Chapter 1

1

San Francisco, CACharles

BRIGHT AND EARLY Wednesday morning, Richard drove us to the airport, bitching nonstop about the ungodliness of the hour. This caused Philip to say, “Maybe we should have taken a taxi."

“Ignore the grouch behind the wheel,” I said. “We’ve been best friends since junior high school, and he’s never been a morning person.”

We settled down on the plane and slept part of the way to San Francisco, therefore arriving as rested as one can be after a transcontinental flight. Philip waited at the baggage carousel for our luggage while I went to take care of the paperwork for our rental car, which was probably a needless luxury for the first several days of our visit inasmuch as we hadn’t planned any side trips for that first week. We’d decided to indulge ourselves anyway, and I managed to drive us to Union Square and our hotel without getting lost in the process.

By four thirty we were sitting on the terrace of a bar at Ghirardelli Square, where we could look out over the bay at the Golden Gate Bridge to our left and watch the cable cars being turned around on the street below and slightly to our right. Despite the January chill, there were a few swimmers doing laps in the bay below us. After an hour or so, we walked over to Fisherman’s Wharf and meandered through the shops.

From there we walked through the North Beach section looking for a place to have dinner, finally settling on Grifone, a small Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue, and it proved to be a serendipitous choice. We had to wait at the small bar for a table, and sat nursing our drinks, watching an attractive young Italian man tend bar and oversee the waiters. After we’d been sitting at the bar for perhaps ten minutes, the bartender, who was also the ma?tre d’, and who’d been standing behind the bar with nothing to do for a couple of minutes, struck up a conversation with us, turning into Chatty Cathy from then until our table was ready. In the course of the conversation, we learned that his grandparents had started the restaurant when they’d arrived from Italy in the mid-1940s. We had a pleasant conversation concerning both the restaurant business in general and Italian food in particular before our table became available.

The meal was as good as the conversation had been interesting, and we lingered for more than an hour and a half over dinner, dessert, and Port before walking down Columbus and catching a bus to Union Square and our hotel. Thursday, we devoted the morning to the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the afternoon to the de Young Museum. That night, we dined in a somewhat eclectic café near the opera house and Civic Center.

Friday morning we visited the Cable Car Museum and wandered around Nob Hill. We visited Grace Cathedral, then went to Chinatown, where we lunched on dim sum. In the afternoon we explored a quaint shopping area that ran along an eight-block strip of Union Street just east of Van Ness. We returned to the neighborhood that evening to try a French restaurant whose menu had looked interesting—the food was very good, the service less so. Saturday morning we ran, as we had the previous two days, up and down the hills of San Francisco, although we covered nowhere near our usual distance. Running up and down steep hills is harder than it looks, and neither of us was conditioned for it. We spent the rest of the morning shopping in the Union Square area.

After lunch, we took a bus to Castro Street and explored the area thoroughly, walking hand in hand, as were several same-sex couples in the area. At first, we were both somewhat self-conscious at such a public display, but the fact that we were just one of many couples behaving similarly got us over our nervousness. A lifetime habit of keeping up appearances is a difficult thing to overcome. The area of shops, boutiques, and bars of The Castro only extends for a few blocks along Castro Street off Market Street, spilling onto several of the side streets for a block or so in each direction. From there, we went back up Market Street to Polk Street and explored that well-known strip of porno shops and bars.

Saturday evening we were back in The Castro for dinner, having earlier selected a restaurant on one of the side streets. The clientele, at least on this evening, was about ninety percent male, all of them same-sex couples. The atmosphere was quaint, and there was a piano in the dining area, presumably for entertainment later in the evening. The food was superb, as was the service. I noticed that the waiter looked at us strangely several times, almost to the point of staring, but concluded that he was merely cruising us, so I pretended not to notice until Philip commented on it.