Honolulu Harbor, 1980: The fishing boats were tied to the dock, ready to set out, but the men aboard sat on boxes and watched the very young woman as she climbed the stairs of the elevated scaffolding on the dock. Her skirt fluttered as the clerk of the Teamsters Local handed her the microphone.

“Hello,” she said.

Three hundred fishermen looked up at her. They were Hawaiian, Japanese, Samoan, Philipino, and Chinese, and they spoke many different languages, though generally not English. She was here promoting a blood drive for the blood bank.

This was Adrienne, when she was very young, but already with a girl-child and a toddler at home.

Up on the scaffolding above the boats, she spoke into the microphone, her voice booming around the dock buildings, and the men shifted and fidgeted. They had no idea what she said. They were anxious to put to sea. She spoke of how their contribution would save lives, and how important it was.

The trade wind picked up. Her pretty skirt began to whip around her legs. She tried to hold the fluttering skirt down as she spoke, and she had to speak bent over into the microphone.

The fishermen watched, impassive.

The talk was over. There was a scattering of applause, and then the crews made ready the boats, and with horns and churning waters the boats put out to sea. She watched them go.

The Teamsters clerk thanked her. She left.

The next week, at the blood drive, the hall was packed. The blood bank had to bring in some special beds, because the Samoans were very, very large. Adrienne discovered that all 300 fishermen had signed up.

Just another day in paradise.

North Beach, San Francisco, 1978: Adrienne found the black cockapoo on Christmas, and so the little dog was named Holly. Found abandoned on the freeway, Holly lived out her life with Adrienne.

Holly led a charmed life. The night she dug out of the back yard to investigate the neighbor’s swimming pool, first she tumbled in, and then was unable to climb up the pool’s lip, so she paddled through the night. In the morning, when Adrienne followed the tracks, Holly, now very feeble but still paddling, was pulled from the water. Holly tried to shake off the water, but stumbled and fell. But soon, after a few hours wrapped in a blankey, she was chipper as ever. That gal!

The Beach Blanket Babylon chapter of Holly’s story came later …

Adrienne was dating an actor named Jay, and when she heard of the auditions for Toto the Dog, for the upcoming Beach Blanket Babylon version of The Wiz, she figured Holly had an inside, because Holly looked like Toto. Adrienne signed Holly for an audition, and Jay was suitably impressed.

Beach Blanket Babylon, now the longest-running musical revue in America, had begun its run in 1974. Now located at the Club Fugazi dinner theatre (across from the Green Street Mortuary, the home of the famous marching band), the Beach Blanket troupe produces parodies of current happenings, and is famous for gargantuan and peculiar hats.

In 1978, based on the Broadway smash hit, a movie called The Wiz appeared, starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, with a Quincy Jones soundtrack. This was a natch for Club Fugazi!

At the Saturday morning auditions, the line of dogs and owners stretched out the front door. The theatre was dark, smelling musty of last-night’s alcohol. Holly patiently waited her turn. Adrienne was nervous.

Finally, it was Holly’s turn. She jumped up the steps, looked back smiling as Adrienne followed. Adrienne introduced Holly to the audience and to Mr. Silver, the guy in charge. “Go ahead, dear,” he said. Adrienne turned to Holly.

“Are you ready?” Adrienne asked. Holly looked ready.

“Sit,” Adrienne said. Holly lay down.

“Shake,” said Adrienne. Holly sat.

“Speak,” said Adrienne. Holly held out a paw to be shaken.

“Lie down,” said Adrienne. Holly barked.

Adrienne couldn’t help laughing, along with the audience. First one, then another of the audience, rose to their feet, clapping wildly. Holly was a hit. Tears running down his face, Mr. Silver said, “Thank you, dear,” but the audience kept clapping.

It was Holly’s standing ovation.

South of Market, San Francisco, 1975: Back in my Simple Simon days, I got a call from a fellow one day who said his name was Will Stone. His voice was precise and somber; I pictured him tall and thin, something perhaps like the House of Usher.

Thin he was, as it turned out, though no taller than myself. He’d started an art gallery in a warehouse cum arty-mall, and he needed a bookkeeper. Somehow he felt that Simple Simon was the guy.

He hired me. I grew to enjoy him tremendously as a friend, perhaps partly because he was as strange as the artwork.

He only sold art of the “Fantastic, Surreal, and Visionary” type.

It was wonderful stuff. To this day, I own an Arthur Bell painting called “Little Red House over Yonder.” (Bell’s work has been featured in Heavy Metal magazine, or as the French say, le magazine Metal Hurlant.)

I also have two Schroeder lithographs, one of a Lion with paw raised in greeting, and one called Tiger Ship featuring a tiger face in the sky with eyes of crescent moons above a ship sailing a black night sea, all with a border of oroboros clasping his tail.

I like these things. There is something both wonderous and somehow disturbing about them, and the fact is, in artwork that’s something I like a lot. Or rather, perhaps I should say I don’t know what I like, but I do know Art, having hung out so long together.

Alas! Will Stone, of the Will Stone Collection, was never satisfied with my bookkeeping work, and somehow it always led to my charging him less. After a while I began to see a pattern there. These days, I’ve come to believe this may be a pattern of guys from New York, because when I listen to Michael Savage on the evening radio, darned if he doesn’t sound like Will Stone!

So this one late afternoon Will and I were going to dinner. There was a humble place south of market called Communion. For $1.99 you could eat dinner there. It was always brown rice, indian vegetable dishes, and warm fresh pan (bread), served with lhassi (yogurt drink) and tea.

The only catch was that nobody was allowed to speak at Communion restaurant.

It was some sort of commune. These abounded at the time. Once, a commune that ran another restaurant off Mission Street wanted to hire Simple Simon to fix up their books, but they wanted to pay me with marijuana, because apparently their restaurant was really a front for a pot-growing business. I passed on that one.

I guess these things were not so rare at that time. My first bookkeeping client, Phil Groves (Raskin-Flakkers Ice Cream Store), had moved to a nice second-floor apartment out in the Richmond district, way out by Mamounia restaurant. One morning Phil came downstairs to find cop cars surrounding the place. The business downstairs, named “Grandad’s Original Sourdough”, turned out to be a cocaine-smuggling operation. They shipped the cocaine in plastic bags stuck down inside cans of sourdough starter. Hah! San Francisco sourdough!

But getting back to Communion restaurant. This was a really swell restaurant, except that you couldn’t talk. I enjoyed Will’s company, but as he talked incessantly, having a break over dinner wasn’t so bad, and since he said he liked the place, that’s where we went.

The first half of the dinner went fine.

The problem was when the lady came in with a child. They sat at a table across the room, and then the child began to fuss. Will glared. The child fussed. Will glared at the woman. The woman didn’t notice. Will glared at the child. The child fussed some more.

Therefore, there in the non-speaking restaurant, Will walked over to their table and said sternly, “Lady, this is a non-speaking restaurant. Please make your child be quiet.”

When he came back to our table, he clearly felt righteous, but I was embarassed as hell that he’d broken the Rule of Communion Restaurant! Even the virtuous fact that I was the only one who had not spoken failed to cheer me.

The pattern repeated. In North Beach, he was the only person I’ve ever known to send a dish back to the kitchen twice. Another time, when we went to brunch downtown, he wore a bathrobe, pretending it was a dinner jacket, and then gave the cook hell over a bagel. Slowly it became clear that he was always dissatisfied at restaurants just as he was always dissatisfied with my bookkeeping. It bugged me.

So finally, when I saw this clearly, that he would never be satisfied with any provider, I resigned as his bookkeeper, and just enjoyed being a friend.

But, somehow, we never went out to dinner any more.

Henrietta, Texas 1953: Being 9 years old, I was walking home from school. It was quite safe then. Ricky Moyer walked along with me, and Bradley, the high school kid, stopped his 1948 black Mercury, to let us pass.

“Give us a ride!” called out Ricky.

“Get on the hood!” yelled Bradley.

So we did.

The black Mercury had a long, rounded hood. You couldn’t really sit on it, so Ricky perched on the right fender, and I sat on the left fender, legs dangling by the front tire.

Bradley drove slowly. It was all very funny.

In the next block, a car was coming the other direction, and prudently stopped. Bradley drove on, very close to the other car. Very, very close to the other car, I saw, and swung my legs up out of the way, to avoid being crushed. As I tottered there on the front of Bradley’s car, with nothing to hold, and no purchase, he passed the other car with two inches to spare. The other driver gaped at the window.

Looking back, I saw Bradley’s jaw drop.

He slowed the car to a stop. Ricky and I scrambled off.

By then, Bradley was out of the car, as was the other driver, an older man. And was that man furious! He called Bradley an idiot, asked didn’t Bradley see him stopped there? In dumb embarassment, eyes downcast, Bradley shook his head.

Ricky and I looked at each other. Bradley hadn’t even seen the other car. It was luck, nothing more, that eased us past with no collision. Had he struck the car, of course, we’d have tumbled in front of Bradley’s moving car. Ricky might have escaped, to the side. Probably I’d not.

Yet here I am. Fifty years later. Because that’s just the way it happened, that day.

When the man left off his shouting and drove away, Bradley was in turn furious with us. He yelled at us and told us to beat it.

We beat it.

I didn’t tell my mother about it. I wasn’t quite certain, but figured it a bad idea. Late at night, I suddenly wondered if Ricky told his mom, because if he did, then my mother would probably find out. Early next day at school, I asked Ricky if he’d told his mom.

“Nope,” he said.

Whew!

Lands End, San Francisco, 1976: The radio was all abuzz. A tzunami was coming. It would arrive around 8:30 just after dark. San Francisco residents are advised to avoid the beach and low-lying areas.

Naturally, we all wanted to see it.

As I rode my motorcycle out Geary Boulevard, I remembered Playland at the Beach. I’d since seen movies from the thirties, showing a boardwalk thronged with crowds in strange bathing costumes. But the week I’d moved into Ms. Douglas’s upper room, I’d driven down Ulloa Street to the ocean.

Playland at the Beach was abandoned. An empty boardwalk, in the middle of the day. I walked around like a human on mars. I heard a garish, distorted laughing and followed it. Through an open door I entered a building, the Fun House, now empty, sunlight coming through the windows. There, a huge mechanical clown inside a glass cage rocked back and forth, bellowing with wild laughter.

Nobody was around. I went back outside. It was all closed. Rides closed. Concessions closed. No cotton candy. No crowds. Two blocks off the beach. Wild laughter echoing round the corners. Empty.

Not long after, Playland had been razed. Ugly apartment buildings were to spring up later, but now, just empty lots two blocks off the beach.

I parked my motorcycle at Land’s End. Land’s End is a cliff, just above the Cliff House restaurant and the winding highway. Once there was a house there but only foundation stones remain, and a gazebo. It rises a couple of hundred feet above the ocean. A great place to see the tsunami.

From the verge of Land’s End, with a crowd of excited people, we peered down past the trees and brush to the highway and the beach below. We watched a fool dash past the police cars to the beach and back. The radio had said Do not go to the beach. Repeat. Do not go to the beach.

They’d not said anything about Land’s End. We laughed at the fool. We wondered at the police cars. A tsunami can be 30 feet tall, and in record cases 100 feet tall. Either would sweep over the seawall and engulf the police cars.

The time approached. Bottles were passed around. A scent of smoke and wildness in the air.

You never know, maybe the tsunami would sweep up the cliff. Maybe our laughing crowd would be killed, carried and buried into the crushing black of the ocean. It was a beautiful night for it, the air so fresh and clean.

The time grew near. Sometimes a big tsunami will first pull the water back, exposing the ocean floor.

The time came. No water pulled back. The waves on the beach seemed about the same, just like always.

We waited a while, but that was it. This particular tsunami, said the radio next day, was only about an inch high.

Teeny-weeny.

The tsunami.

Mount Tamalpais, Marin County, Yesterday Morning: Layla is a great athelete in my book. Adrienne’s younger daughter, Layla spent some time years ago deathly ill, but has recovered amazingly, and she hikes and bikes, and leaves strong men puttering along in her dust. In her gym, she excels as well.

On her radio as she got up she heard that, further down the coast, a young mountain lion killed a couple of bicyclists and a jogger. Quite possibly from the young cat’s view, it was just having fun. But we humans take it seriously when it an animal has power over us.

The cat is gone, put down by the law, but of course it worries Layla, because on Mount Tam, where she goes running up the mountain trail most mornings, there are lions and tigers and bears, oh my. At least, there are lions and bears.

Yesterday’s run began as usual …

That is to say, Layla drove to Mount Tam, and was stretching by the car, and chatting with Harry and Comet. Harry is an older guy who hikes the same trail most mornings. Often they’ll start off running together, then in a bit, Harry waves her on, and Layla, warmed up, sprints up the trail with a wave.

This morning, while stretching, Harry told Layla that yesterday, at the trailhead, he and Comet had seen a large black bear. Layla, muttered under her breath, “Oh that’s just great. Both mountain lions and bears.”

Comet, of course, is Harry’s dog, a big and bouncy yellow lab. Adrienne wishes Layla would get a dog to go with her. A big dog would love such exercise, and the dog would be some protection against lions and bears, and of course the human predators as well.

As some may recall, back in 1979, a serial murderer dubbed the Trailside Killer haunted Marin County trails. He was eventually identified, captured, and venue-changed to Santa Cruz. My then-wife Lori‘s college pal Michelle V., working in the Santa Cruz Public Defender’s Office, was assigned to the Trailside Killer’s defence. One day, Lori and I had stayed the night in Santa Cruz at Michelle’s house, and over coffee in the morning, I asked Michelle what it was like working to defend the guy. She paused for rather a long time, and then said, “He has very little to recommend him.”

Meanwhile, back on the early-morning trail, the rain had increased and Harry waved Layla onward, and she sped up, bursting ahead as the rain grew thicker.

The trails up and around Mount Tam wind and switch back, divide and come together, and the visibility in the rain lessened, as her trail twisted up the mountainside. She heard Comet the dog barking behind her, but it sounded OK.

What she didn’t know was that Comet, kicking up his heels, had sprinted up a side path. And as she ran, Comet the yellow lab was on the side path, racing ahead. And at a turning just ahead of her, he came back around the turn, now running toward her in the rain, on his way back to Harry, who trailed the girl and the dog.

Layla, feet and lungs pounding, and peering dimly ahead through the rain, through the trees suddenly saw the yellow shape bounding toward her. Certain that it was a mountain lion, she stopped and emitted a mighty scream worthy of Hitchcock!

Comet the dog froze in mid-bound, looking all around in fright, and put his tail between his legs. Harry came accellerating up the trail.

“What’s wrong? What! What’s wrong?” he shouted.

Layla, now embarassed, paused for breath. Harry craned his neck this way and that.

“What? What?” he yelled. Layla, breathing heavily, stared at poor Comet, slinking behind Harry.

“Oh,” she said, “… nothing.”

Henrietta, Texas, 1952: Back when I was six years old, in September one morning my mother took me to school. I was excited and afraid, but after a few days I liked it, and then, the weather being mild the following spring, my mother showed me how to walk to school.

The first few days, we drove in our 1951 Chevrolet, and she pointed out the window to show me this and that landmark. Then one morning we walked. Down to the highway, watching the cars, and then across for another block. A right turn and fourteen blocks in a row, and by golly there was the school!

So it wasn’t long before I wanted a bicycle.

Some of the other boys had a bicycle. Linda Brown had a bicycle. I wanted a bicycle.

This year, one showed up at Christmas. There was only one problem. I couldn’t ride it.

I tried a few times. Fell over. Fell off. My mother tried to help me, to no avail. Fell over. Fell off.

Bicycle sat. Bummer.

Now about that time, my mother found a boyfriend named Pete. She was raising me alone, my father being long gone, and so in a way I was happy for her, even though it meant getting dressed up on Sundays and driving all the way to Bowie. Yes, Bowie is named after Jim Bowie, with the Bowie knife, that fought and died at the Alamo. And it’s way up the road from Henrietta. We had to drive for a long time, like a half an hour. Tedious it was.

His house sat beside a busy street, with a mulberry tree and a yellow dog to look at. His mother lived there, too. They had a television with Milton Berle and western movies and wrestling. My mother liked Milton Berle. I didn’t understand Milton Berle at all.

My mother was very happy to go and visit Pete. He didn’t generally know what to say to me, didn’t take much interest. I suppose he had other things to think about. I realize now that going to Bowie was better from my mother’s point of view, because if they disappeared from view for an hour, there were no Henrietta neighbors to start talking.

But now and then Pete visited us in Henrietta, too. And he saw the bicycle. “Do you ride it a lot?” Embarassed, I shook my head.

“I can’t ride it,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know why I couldn’t ride it. Other boys could, but I couldn’t. “I just fall off,” I said.

He looked at me. “Well, that might not be so difficult,” he said, “Do you want to be able to ride it?”

“Sure!” I said.

So he promised that he’d show me, next visit.

The following week, he came to see us in the morning. As promised, he showed me a trick he’d once used to learn to ride. We went out front, to the sidewalk and Uncle Doc’s lawn.

The trick was to place the right-side pedal forward and high, in the 2 o’clock position, looking from the right. Then you hold the handle bars and place your right foot on that pedal. You stand on that pedal while throwing your left leg over the seat.

Your weight on that pedal makes the bike move forward, and as you know it’s easier to balance on the bicycle once it’s moving. Only later did I figure out that it’s because the front wheel is mounted at an angle, so that when the bike tilts to the right, the wheel tends to turn slightly to the right because of the angle, meaning that the bike tends to move underneath you, which is helpful.

Pete held the back tire upright for the first couple of times. I fell off a little, but within a half-dozen attempts, I didn’t fall off! Not right away, anyway.

Pete laughed and laughed. Although I’d begun with worry and trepidation, now I laughed, too.

Ha ha ha ha ha!