The animals leave the Ark. Tigers and Gazelles and Pumas, two by two, disembarking…into a Golden State. Led Zeppelin is playing in my head. The song has issued from the radio of our school-bus driver a hundred times now, the soundtrack to as many frigid mornings. “Going to California”: Took my chances on a big jet plane. Never let ’em tell you that they’re all—all the same.
Dad retrieves our rental car, a station wagon with gorgeous California plates, gold numbers and letters on a vivid blue background. The bench seat in the way back of this wagon faces backward, at the drivers behind us, making it easy to look for famous motorists on the northbound 101. Minutes after we leave the Hertz lot, Candlestick Park suddenly appears on our right, and I can scarcely believe that I am walking distance from the various Giants on my baseball cards—Bill “Mad Dog” Madlock, John “The Count” Montefusco, and relief pitcher Randy Moffitt, whose big sister (according to the back of every one of his cards) is Billie Jean King.
“That’s where Willie Mays played,” Dad says.
“Actually, he played at the Polo Grounds in New York for the first five years of his career,” I say. “Then the Giants moved here in 1958. He played fourteen seasons in San Francisco, but his last two were back in New York, with the Mets at Shea…” Jim has opened his suitcase, pulled out a T-shirt, and is now gagging me with it.
“Shut up, squid,” he says.
And so it goes all over San Francisco. I point out the famous Fisherman’s Wharf sign with an orange crab on it that features in the title sequence of The Streets of San Francisco. Tom and Jim roll their eyes.
“That restaurant over there, Tarantino’s, is also in the opening credits,” I say. Tom gives me a flat tire, stepping on the heel of my new Gazelles, but my year of reading about California will not go to waste. I am powerless to stop my factual exhibitionism.
“That’s Alcatraz,” I say. “The Rock. They sent Al Capone there. And ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. But not John Dillinger.”
Tom laughs. He told me once that John Dillinger could wrap his dink around his leg two times and still have enough dink left over to tie in a bow. I said I didn’t believe him, but he said it was true; he heard it from his friend Steve Raich.
“Can we walk across the Golden Gate Bridge?” Tom asks Dad.
“The Golden Gate Bridge is one point seven miles long,” I say. “It’s made from the same cable used in the Brooklyn Bridge, which features in the opening credits of Welcome Back, Kotter.”
“Make him stop,” Tom says.
Dad takes over for me. “Scoma’s,” he says, pointing to another restaurant whose sign is in The Streets of San Francisco credits, “has the best abalone in the world.”
“Better than Oscar Mayer?” Tom asks skeptically.
“Not baloney,” Dad says. “Abalone. It’s a mollusk.”
I sing, “My abalone has a first name, it’s S-C-O-M-A…”
“And over there,” Dad says, “at the Buena Vista Café, they do the best Irish coffee in the world.”
He must know that his children don’t want a dinner of mollusks, washed down with coffee and Irish whiskey and heavy cream, but this too is a kind of exhibitionism, designed to remind us that he knows things, has been places, has favorite bars and restaurants in cities around the world. Oftentimes this knowledge will flatter Bloomington. “I’ve traveled everywhere,” he likes to say, “and Bloomington has the best tap water in the world.” And he’s right. Bloomington’s tap water—from kitchen sink, from backyard hose, from burbling hallway fountain at Nativity—is renowned.
Other times, Bloomington suffers from Dad’s worldliness. In a couple of years, when Bloomington gets a Tony Roma’s rib restaurant, Dad will mortify all his children by asking our waitress there, “Have you ever eaten at the Tony Roma’s in Shinjuku?” In reply, she will stare blankly into the middle distance. “The Tony Roma’s in Shinjuku?” Dad will say again, as if trying to jog her memory. “In central Tokyo?” Our waitress, a sophomore at Jefferson High, will confess that she has not yet been to central Tokyo or even outer Tokyo or anywhere else farther afield than Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Nor have I. Cincinnati is the eastern frontier of my world. I have never been farther north than north Minneapolis nor farther west than Rapid City, South Dakota. Until now. San Francisco is unlike anything I have ever seen—not the hills and cable cars, which books and TV had prepared me for, but the exotic objects that pass for everyday life out here. At the curb in front of our hotel, the Holiday Inn at Fisherman’s Wharf, I pick up an empty sixteen-ounce Coke can. I’ve seen sixteen-ounce beer cans on Snake Hill—“silos” of Schlitz Malt Liquor—but never pop. I ask Mom if I can bring it home and give it to my friend Tom McCarthy for his pop can collection and she instantly assents. At home, Mom will seize and discard a not-yet-empty pop can before I can set it down, lest it leave a condensation ring on the counter. At the Holiday Inn, however, she happily stuffs a piece of San Francisco street litter into her Samsonite suitcase because she is a different person on vacation, free of care. And so am I, never once rising in the night to tinkle into the wastebasket or onto the rotary shoe buffer in our room.
The hotel is a short walk to Lombard Street, with its eight switchback turns in a single block that descends vertiginously from Hyde to Jones Street.
As we gaze down its serpentine descent, Dad says, “This is it—the crookedest street in the world.” He sweeps his hands like a Price Is Right hostess showcasing a new car.
“Most crooked?” I say.
“That’s what I just said,” Dad says.
“You said crookedest,” I tell him. “‘Crookedest’ isn’t a word. It’s most crooked.”
Jim announces his intention to violate me with the crookedest stick he can find, but Dad is holding my gaze and nodding in a way that says he is impressed. At home, whenever I stumble on a word in the newspaper and ask Dad what it means, he always says “Look it up” while hooking a thumb at the red American Heritage dictionary he keeps next to his Archie Bunker chair.
“What is ‘tendentious’?” I’ll say.
“Tendentious,” he’ll repeat, nodding sagely. “Look it up. If I tell you, you won’t remember. But if you look it up, it will stick in your brain. This is a good vocabulary lesson.”
So I look it up and shut the dictionary with a satisfying clap and go back to the story in the Star, only to have Dad clear his throat. “Well,” he says. “What did it say?”
“Oh,” I say. “You know. ‘Favoring a particular point of view’ or ‘Trying to provoke a reaction.’”
But he doesn’t know. Only after I’ve looked up a hundred or more words at his insistence does it occur to me that I’m giving him the vocabulary lesson.
“You didn’t know the definition until just now,” I say. “Did you?”
He is hidden behind the business section of the Star, but his laughter through the paper is a kind of confession. He sticks his head out from behind the wall of newsprint and says, “Now who’s being tendentious?”