I remember as a kid.  My brother and I camped out the summer night in the tent.  (An old Eureka two man tent.)  We had some beer.  We took a walk through the fields to the hill looking down on 12B, in the distance, where you could hear the sound of the tires along the road when a car came by with its headlights in the summer night.  And beyond, maybe you could make out by sight a little bit of the town.

The hillbilly, the country boy, the desire to make it to the lights of the city.  The heady feeling of the beer taking hold, and beyond, the adventure, girls, bars, people. things to do.


Hunter S. Thompson:  I'm a hillbilly, in other words, lazy.  Trying to get by being a writer.  Nothing else he had any qualification for.  Tried being a cab driver, but not a registered voter in San Fran long enough.


I get close to the end of my shift.  Not quite.  I have a sense I've done my job, lit small fires of hospitality in the brains of the good customers through the subtleties of engagement.  I've waited on a former Secretary of State, who asked who I was, what my role was, am I the owner, at the old wine bar of The Dying Gaul...  Unobtrusive, connecting on a Sunday night.

Thank you, Czech friends, I say at the end.  I tell them how we love Central Europeans, tell a quick version of our Polish neighbor lady who would invite us over when the moon was full to tell war stories from WWII Warsaw....  I emphasize the Irish side, friend of Bruno the Breton chef, whose tale I tell, while forgetting my Austro Hungarian immigrant grandparents on my father's side...

I get a flatiron steak, a special, rare, discounted it will be $20.  But I need to eat.  Later I'll go grocery shopping, but in the meantime it's the last night with the young person who'll be going off to Alaska for a month, taking a year off after graduating from Washington International School...  She's worked at both the restaurants, and the tradition, now and then, not every time, for her to play the guitar I keep in the office, singing her songs, and then her friend Maritza who used to work with us comes up the street to catch up.

After grocery shopping and getting home, the night is finally mine.  I put things away in the fridge, put a gluten free pizza into the oven, with sliced soy laced Safeway meatball on top, have some of that, feel disgusted with myself, have some cheap pinot on the rocks with soda...  Take a walk by the bluff, and listen again to Charlie Rose interviewing Hunter Thompson, 1997, seeing a fox up on the top of the bluff that wasn't bulldozed, a nice little grassy knoll with trees, looking down over the river.

It was a tough job.  Just the stream of people would finally drive you to have a sip of wine, the last kitchen guy coming up...  being the father priest of the restaurant, always there.  Then when you got home, you needed some artificial company, the soothing of wine along with a hobby like taking a stroll at night.  Or listening to some old interview of some crazy bastard talking about a dying art form.