Dad first came to San Francisco in 1939, when he was five years old, put on a train in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his aunt Juanita to meet his biological father, with whom he would live for a month in a two-story walk-up at 532 40th Avenue, in the windswept and fog-shrouded Outer Richmond district, at the outer edge of the city, at the far reaches of the known world.
Dad’s father was a carnival pitchman, liquor distributor, and nightclub fixture named Jack Rushin, who spent the summer of 1939 working the Midway at the Golden Gate International Exposition—a world’s fair nicknamed “The Magic City”—on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. Dad’s mom, our seldom-seen Grandma Miranne, would remarry several times, including twice to a man named Ted Dixon, whom she also twice divorced.
To well-traveled adults, the Golden Gate Exposition was a wonder, a fairy-lit confection whose man-made glow was visible at night from a hundred miles away. To a five-year-old fresh off a train from Fort Wayne, Indiana, this Magic City on Treasure Island was a waking dream.
The Midway of this electrified dreamscape was called “The Gayway,” and to the passing throngs in the summer of 1939, Jack Rushin hawked a jumble sale of dodgy products. In the official directory of exhibitors, he was listed as a purveyor of “lavender and rose beans, orange blossoms and lavender, plastic and wood names, Rushin linens, Rushin gadgets, Rushin leather goods, Stromberg condensers, kitchen utensils,” and “cookie cutters.” Dad remembers him flogging paper flowers soaked with cheap perfume, which he billed as “Perpetual Roses” guaranteed to “never lose their scent.” Jack Rushin also stood by the pay phones and made not-quite change for a dollar, accommodating anyone who needed to break a bill by giving them eighty-five cents in change. A man who sells fly-by-night products is naturally used to flying by night, and so Jack Rushin had lived in Brooklyn (where he and my grandmother shared an apartment on Flatbush Avenue) and Detroit and other points unknown before alighting in San Francisco.
Jack apparently wore the most beautiful silk shirts on The Gayway, and bought his five-year-old son a cowboy suit before sending him home on a slow train to Fort Wayne.
These are almost all of Dad’s firsthand memories of his father. He later learned that Jack Rushin managed a nightclub on Kearny Street called The Top Hat, married a waitress at The Sea Horse named Mildred, and in 1946 opened his own bar at 609 Market Street called Jack’s. When the great neon sign he ordered came back misspelled, Jack couldn’t bear the expense of changing it, so he called his new joint “Fack’s.”
Fack’s (and its later incarnation, Fack’s II) became a famous nightclub in the 1950s, showcasing everyone from Frank Sinatra to Louis Armstrong to Lenny Bruce, but by then Jack Rushin no longer owned the place. By the mid-1950s, he had vanished from San Francisco, or at least from the historical record.
None of which explains how Dad became what he is now—a husband, a Dad, a necktied, gig-lined, seven-to-six soldier in the service of Mickey Mining, diligently doing his own taxes on a card table in the basement every April 14, wanting to send every penny he owes to Uncle Sam, though not a penny more, because it’s important to make exact change for a dollar. Maybe this is why he despises vending machines that rob a man of his hard-won nickels.
While I copy Dad—abhorring nature, mocking bozos, howling at Carnac—Dad has had no one to copy. He has played it all by ear. In a few weeks, when we’ve returned to Bloomington from California, Elvis Presley will die on the toilet at Graceland. Dad will express mild disbelief at the magnitude of the world’s mourning. Every Elvis hit that plays over TV and radio in tribute to the King is new to him. “I completely missed Elvis and the Beatles,” he’ll say, as he has always said. But even I know Elvis and the Beatles. When I ask Dad how it was possible to grow into adulthood in the 1950s and early 1960s without hearing or even overhearing the most popular musicians of the day, he’ll say, “I didn’t have time to listen to Elvis or the Beatles.” What he won’t say, because it will go without saying, is “And that’s why you have the time you do.”
Every roadside restaurant south of San Francisco is more exotic than the last. When Amy throws up her lunch from the Happy Chef in the way back of the wood-paneled wonder wagon, on its stately progress down Highway 1, Dad forever after calls that hamburger chain the “Happy Barf.” He pulls over to the shoulder and cleans up the mess with a pair of paisley boxers fished from his suitcase. Then he throws his vomit-covered underpants into the rolling blue of the ocean that gave this road its name.
But the Pacific Coast Highway, in my mind, is Ventura Highway in the sunshine, ’cause the free wind’s blowing through my hair—literally, all six passenger heads are stuck out an open window like dogs to avoid the baking barf smell inside the wagon. It’s in this posture that we roll up—exhausted and exhilarated—to a Best Western at Big Sur. After hours of serpentine driving in a wood-paneled sick bay, the kids fall out of the car like five marionettes, our limbs returning to life joint by joint, until suddenly we’re all fully functional and sprinting to our adjoining hotel rooms, where I step through a door to see John standing in a geyser shooting from a burst pipe in the bathroom.
“Dad!” I yell. “Hurry! It’s John! There’s an emergency!”
The movie Earthquake was chockablock with bursting pipes and breached levees and busted dams, combining my fear of drowning (earned while enduring The Poseidon Adventure) with my fear of falling masonry (cultivated by the illustrations in a dozen library books on the Great San Francisco Earthquake of ’06). Had I missed the first tremor that severed the pipe in the bathroom and sent a water cannon straight up to the ceiling, where it returned to the bathroom floor in the form of rain? I can’t tell if my knees are shaking independently or in unison with the ground. If this is the Big One—“Cal-i-for-nia, tumbles into the sea,” as I heard Steely Dan sing on one of Jim’s albums—then why isn’t Dad coming?
“Dad!”
Dad is schlepping two suitcases in from the car when he hears me, drops the bags, and comes running down the hall.
“What in the hell?” he shouts, steaming into the bathroom like a sea captain into a squall. “God dammit. We haven’t been here for one minute and you’ve destroyed the place. What the hell is the matter with you…?”
“Is it an earthquake?” I ask him.
The geyser has stopped, and Dad and John stand dripping on the bathroom floor, clothes sodden.
“It’s not an earthquake,” Dad says. “It’s a bidet.”