I tired of the pretentious San Francisco social world of my brother and his friends
as quickly as assembly line workers tire of their daily routine of servitude.
after I told his friends, they whispered , then smiled, and drove me to the toughest part
of the Tenderloin where they ushered me into a bar where the customers looked
every bit the freakish monsters as the bar scene of Star Wars but it was a relief to me
after the elite social scene on Fillmore Avenue, Pacific Heights and North Beach.
a man with the look of an escaped prisoner who the superintendent did not want to be
captured and returned was sitting by me at the bar.
he kept mumbling to himself in tongues and pounding the bar with his fist
for no reason discernible to me or anyone else with a modicum of sanity.
suddenly the man with vacant eyes put his finger in his left eye socket and took
out what appeared to be a glass eye and placed it by my draft beer to scare me.
I took his glass eye, put it in my glass of draft beer, shook the glass and watched
it swish in the beer like a huge olive with a brown pimento center,
then chugged the entire glass of beer,
careful that I did not swallow his glass eye and become a Cyclopes.
I returned the glass eye to the stranger and thanked him for its use.
two patrons spontaneously applauded and the bartender
offered me a draft beer on the house which I turned down.
the strange stranger and my brothers friends mouths were agape.
his elite friends never asked me to join them for a drink again
which was the best part of my trip to San Francisco.