  It is an allegory, the finished photo, of innocent dreaming, the old Emperor contemplative, ruminative, astride a broken toy.  “Muybridge,” he said, “did I ever tell you about my bridge?”

                                                                        7.

WHEN NORTON DIED in 1880, the citizens of San Francisco gave him a splendid funeral and bought him a proper grave.  Brass bands played lyrical dirges across the hillsides. And many years later they built the bridge across the Golden Gate, arching above blue water and the green mantle of Yerba Buena, the bridge that is his truest monument.