I was raised by people who had no idea what they were doing.

But they were pretty interesting as long as you weren't one of their kids...

My father’s worst day

It is mid-March, 1966. It is a Monday and it had rained the whole weekend. How do I know this? Trust me.

My father arrives home a bit earlier than his usual 5pm to 5:15 slot. Let's call it 4:30pm. It's been a clear and brisk March day, the kind you get after a couple of days of rain.

He comes into the house through the garage door a bit more agitated than is normal, which is to say, darn agitated.

He looks at my mother and me and says, come with me. We follow him to my bedroom, where he motions us to seat ourselves in a sitting kind of position on the sofa that doubles as my bed, which is called a sofa-bed.

Sit down, he says.

We are seated, thank you, we say.

Good. Let me tell you about my fucking day, he says.

We are seated and listening, we say.

Here is the story he told us.

He arrived at work on Lombard Street in his usual 18-21 minutes from Larkspur. This sounds impossible in 2014 but in 1966, you could do this on a regular basis.

It being tax season (Jan. 1 to April 15) and his profession being accounting (he was a CPA when he has not playing golf or watching USF and the 49ers), there was a lot going on in the office, even aside from his monumental quest to establish Ernie's Restaurant at the top of the Bank of America building from its then Montgomery Street location, which would not be completed until 1968. The Ernie's/BofA story is a completely different matter and will be covered in a subsequent dispatch.

His first appointment was to be at Pompeii's Grotto at the Wharf, where Frank and crew always welcomed him openly because they all thought he was fucking crazy, even for an accountant. Where they got that notion I have no idea.

Just prior to his arrival at Pompeii's, he decided to get his car washed at the revolutionary new facility near the Wharf, in which you could actually ride your car THROUGH the facility as it was showered, sudsed, and rinsed off. The only real issue was that AM radio reception did suffer while you were inside, so my father missed a few minutes of Don Sherwood's morning program on KSFO.

His decision to get the car washed was just the first in a series of mishaps, which were to plague his day and compel him to come home early, sit us down, and tell the story.

About midway into the Rinse cycle of the car wash process, my father noted that the entire left side of his body was soaked with water. He quickly calculated that this was not perspiration and was in fact caused by the fact that the driver's side door to his immediate left was open sufficiently to allow a significant stream of moisture inside the vehicle.

He moved quickly to correct the situation.

His move was to wait until the natural break between the Rinse and Wash cycles to push open the door and close it back to avoid further moisture entry.

The problem is that, when he opened and closed the door as he had carefully planned to do, he didn't really close the door again. It remained ajar.

Imagine his surprise, then, when the Wash cycle began and he was more or less hosed off for a second time, this time with the addition of suds.

Once again he believed he could stem the tide, so to speak, and he opened and closed the door, this time in a completely successful manner. Meaning he did not get re-Rinsed. So there he was in his car, half Suds Man and half Jesuit Accountant Man.

Dismayed but unimpeded toward his objective of the Pompeii's appointment, he drove to a parking area, which was unpaved, near the restaurant. To pay for parking in my dad's world was to submit to the demeaning forces of unwanted commerce. He did not pay for god damn parking, thank you.

Emerging from his vehicle in the unpaved parking area, he badly sprained his left ankle in a mud puddle.

At this point he is half washed, half dry, and has a badly sprained left ankle. Picture him, if you will, limping (badly) into Pompeii's, where he is already considered part of the entertainment industry. 

Just about everybody who worked in the restaurant echoed the greeting of Frank Pompeii when he saw my father: Vic, for Christ's sake, what the hell happened to you?

Appointment now over, my father, the Half Man, limped (badly) to his car, parked in the unpaved lot, and drove back to his office.

He parked along Lombard Street, right there between Scott and Divisadero, and before he could get inside his office to enable his colleagues to ask, Vic, for Christ's sake, etc., he experienced another mishap.

As he exited his vehicle, he kind of whipped his set of keys toward his pocket, perhaps as a response to slight frustration. Alas, the set did not cooperate.

To give the reader a fuller picture of what this meant, one must first state that my father carried a lot of keys on his person. Since he had so many clients among San Francisco’s finest dining establishments, a truly door- and key-rich environment, his key chain held between fifty and sixty keys, perhaps more. This is janitor-level key responsibility, we're talking here.

He grabbed the set of keys he was carrying that day and, as I said, kind of whipped it in the direction of his pocket, which did not so much breach itself as explode outside the confines of his pocket onto Lombard Street. It turned into a kind of key storm.

This storm scattered keys from where his car was parked to the median strip on Lombard, across three lanes of very busy traffic.

(at this point my mother, who possessed one of the great cigarette laughs in history, excused herself to use the bathroom in fear of a laughter-induced bladder mishap)

My father, a responsible Jesuit accountant to say the least, could not simply look at the stream of keys lain across three lanes of busy Lombard traffic and say, for example, fuck it, I will come back for these keys at a later time. He had to get each key back, one at a time, limping (badly) from his staging area into the teeth of busy Lombard street traffic. Recall also that he is dressed as Half Washed Man, etc.

Fifty to sixty keys, or more, retrieved one at a time, limping (badly) and half wet. Took about 20 minutes of non-billable time.

See him, a white-haired man in his fifties in a half-washed suit, sprinting into traffic, pausing to pick up "a" key, and darting back to the staging area. See him do this.

Once he had succeeded in recovering all his keys, he entered his office to the chorus of Vic, for Christ's sake, etc.

The rest of the day was uneventful, until he decided to take a considerable pile of tax returns to the Marina District post office, which was far enough up Lombard Street to drive them there instead of walk

Another mishap faced our hero.

He was able, at that point, to exit his vehicle without impairment and proceed in a bad limp toward the post office's entrance along the south sidewalk of Lombard.

On the way there he encountered two individuals, one of whom an adult male who might have been described as a man of counterculture dress and general comportment. The adult male was at that moment addressing a young boy of, say, four years in age, who may in fact have been his child.

Addressing may be too polite a term, as what the adult male was actually doing was screaming at and shaking the young boy in admonition for some real or imagined transgression. The boy, it turns out, was holding a large cup that appeared to contain a carbonated soft drink. 

The shaking of the child and the drink caused much of the contents of the cup to fall upon my father and his arms full of tax returns as he walked (actually limped, badly) past the scene.

So, now we have Half Wash, Half Dry, Sprained Left Ankle Man Who Broke His Keychain being transformed into Coke Man before our eyes.

My father was not the kind of person to simply watch this scene naturally unfold, of course.

He issued a proclamation any of us might have used. He said, "hey, you idiot, why don't you leave the poor kid alone? Jesus Christ."

Another miscalculation.

The man of the counterculture postponed his assault to address my father.

"Fuck you and mind your own business, asshole."

He then pushed my father to the ground. In so doing, he caused the arms full of soda-laced tax returns to travel into the rain-swelled gutter of the south side of Lombard Street, where they sailed happily along toward the sewer.

My father's priorities suddenly changed.

He turned and directed his attention to the floating returns and gathered them up.

While doing this, he noticed a scuffle had ensued involving the counterculture individual and another individual.

Not really a scuffle, though.

A man in a large truck parked close by had witnessed the interaction between my father and the counterculture individual and son. He saw the whole thing and he responded.

His response was to exit the cab of his truck, approach the counterculture individual and lay on him a haymaker that drove the man instantly to the ground, quite unconscious. Knocked out cold with one blow. Blood spattered down the person of the counterculture individual to the ground. 

My father took a look at this scene: truck driver standing over his victim, fists at ready, hoping the bloody victim would get up for another round, young child now bawling at full decibel level, and a small crowd assembling. 

He made a good decision, my father. He dried his papers as well as he could, inserted them into the mail slot inside the post office, and exited the scene.

He did not even go back to his office. He drove directly home, a little earlier than usual, and sat us down to tell the story, in full detail.

Before he started, my mother of course wondered out loud, Vic, for Christ's sake, etc.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of my father's worst day.

thank you.