Account of journeys leads to self-discovery and now a one-act play

'Bone Man' takes us back to '70s

BY CASEY MILLS Aug. 15, 2004

TERRY TARNOFF seems at home in the Cafe Prague. The San Francisco coffee shop reminds him of a European cafe, with its bright murals on the walls, framed photos of exotic locations and world music blaring out of the speakers.

Tarnoff spent more than four years of his life in and out of cafes like this, as well as Nepalese Buddhist temples, African peasant huts, Swedish art museums and a host of other wildly diverse locales. It was in this very cafe that he documented these experiences in his recent novel, "The Bone Man of Benares."

The book is a semifictionalized account of Tarnoff's life from 1971 to 1974, when he traveled on an epic adventure through several continents, love affairs, tragedies, spiritual revelations and drugged-out bummers. The journey reflects the insanity of the times, as the protagonist runs into everyone from monks smoking hash to African blues musicians.

Music weaves throughout the narrative as Tarnoff, an accomplished harmonica player, jams with all kinds of fellow musicians during his travels. Music can be heard in his writing style as well. While the narrative is mostly traditional, Tarnoff will suddenly switch gears and dive into a page-long stream of consciousness without punctuation, sentence structure or attention to tense.

'Saxophone solos'

These sections provide the book's high points, revealing many of Tarnoff's most emotional and spiritually intense moments in equally intense prose. Tarnoff likens them to saxophone solos, with the rest of the book working like background piano chords. Tarnoff realized the book's close connection to music when, while writing it, he'd start tapping his foot in time to the words.

"I always knew I was onto something then," he says.

While this style may sound like another group of San Franciscans -- the Beats -- Tarnoff is reluctant to agree with the comparison. "I have lived the past 15 years in North Beach," he acknowledges with a smile, but then goes on to liken his writing more to that of Henry Miller or Nikos Kazantzakis.

The comparison is an apt one, especially considering the messages these authors present to their readers. "The Bone Man of Benares," despite the protagonist's tremendous hardships, including everything from spurned love to sharing a pipe with a leper, ultimately leaves the reader with a profoundly positive conclusion -- that life is beautiful, from the smallest grain of sand to continents the size of Africa.

Novel as medium

Tarnoff spent the past 15 years as a screenwriter, and while he sold several screenplays, not one turned into a movie. Throughout his career, though, he knew the real story he had to tell, the unique one that could not be told by anyone in Hollywood, and that was the story of his travels.

He struggled with writing it as a screenplay, growing frustrated with turning such a sprawling adventure into a tidy feature-length film. Finally, he woke one day to a simple realization -- he would write his story as a novel. He started immediately, soon finding he loved the freedom the medium allowed him.

Oddly enough, the process revealed to him how the story could be told as a movie, and the film rights have already been optioned. Beginning next month, the book will also be performed as a one-man show in San Francisco by renowned Bay Area actor Ron Campbell.

Tarnoff says he's incredibly excited about the show, which started a year ago at his first reading of the book. After the reading, several people told him he should turn it into a one-man show. He scoffed at the idea until Magic Theatre's Mark Routhier said he'd like to direct it. Soon after, Campbell signed on to star in it, two Encore Theatre members decided to produce it, and the production was under way.

Learning curve

The play, like the book, will document a journey of self-discovery. Throughout "The Bone Man of Benares," the protagonist throws himself into increasingly difficult situations, from the frigid cold of Stockholm, to the brutal heat of the Kenyan coast, to disease-ridden India, to lonely Nepal. At each step, however, he learns more about himself and the world around him, a process Tarnoff says was almost as hard to write about as it was to live.

"The hardest thing, and ultimately the most valuable thing, was digging deeper into who I am," says Tarnoff about the writing process. "I was digging into my emotions, my fears, my sense of what was I doing out there for all those years. This was a very crazy thing to do."

While the book helped Tarnoff to better understand those years of his life, he says he wrote the book for other reasons. One was to provide an account of the era and those who lived in it by someone actually a part of it.

"I've always felt that groups that are in the avant-garde at any time in history are just completely misrepresented," he says. "And I've always been kind of outraged at the portrayals of this scene I was part of, and so one of my goals when I wrote the book was to accurately portray what it was really like."

Cultural understanding

So far, Tarnoff thinks he's done a good job. Many old friends who appear in the book have been contacting him, for the most part to tell him how well he's encapsulated the times and their experiences.

Another reason he wrote the book was because he feels that his story, while universal, is extremely relevant at this point in history. He feels his and his friends' travels in the '70s represented an attempt to understand foreign cultures, to see what peasants in Africa had to teach them, for example, rather than telling them how to live their lives.

Tarnoff sees many of today's current problems, especially the recent terrorism, as stemming from the absence of this type of perspective. He hopes his book, as much as it connects with the older generation who lived during the era, will reach younger people and help give them guidance as to how to deal with a fractured world.

"Something went very wrong," he says. "And I think the only solution is to get back to that very nice start that we had going."

Long, Strange Trip

Sex, drugs, and scurvy marked Terry Tarnoff's eight-year trek.

BY SAM HURWITT May 26, 2004

In 1970 Terry Tarnoff, a hippie and recent University of Wisconsin grad who'd moved to Berkeley at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, left America with the feeling that his country had strayed from any useful path and went looking for a better one. The tangled journey that followed lasted eight years, much of it in Africa and much more in India, planting seeds in Tarnoff's psyche that have borne luscious fruit in The Bone Man of Benares. New this month, Tarnoff's memoir picks up in the middle of his time abroad, with our narrator kicking heroin and exchanging longing glances with a hooker in Laos. It then jumps back to a bittersweet tale of love and scurvy in chilly Sweden, making peace with nature and goodly doses of bangi on an island off the coast of Kenya, and Tarnoff having his mind thoroughly blown by India and Nepal, playing blues harmonica with local bands wherever he went.

"We were sort of the anti-Peace Corps," Tarnoff reflects today at the cafe in his North Beach neighborhood where much of the book was written. "The people in the Peace Corps had very positive motivations, but they tended to go over to places like Africa in order to teach the Africans how to better their conditions. But we went over to learn from the Africans."

The author's down-to-earth insights and self-deprecating humor keep you right with him throughout this psychedelic safari. As a narrator, he is so delightfully upfront about his own unreliability that you're willing to accept the most outlandish tales at face value. "There are several things that are metaphorical or allegorical," he concedes readily. "But essentially this is a true story, and some of the things that seem to be impossible are actually absolutely true." Tarnoff started writing Bone Man after years of suffering the frustrations of a Hollywood screenwriter, selling some scripts but never quite seeing any of the movies get made.

"I was writing film noir and modern comedy and trying to put my own spin on it, but anybody could do that," he says. "This story of this journey that I had taken was the one story that no other Hollywood screenwriter could tell, but I could never figure out how to make it into a film script. It was too vast; it was too crazy. There were too many themes and too many characters and too many locations and too much dope and too many women -- there was too much of everything. After years and years, I woke up one day and I suddenly realized the reason I hadn't been able to write it as a screenplay is because it's a book."

Still, Tarnoff the memoirist had by no means supplanted Tarnoff the screenwriter, and he plans to divide his time between books and screenplays in the future. "About halfway through the book, I suddenly realized, 'Ah, I think I see where the movie is now.' And in fact, film rights have been optioned, so we're very hopeful that there will be a movie." Whether or not Bone Man reaches the big screen, audiences will get a taste of it this fall. Tarnoff is in the process of adapting the story as a theater piece starring Ron Campbell and directed by Mark Routhier, to open September 27 for a six-week run at San Francisco's Encore Theatre. The play, like much of the book, was born in this same cafe a year ago, when Tarnoff gave a reading to celebrate the sale of his manuscript. "The next morning I got calls from a bunch of people who said they really enjoyed it and that I should turn this into some kind of one-man show, which never occurred to me in my wildest imagination," he says.

Tarnoff's imagination is pretty wild and proves an endearing companion in Bone Man, a way-out Watson to his own Holmes as he chases the most elusive mysteries of them all. But he cautions fellow travelers that on the road it's easy to let your imagination get the better of you.

"When I first got to Bombay, I met this Englishman at a little fruit stand who had been there for five years, and he wanted to know my impressions," he recalls. "I said, 'Why do you care about my impressions? I just got here.' He said, 'When I first came to Bombay I thought I kind of understood it after a couple of days, but then I was here for six months and realized my first impression was totally ludicrous. Then a year passed, and I realized that what I was thinking at six months was totally wrong. Two years passed and three years passed, and every time I realized I was totally wrong. Finally after five years I looked around and said, Yeah, I do understand it, and you know what? It was the same as when I had arrived after two days.'

"Sure enough, I wound up staying for five years, and I pretty much had that same conclusion, that my first impression of India was largely correct. So my advice is, if you're going to go to a place like India, go for three days or five years. But it's really dangerous to go for six months, because you'll think that you know something, but after six months you have learned nothing but lies."