The Life in My Years

Rallying Around the Grifter

Paul

March 19, 2023

“ … your position and power in life do not matter: no one is above the law … “ ~ South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson following the conviction of Alex Murdaugh.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” ~ Donald J. Trump, January 23, 2016.

***

If the two statements above seem to you to be at odds with each other, well, you’re right.

Can’t go a week without hearing some version of the former statement, “Nobody is above the law.” It’s usually delivered with a self satisfied harrumph and can come from just about any mouth; politician, pundit, law enforcement official, or just the average citizen. Van Jones said it. Gloria Allred said it. John Yang, Leon Jaworski and, ironically enough, Andrew Cuomo said it.

We’ll come back to the quotes a bit later, but first, let’s get to Donald Trump’s recent bloviation, delivered on Saturday via his chicken shit media platform, Truth Social (“truth” is a seldom found commodity on that platform).

In a statement delivered all in caps (because that’s how Donnie rolls), Trump said that he will be arrested (correction: ARRESTED) on Tuesday by the New York D.A. over his alleged hush money payment to porn star, Stormy Daniels. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump ended his statement by urging his followers to take to the streets and protest. We saw this movie on January 6th, 2021 and it didn’t end well. In fact, it hasn’t ended. January 6th is the never ending story without apparent resolution.

But Trump wasn’t done. Feeling the need to pour more gasoline on the fire he went back on Truth Social, and posted, “WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”

Cry Me An Atmospheric River

Paul

6 comments

March 14, 2023

Dateline 5:30 AM in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Mother Nature is crying a river – an atmospheric river.

***

Cry Me A River. The song is a classic. The original version sung by Julie London, that is.

“Now you say you’re lonely
You cry the long night through
Well, you can cry me a river
Cry me a river
I cried a river over you”

You have to be a geezer, or on the cusp of geezerdom, to remember your parents listening to Julie’s soulful, dusky rendition of the torch song written by Arthur Hamilton in 1953. Or maybe you’re an aficionado of the torch song genre; Ella Fitzgerald, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Rosemary Clooney, Bessie Smith.

You can listen to Cry Me A River anywhere; your car, your home, the backyard cookout.

But do you want to get the full effect? It’s near closing time in the wood paneled hotel tavern. It’s dim lighting; a few weak lamps, and candles in red globular candle holders, flames flickering wearily as if they wish to be done with their night’s labor. You’re seated on a stool, upholstered in red leatherette. The place is empty, but for the couple at the corner table, and they’re just staggering out of their seats. They’re headed upstairs to do the dirty boogie. He’s a traveling salesman, cheatin’ on his wife. Her? She spends her evenings in that dank bar, huntin’ traveling salesmen. Now it’s just you and the bartender. He’s at the other end of the bar, polishing the mahogany surface before closing out the till. There’s a squint in his left eye from the curly-Q of smoke drifting up from the butt of an unfiltered Camel dangling from his mouth. He glances at you impatiently from time to time. You’re boozy, swaying your head to the melody while you stare down into the bottomless well of your third gin martini. Your collar is loose, tie all a kilter. Your fedora is pushed back on your head. Haven’t shaved in a couple days. You want a cigarette, but you smoked your last an hour ago. The song ends, the joint goes as quiet as a church on Monday morning. You drain your glass and your head bobs down, chin resting on your chest. The bartender looks over. In his Bronx accent that’s sharp as a straight razor, he shouts, “Hey Mac, I’m gettin’ ready to close up.”
You look outside through a veil of cigarette smoke and the tavern’s thick glass window at the dank rain soaked streets. Street lights reflecting off the puddles. The streets are as desolate as your heart. A Yellow Cab splashes through a puddle and disappears into the dark of the city.
“C’mon Frank, my baby just left me. One more. For the road. For her.”
“Alright, but that’s the last. I’ll tell you what, Mac. Since you’re havin’ hard luck, I’ll make it a double. On me. But finish it up quick – ya hear”

That’s how you listen to Cry Me A River.

Monthly Monochrome: The Road Most Often Taken (Len-Artists Challenge)

Paul

27 comments

March 11, 2023

This week John, of Journeys with Johnbo, leads the Lens Artists Photo Challenge with his topic, The Road Most Often Taken. John is speaking metaphorically. He writes, “I want you to think of your favorite type or style of photography as the road you’ve chosen to take most often.”

Quite honestly I’ve been all over the photographic map. Landscape used to be my go to. And then I visited the S.F. Botanical Garden and got hooked on plants (photographically speaking). Then it was urban photography and architecture. Or was it oceanscapes? Then I got buried in cemeteries. My road has more forks than my kitchen drawer.

My current passion is monochrome. Now, whenever I go out and shoot, I do so in color. But I also stop to consider what a shot might look like in black and white or sepia. I might compose a shot a bit differently if I think there’s promise in editing in monochrome. Cemeteries, old buildings, people and relics? I almost always shoot with monochrome in mind.

Places and things left to the whims of time fascinate me. When I’m traveling, I’m always looking out for an old barn, a building in some stage of dilapidation. I’m drawn to the detritus of the ages.

During a road trip in the autumn of 2021, I left Hannibal, Missouri, headed for Springfield, Illinois. I stopped for breakfast in Louisiana, Missouri, on the bank of the Mississippi River. Near the riverbank are the remains of an old ice house. Built in 1924, it burned down eight months before I passed thru town.

Louisiana, Missouri

Just outside of Virginia City, Nevada (those old enough to remember the old western, Bonanza, will remember Virginia City, and old Sheriff Roy Coffee) are the remains of an old wagon.

Virginia City NV

Last fall, my wife and I traveled to Bodie, California, a ghost town in the true sense of the term. I posted about Bodie recently. Below are a saloon (on the left) and a barber shop (note the barber pole design on the far right).

Saloon and barbershop

The U.S. 395 Chronicles: Bridgeport and the Ghost Town

Paul

15 comments

March 5, 2023

The fourth in a series of occasional posts about tripping along U.S. Highway 395.

From Sonora Junction, Highway 395 heads due east before dipping to the south and finally cutting back east to enter Bridgeport. Crane your view to the right and you see the picture of green, brown and yellow grazing land backdropped by the Sawtooth Range of the Sierra Nevada. You could be looking at a location for a western movie.

Grazing cattle with the Sawtooth Range as a backdrop

It’s two lanes into Bridgeport but once in the town proper the street widens to accommodate angle parking. The parking signs instruct drivers to back into the parking spots. It’s odd. For me anyway. Apparently odd for others as well, as cars are parked at some very creative angles.

Downtown Bridgeport is slightly more than three straight, albeit long, blocks of 395 before the highway leaves town and curves to the south. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss a few motels, a hotel, a drive-in burger joint cheek by jowl with a Mexican drive-in, a meat market, a deli/food store with little in the way of selection unless you’re into the three food groups, beer, hooch and snacks. One filling station and convenience store and a little shop hawking Native American artifacts. There’s a bakery and there’s Ken’s Sporting Goods where you’ll find your hunting rifle, fishing gear and some advice on where to put that gear to use. If you’re looking for a soccer ball, well, you might find one about 80 miles north in Carson City, Nevada. Oh, and on a snowy day in winter, you’re out of luck – road’s closed.

Below, two views of the Bridgeport Valley

The U.S. 395 Chronicles: Chinese Camp and Over the Summit

Paul

11 comments

February 23, 2023

The third in a series of occasional posts about tripping along U.S. Highway 395.

Between Knight’s Ferry and Chinese Camp is 21 miles of rolling ranchland. Out here the land is split into parcels, each section defined by the brainchild of an Illinois farmer named Joseph Glidden. Glidden’s invention would forever put its stamp on the American West and at the same time, make Glidden a millionaire.

In 1874, Glidden was issued a patent for his version of a wire fence that was fitted with barbs along its length. Glidden’s version was an improvement on the first such fence invented by Michael Kelly, called the “thorny fence.” You can’t travel a mile through western ranchland without seeing that predominant fixture, the barbed wire fence.

The land out here seems perpetually brown and dry. At least that’s how it’s always presented itself to me. I’ve never traveled this area in the spring when maybe, just maybe, the hills are wearing a fresh coat of green.

Just past the Arthur Michael Vineyard, Highway 120 veers to the southeast. We pass by the Diestel Turkey Ranch to our right and then Sierra Pacific Industries to our left before arriving at the junction with Red Hill Road. It’s a lonely corner occupied by the Chinese Camp Store and Tavern. In front of the store are an old mining cart filled with white rocks and some racks over which are draped some Native American blankets.

I take Red Hill Road for a few blocks until we hit downtown, or what constituted downtown over a century ago. Main Street is a small collection of old, deserted buildings, many bearing the iron doors and shutters that are common in the Gold Country. What was once a business district is now nature’s reclamation project as many of the dilapidated structures are overrun with weeds and vines. Outside of this forlorn and neglected block are a few scattered houses, most of them ramshackle, some of them occupied.

Chinese Camp isn’t a ghost town in the classic sense, but it’s about as close to one as a town can be. The good news is that Chinese Camp still has a post office, because once the Postal Service bugs out, you can pretty much issue the town its last rites. The bad news is that the population has seen a decline of 16% to 146. Maybe for the residents that isn’t bad news. A walk around the small community reveals that there is little or nothing to recommend it. To cherish a life in Chinese Camp is to cherish desolation. In its prime, Chinese Camp was a booming Gold Rush center with a population of 5,000 Chinese. Today there are 13 Asian residents, and they may or may not be of Chinese descent.

***

Baseball: A Field of Broken Dreams

Paul

8 comments

February 18, 2023

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” ~Jacques Barzun

Major League Baseball’s spring training is open for business. With all due disrespect to Punxsutawney Phil, that know it all buck toothed rodent, the news that pitchers are lobbing baseballs to catchers and batters are getting in their hacks down in the Arizona heat is the real signal, as true as the calendar on the wall, that spring is just around the bend (even for those who still wake up in the morning and groan over the sight of snow in the driveway).

It’s the rite of spring, when baseball fans begin the season with eternal, if often irrational, hope that their team will be vying for the World Series, months later when the first snow is just weeks away.

Peanuts, hotdogs, beer, a souvenir for the kids, and the hope of catching a ball that drifts into the stands on a warm, sunny afternoon. The season starts in earnest on March 30.

And I have zero fucks to give.

THE U.S. 395 CHRONICLES: From Halo Halo To The Motherload

Paul

5 comments

February 15, 2023

The second in a series of occasional posts about tripping along U.S. Highway 395.

To explore Highway 395, you first have to get to 395. We’ll be picking up 395 at Sonora Junction, at the terminus of Highway 108, just east of a twisting descent from the Sonora Pass.

We’re eastbound cutting across the width of California’s Central Valley from San Jose, where we left our dog Lexi in our son’s care.

California’s Central Valley. Driving its length, from north to south, can be drudgery, a slog that carries you past miles upon miles of orchards, vineyards and farmland. What might start as a pleasant bucolic drive can quickly become mind numbing. There’s little of the allure you find in Midwest farm country, where the miles of cornfields and soybean fields are interrupted by small town charm, occasional road houses, and barns adorned with colorful quilt designs. Highway 5 along the length of the valley is a protracted scream of unsightly agri-business.

The eastbound drive, the one we’re taking, can be a pleasant one. That is, once the clutter, the traffic and the commercial crap of the Bay Area has been left behind. The problem is, the clutter, the traffic and the commercial crap are all making their way east, spreading like a concrete and steel fungus.

From San Jose, we negotiate a web of South Bay freeways. Highway 101 to 680 to 580.

Eastbound 580 passes through the Livermore Valley. It’s wine country but you wouldn’t know it from the highway. From 580 you only get hints of a wine region; signs that point to wineries off on the far slopes, or a quick glimpse of a vineyard now and then. What you mostly see is a procession of shopping malls, auto malls, tract houses and some gaudy mcmansions scattered around the distant hills. And cars. Plenty of cars. This is the main artery from the outer banks of the East Bay to Silicon Valley. Hit it at a bad time and you’ll wish you’d brought with you the two P’s – patience and provisions. Add a hot August, 90 degree, Friday afternoon getaway day and you’re truly fucked.

Cora and I are getting away on a Saturday morning. There’s no traffic and we breeze past the overdeveloped, commercial ugliness and up and over the Diablo Range and the miles and miles of wind turbines that stand like battalions of aliens, escaped from the imagination of H.G. Wells.

Our first stop on the trip is in Tracy, just east of Livermore and the Diablo Range.

The Boy Turned 13

Paul

13 comments

February 8, 2023

The boy turned 13. Thirteen begs a question. Is he still a boy?

For a time, back when he was two or three, he would insist that he was a boy. Whenever Cora or I presented him with the proposition that he was a person he responded with a reasoning, “I’m not a person, I’m a boy.”

Maybe he already knew what we all know. Boys can be sweet, if a little mischievous. People can suck. Well, he’s not a boy anymore. He’s a teenager.

He’s a teenager with a shock of hair that cascades to just above a pair of expressive, and ridiculously gorgeous, green eyes. Friendly eyes, look of wonder eyes. Whenever he visits the house, his grandmother, known far and wide, or at least in family circles, as Mama Cora, offers (threatens?) to cut (butcher?) that marvelous cascade of hair. His tousled mop and I say that with affection and, in my baldness, a healthy dose of jealousy, could be something of a distraction when playing AAU basketball. He’d tug on it or push it back or off to the side or keep giving his head a shake. Finally the parents enforced a no playing with the hair during games rule and got him a headband – which from time to time gets lost or forgotten.

His basketball shoes are a size 12 (that is, unless he’s grown another half size since the last time I’ve seen him). He towers over Mama Cora, an admittedly low, barely five foot, bar, and he’s topped his mom.

“Seems like ages ago,” as the trite old saying goes, when I could cradle him in one arm. Well, trite old sayings are trite for a reason – they neatly and conveniently convey a point. It wasn’t ages ago. Just a mere thirteen years. That’s not so much when you’re gnawing on the last year of your sixth decade. Just thirteen years ago, my daughter Jessica gave birth to her first child, Jackson, our second grandchild (the first being my son’s Sophia).

I’ll admit it, Jack has always been the one of my four grandchildren, who I’m partial to. Some grandparents won’t admit to partiality, but they’re just bullshitting. Everyone has a favorite.

In my own defense, you could say that I came by my partiality honestly. You see, three months after Jack was born, I was laid off from my job. It wasn’t a bad thing really, nor was it completely unexpected as it occurred during the Bush Recession. Everybody was getting laid off in that company. I wouldn’t doubt that there was a clandestine pool among the managers, none of whom were issued walking papers, by the way, over who would get axed in any given week. It was death by a thousand cuts and I got slashed on May 10th. No tears. Just a quick call to Cora telling her, “I’m glad that’s over with.”

At the time, we were all living under the same roof until Jessica and her husband could get on their feet. With Cora and Jessica gainfully employed and my son in law at the firefighting academy, I was designated daycare. I was pulling two severance checks a month along with unemployment, so it was a good gig.

Every afternoon, I took Jack to a little outdoor coffee joint to read and sip coffee while Jack slept or played in his stroller. It didn’t hurt that Jack was, as the saying goes, “a chick magnet.” Young moms would come by and ooh and ahh at Jack’s striking blue eyes and big toothless smile, often stopping to sit and talk for a bit. Like I said, it was a good gig. Sure I know what you might be thinking, but it sure beat listening to some retired old mossback rail about liberals, while an unfiltered shmag dangled from his mouth.

Jack and I bonded for four months until I started work again in September. Maybe that bond was manifested one evening when baby Jack went on a crying jag, one of those sustained bawls with no apparent reason behind it, other than being pissed off at the world and everyone in it. He didn’t want any pureed carrots (who the hell does?), and he wasn’t about to be consoled by anyone or anything until I recalled a little trick that my father came up with when my son started a crying fit. Dad would pick Matthew up and walk him around the house, stopping at every picture and painting until Matt’s curiosity distracted him from whatever was bothering him. On a hunch, I picked up Jack and walked out to the backyard, pointing out flowers and bees and bugs until pretty soon Jack’s crying turned to sniffles and snuffles and a little finger reaching out to touch a leaf or a petal.

Kyle started work with a fire department in Marin County, and the family moved to their own place, a strange little place in an equally strange area of nearby El Sobrante. El Sobrante is a little community with an undisciplined border that could’ve been drawn by a couple of Republicans on a bender. It looks less like a town boundary and more like a lost piece to a jigsaw puzzle. El Sob, as it’s sometimes called, has everything from shacks in sketchy areas with tortured, twisting roads to custom-built homes. It was time for Cora and I to deal with the whole empty nest thing again. A year and two months after Jack was born, Jessica gave birth to Luciana (Lucy).

When El Sobrante’s quirkiness became unendurable, Jessica and Kyle bought a house in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Pinole, just one town over.

Things don’t always work out, and so, after Kyle and Jessica split up, she moved to an apartment complex in Richmond. She stayed there for about a year until she moved back home. The idea was to allow Jessica to be a single mom without some of the single mom stress and also to allow her to save enough money to buy a home of her own, no small feat in the overpriced Bay Area.

The kids attended the same elementary school and played soccer on the same fields as my daughter had years before. They grew up on Mama’s adobo and Papa’s meatloaf and groused about anything green on their plates (they learned, early on, how to surgically dissect their foods, deftly removing any offending bits of peppers or mushrooms).

Maybe the bond with Jack was manifested in a little horse made of beads that he gave me when he was five or six. I tacked it on the wall above my bed until it started to unravel a bit. I wasn’t about to throw it away, so I set it aside in my nightstand drawer where it still sits to this day.

Over the years I’ve taken Jack to school and to practices. I watched him take a stab at baseball. It never caught on, likely because his coach for two seasons was a mean SOB named Arnold. He was short on praise and teaching, and long on punishment and berating and was probably responsible for ruining the sport of baseball for countless dozens of kids. (I heard recently that, after a number of complaints, he was bounced from the coaching ranks).

My daughter often calls her son, “a good egg,” and he is that. He has an uncanny ability to read someone’s mood. When his mom is feeling down about something he’s quick with a hug and a consoling word. When his five year old cousin buzzes around him like a fly, repeating, “Jackson, play with me,” Jack will let out a sigh and play with the little boy.

Jack may be a “good egg,” but even the best egg can turn out a runny yolk sometimes. There was a period when Jack’s table decorum would embarrass a Visigoth freebooter, causing all eyes at the table to glare in his direction. Don’t like the asparagus? Just give it a few chews and then spit out a green glob in front of everyone. I guess you could say he was pragmatic about it. I mean, what the hell, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. He has a habit of wiping his hands on his clothes. It started with the shirt, but he found that it’s more clandestine to surreptitiously give a quick swipe on a pant leg. Hell, what’s wrong with that? It’s environmentally friendly – saves on paper.

He can be forgetful; a jacket, schoolwork, soccer cleats, water bottle, school I.D. Drives his mom nuts. When he started middle school, there were a few times when he’d be halfway to school and then call me up to tell me that he’d forgotten his computer or his I.D or a book. Whatever he’d forgotten, I’d drive it down to him and reassure him that I wouldn’t rat him out. I thought I was fooling my daughter, but she knew that I was covering for Jack and so one morning I got the, stop covering for Jackson, he’s gotta learn the hard way lecture. She was right, of course, but that didn’t stop me from covering for Jackson.

A little less than a year ago, April, it was, the two of us went on a night tour of Alcatraz. Before going to the boat, we went to Molinaris, an old school deli in North Beach. You know an old school deli, right? It’s got the salamis hanging from the ceiling and display cases filled with meats and cheeses and Italian delights like ravioli and lasagna and focaccia. The rear counter has a bin heaping with crusty sandwich rolls and somewhere in back, meatballs and sausages are simmering in a thick red gravy. The shelves are stocked with canned tomatoes and sauces and wines and sweets from Italy. The smell is, well, it’s the smell of an old school deli. It’s a unique, delicious smell that can’t be described. You just have to experience it for yourself and once you know the smell, you’ll never forget it. Kinda like being initiated into an exclusive club. Jack didn’t know what an old school deli was until he walked in and his eyes got as big as a pair of medium pizzas. A woman working the counter noticed Jack’s amazement and asked him, “Wanna work here some day?”

When we got to Alcatraz, I couldn’t keep up. Lost him once. Thank god for cell phones. Couldn’t imagine the conversation with my daughter.
“How was Alcatraz?”
“Good. I lost your son though.”
“Where is he?”
“Somewhere on the Rock. Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere.”

The next day Jack and I played one on one basketball. Didn’t matter that I was a good half a foot taller, I couldn’t stay between him and the basket. He’d fake left and then go right – right past me to the basket. After fifteen minutes, I thought I was going to die. I was grateful when he sank the winning bucket.

By that time, Jessica was house hunting and I knew the days were numbered. They were biding time until the school year ended and then they would move to their new house. By the end of June, they were in their new house in Suisun, 25 minutes or so away. “It’s not like we’re that far away,” said Jessica. And they’re not far away. Still, it’s not the same. How could it be? It’s an emptier house now. The vibrancy of youth moved up the interstate.

I turned Jack’s room into an office but I kept some of the things he didn’t want to take with him. There’s a Steph Curry piggy bank, a baseball trophy and a few soccer and basketball medals. Like many boys, he was enchanted by space and the universe. One Christmas, Jess gave him an astronaut desk lamp. He didn’t want to take it with him and I was glad to keep it. There’s still a galaxy of stars stuck to the ceiling and the planets of the solar system stuck to the closet doors. The room is neater but it misses the boy who used to live and play in it.

I worry about my grandchildren, all of them. I worry about the world that’s being left to them. We have so-called adults in Congress clutching their pearls over a national debt that we’re “leaving for our grandchildren,” as they like to put it. They lose their minds over the petty things of the present while ignoring the greater perils of the future. If they were honest they’d admit that they don’t really give a shit about anybody’s grandchildren.

I wonder sometimes which of my grandchildren’s milestones I’ll be around to see – and be lucid enough to appreciate. I never thought I’d be a great-grandfather (at least one who’s still above ground) until I did the math and realized that Sophia will hit her thirties in fifteen years. Soph at fifteen – damn. I’ll be 85 then. My own kids will be middle aged –damn. Jack’s only three years behind Soph, and Lucy’s just a year behind Jack. Maybe I’ll see a gaggle of great-grandchildren. And Zack? He’s five. I suppose maybe I’ll hang around long enough to see him graduate college.
Eighty-five seems doable. Anything over 85 is a crapshoot. Who am I kidding? Anything from here on out is a crapshoot.

The boy turned 13 on the same weekend that San Francisco held its annual Lunar New Year Parade. Lunar New Year always brings to mind the time we went to the New Year celebration with Jessica, and the kids who were at that time still very little. Jack wanted a balloon in the worst way and he was overjoyed when he got one. When we got back to the car, he accidentally let go of the balloon before the door closed. Jack was inconsolable. It broke my heart and it still does every Lunar New Year.

The U.S. 395 Chronicles: In Search of the Loneliest Road

Paul

21 comments

February 1, 2023

The first in a series of occasional posts about tripping along U.S. Highway 395.

Highway 395. From the Canadian border to the Mojave Desert in California, it makes its way through thick green forests, flinty high desert country, and oceans of cheatgrass. It rolls past golden yellow wheat fields, blinding, bleached alkali lakes, the rugged, white capped eastern spine of the Sierra Nevada, and an ancient azure pool. It runs over a mighty river, beneath craggy bluffs, and in and out of metros, small towns and forgotten specks on the map. It travels past the old west, the real and celluloid versions, and within view of a nation’s shame. Long stretches of the highway are described as the loneliest in America.

What’s not to like about U.S. Route 395? Even that loneliest road part. Maybe that’s the best part; the part that calls out to anyone who wants to escape cities, suburbs, tourist traps and mobs of moms, dads and the kiddos cruising in the Winnebago.

I didn’t know U.S. 395 existed until some thirty years ago, though I’d briefly, and unknowingly, crossed its path while driving through Reno. It was just a dangling thread in the national web of highways.

I might still be oblivious to that wondrous ribbon if a rainstorm hadn’t interrupted a family camping trip to Lassen National Park, in Northern California.

My San Francisco: A Photo Walk Down the Year of the Rabbit Hole

Paul

25 comments

January 24, 2023

My San Francisco is a series of posts that describes my own personal relationship with The City. My San Francisco pieces might be photo essays; they might be life stories or they could be commentaries. They might be a combination of some or all three. My impressions aren’t always paeans to San Francisco; it’s a beautiful city but like any beautiful city it has it’s dark side and its ugly stories. These pieces will always have one common theme; they are my expressions of my personal San Francisco experience.

A photographic tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of my favorite places in the world.

I try to visit Chinatown a couple times a month. When I was young, single, living in The City and didn’t know better I visited multiple times a week, usually stopping at a little bar on Ross Alley, called the Rickshaw Lounge. It was across the alley from Danny’s Dynasty. Both joints were divey (Danny’s looked downright dangerous) and the alley itself had an air of assault and battery to it.

Didn’t know better? I sometimes closed that place down, particularly when I was dating Hyung Suk, one of the hostesses who worked there. It must’ve been nice to be young and have the vigor, or bad sense, to leave a bar at 2 in the morning when you have to get up 4 hours later to get ready for work.

That was during the 1970’s, when 2 rival Chinatown gangs, the Wah Ching and the Joe Boys were feeling their oats. In 1977, 5 members of the Joe Boys shot up the Golden Dragon Restaurant on Washington Street just around the corner from Ross Alley.

I guess my love conquered all, even common sense.

The Golden Dragon is gone now, replaced by another restaurant. The dives are also gone, replaced by … It’s hard to say what replaced the bars. There’s no indication of a saloon ever having been on that alley. Now housing a florist, a fortune cookie shop, a gospel center, and a neon bedecked boba shop, Ross is hardly foreboding anymore.

The Chinatown alleys are fascinating places. I cut through them often to avoid the crowds on the main streets, or well, just because. The old mystique is of opium dens, brothels, and gambling parlors.

Indeed you can still walk through an alley at night and hear the clattering tiles and animated voices that mark a Mahjong game.

***

I usually carry three lenses with me when I walk through Chinatown; a wide angle, a 70 – 300 mm zoom, and the usual go to, an 18 – 135mm zoom.

All of the photos in this post were taken through the 18 – 135.

St. Louis Street is a dark little dead end alley. It’s home to the Waiyang Benevolent Association, Leung’s White Crane Dragon & Lion Dance Association, and two or three other businesses which I might be able to name if I could read Chinese characters.

Saint Louis Alley, Chinatown, San Francisco

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