Foxy {L_WROTE}: Spinoza, was this on Broadway, by any chance? Sounds like the place I was in up there among the lap-dancing and hustler clubs. Loved it.
No, the Dickwad and Whore was in an alley off Sutter Street in the downtown financial area at the base of French Hill (this is the hill up to the gate of Chinatown and a Frenchy cafe). It attracted a lot of riff raff stock brokers and their doxies.
I don't mind people getting crazy but except for mean drunks, drunk chaps are usually in a friendly, expansive, Falstaffian if not Rabelaisian mood, and when confronted by a forthright, manly chap who needs his beauty sleep with a simple request, they will chill.
In extreme American cases, said forthright, manly chap might be advised in Frisco and points east to carry a Remington peacekeeper hogleg style, but God would usually grant him no need of that in the old days when men were men and the sheep were nervous.
The problem was I yelled out the window like a Charles Bukowski character.
I eventually drifted off into a troubled sleep in which dickwads were trying to interest me in a Web development scheme. But suddenly, we were crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle with the crew of the Marin ferry, and the dickwads were trying to interest all the TARS in the particuLARS of a scheme that the dickwads were interested in.
[PS: it is an American solecism of the first water to call San Francisco, Frisco. Don't call it Frisco unless you are one of those sublimely self-confident British milords, mad bishops, or intellectual-Marxist-Militant-Tendency hard cases who keep garden gnomes in your garden, because this is the spirit, a lofty spirit that takes no note of class, in which I use 'Frisco. Literally, before I write, the sort of zoot-polyester American who called it Frisco was a traveling salesman who couldn't get laid even in Chinatown because he ordered chop suey at Jimmy Wong's, from the cute "gal" in the Cheong-sam.]
[But, I digress.]
I am also familiar with Broadway, but my favorite watering hole in the 1980s was on Van Ness, an unlikely street for fashionable bars, being ugly-widened in the postwar American style to four lanes.
This was Henry Africa's. A little on the touristy side (being on a suburban-style street for starters) this place redeemed itself, to a degree, by having an interesting clientele (easy to come by in 'Frisco) and a true lunatic of an owner.
It appears he had served in the dear old French Foreign Legion, La Legion of the Damned, march or die mes enfants and Beau Geste, hey hey what what.
He had a sign labeled "The Perfect Master" over the bar. It was his drill Sergeant, dear old Lucien *le Maudit* who would take him for delightful marches out in the desert where they have all the sand.
He was a complete martinet and usually a hair from the edge, but he served a mean martini cocktail.
The bars and hustler clubs of Broadway were for later in the night when we called, for madder music and stronger wine. Your Englishman goes home and so to bed: your Frenchman sits quietly until closing time: your Russian calls for Gypsies.
Your American usually seeks out the Fun in low places.
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