Chapter Five

Paul Ann was a model by profession. She was tall with on second look substantial musculature. She mentioned that in high school she had a reputation for beating people up. I paid it little thought at the time.

She had lived in New York for a few years prior to coming to San Francisco. I asked: “Hey Paul Ann, how come you have such a load of expensive clothes?”

“I like clothes. Men buy me clothes and it makes me happy” she laughed.

“I’m not buying you any clothes.”

“I know. That’s OK.”

I moved in with Richard Magnoli in San Francisco. It was a basement flat with one window that looked out onto a small vegetable garden. An old Chinese gentleman grew bok choy and other vegetables in an area about twenty by forty feet. He started seedlings in one area and moved them to the growing areas in an amazingly productive dance. Every few days he harvested food, grandpa’s contribution to the kids and their kids and cousins.

Paul Ann rented an apartment on 8th near Geary in San Francisco. I headed in that direction to visit. It was a weekday morning. The sun was starting to peek through the clouds. Turning the corner onto Geary, I came upon a small pool of partially dried blood. Continuing up Geary I noticed a bloody footprint. The right shoe was perfectly outlined. Eight or ten feet further there was another. Then another and so on for about a block. The shoe prints were now seven feet apart, now six feet, now five, until they were three feet apart. The footprints turned right onto 8th, grew fainter and stopped near the lawn in front of her house.

I rang the bell and Paul Ann answered. “Oh my God!” she said.

“What.”

“There was a dead body on the neighbor’s lawn this morning. Cops all over the place.” If I believed in divine intervention I might have begun to wonder if it was a message.

Paul Ann and I were at a party celebrating the opening of a play in which Cab had landed a roll. The house was packed and I found myself sitting on one of few available places to sit, a bed, talking with a young woman I knew.

I lost track of Paul Ann for a while. When I encountered her in a hallway she jacked me up. She grabbed me by the shirt collar with both hands, threw me against a wall and lifted me up so my feet felt like they were off the ground. “How’d you like me to knock all your fucking teeth out?”

I assured her that nothing had happened and she ultimately released her hold and walked away. I then couldn’t find her and learned the next day that she had walked completely across the city to her place. And that was the end of that relationship, if you could call it a relationship. I was beginning to wonder if not trying harder to work things out with Jan wasn’t a colossal mistake.

This memoir is the truth, nothing but the truth but not necessarily the whole truth. There’s no point in sharing the irrelevant. There were instances were the nearly irrelevant turned out otherwise. Such was the case when I wandered into a small bar on Clement Street and ordered a beer. Two young women were seated at a table. I took a seat at the bar across from them and said “How’s it goin’?”

“Fine” one replied.

“You from around here?”

“I live up the street.”

We talked for a while. One was named Janice and one was named Ilsa. They claimed to be Latvians. After a while I said “Why don’t we go over to my buddy’s place?”

When they stood, both were over six feet tall. We walked to Richard’s apartment where he greeted us with a laugh. “So what gives lovely ladies?”

We hung out and talked for a while and Richard began to take an obvious liking to Janice. “Hey Ilsa” I said “Did you say you live around here?”

We left Richard and Janice to their own devices, which ultimately included marriage and two kids.

And there were close calls. Several people in the Bay Area had been murdered, seemingly at random other than they’re being white, in what was being called the Zebra killings. Rumors had it that the murders were an initiation into a club of some kind. I didn’t think much of it, driving up Geary in the Singer. I stopped and picked up a young black man who was hitch hiking, a pleasant looking fellow.

Upon taking his seat in the car he pulled out a corkscrew, a four inch spiral that came to a sharp point with a wooden handle.

“How’s it going?” I asked, looking at the corkscrew. The young man looked straight ahead and said nothing. He slapped the corkscrew on his thigh repeatedly. This did not look good. Somewhere between a thought and a whisper I heard myself say “I may not beat you but I’ll put a serious hurt on you”. There was no reply but I could detect growing agitation on the part of my passenger.

We drove on, through the Mission District. I figured the guy was looking for an isolated place where he could jam the corkscrew into my ear. A group of pedestrians stood at an intersection waiting for a light to change. I slammed on the breaks, jumped out of the car and yelled “Get out!” The guy paused a second, jumped from the car and took off up the street.

Sometimes, when you’re hopelessly mired in the lowest, rankest mud, someone will come along and pull you up. I was about to meet that person.

Richard’s landlord, Mr. Lo, asked Richard if he had any friends who could use some work and Richard introduced us. Mr. Lo appeared to be in excellent shape. “I run a mile every morning” he said. “I follow that with a cold shower.” We drove around for an hour looking at property. Over the next week I painted a studio apartment and did a few plumbing and wiring fixes.

Which brought us to a big house on Second Avenue. The windows on the front were black with smoke. The smell of a fire permeated the place. Inside we stood in the living room looking up through a hole in the ceiling, through a second hole in the ceiling upstairs, and through another hole through the roof above. From the first floor we could see a small piece of blue sky.

Mr Lo began “This house was purchased sight unseen by one of my clients, a Dr. Sin who lives in Hong Kong.”

“Dr. Sin?”

Mr. Lo nodded “S-I-N”.

“And he lives in Hong Kong?”

Mr. Lo nodded again looking up at the piece of sky. “Do you think we could fix it without getting any permits?”

“We could try.”

“I’ll pay you for time and materials and you can live here.” It was a system built entirely on trust. There was no reason to bring paper pushers who would contribute nothing tangible into the equation.

The house had been divided into three units. I could live in one unit while re-doing the others. The first weekend we put together a crew and replaced the burned section of roof. I moved into the first floor and began rebuilding the second floor apartment which had a kitchen in back, a large bathroom and a combination living room and bedroom with large windows facing the street side. Opposite the windows was what looked like double closet doors that pivoted 180 degrees on heavy top and bottom pins revealing a murphy bed that could be lowered. This is where the fire had begun.

Most of the bed had burned up so I converted it to a closet. The pins survived. Behind a wall to the right was a long room with sloping ceilings that was just wasted space. I built a bookshelf that pivoted on the murphy bed pins, allowing access to the secret room behind.

The year was 1974. I met a young woman named Coleen, a graduate student at UC Berkeley., who had a line on concert tickets. We attended a concert at Winterland… a group called Yes.

Yes was good but more like a graduate thesis in musicology than a rock band. A few weeks later we attended Fleetwood Mac at the same venue. This time we had front row seats. Contrary to my prediction Christine McVie fit the mold perfectly. It was an excellent show.

By 1975 the war in Vietnam had been raging for thirty years. The American backed South had gradually given up the perimeter but still controlled a significant portion of the country and seemingly would forever. Suddenly the perimeter collapsed and Vietcong and North Vietnamese armies overran the South.

In April of 1975 the War in Vietnam officially came to an end. The last of those who had cooperated with the American effort clung to overloaded helicopters that were kicked overboard off aircraft carriers to make room for more overloaded helicopters. In the panic many were left behind. President Gerald Ford summed it up: “We’ve reached the end of the tunnel and there’s no light there.”

In September of 1975 there was a concert in Golden Gate Park. The Grateful Dead played for the first time in a while and the Jefferson Airplane too, though under a new name, the Jefferson Starship. Painted people dancing and writhing like snakes. I met a couple of ladies heading from LA to Canada who camped in the back yard for a few days.

Riding the bicycle down Clement Street, I caught a glimpse of golden hair shining in the sunlight. Could it be? I parked and locked the bike and followed her from a half block behind. She continued on for two blocks, turned into a bookstore and I followed. Sure enough, there was the strawberry blond who’d helped me get back into school, looking at an opened book, forming her full lips into the shape of a kiss. A bit May West and a bit Marilyn Monroe. I stood in the same isle and pulled out a book. She turned and said “Have you read this?”

I laughed. “How crafty am I?” I said. “Aren’t you the person who helped me get back into school?”

“Oh yes” she said. “I remember”.

Marilyn lived in an enormous studio apartment that had once been the living room of a mansion overlooking Golden Gate Park. Her landlords lived upstairs. “They’re so sweet” she said. “I just love them. I wish they wouldn’t have such terrible arguments.” Marilyn and her gay landlords had a mutual affinity. We hung out for a while and went for a walk.

A young Chinese American named David was also working on the place. The given name, David, placed him in the same category as myself. A good person, a hard worker, worthy of respect, intelligent, funny, amiable, a friend to one and all, but not necessarily a pillar of the community in the sense that Mr. Lo was. Being a Mr. came with responsibility. Mr. Lo made the wheels go round.

David occasionally worked on the Second Avenue place. One evening an attractive woman with curly black hair named Maxine knocked on the door inquiring if there might be a vacancy. She noticed the place looked empty. I introduced myself and suggested she come back the next day. The next day I was working on the upstairs apartment and David was working on the stairway. Maxine knocked on the downstairs door and David let her in. “Is Harry here?”

“Upstairs.”

We talked for a while and I showed her around. Not long after she left and Jan dropped by with a few of my things. “Is Harry here?”

“Upstairs”.

Jan departed and a short while later Marilyn showed up. “Upstairs”. When She left I was working on the shower and realized David was standing in the doorway looking at me.

“You must be good with your tongue” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t look like such a stud. How come you have so many girlfriends?”

“They aren’t all my girlfriends.” I replied.

One of Mr. Lo’s rentals needed a minor fix. The place turned out to be occupied by a large Philippine family. Two daughters were home when I got there, both about twenty years old. Cab Covey was doing a comedy show at the Great American Music Hall that night and I asked if they’d like to go. Joslin and May Rose wore traditional baro sayas. They were a stunningly beautiful sight. Cab’s performance as a ventriloquist’s dummy was hilarious.

Work on the house was coming to a close and Dr. Sin was coming to town for a visit. We drove around San Francisco looking at properties. Dr. Sin was a smart, funny, engaging man. He paid for lunch.

Mr Lo began “We bought that house for twenty seven thousand dollars, cash.”

“Cash.”

“Cash. A bag of money. That’s not unusual you know. I often negotiate the purchase of a house and the buyer will pay in cash. Chinese people either save their money or borrow from family.”

Dr. Sin laughed. “In a shoebox”.

“It’s good money” Mr. Lo interjected.

“ I’m a physician” Dr. Sin said.

“You know” I said “The point is it’s money. Real money. That people earned and saved. Not invisible money that grows in invisible portfolios.”

We arrived at the house and did a tour. Dr. Sin was pleased. He was especially happy with the rotating bookshelf and secret room. “Right out of the movies” he laughed.

As things turned out Maxine did rent the apartment and I came to know her doing followup work around the place. She had recently split from her husband in New York and was loads of fun. To her I was “Harry the rat with women”. She said it was the title of a movie.

Mr. Lo came up with another opportunity. “Some Buddhist monks bought a place nearby. They’re relocating from China and have a shipping container that needs to be unloaded. You’d need to get some help it’s a big job”.

Mr. Lo was often in the favorable position of being the listing agent, sales agent, broker and purchasing agent. Speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and English he often served as translator as well. After some conversation with the monks he negotiated a generous rate of $10 per hour.

We unloaded many beautiful things from the container. Fine furniture, sculptures, art pieces, fantastic items coated in gold. About half the pieces were damaged. Some were completely destroyed. As we worked our way forward, a large gold Buddha could be seen near the front.

“Tell me that Buddha isn’t trashed” Paul said. As things turned out it wasn’t. Everyone was happy that it had arrived intact. “Devine intervention”.

Afterward out front we talked for a minute with Mr. Lo. “Wow” said Paul. “That container must have been dropped on its end or something”.

“Terrible tragedy” Mr. Lo replied.

“Thank you by the way for negotiating such generosity on their part”

Mr. Lo picked up on Paul’s sarcasm. He chuckled “It’s no secret. I’m a Catholic”. Then he grew more serious. “That has nothing to do with anything. You do excellent work. I got them a good place for a good price. I have nothing against Buddhists. All these things should have stayed in China. That has nothing to do with anything either. It’s all about business.”

To Marilyn I was “UH”, Ultimate Hippy. She had a walk-in closet full of expensive cloths. I had two pair of Levis and a box of tee shirts. She had been raised a prude and decided to play catchup by enrolling in a lesbian sexuality class at SF State. She’d call me up after school and ask “How was your day?”

“Long.”

“Are you worn out? I have some new erotic poetry. Are you going to be able to pafoam” Marilyn’s New Hampshire dialect would emerge when she would say words like perform. She reeked of old money.

Marilyn was prone to conjecture. “The Odyssey wasn’t written by Homer, it was written by Homer’s daughters. It’s a better story than the Iliad. Penelope is in charge of the house. Her husband comes home and kills all her suitors. That’s a woman’s wet dream, not a man’s.” And so on.

Gay men adored Marilyn. They seemed to be everywhere. It was like a big gay orgy. Everybody loving everybody. In less than two years Harvey Milk would be elected to the City Council. A few years after that he would be murdered by a fellow supervisor who would get off on the “twinkie defense”; he was high on sugar. Then the aids epidemic would begin its murderous toll.

“I’ll tell you the best thing about being gay” she laughed. “You don’t have to worry about anybody getting pregnant. And who in their right mind would ever want to be pregnant? To have a person growing inside of you. And that person isn’t planning on just walking out. Then if everything goes perfectly you have a child. And you hang out with moms eternally bragging about their kids. People who have kids lose their intelligence.”

I pictured myself growing old with Marilyn, a couple of increasingly sophisticated urbanites and the picture just didn’t come into focus. The picture that kept coming to mind was a stay at home dad raising a couple of kids. That would be perfect. And that was looking less likely by the day.

Walking up Geary Street I came to the intersection of fifth where I stopped next to a man waiting to cross. The man was well dressed but unkept. When traffic cleared I started to walk but the gentleman remained on the curb looking down into the gutter.

I walked back and asked “Are you OK?”

“Oh yeah” he replied, shaking slightly.

“What’s going on?”

“Snakes. Snakes in the gutter there”

“I don’t see any snakes.”

“DTs they say. DTs. But they’re real. They go away sometimes. But they always come back. Same with the man made out of corks.” I helped the guy step over the snakes and across the street. “All the corks from all the bottles of wine I’ve drunk. He started out like a little gremlin. Now he’s seven feet tall. I ignored him for years. Worked downtown. A man of influence.” He paused briefly. “He keeps growing. And now the snakes.”

Wine. Fermented grapes. A natural thing. Like so many things. Plants. Sap. Mold. Mushrooms. Cacti. How’s a person to know what the long term effects are? It’s all there to know. Bob Dylan proclaimed that “everybody must get stoned”. It was a joke. Especially in concentrated and synthetic forms substances can be immediately addictive and deadly. Some take a little longer.

I enrolled in an ecology class and found that science had if anything become more intriguing over time but there was still something amiss and decided to see if ceramics might fill the void inside my head. I’d typically work on the house for a half day, then head to school for a half unit yoga class and then on to the pottery lab where I’d work into the evening.

David Kuraoka, the master, would be creating a museum quality masterpiece at the head of class. A dozen students would struggle on wheels to make something worth firing. When the big day came we’d get our pots red hot in a raku kiln, pull them out with iron tongs and drop them into cans filled with straw. The reduction brought out unpredicted colors. In some cases the piece would break. “All part of the process” David would explain. “Don’t be throwing precious pots.”

The house was completed. Lastly, I washed the smoke covered windows and painted the exterior. Moving day arrived and Mr. Lo dropped by. “Dr. Sin has bought another building and we’re wondering if you’re interested in a similar arrangement there.”

“Sure. Always interested in any idea of yours, Mr. Lo.” We arrived at a Russian restaurant and walked down a paved walkway running beside the building to a locked door. Inside was a time capsule, an apartment that appeared to have not been occupied for a hundred years. The ceilings were 14 feet tall. Wood trim, cabinets everything was original to the building. There was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a small kitchen that overlooked a large back yard.

“Problem is” said Mr. Lo, “There’s no electricity.”

“There’s electricity in the restaurant right? No problem.” I hot wired the apartment into the restaurant, then put in a garden and acquired a ping pong table.

A door in the living room led to the restaurant, a thin door through which sound readily passed. During dinner hours the sounds of the kitchen echoed through the living room. On weekends someone played Eastern European ballads on an accordion.

I heard about a sailboat that was for sale for an unbelievably cheap price. It was an English built Folkboat named Scarab for five hundred dollars. The difficulty was the terms. The owner was involved in a salvage operation and needed cash that day, which happened to be Sunday. I checked with the marina in Sausalito where the boat was moored. “There’s a month’s moorage owed but if you just take it away we’ll call it even” was their reply. I hit up every person I knew. Fifty dollars here, twenty there and bought it.

The following morning, I went to the marina. Ted tagged along. Upon arriving the marina owner asked if I’d bought the boat to which I replied yes.

“There’s moorage owed on that boat” he stated. “I’ve impounded it”.

“Really?” I replied. “I’m taking this boat now and I challenge you to try and stop me”. Ted and I proceeded to untie the boat and back it out of the slip.

The marina owner laughed “Well good luck. I don’t know where you think you’re going. Other than out under the Gate. Tide’s going out you know”.

Once out of the marina we were becalmed and drifting. Ted finally spoke. “What’s the plan here?”

“Plan?”

“We seem to be drifting backwards” Indeed we were, at an increasing pace. Soon the Golden Gate loomed overhead. Then it passed behind and we were in the open ocean with no food, no water, no engine and no wind.

As it always does, a few hours later the tide changed and we passed under the gate again heading into San Francisco Bay. Under a slight breeze we made our way past the San Francisco waterfront. First came the Saint Francis Yacht Club. No moorage there. Then the commercial piers. Ultimately we came to China Basin, a long canal toward the south end of the city where freighters tied up to load and unload cargo.

“Looks like we’re running out of options” Ted pointed out. We pulled up to a draw bridge and waited. Amid the blare of horns and whistles the bridge raised and we tacked and paddled our way through. Passengers got out of their cars and looked over the edge to see what the hold up was.

“Son of a bitch. Why don’t you get an engine?”

We made our way past a second drawbridge to a row of house trailers on barges and other similarly dubious looking houseboats that lined the south end of the upper basin.

Ted pointed to a spot at one of the floats. We pulled up and were greeted by a gentleman calling out “Go away!”

“Huh?”

“Go away. There’s nothing here for you.”

“We just want to tie up”.

The gentleman pointed toward the bridges “Back the way you came”. So we headed back but the bridges wouldn’t open. Finally someone poked their head over from above and informed us that the bridges were closed for rush hour traffic. So we returned to the houseboat and called out that the bridge was closed. “Oh shit. I guess you can tie up here for a while.” Once there, we were invited aboard the houseboat.

“What in the world brings you guys all the way in here?”

We explained how we had to steal the boat from a marina in Sausalito then drifted half way to the Farallon Islands and back. Mentioning Joe Tate and the Red Legs band did the trick. The Gate Five squatters were kindred spirits with the folks in China Basin. After visiting for a while it was decided. “You guys are welcome here. You pay an equal share of the electricity, water and garbage. Maybe $25 a month… even if you never use any electricity or water or dump any garbage in the dumpster. It’s just easier to divide it equally”.

So, I moored the boat at China Basin for $25 per month. Whenever I went sailing I tacked the length of the basin, passing under two heavily trafficked drawbridges, under sail, people getting out of their cars and hurling insults from above.

When I was 14, my dad, Big Harry, bought a National class sailboat and kept it at the Palo Alto Yacht Club. With money made mowing lawns, I bought an eight foot El Toro. Every weekend we went sailing. I sometimes sailed the El Toro, sometimes I crewed with my dad and I sometimes crewed on other boats. National class boats are required to have a crew of two. One of the club members, an airline pilot named Browny, was in line for the State Championship. He could sail his boat fine alone and viewed a crew member as needless weight. He chose me for his crew and had me crawl under the foredeck where I would present no windage. We won. The following year a new rule was written into the books that you have to have a true crewman and not a kid hiding under the foredeck.

Big Harry bought a house on Schwann Lake in Santa Cruz. I equipped the El Toro with oars so that I could row through the surf. Sailing in the ocean required a lot of weight repositioning and bailing.

He bought a larger boat in partnership with a couple of friends and moored it in the newly opened Santa Cruz marina. Soon thereafter one of them sailing at night mistook Seaside for Monterrey and ran the boat onto the beach, an accident in which his girlfriend drowned.

We were helping deliver a sailboat belonging to an insurance sales agents employed by dad named Ray King. We left Palo Alto on our way out under the Golden Gate bound for Santa Cruz, eighty miles down the outer coast. At 9pm and I crawled into a sleeping bag on an upper berth in the main cabin. Big Harry explained our position and went below to make some tea.

In the cockpit, Ray and a friend named Pete Pledger discussed the situation. Ray began. “I don’t know why we’re heading this way. We can see the Golden Gate that way.” So they changed course. They forged on doing a full six knots under both sail and power, plowing through the night. Then a voice rang out. “Sheeeeeiiiiit!!!”

The boat struck the Alameda Breakwater, a big pile of rock, with all its force. My head was driven against the bulkhead knocking me momentarily senseless, after which I rolled over to see water emerging from under the floorboards.

The boat was equipped with a large bilge pump mounted on the front of the engine. The pump worked well enough to barely keep up with the flow of water entering the boat. It stopped working twice and Ray methodically cleaned and reassembled it and it continued working. After a couple of hours we arrived at Fisherman’s Terminal and tied the boat to pilings with every rope we could find. The fire department brought bigger pumps and all was saved. The boat had a broken bow stem and numerous broken planks and frames. Ray spent six months in the yard at Oyster Bay fixing her up.

We them tried again. We passed under the Golden Gate mid-day and sailed southwest into the open Pacific. The winds dropped and we all slept well, I on a top bunk in the main cabin next to a large window.

The following morning I awoke to shouts from the deck and a loud whooshing sound. Through the window, it seemed as though a wall had been placed a few feet away, moving forward a few knots faster than the boat. It was covered with white bumps. Then the tail passed nearly brushing the boat. The enormous gray whale was then followed by eight more.

The following evening I was steering. Ahead I could see our destination, the Santa Cruz marina. A porpoise appeared next to the boat. It came closer and swam on its side along the surface next to the cockpit, six feet away. We watched each other in silence. Then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, it was gone.

“You guys” he called out ”You won’t believe what just happened.”

Big Harry stuck his head out of the cockpit.

“A porpoise and I just bonded”

He looked around. “That’s great. Where are we?”

During the five minute encounter with the porpoise a fog had settled. I had taken no line of position to the marina. We weren’t about to sail toward land in such a thick fog. So we slowly sailed toward open water throughout the night. In the morning the fog thinned and we made our way in.

A few years later Big Harry bought a 42 foot Sparkman and Stevens ocean racing cutter located in Richmond. The plan was, once again, to sail down the coast to Santa Cruz. The crew would be myself, Harry Sr, Pete Pledger and a young neighbor of Harry Sr’s in Santa Cruz named Gary, who had never sailed.

Once under the Golden Gate we encountered four foot waves. The boat had a deep full keel and held her way through them. But she was leaping and diving a lot causing Gary to vomit. The boat leaped and dove into ever bigger waves. She dove over the top of one particularly big wave and down into the next one. I, steering from behind the wheel at the very stern of the boat, watched in amazement as the entire boat was submerged under blue water. Only the mast and sails showed.

I remained dry on the stern watching the boat roar to life like a giant beast, throwing off water and forging ahead. Gary vomited again. And again. Nothing was coming up and he kept heaving. I quietly addressed dad. “I vote we give up and go back”.

“Ahh come on. We’ll turn south a ways ahead and it’ll be smooth sailing”.

“Gary’s not going to make it”.

After some discussion it was decided. I took the wheel and turned as the big boat came up over a wave. We then surfed down a wave that quartered the stern and Gary puked again. Ultimately Big Harry steered and I held Gary by the rear pockets of his Levis as every five minutes or so he attempted to throw himself overboard.

Mr. Lo asked if I’d be interested in a big paint job. Paul and I took the job and then realized what we’d done. The building, at the corner of Sixth and Clement, was 62 feet tall and near power lines. The only way to legally paint it in San Francisco was using painters falls, a plank suspended between two block and tackle rigs, dangling from steel hooks.

We acquired the pulleys and rope but needed to get the stirrups and roof hooks in Sausalito. The only vehicle that would do it at the time was Mrs. Lo’s Volkswagen bus. Driving back from Sausalito Mrs. Lo and Mrs. Chin, the owner of the building, were in the front seat and Paul and I were in the back. Mrs. Low was driving all over the road, obliviously moving from lane to lane, carrying on an animated conversation with Ms Chin. After a third near collision a Highway Patrol car pulled in behind and called through a loudspeaker “Pull over to the right lane”. Mrs. Lo didn’t seem to hear. “Pull over to the right lane” again.

“Mrs Lo” Paul said. “There’s a cop behind us that wants you to drive in the right lane.”

We drove in the right lane up Waldo Grade and down across the Golden Gate under police escort and then went on our merry way. Mr. Lo explained later that they had to get rid of her “Rose Lo” vanity license plates because of threatening phone calls.

The pulleys on painters falls are a four part purchase. Pulling the painter’s falls up sixty feet isn’t exactly like climbing a 240 foot rope because the weight is one quarter of what it would be without the pulleys. But when the stirrups, plank, paint, buckets, brushes and scrapers are added it gets to be a load. Then at the top one is faced with the question: How do I tie a knot with one hand while holding onto the rope, supporting all that weight, with the other? We developed a system of simply looping the rope around a hook with one hand. This still meant hanging on to the rope with one hand for a second or two. To release the rope at this point would have meant that planks, buckets and people would plunge headfirst to the earth.

Once the rope was fastened, we stood up. The plank rocked back and forth under foot. People looked like insects far below. We scrubbed the area with water and sat down on the plank facing the building.

Paul surmised “You know this isn’t too bad. We can move this plank up and down in small increments and always have our work right in front of us.” And so we did. We grew to love the painters falls and used them when we could have gotten by with ladders and scaffolding.

We always discussed what we were doing. What needed to be scraped, washed or sanded. We often would then move on to other topics. The deeper nature of work, fulfillment, alienation, cooperation, competition.

And religion. ‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?’ How is this not a direct parallel to Marx’s theories of profit and labor value that you talk about?”.

“Not sure I understand the reference to God and Marx” I responded. “Marx says that under Capitalism we’re alienated from our work. We see no product. This alienates us from our humanity”.

“Not sure I agree” Paul said. “For one thing, I don’t know what capitalism is exactly. We do the work. We get paid. I don’t feel alienated from my work. I enjoy it. I suppose I could think of things I’d rather be doing. The important thing is that I’m not being forced by circumstance into doing something I’d rather not be doing.”

“Maybe socialism is better” I surmised. “Management by bureaucracy.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.” Paul laughed.

“Maybe the role of government should be to protect free enterprise. When a company is too big, when it reaches a point where the economy of scale makes it immune to competition, it should evolve into actual public ownership”.

Paul countered “And the government by assuming the manufacturing of refrigerators would make money the old fashioned way so we’d not have to pay any taxes”.

“We don’t pay any taxes anyway”.

“We would if we were a real business. You’re still grousing over the business cards”.

“It may look funny but we save you money?” I laughed.

It probably seemed unlikely to passersby below that the two guys hanging off the building above were solving the problems of the world. We sat on the plank looking out over the Richmond District. Cars and people milled in the streets and sidewalks, a continuous flow of people walked in and out of establishments directly below. “We don’t want to drop anything” Paul said.

“Especially over the fern bar”. The fern bar was located on the corner of the building. It was a popular place. People were constantly walking in and out below. To make matters worse, the corner of the building was a large round turret. Working in this section the plank was occasionally blown away from the building by westerly winds coming off the ocean. We were then sitting on a trapeze, blown this way and that and always returning to parallel, our feet against the building.

I parked the Singer in a safe place and removed the battery. A person can get anyplace in San Francisco faster on a bike than in a car, if you count fighting traffic and finding a parking place.

I rode up Clement to 32nd Avenue, specifically 420 32nd. The house was set back at the end of a long driveway. A basement door was on the right. I knocked and after some time a young woman answered the door. Her frizzy Afro gave a perhaps African look, but not quite.

“Hi” I said. “Mr. Lo asked me to come by and look at your sink.”

“Oh yeah.” Pretty eyes and full lips, she smiled a perfect smile. “Come on in. My name’s Lani”

“My name’s Harry. I knew it. Polynesian. Right?”

Lani looked over her shoulder suspiciously. “Yeaaa (tapering off). Here’s the sink. I don’t know why Mr. Lo sent you over though. We’re moving.”

“He probably just wants to stay on top of things. Said something about a new owner?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I’m moving around the corner with some friends.”

“That’s convenient. Mr. Lo thought maybe some friends of mine could rent this place after you move.”

“I don’t see why not. It’s a nice place.” We talked for a while longer. Lani was one hundred percent Native Hawaiian, a member of the royal family. She was adopted as a child by a couple of well-meaning wealthy white people who drank too much.

Paul and Barbara moved into the ground floor apartment the following week. The house was three stories tall. At the end of the basement hallway, going left a stairway climbed to the next floor. A short time later some young men moved into the top two floors, friends of Lani and her girl friends around the corner.

I got to know them all and rented a room there but kept a key to the apartment behind the restaurant, mostly for the garden and the ping pong table. Les and George were math and engineering majors at SF State. Although I was now approaching thirty, I felt some kinship, as if I was emerging from a long dream to the place I had been when younger.

Around the corner on clement Street there was a laundromat and a small coffee shop, the Bebop Shop, where high school kids gathered every afternoon and played the juke box. A gentleman, perhaps in his sixties, walked the neighborhood. Within a five block area, at any time of day, the man could be found somewhere. One afternoon I bought a cup of coffee and looked around for a seat. The walking man was seated alone at a table.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Have a seat.” we conversed for a while and the conversation turned to what brought the walking man to the neighborhood. “I was an engineer during World War Two. Unlike most people I had money at the end of the war. I invested it well. In 1948 I bought a TV station. Channel Five. I sold it two years later.”

“You make any money on that deal?”

Everything I touched turned to gold.” He paused. “But other people were doing the same and I didn’t like that. I wanted it all.”

“All?”

“Ever heard that money will drive you crazy? Well, money will drive you crazy. I was sentenced to eleven years in prison.”

That was a stunner. A rich person gets eleven years for something like murder.

“I spent some of the sentence at Agnews State Hospital. I was released after seven years with certain conditions. I can’t leave this neighborhood. My holdings are in a trust. I have a simple house. I get a hundred dollars cash each week for which I have to account”. He held up the receipt for his coffee.

All I could come up with was “Wow”.

“I needed to rediscover my Christian values. I’ve come to know misery. Have you read The Divine Comedy?”

“No”.

Dante refers to the seven levels of Purgatory, called terraces. Some people call them the seven deadly sins. That’s not what he said at all. They are a reckoning, to my thinking the sources of human misery.”

“OK?”

“Love of self and contempt for one’s neighbor. Pride is the worst because it’s the source of all the others. Envy. A desire to deprive others of theirs. Wrath, spite and a desire for revenge. Sloth, failure to do what you know you should. Greed, a desire to acquire more than you need. Gluttony, over-indulgence, over consumption. And number seven, lust, for money, food, fame, power or sex.”

“Interesting”.

“Sex you might notice is last. And that it refers specifically to turning sex into a commodity”. He chuckled. “I’ve had them all in spades”.

I shared my understanding of the Eightfold Path in Buddhism: right resolve, speech, conduct, right livelihood… wholesomeness, mindfulness, meditation and insight.

The walking man shrugged.

It takes two people to run a set of painter’s falls, one on each end of the plank. I showed up for work in the afternoon to find Paul sitting mute on one end of the plank smoking a cigarette. “I’m sorry again Paul.” I said. “I had to go out to the school to take care of some things”. Paul flipped the cigarette onto the ground and said nothing in reply. Once we cranked our way 62 feet up in the sky all was forgiven.

We eventually worked our way around to the side of the building where the owner’s apartment faced a flat roof. She beckoned from an open window.

Ms Chin was an elderly lady who was known around the neighborhood as being more than a bit eccentric. Rumor had it that she kept large quantities of money in her closet. In the evenings she’d unwrap the stacks and press the bills with a steam iron then re-wrap them into bundles of twenties, fifties and hundreds, fifty to a bundle. She could frequently be found going through garbage bins behind markets and restaurants, pulling out discarded remnants of vegetables.

Ms Chin beckoned again. Paul and I approached and she handed us each a bowl of food, smiling broadly.

“You like. Very good” she said. I weighed the options. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Paul stepped to one side, out of her field of vision. But I was centered, no way out, left or right. “You like. No?”

Off to the side Paul pulled out pieces of what could have only been hog snouts with his chop sticks, curling his face up and silently laughing. I ate the entire bowl and thanked Ms Chin. Though it wasn’t the best meal ever it was filling and I appreciated the thought. She was a sweet old lady.

“Paul,” I said later. “I think that was worth a big bonus. You can’t be angry with me for a week. OK?”.

Later, back on the painter’s falls I asked “What’re you up to tonight?”

“Not much” was his reply. “I’m finishing up a good book by someone named Lynn White. Saint Francis suggested that humans do not have limitless rule over all creation. We should establish spiritual autonomy with nature. Unfortunately we’ve gone the other way. These primitive Franciscans were on to something”.

“And then along came the industrial revolution”

“What worries me is I don’t see any mechanism to ever even slow down let alone stop. We need to get back to a simpler way of life”.

“I don’t know Paul. I think you and I live simply. Maybe too simply. Maybe we need to complicate things.”

“Yeah” Paul laughed sarcastically. “You know I’ve got to say, we’ve never signed anything and we’ve never had a problem. Not even a handshake. If we say it, we’re good for it”.

“The work is good. And we do good work. There’s some other mechanism at work here though. Some tradition. I’m thinking it goes back to Confucius – a philosophy of mutual respect.”

We enjoyed many good conversations. But it was becoming apparent that I was going in too many directions for Paul who was trying to support a family. Without even deciding to we divided the company in half. Paul hired a couple of employees, got his license and joined the union.

I painted a house belonging to Mr Wong who ran a vegetable market in the 6th and Clement building. It was an old house standing alone among some vacant land. It had to be painted on all sides and was visible from all directions. It was also as big as a barn.

Mrs. Wong was fresh off the boat from Hong Kong and was on a steep learning curve.

Before beginning we were going over the color options. “Happiness red and grasses green.” I brought out some color samples. “Not right. More color.” After a few tries we arrived at day-glow red and green, colors that would glow under a black light.

“Mrs. Wong. These colors don’t look too bright on this little card but on the entire side of this house, they’re going to be very bright.”

“They right colors” she laughed.

“They’ll be perfect” I said. Mrs. Wong was talented and beautiful. She and Mr. Wong were as in love as two people could be. They invited me in for snacks every day, including a shot of French brandy.

One Sunday I was painting the trim on the front of the house. Four gentlemen in suits arrived one after another and were admitted by Mrs. Wong.

I knocked on the door. “Mrs. Wong, I have a question. Do you want the sills painted red or green?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could you ask Mr. Wong if he cares?”

“Mr. Wong busy”.

“Can he just come out for a second?”

“No, he praying”.

I was stunned. “Praying? What kind of praying is Mr. Wong doing?”

“He praying poker”.

I decided to paint the sills green. Later, as the gentlemen were exiting one of them stopped to talk. “Mr. Wong speaks highly of you. Says you do good work. Says you can do anything”.

“I appreciate that. Mr. Wong is a great guy. Nice folks here”.

“Yes they are”. We chatted a bit more and he asked “Would you be interested in some extra work?”

“Depends” I replied. “What do you have in mind?”

“Give a guy some punches.”

“Punches?” I replied. “I’m not really very good at that. Why do you want this person punched?”

After a pause he continued awkwardly. “Let’s just say he is married to a friend of mine and he’s mean. He hurts her.”

“How do you know that?”

“I see the marks. She didn’t want to tell me but she couldn’t hide it anymore. I don’t want him to get hurt you know. He’s married to my sister. Just frighten him.”

“OK. I see. You know, I’m not very frightening. I know a frightening guy however who might be interested.” John was more than happy to take on the job but insisted on not being paid.

I bid small jobs that I could work on from time to time. Sometimes I’d hire my roommate Les. As a bonus on one of these jobs, we ended up with an ounce of opium. The house spent a week in a clouded stupor. And then we all quit. I wondered about that. If opium is so addictive, why was it so easy to quit after a week? Raw opium is not instantly or highly addictive. We’d learn as time passed that refined or synthesized “opioids” are a horse of a different color.

Opium is effective in a variety of ways. Drug companies make opioids that are similar in name and in that they can reduce pain. They’re dissimilar in that opium contains euphoric substances and that’s a sin. The bigger problem with opium though is that it’s grown by farmers in Afghanistan and where’s the money in that.

A full sized pool table dominated the center of an enormous kitchen above which a large skylight showered the room with light. It was also a prominent feature on the flat roof above. Around the perimeter an assortment of plants grew in large planters.

The plants were, given the time and place, naturally marijuana. Les and I were on the roof reading when a helicopter flew over. It turn back and started circling overhead. “Busted” Les proclaimed. Then we noticed it was a sheriff’s chopper. Richard. Hongisto, our openly gay sheriff had made it clear. Nobody was going to get arrested for growing marijuana on their roof.

Three top floor bedrooms faced this flat roof out the back and the street out the front. Cloistered in one of them Mike Sims practiced the guitar ten hours each day. He learned riffs from George Benson, Wes Montgomery and other greats by playing them repeatedly at half speed on a record player. He came to play like one of the greats and was picked up by Sam Peoples, a well known keyboardist. They played mostly clubs on Fillmore. We roommates could hear great jazz and get high with the band during breaks.

Lin Lau, the new landlady, was a realtor. Lin was 5’6”, 30 years old and gorgeous. She and her boyfriend stopped by decked out in tennis shorts, shirts and shoes and carrying their rackets. They were a couple of handsome jet setters. The beautiful people.

“Bicycling back from the club?” Les asked?

“Yes” answered Lin. “How are things going here?”

“Just lovely” Les replied.

Lin smiled my direction. “And how are you?” she asked.

“Just Dandy.” I had been introduced to Lin by Mr. Lo sometime in the past. The boyfriend looked at me dubiously.

As it turned out he might have had good cause. A couple of hours later Lin returned alone. I greeted her awkwardly. “Hi Lin. Like some tea?”

“No thank you. I have ah, well a question. My mother is a friend of Mr. Lo’s and they have shared a number of conversations about you. And, my mother would like to meet you.”

Lin Lau was the most beautiful woman in town, the smartest woman in town and destined to become the wealthiest woman in town. She was strong willed and not to be denied, not that I would have been inclined to deny her.

We met for lunch at an upscale Chinese restaurant on Clement Street. Mrs. Lau was given special treatment by the crew, as if she owned the place. The food was amazing. She teased me throughout. “I tell my daughter you should get an American boyfriend. Chinese boyfriends are boring. American men are more fun.” We laughed a lot.

Lin and I exchanged phone calls a few times over the following weeks. Anything further between us would be slowly evolving. The boyfriend was still around. Les advised me that any dreams of hooking up with Lin Lau were pure fantasy.

I entered the kitchen and noticed a newspaper tabloid on the table. It was opened to a centerfold photo covering both pages, a wide open view of a woman’s private parts which were not normal. There were sores and horrible, shocking things.

I turned back toward the living room door and noticed a business card on the threshold. The name on the card was Lin Lau. I called several times and finally later that day she answered. “Yes?”

“Lin, this is Harry”. Silence. “That was my stupid roommate Mike’s doing. He was trying to be funny.”

“Mike. The guitar player.”

“Yes.”

“He’s not funny.”

“No, I know. It wasn’t me Lin. I can’t control what my roommates do.”

After an extended pause she said “They are your friends” and hung up.

It was a time of angry young women who were not to be denied. I remember one evening during semester break when I was alone at the house and a normally aloof neighbor dropped by. After some polite conversation she held out a pill as big as a nickel. “Wanna split a quaalude?” This was the yes drug. Any inhibitions went out the window. It was like being drunk enough to fall down without falling down. I wondered what earthly good was served by such a thing… and what kind of condemnation would have ensured in the opposite case, where a man had given the pill to a woman.

The big dilemma among roommates always seems to center on the dishes. Should everyone clean up after themselves? That means a lot of washing of small numbers of dishes. As a group, it’s easier to rotate the chore. Each person may have to do a larger pile of dishes but only once a week or so. This generally worked OK but not always.

Les made shrimp salad for some friends. Everyone understood that it was also his turn to do the dishes which seemed doubly fair. But the dishes sat. After the third day George wondered “Les when are you going to do the dishes. The shrimp are starting to smell.”

“It’s not my turn” was his reply. “I did them the day before”.

“What? That’s not fair.”

“Sure it’s fair. It’s Mike’s turn”. Mike laughed from the other room.

So the kitchen sat. Day after day.

“Les. The smell is becoming unbearable”.

“Gotta go. I don’t see the problem. You wash the dishes? They just get dirty again. What’s the point?”

George found a sheet of butcher paper and using a felt tipped pen wrote “Why wipe your butt, it’ll just get dirty again”. He hung the banner in the living room across the top of the kitchen door, through which a fog of shrimp spread forth. A Christmas tree, a female marijuana plant in full bloom decorated with lights and ornaments, sat in the corner.

The following day my parents unexpectedly showed up, knocking on the door. They’d been traveling around on tramp streamers for a year. After navigating the fowl smell and sign about dirty butts, we adjourned to the living room where we talked awkwardly. She ultimately commented “That’s not a Christmas tree“.

“Maybe we should go get a bite to eat someplace” I replied.

Les and Lani started dating. They were a very handsome couple and things seemed to be going well. But something just wasn’t right and I again begin to wonder if this isn’t always the case. That the single man woman bond is wrong, that we should exist as a tribe. Les was an extremely smart math major. Lani was an aspiring actress.

Paul had taken on a large job for a property management company repairing and painting a home in the Marina District that had belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson. The manager was a gentleman named Jim Everett, a good dresser, always in a suit. One day as the job was nearing completion he invited Paul and I to lunch. The conversation was friendly.

“Retired military” he said. “CIA.”

Paul tried to redirect things. “You’re married right?”

“Yep. Wife’s Saudi.” Jim returned to the topic of Vietnam. “I was a liaison. I hired killers. Professionals. You heard of Fred Hampton? Killed by the Chicago police? Yeah right. The guy who killed him worked for me in Vietnam. Not your everyday cop. Works on commission” he laughed.

I had now been enrolled at SF State for eleven years all totaled. I’d changed my major from philosophy to biology to film and now to ceramic arts and had accumulated more than twice the number of units required for graduation. The inevitable letter ultimately arrived. Pick a major, any major and be gone.

My skills at throwing pots were limited but my background in chemistry came in handy in glaze calculation, which is easily half the challenge in ceramic pottery. David Kuraoka and other faculty were suggesting that I enter the graduate program.

My friendship with Mr. Lo continued to grow. I could see myself teaching college and investing in real estate. Maybe Lin Lau would forgive my choice of roommates and become a partner in business. Opportunity abounded and I couldn’t see it. I was going from one thing to another and couldn’t keep my mind on anything.

Marilyn and I had a lot of fun and might have someday moved in together but that was seeming less likely by the day. We were heading in different directions. I adored Marilyn. Saying goodby forever would be too painful. We might continue to date from a distance and say good bye for now.