Kurt Cobain partied with me at my house. 

There, now please don’t ever accuse me of “burying the lede”. It’s actually a tale of little consequence nor much entertainment value, yet it’s also one I’ve fitfully used as an answer in organized “icebreakers” with co-workers for nearly thirty years – i.e., “What’s one thing that might be surprising about you?”. Or perhaps it’s just magically come up in conversation, I don’t know.

Invariably my story is met with incredulity, or shock, or wonder. “You?” is usually the first response, as in, “Why would this have happened to you?”. This is because Kurt Cobain occupies for current generations the sort of legendary/untouchable status that Jim Morrison did in mine – someone now dead from before your time whose music and vision and lyrics and overall bearing touched the world (or whatever). Let me be the first to say: we couldn’t have known it at the time.

Actually, my in-person and otherwise interactions with Nirvana, the band, began during my senior year of college at UC-Santa Barbara. I had a show on our college radio station KCSB and also helped out in other ways, and as a consequence found myself on the phone talking to Jonathan Poneman, one of the founders of Sub Pop records. The label was just beginning a new subscription-only mail-order singles club, and he told me to get ready to get excited about the first one in the series to come out later in 1988, from a new Washington State band called “Nirvana”. He said they were “a cross between Black Sabbath and Cheap Trick”, which sounded just awful to me. Thankfully the single that would eventually arrive in my mailbox, “Love Buzz / Big Cheese”, was marginally better than that. When I eventually sold it via a Flipside Magazine classified ad around 1993 for a whopping $75 – a year before Cobain’s death – I felt like a shrewd, record-trading Rockefeller. (The numbered, limited-edition single now routinely goes for $5,000+ and is easily one of the most collectable records of its era).

Not long after this time, in May 1989, the former hardcore punk band Scream came to KCSB and were slotted to play a live show on my Wednesday night 8-10pm radio program. Santa Barbara is a perfect gig-less Wednesday night pit stop between early-week gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area and weekend gigs in Los Angeles/Orange County/San Diego, or vice-versa. I was always happy to receive some touring band on my show because our music director, Eric Stone, had exceptional taste in punk rock and its offshoots, and even if he brought in some middling band like Scream it was still a feather in my cap that a band we’d heard of and sometimes liked was playing within the walls of our beloved radio station, and on my show, no less.

Scream were by this time sort of a grunge/emo hybrid, before either term was in heavy rotation, and I know that they counted among their members at least two former and current intravenous drug users, because one of the members told me so. That member was Dave Grohl, the fresh-faced 20-year-old drummer of the band, easily the most likable and extroverted visitor to our studio that day. While other Scream members sniffed & snorted and argued with other, Grohl came into the DJ booth when I was back-announcing records and hung out & talked music with me, then consented to a brief on-air interview during which he cracked jokes & made mirth that I unfortunately remember none of the particulars of. I don’t believe a tape of this encounter exists, but with god as my witness, it happened. 

As you may be aware, Grohl would, within 2 years be recruited to drum for Nirvana on their path to becoming one of the biggest bands of all time; become incredibly rich; form the Foo Fighters and become even more incredibly rich; and so on. I saw a book written by him at the airport just three weeks ago.

I recognize that none of this tells you anything about the time Kurt Cobain partied at my house. Hey, just like any good icebreaker, you’ll need to wait! Actually we’ve nearly arrived at that part. So Nirvana, the ones who put out that mediocre 45 I sold for a mere fraction of its eventual immense worth, would then put out a 1989 LP called Bleach that I liked better. The band was part of a great whoosh of heavy, punk-influenced Seattle-area bands releasing music that year, often on Sub Pop and/or on similar labels, catching all sorts of buzz and all seemingly touring up and down California during the year 1989.

I was visiting my parents in San Jose toward the end of my time in college, and it just so happened that my no-question absolute favorite of these heavy bands, Mudhoney, were playing at Marsugi’s in San Jose that weekend on February 11th, 1989, with their openers Vomit Launch and Nirvana. Yes, a then- four-piece Nirvana, playing a 150-person club, themselves opening for Chico, California’s Vomit Launch before Mudhoney went on. I recall enjoying their set, which ended with Cobain deliberately tumbling backwards on stage, into the drum kit, scattering equipment everywhere as feedback squalled and the 35 or so people who’d arrived to that point hooted their appreciation for his showmanship. Over two years later, on June 13th, 1991, I’d also see a now 3-piece Nirvana, with Grohl, open for Dinosaur Jr. at The Warfield in San Francisco. It was the first and only time I’d see them in this form. They were still an indie band, still “one of ours”, I guess, but decidedly more popular than before thanks to a strong overall reception for Bleach, and about to become the biggest band in the world in 6 months.

Yet it was earlier in 1991, January if I’ve got my timing right, when my friend Bob, who happened to also be Mudhoney’s manager and jack-of-all-trades (merch seller, check writer, tour helper etc.), was visiting from Seattle and staying at my apartment at 941 Stanyan in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. We had plans to get some food on nearby Haight Street and then eventually walk over to the I-Beam Club that night, where The Melvins were playing. I wasn’t really a fan of that particular band, but it was a night out, and, as I’m sure you’d agree, sometimes you need a night out.

After we ate, we walked by a Thai restaurant and Bob spied Kurt and Chris from Nirvana coming out of it. There was a nice what-are-you-doing-here reunion between the three of them. It turned out that the Nirvana guys were driving back from Los Angeles to Seattle; perhaps, at least as I imagined it in hindsight, they had just signed their deal with DGC for Nevermind and were heading back home to figure it all out. They had plans to stay with a friend that night in San Francisco before starting for home the next morning.

Once we confirmed that they, too, were going to see The Melvins that night, Bob promptly invited the two of them over to my place for the pre-show drinks. The four of us walked across the street to Cala Market for liquid fortification, and I recall us bantering aimlessly until Cobain theatrically dropped a giant bottle of vodka on the checkout line belt and confidently proclaimed, “I want to have a hangover tomorrow”. To be honest, it’s the only thing I remember him saying of any consequence the entire night.

We then hoofed it back to my place and my room, whereupon the scene was set: Kurt Cobain sat quietly on my bed, drinking and not interacting much with the other three of us. He found much pleasure reading my Zippy The Pinhead comic anthologies, and immersed himself in those. Chris animatedly rifled through my record collection, getting super-excited when he’d pull something out he liked: “Oh! You have this Half Japanese record! Let’s play it!”. Bob, Chris and I talked loudly a bunch about music, while Kurt retreated quietly but respectfully in his corner of the room, not really getting into it with the rest of us at all.

We probably pre-partied for about an hour, three of us with our beers and Kurt with his bottle of vodka and a chaser, before we walked over to the I-Beam together. On the way over, I remember asking some dumb-ass question about their touring or their next record or something similarly sycophantic, and getting kind of a blow-off non-answer from Kurt, who clearly didn’t want to talk about his band at all. Once safely inside the club, we split up, and I didn’t see the two Nirvana guys again that night.

So this legendary night of Kurt Cobain partying at my house, the one I’ve used to grease the wheels of social interactions when called upon to do so, was about as inconsequential as any other night in my early 20s spent having a few drinks with various yahoos before seeing a band at a club. It just happened to be with a guy who’s now so posthumously world-famous that he’d be headlining Coachella or Glastonbury as a hologram right now if his bandmates had enough lack of integrity to allow it. 

There’s a postscript to this mediocre story as well. Only three weeks later, I went to see The Dwarves at The Stone, a club on Broadway in San Francisco. I immediately spied the insanely tall, aforementioned Nirvana bass player Chris Novoselic, with whom I shared much mirth and alcohol not even a month earlier. I bounded up to him while he was mid-conversation with someone and excitedly asked, “Hey Chris, remember me?”. He squinted his eyes, looked me over, and said with much finitude and no small amount of emphasis: ”NO”. 

In the spring of 1973, my parents, my toddler sister and I moved into a 3-bedroom house on Key West Way in Sacramento, California. I was five years old, and, overeager to immediately figure out what new turns life would place in front of me, proceeded to knock on every door in the proximate neighborhood with one extremely urgent question: “Do you have any kids?”. If this sounds like a moderately adorable tale, embellished by parents and worn with time – well, I’d agree, except that I remember making these rounds as clearly as if they’d occurred yesterday. 

As far as finding fellow five-year-olds in the neighborhood that day, I struck out (I hadn’t gone as far as Scott Garo and Rebecca Gailey’s houses yet). Yet I totally hit the mother lode with the house directly across the street from ours. “Yes, we have three kids – Tammy (aged 10); Sami (Samantha, aged 11), and Jim (aged 12). Big kids!! These were the Reece children, the progeny of Wayne and Mary Reece, and for the next five years, they’d be formidable and consistent influences in my young life. 

Even now my wife jokingly needles me about my outsized idealization of this relatively short period in my life, age 5-10, when we lived in Sacramento and when I traversed a path from Kindergarten into the 5th grade. Yet the years 1973-78 loom overly large in my psyche. I had a happy childhood there, with lots of friends. There was Little League, Cub Scouts and tons of off-leash, free-range 1970s-style roaming. It stood in marked contrast to my San Jose-based adolescence, which was by no means miserable, but which came with typical teenage travails and challenges. I’ve written some words about that time in my life here and here. 

The Reece kids and their parents instantly entered our family’s lives in 1973 and carved out an extremely important place there until we moved away. It was to the Reece’s that I’d go during summer afternoons when my mom had work. Tammy and I would sit on the couch and watch “Match Game ‘75” and other game shows until the soap operas came on, which signaled to me, at least, that it was maybe time to go outside into Sacramento’s 95-degree heat. Tammy was our first regular in-home babysitter as well, including the time my parents went out to see the talk-of-the-nation new film The Exorcist. Given our five-year gap in age, she fell somewhere between a peer and a respected elder, and re-connecting with her on Facebook a few years ago helped to validate the existence of social media in the first place.

Tammy and her siblings were huge music fans, in an era of AM radio and a time when popular music was an extremely important component of youth culture. Tammy once told me the start-to-finish story captured in the lyrics of Tony Orlando & Dawn’s 1973 hit “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”, which I found totally enrapturing (a guy coming home from prison! 100 yellow ribbons!!). This led me to bug my mom to buy me what became the very first 45rpm single I ever owned. Jim seemed to have snippets of song lyrics darting across his brain at all times; he flung some verses of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” my way once, and that instantly became another song that was the epitome of childhood cool, merely by virtue of Jim having sung it.

One time he busted out, apropos of nothing, the Led Zeppelin lyric “Say hey mama like the way you MOVE / gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove!”, which my sister Julie and I thought was probably the funniest thing we’d ever heard. There’s another one he used to sing that I’m still puzzled about, the lyrics of which were just, “Li-za Minelli”. Mostly I remember the three Reece kids were deeply into the AM radio-friendly rock of the day like Boston, the Steve Miller Band and The Eagles. This music was totally ubiquitous in the 70s, with every local kid’s radio tuned in simultaneously to the top 40 stations KROY and KNDE. I’m pretty sure it was Tammy that got me into Steve Miller, with “Fly Like an Eagle” being an early big hit in my house as a result.

Jim Reece was definitely far less of a peer and much more of a respected elder, the sort of teen my parents probably wanted me to be, and whom I certainly held as a model youth to emulate. He and his father Wayne were of the era and temperament of men who actually built and repaired things, as opposed to lily-livered modern guys like myself who mostly write checks for others to do the heavy lifting for them. They had a garage with a perpetually open door, and inside were various dials and winches and tools and a beautiful old Packard that I took to be Wayne’s pride and joy (outside of his kids, of course). There seemed to be constant fiddling and repair work of all kinds going on in there, night and day.

One of the major, top-tier highlights of every year was the “Jim Reece room cleaning”. He’d invite me over for the blessed event to be on the front lines as he purged various trinkets large and small. I’d come home with armloads of his rejects. I got a fantastic old Victrola-style radio that served as my main music-listening companion for several years afterward; copies of Boy’s Life magazine, and lord knows what else. I just remember it being extremely exciting to get the good word each year that it was, once again, finally time for Jim Reece to clean his room.

One time Jim foisted his ne’er-do-well friend Henry on my parents when Tammy was unable to babysit. If Jim was the Wally Cleaver of the neighborhood, then Henry was definitely the Eddie Haskell. Even at my young age, I knew that Henry had not been born to babysit. He certainly faked it enough with my sister and me to keep us safe and sound, and in the libertine 1970s, that was more than enough for parents of the era. I remember only one thing about his short tenure as our babysitter, which was that he introduced Julie and I to the time-honored “watch me light my farts on fire” trick. He’d throw himself on his back, jack his legs up in the air, stick a lit match in front of his ass, and – whoosh! Fantastic entertainment for a 9-year-old! We’d never seen anything like it, but we still liked Tammy better.

Another defining moment for me, one which very much involved Jim Reece, was the time I was “hit by a car”. It may have been the lamest hit-by-a-car moment of all time. We were out in the front yard, me and Jim and several other neighborhood boys, engaging in the exceptionally popular 1970s pastime of “Smear the Queer”. For those unlucky enough to have not played this pre-enlightenment childhood classic, it involved throwing a football randomly upward in the air; having someone grab that football from the resulting scrum, then run away as everyone tried to tackle (i.e. “smear”) the possessor of said football – the titular “queer”. Once the tackle had been completed, the game started anew, with the “queer” again chucking the football vertically. 

For whatever reason, I found myself across the street in the Reece’s yard – perhaps grabbing an errant football – and darted between two cars to run back over to my own yard. A car – as it turned out, the aforementioned Scott Garo’s grandfather’s green, ancient 50s Detroit car – was creeping down Key West Way at about 3-5 miles per hour. I was tapped very gently by this car as I sailed across the street, and the massive force of impact made me fall to the pavement for about three seconds, before hopping right back up again, fully uninjured and unhurt in any way. I still remember Scott Garo’s older sister, name now forgotten, in the passenger seat, screaming like a banshee; Jim running immediately to my parents’ front door, and me, now sobbing – not because of my horrible accident, but because I didn’t want my parents to find out about what just transpired. I was tugging on Jim’ shirt: “No, Jim, no, don’t tell them, no….”. I remember Jim blurting out – and remember, this is with me standing right there, with five other boys at my side – “Mr. and Mrs. Hinman, Mr. and Mrs. Hinman, Jay’s been hit by a car!”. My mother actually fainted. I think I eventually got a popsicle. We dined out on that story in my family for years. 

Samantha, known to all in those years as “Sami”, was the Reece teen who was always nothing but nice to me, but with whom I probably interacted with least. I get the hindsight sense that the annoying younger children across the street were probably – and quite understandably – not an adolescent priority of hers. My friend Charles Davis and I used to play a game we made up called “Starsky and Hutch”, where we’d run around the neighborhood like idiots, climbing and jumping off of fences, rolling on car hoods, shooting neighbors with our finger-guns and so forth. One time I remember doing this all by myself, as Sami and her posse of denim-jacketed, feathered-hair 15-year-olds roamed the corner of Key West and Rawhide Ways, looking not at all dissimilar to the cast of Dazed and Confused. 

Let’s state for the record that they were less than amused by my antics, and by my attempt to stalk them to wherever they were headed. One rogue, a blonde male who’d code-named himself “Snake”, asked to see my eyeglasses (I was – and remain – ridiculously nearsighted). I dutifully handed them over, at which point he hocked a gigantic disgusting spitball onto a lens, and then carefully placed them back onto my face. If that’s the main thing I remember about Sami during those years – well, it’s just not fair, is it? It isn’t. She was absolutely a great childhood comrade. I just hope Snake is serving time in Folsom Prison right about now.

During the latter part of that era, a sense of dread and fear pervaded our neighborhood and the entire Sacramento region. You’ve quite possibly heard of the East Area Rapist – later known as the Golden State Killer – a sociopathic serial rapist and murderer who was finally, finally named, captured and imprisoned several years ago. The “East Area” – well, that was our area. Some of his higher-profile crimes happened less than a mile away, with nearly a dozen more taking place within a 10-mile radius. I remember my mother and the neighborhood in general being really worked up about it, yet at the same time, I was 9 years old, and didn’t quite understand what rape was, nor did I quite understand the stakes for teenagers like Sammy and Tammy; their mother Mary; my own mother, etc. 

My dad has subsequently told me about the watch patrols that he and other neighborhood men would go on during the nights, and about the gun he kept by the bed. I read Michelle McNamera’s excellent I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about the quest to find the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer, and later watched the HBO documentary series of the same name. It was only then that I truly became retrospectively terrified for the women of our neighborhood, and for the teenage Reece girls in particular. I am thankful that our tranquil and neighborly Key West Way was spared.

In late 1977, my dad announced that he’d found better employment in San Jose, and that we’d be moving. Since Sacramento, Key West Way and the Reeces were virtually all I knew in the sentient phase of my life, I was both saddened and yet excited about this new development. We’d grown extremely close to the Reece family, every one of us, and we never again had neighbors quite as good as them. Jim, too, may also have been sad to see us go; he tried to scare me by telling me that “all the girls in San Jose carry switchblades in their hair, and they’ll cut you”, along with various other horror stories that contrasted San Jose quite poorly with idyllic Sacramento. 

While he may have been a bit, shall we say, hyperbolic, he was also right, in his way. We didn’t ultimately like it as much as the world of Key West Way, the world of the Reeces; Strange James next door; 4th of July block parties; the sunshine, the heat, and the American River levee nearly in our backyard. When I became old enough to drive, and once nostalgia truly started kicking in around age 25, I’d sometimes go back to Sacramento by myself. I returned in 1992 and decided to walk the old neighborhood. I parked the car in front of our house, and found Wayne and Jim Reece across the street, working on an old car in the driveway, just as they’d done fifteen years previously. It was some incredible deja vu come to life, and they delightedly came across the street to greet me, like we’d only slinked away to our new life just the week before, rather than back in 1978.

It was only a few years ago when I thankfully reconnected with not just Tammy, but with all 3 Reece kids on Facebook. I’m going to send this piece to them right now and see what they think. Hey, if you see it published here on my blog, then it looks like they were cool with it.

Unrepentant nostalgia can be a hell of a slippery slope. There’s always the temptation to lionize one’s formative years – the ones in which you were younger, more interesting, more open-minded and far better-looking. I try not to stumble down that path too often, but it’s sometimes pretty unavoidable to laser-focus my writing attention on telling stories from those years that spanned from my childhood to young adulthood. I’m sure someday I’ll write a real stemwinder about that time I turned fifty, or that time I missed a property tax payment. 

Speaking of young adulthood, mine could be said to have started around 1989, the year I graduated from college and hightailed it back to the San Francisco Bay Area, the place where I’d grown up. I’d had this notion even back in high school in San Jose, California that the #1 thing I wanted to do upon leaving college was to move to San Francisco. It was probably the sum total of my life goals at that point. What I was going to do with the rest of my life was very much up for debate. My undergraduate English degree was tailor-made for just about any low-paying career option available, and I sampled them all: warehouse worker, parking lot attendant, telemarketer and, eventually, customer service rep.

After a lifetime of suburban living, transporting myself to the center of the beating cultural heart of San Francisco – home of dingy punk clubs, record stores, weird cinemas, freaks, bars etc. – was my be-all and end-all, and I committed myself accordingly. Of course, the city’s natural, topographical and architectural beauty was also a huge draw. My family had taken my sister and I there quite frequently while we were growing up nearby in Sacramento and San Jose, and it always gave me a bit of an energy jolt even to look out the window at the various savory & unsavory street scenes in The City as we made our way to Grandma Kay’s house in Sausalito.  

I moved back in with my parents in San Jose for five months & worked to save money to afford the exorbitant $300/month rent to share a San Francisco flat, and to find gainful employment up there. I got to experience the 6.9 magnitude 1989 earthquake at their house, in fact – and yes, I was watching my San Francisco Giants in the World Series at that very moment. I spent several days a week in San Francisco despite living an hour south of it, either interviewing for jobs or, far more likely, seeing local bands like the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, World of Pooh or The Mummies in small clubs, while trying to aggressively shoehorn my way into underground hipster/doofus urbanism.

After months of searching for work, I finally landed a role in December 1989 at the South San Francisco company at which I’d spend the next six years, Monster Cable. (You can read all about that here). My pal Uli set me up with some friends of his at 941 Stanyan Street (pictured here) in the Haight-Ashbury/Cole Valley neighborhood who needed a roommate, and in January 1990, I moved in. I was un-hyperbolically delighted to be there. I was like Marlo Thomas in the opening credits to That Girl: ready for all that the world had to offer. Life could now begin.

This was a decidedly different San Francisco than the one I live in now. This whole notion of “San Francisco before the Internet” is not my own; in fact, it’s the secondary title of a documentary film currently in production, one which I’m naturally quite excited to see. Culturally, politically, economically and across countless other dimensions, San Francisco before the tech booms was in many ways a better and in some key ways a worse place than it is today. Rather than enumerate those pros and cons, I thought I’d share my own highly subjective view on what this place was like during the years 1989 to 1993 or so, with the latter year being the one that internet-connected personal computers started showing up in the homes and workplaces of people I knew (with my mom being the earliest adopter of all – go, Mom!). 

First of all, it was cheaper. Back in 1989, San Francisco was only the third or fourth most expensive place in the US to rent a flat or buy a house; when we’d complain about it, we’d say “at least it’s not New York / Boston / Washington DC”. Now their residents say the same thing about us, when they’re not thinking about moving to Portland / Nashville / Atlanta / Chicago. I paid $300 a month in 1989-91 for my own room at 941 Stanyan with three other roommates, and that was affordable enough for me, enough so that many of the freaks and great unwashed punk rock hoards with whom I went to school at UC-Santa Barbara found that they, too, could more or less afford to live in San Francisco.

That continuing surge of weirdo creativity was part & parcel of what had made the city such a longtime haven for hippies, gays, artists, filmmakers and punks – which was then reflected in the sorts of unique businesses and institutions that could be found merely by walking the streets. A few favorites of mine included:

Naked Eye News & Video – 533 Haight Street

A sub-underground VHS video rental store and alternative newsstand. Naked Eye carried music fanzines, far-left wing political agitprop and a wide variety of newspapers and mainstream magazines. As a video store, their focus – at least as reflected in what they’d feature and highlight in the windows – was on the offbeat and bizarre: think Survival Research Laboratories, Russ Meyer titillation movies and Dario Argento Italian horror. At least that’s how I remember it. I know it’s where I rented “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill” for the first, second and third times.

Freedom’s Forum Bookstore – 1800 Market Street

You know who willingly settled in San Francisco, because he and his wife loved the city in all its weird, wacky diversity? Milton Friedman, the prototypical Chicago School free-market economist, and the father of “disaster capitalism”, if you believe Naomi Klein. Me, I went through  big post-college “libertarian phase” in my politics, which I very thankfully grew out of. Ground zero for the magazines, pamphlets and free minds/free markets radicalism I used to feed my ideals – such as they were – was Freedom’s Forum Bookstore, in a beautiful and run-down Victorian that now houses the LGBT Center & Museum. 

The two dudes I recall being there every time I went in just happened to be oddballs right out of central casting – always up for a rant about the shackling of capitalism or gun rights or marijuana rights if you so much as touched a publication or book that addressed one of these topics, let alone asked them a question about it. It got to the point where I’d have to quickly leave the store if I merely wanted to buy something and not engage. Oh – and I was always the only person in there whenever I visited. Great memories!

The 6th Street Rendezvous – 60 Sixth Street

There were a number of long-gone music venues that nurtured my odd tastes during these years before the internet – the Covered Wagon; the Chatterbox/Chameleon; the Nightbreak/Thirsty Swede; the Blue Lamp, I-Beam, VIS Club/Kennel Club, Paradise Lounge, Morty’s and so on. I’ll highlight “Chel’s 6th Street Rendezvous”, a short-lived makeshift club located at the gauntlet-running intersection of 6th and Jessie Alley, between Market and Mission.

A nattily-dressed booker whose name escapes me brought in a variety of lowbrow underground local and touring musical acts to this decrepit bar, owned by “Chel”, an older Filipino man looking to jazz up his revenues on what was easily one of the most unsafe blocks in the entire city. That half-block walk between Market Street – where I’d get off the bus – and the 6th Street Rendezvous doors was a pulse-rushing crucible to not merely be endured, but survived. Between dodging the derelicts trying to sell me either “late-night transfers” (a freshly-stolen MUNI bus ticket that allowed for unlimited nightly rides) or drugs (the hard stuff – not the pedestrian “buds, doses, doses, buds” for sale up on Haight Street), I found myself kicked, insulted and one time even chased off the block (“Get the fuck off my turf!”), simply for the crime of trying to hoof it over to the Rendezvous for a ‘lil goodtime rocknroll music.

Casa Loma Bar – 610 Fillmore Street

This entry really could have been any of the many bars that Liz B and I used to go to, sometimes six at one go on a Friday or Saturday night, repeated ad nauseum. While she and I weren’t dating, she was my best drinking buddy in 1989-90, and Casa Loma at Fillmore & Fell was one of her favorites. It was on the ground floor of what is still a cheap hotel, walled off from occupants and featuring an ambiance that was a little bit divey, a little bit classy, with a few nascent “microbrews” on tap (I’m talking Red Hook and Anchor Steam). I can’t even remember the layout, but I certainly remember imbibing there a dozen or two times. It’s been gone for decades now.

My favorite at the time was The Uptown, at 200 Capp Street – still there! Honorable mention goes to the now-defunct Lloyd’s at 1099 Mission downtown – “shot and a beer for $1.50” – as well as a multitude of other dive bars that are somehow still standing: the Silver Spur in the Sunset; Murio’s Trophy Room and The Gold Cane in the Haight; The 500 Club in the Mission and Mr. Bing’s and Li Po in North Beach/Chinatown. While the planet surges into AI-powered automated everything, the great San Francisco dive bars remain. 

Artists’ Television Access – 992 Valencia Street

An absolutely timeless, frozen-in-amber 1980s San Francisco gem that is still there to this day. ATA was and remains an experimental film venue that showed Super 8 films, strange collages, no-budget feature films, radically queer and leftist performance-art movies and more. There’s no reason why it should still be there, and yet the fact that it is means it’s really the most visible and unchanged link to pre-internet San Francisco’s underground culture.

Record Vault – 2423 Polk Street

Online, this store is lionized as the home den for the Bay Area thrash metal scene that spawned Metallica, Exodus and many others. I don’t remember it that way at all. “Speed metal”, as we called it then, was an unfortunate constant in the 1980s, and if you were out shopping for punk records, metal records were bound to be nearby. So I personally recall Record Vault as a relatively messy and crammed store in a tidy and upwardly-mobile neighborhood – Russian Hill – that was the antithesis of everything this no-morals/no-values store stood for. By way of example, I bought an original copy of the Fuckin’ Flyin’ A-Heads’ “Swiss Cheese Back” here. I was there the day that the poster for Big Black’s San Francisco show was being put up in the window, and everyone in the store was abuzz about it. 

Other top-drawer record stores around this time were Rough Trade (especially the location on 6th Street – it went downhill when it moved to Haight Street); Aquarius Records; Reckless Records; and starting around 1990 or ‘91, Epicenter Zone, run by the folks behind Maximum RocknRoll fanzine. 

9th Avenue Books – 9th Avenue between Irving & Judah

The two great San Francisco bookstores back then were, and remain, Green Apple Books and City Lights. Yet because of where I lived, and due to my lack of a car, I’d instead wander into the pre-global warming Sunset District, which unlike now was almost always blanketed in fog, and go book shopping in the area bounded by 9th Avenue, Judah and Lincoln. I remember four distinct used bookstores in the area, all dead now. The best was 9th Avenue Books, an exceptionally well-stocked emporium that had all the William Faulkner paperbacks I could handle. All but one of the shops went kaput before the launch of Amazon.com, leading to a great deal of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing among residents and self-professed cultural arbiters (Borders and Barnes & Noble were the destroyers of the indie shop, if you’ll recall). 

So what else was going on in 1989-93?

I think if you ask most longtime San Franciscans about what the city was like back then, the word “grimier” will come to the surface pretty quickly. I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. Sure, neighborhoods like Hayes Valley, SOMA and most of the Mission have been utterly transformed by wealth and development over the last thirty years, but by and large, much of San Francisco remains just as grimy and depressing now as it was then. The Tenderloin, save for a few concessions to modernity, is identical in its druggy squalor and filthy streets as it was to a wide-eyed new arrival like me in 1989. 

You’ll notice that food – something so central to San Francisco’s popular conception of itself – has thus far not been discussed. That’s because the then-staple of my and that of many other struggling twentysomethings’ diets – the cylindrical protein and caloric delivery system known as the “Mission Burrito” – is still as robustly awesome now as it was in 1989. I ate them most frequently then at El Toro in the Mission and Zona Rosa in the Haight, and both taquerias are still around (though are by no means anywhere close to the finest examples of the form). There were then, as now, expensive and lovely high-end restaurants for people of means. The only big difference today at both casual and higher-end San Francisco eating establishments is that annoying line of underpaid delivery drivers waiting to pick up your app-procured food and drive it to your apartment. 

The printed word was paramount in pre-internet San Francisco. It had to be. There were really only two ways to broadcast one’s predilections & preferences to a larger audience than oneself: create your own publication, or – far easier – post up a flyer about your band’s gig, your event, film, political stance and what have you. Flyers were the social media of their time, especially in large cities like ours. They were vitaly important to musicians, filmmakers, theater production companies, politicians, community organizers and event sponsors. San Francisco telephone poles were literally plastered with them. Record stores and theater lobbies had stacks of them. When I did a radio show on KFJC, I’d make flyers and strategically drop them in stores and at clubs to try and get like-minded folks to give me a listen. I couldn’t think of a better way, short of paying for an advertisement somewhere. Today, the only flyers I see around town are for lost dogs or Spanish tutors. 

Free weekly newspapers were also a major force at this time. Even well into the 2000s, the big two for entertainment listings & local political coverage were the SF Weekly and SF Bay Guardian (libertarian me severely disliked the latter, and their predictable knee-jerk PC progressivism on every last issue). The gay community had something like five alt-weeklies going at once (Bay Times, Bay Reporter and more). As with flyers, these would all be stacked up in droves just about anywhere interesting that one found oneself. I immersed myself in the Weekly and Guardian each and every week, following every foible of Mayors Art Agnos and Frank Jordan or supervisor/police chief Dick Hongisto, then scouring the entertainment listings for wherever I might be blowing my paycheck next. (I even remember when SF Weekly was called “Music Calendar” in the mid-80s). When Craigslist arrived, it flattened the classified revenues of these papers quite dramatically, and they ceased to be much of a force as the internet took a chokehold on our attention spans. 

It would be criminally negligent to not mention the long shadow that AIDS was casting over the city when I arrived in 1989. The city’s gay population was suffering through an untold number deaths of lovers, friends, shop owners and acquaintances. The guy who trained me at my first job at Monster Cable in 1989, David Poole, would be dead from AIDS by 1992. ACT UP – the protest group that helped shake off straight America’s complacency about the disease – were a real omnipresent force in San Francisco. Flyers, fanzines, benefit concerts and even local riots were part & parcel of the gay community’s reaction to the death and shrugged shoulders that surrounded them. I even recall that “fag bashing” was still something that gays in the Castro District had to be on guard for. I went to my first Gay Pride Parade – that’s what it was called then – in 1990. (Salt Peter from The Dwarves had told me it was a “don’t leave town event”). The tone was more hopeful than was probably merited at the time, but it was a great example of the city I had hoped I’d be moving to: unrepentantly & boisterously free, and uniquely & proudly at odds with the mainstream. 

Of course, any living arrangement is what you bring to it. The well-heeled and physically toned people in San Francisco’s Marina District, to deploy a often-referenced stereotype, were most certainly not proudly at odds with the mainstream in 1990. Yet it was “they” – the creators of capital, the upwardly mobile, the fit and the well-toned – who effectively won the cultural sweepstakes for the dominant story of what San Francisco would evolve into thirty years later. 

No, it’s not like the olde world of 1989 has completely vanished, and I’m certainly no advocate for wishing that it remained as it was. But something about the mass arrival of the internet around 1996-97 really slammed the door shut on that initial era when I attempted to marinate in San Francisco’s low-rent bohemianism. First it disappeared at a trickle, and then vanished with a whoosh in the early 2000s. Then again, that’s when I happened to be personally hitting my mid-thirties, married and with a new kid. I’ve subsequently come to believe that our perceptions are all a cycle-of-life thing, distorted by the ravages of age and heightened by the passage of time. There are new arrivals who are undoubtedly sowing their oats and feeling their way into San Francisco’s dark corners even now, and who’ll be writing pithy purple prose thirty years hence about how cool it all was, and how much they desperately miss it.

I possess a “feature” lurking either in my DNA or in my nurtured makeup that has both allowed me to be quite accomplishment- and achievement-oriented (great for getting stuff done while working for “the man”), and a total weirdo obsessive about even my most navel-gazing of personal hobbies. It’s the proverbial two sides of the same coin, and this manic, Type A foolishness has been a lifelong constant, annoying me and my loved ones since childhood.

Even today it’s quite difficult for me to just be a little bit into something. If I’m “getting into” a genre of music, I need to ensure I’m a self-anointed subject-matter expert on every major and minor player who created music in that genre – and that I own virtually all of their cornerstone recordings – within a matter of weeks. If I decide I’m into old 1960s motel signs, I have to collect hundreds of postcards and photo books of them that I buy and stack up around the house (note – this is not really an “if”). For me, there’s generally very little worth doing halfway, unless it’s boring and expensive home maintenance, or something else that offers neither material nor psychic reward.

So it was in late 1970s Sacramento and San Jose, California, where my professional sports obsession was birthed and very rapidly harvested. It started with my dad’s transistor radio and a 1976 San Francisco Giants baseball game on in the backyard of our Sacramento home. I’m not even 9 years old. He’s clearly excited about something. What happened, Dad? Jack Clark just hit a home run. Who’s Jack Clark?, etc. The fabled father-son bond and baseball knowledge transfer was thus kicked off, as was my lifelong baseball obsession.

Two summers later, I’m in the car on a long drive with my grandparents to visit my uncle and his family in British Columbia. Spread out across the backseat where I’m sitting are my well-organized and voluminous baseball cards, the statistics from which I’ve completely memorized to the point where my parents would sometimes trot me out in front of guests for a parlor trick and ask me to reveal, for instance, the number of runs batted in George Foster or Bake McBride or Roger Metzger accumulated last year. I’d dutifully respond with each player’s 1977 batting average / HR / RBI totals to the exact number; gasps would ensure, and I’d trot back to my room extremely pleased with myself.

Right there on the same backseat is my “All-Pro Baseball Stars 1977” book, bought for me by my parents as part of my monthly scholastic book order, and my grandfather has just politely asked me to please take a thirty-minute break between reading him each team’s summary. I’d just spent most of the day’s six-hour drive regaling him and my grandmother with the book’s full prognosis for the 1978 Montreal Expos, the ‘78 San Diego Padres and so forth. I’m hoping that if I’m really good, they’ll take me on the way up to see the brand-new Seattle Mariners’ – whose name I pronounce Mareeners – stadium (they pointed out The Kingdome from the freeway, which was enough for me). I look at my watch, and it appears I’ll be allowed to read the 1978 Pittsburgh Pirates preview at exactly 3:32pm.

Here’s how any given ten-year-old American sports nutball educated himself with the intricacies of baseball at the time. First, there were baseball cards. I bought them by the bushel at my local 7-11 and Quik Stop. Josh Wilker wrote a phenomenally nostalgic and often sad memory-hole book about 1970s baseball card collecting called Cardboard Gods – I highly recommend it. There was near-daily San Francisco Giants baseball on the radio on KSFO with Lon Simmons and Joe Angel (later Lindsay Nelson and Hank Greenwald), and I listened to every game I could.

While I wasn’t an Oakland A’s fan – my dad ensured that I inherited his love of the Giants and the National League, as well as his lifelong hatred of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers – it didn’t matter much that particular year of 1978, because A’s games all spring were broadcast by UC-Berkeley college radio station KALX, whose laughable 10-watt signal didn’t even reach the next-door city of Oakland, let alone our new home in San Jose. The A’s moved to radio station KNEW later in the season, and I couldn’t get their signal in San Jose either.

There was the weekly syndicated highlights show This Week in Baseball; the Saturday morning NBC Game of the Week (which I never missed, including the game in which Dave Kingman bombed three homers); dog-eared copies of Baseball Digest, which I read at the library; and a plethora of borrowed baseball books checked out on mom’s library card – including great kids’ titles like Bud Harrelson: Super Shortstop and not-for-kids classics with sexual situations and curse words, such as Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo.

I really loved everything about baseball, but I especially loved how wonderfully the action on the radio and TV broke down onto paper, and allowed for much more engaged statistical contemplation. I dug deep into box scores and lists of batting averages. I’d mesmerize myself by comparing stolen bases across teams and lineups. I’d sometimes even score games I was listening to at home on homemade scorecards, tallying up my 6-3s, 5-3s, Ks and HRs at the end of each three-hour session. (This is now referred to as a “lost art”).

Mostly, though, my obsession was focused in and around all things San Francisco Giants. They’d been a bit of of a laughingstock in 1976 and 1977, as my fandom was solidifying. Veteran Willie McCovey and aforementioned power-hitting outfielder (and world-class postgame interview doofus) Jack Clark were my gods. My paternal grandfather – not the maternal one made to suffer on the trip to Canada – took me to my very first Giants game(s) in August 1977, a doubleheader against the “Big Red Machine” world champion Cincinnati Reds.

I remember the blessed event like it was yesterday – coming up the stairs of Candlestick Park and gasping as I caught sight of the field and scoreboard, as well as the monstrous grand slam that future hall of famer Joe Morgan hit to bury us in the second game. (Morgan would later become a Giant, and I would be fortunate to attend at age 14 the legendary 1982 season-ending game in which his home run eliminated the hated Dodgers from the playoff race, the day after they’d eliminated us).

The 1978 Giants, though, were actually good! In fact they spent most of that summer in first place, only to swoon to third at season’s end, and to return to their normal level of awfulness the following year. Yet what an amazing year that was across the board. I got to see Tom Seaver (again of the Reds) throw a 3-hitter against us with nearly 55,000 other fans in the freezing San Francisco fog/cold in a game that, though none of us knew it at the time, had been an early part of Pete Rose’s record 44-game hitting streak. I saw McCovey pinch hit a game-winning home run; I saw my hero Jack Clark up close and personal; I watched the exceptional Giants starting pitchers John “The Count” Montefusco, Vida Blue and Bon Knepper blow through opposing lineups; and I coerced my grandfather to buy me concession stand snacks every two innings, from polish sausages to malt cups to “big cookies”.

I also got really into APBA baseball, which was sort of the pre-fantasy baseball board game for obsessive dorks like myself. One could hide out in one’s room and recreate, with dice, a spinner and stat cards, an entire mock season of baseball with a team made up of actual players – and oh, I did. I did also play actual little league baseball with real living human beings every year until I was about 14, yet the futility of most late 70s Bay Area sports teams was generally mirrored by my own as a baseball player, perhaps as sort of a unknowing and unspoken tribute to my floundering heroes.

Baseball obsession eventually begat an NBA basketball obsession, which begat an NFL football obsession. My local Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers were as abysmal in 1979 as the Giants and A’s were. The Giants went 71-91 that year; the A’s were an incredible 54-108; the 1979-80 Warriors went 24-58, and the 49ers notched a 2-14 record. These were truly the leanest years among many suffered by Bay Area sports diehards.

I even fell hard for NASL soccer for a while – and we had an actual professional team, the San Jose Earthquakes, right in our provincial little backyard. I’m sure I was probably insufferable on the schoolyard as a fount of would-be sports knowledge and statistical memorization, yet I mostly remember having friends that were just as strangely obsessed and willing to blather on about sports as I was.

The Bay Area sports radio leader, then as now, was San Francisco’s KNBR, 680 on your AM radio dial. They hadn’t moved to a sports-only format just yet, as they did in the 1980s, yet they had started poaching the local pro sports teams’ broadcasts from other stations, starting with the Giants that magical year of 1978. They also had a great nightly sports call-in show hosted by Ken Dito called Sportsphone 68. I listened religiously as Ken and his callers talked all things pro sports and picked apart the futility of our local teams. One of the most popular pastimes on the show was for a caller to ring up and propose some potential trade to Ken. For instance, some rube would opine that the Giants should trade Jack Clark and a player to be named later to Boston for power-hitting Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice, and then Ken would pick it apart and tell them why it was wrong; or in rare cases, why it was actually a great idea.

After months of listening to callers pontificate, wheel and deal, I got it in my 11-year-old head that I needed to stop passively listening and start participating in the grand conversation. At Dito’s urging, I dialed up Sportsphone 68 one night from my parents’ bedroom, was placed in the queue by a KNBR operator, and waited for Ken to take my call, listening from the bedroom’s clock radio all the while.

I really had a doozy of a basketball trade for him: ship out the Golden State Warriors’ top scorer, Robert Parrish (later to be a superstar in Boston, alongside Larry Bird), to the San Diego Clippers for the NBA’s then-leading rebounder, a big lunky Dutchman named Swen Nater. Dito jumped on the phone far faster than I was ready for him – “Sportsphone 68, you’re on the air”. Out of the clock radio, four seconds later, I heard Ken’s exact words pour out: “Sportsphone 68, you’re on the air, we have Jay from San Jose and he has a trade for us”. I was totally baffled and discombobulated, as everything he and I would say came out of the radio a few seconds later, and in that moment, I couldn’t tell my ass from my elbow.

“Uh….Ken…..um….uh….I’ve got a trade for you…..uh….Robert Parrish….uh, hello?….uh….for Swen Nater.”. Ken’s immediate and precise words were seared into my brain for eternity: “Now son, why would you want to do THAT? Thanks for calling – and turn off your radio next time you call”. Happily for KNBR listeners, there would be no next time.

In no way was that very public misfire the end of my sports obsession, but as I headed into my teens and the 1980s, I found new ways to fill my mental space, mostly by discovering punk and post-punk music, and the related unrefined thrill of record collecting. It took me until my late 30s to regain some of that same strange accumulative behavior with regard to sports – at times going through my obsessive motions with NHL hockey, at times with English Premier League soccer, and always with major league and San Francisco Giants baseball.

Today I work it all around my other, more important life obligations, and am better able to let it ebb and flow in a somewhat managed and non-off-putting manner. I let the internet shuttle much of the information I need directly to me in the form of podcasts, video clips and email newsletters, and though I recognize that my attention span is shortening and my intelligence is likely plummeting, I do appreciate that I can now dip in & dip out of Fulham or Warriors or Sharks or Giants mania at will.

That said, I possess the same sort of perverse pride many modern adults feel about their pre-internet-era childhood obsessions. We had to work at it all so much harder than these kids do today. Perhaps that actually deepened my love for the game. I’m not sure if I could have psychically handled having every 1978 MLB game instantly streamable on TV or my phone; every baseball book instantly deliverable to a Kindle; every argument-settling stat able to be called up at will from Baseball Reference.

I certainly recognize the ultimate frivolity of all this leisure-time onanism, both then and now, yet then I call up with clarity my memorized .306 / 25 / 98 Jack Clark 1978 stat line, and remember that I still know one thing – something very, very special – that only Clark, Mrs. Clark, about ten thousand other 70s baseball dorks and I know.

“Your employees — they just don’t like you” — Melanie Coyle, Cellular One Customer Service Director, to me in 1995

No, I wasn’t always the sure-footed, wizened, mentor-to-many corporate leader and in-demand management guru that I am today. In fact, my first real job as a “manager” began as something of a train wreck. Cellular One in 1995 almost broke my spirit, sapped my will to live and nearly got me sent packing for the high crime of being a nervous-Nellie, fumble-footed, greenhorn manager.

My adventures in the nascent world of cellular telephony started in the Fall of that year, when I exited after six years at Monster Cable (more on thatexperience here) and excitedly joined South San Francisco’s Cellular One as a Customer Service Supervisor. This was a pretty heady and massively profitable time for that industry, although the “mobile landscape” looks amazingly quaint by today’s standards.

Back then every market in the United States had only two cellular network carriers — an “A” carrier and a “B” carrier. Most of us didn’t have cell phones yet. “Car phones”, installed on the floorboards of an automobile, were actually still a thing. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the two mobile operators were GTE and Cellular One, the latter of which was a joint venture between AirTouch Cellular and AT&T Wireless. Down in Los Angeles, those two actually competed against each other, with the “A” carrier being L.A. Cellular (AT&T) and the “B” carrier being AirTouch. Confusing, sure, but nothing like it later became with the arrival of Sprint and many others. Competition was minimal, in other words.

Cellular One really had two problems at that point: counting all of the piled-up money they were making from the exploding mobile phone industry, and something called cloning fraud. This is how I came into the story.

First, a little bit about cloning fraud, which, again, sounds totally ridiculous in the 21st century. Anyone’s analog phone signal back then could be “cloned” by dastardly tricksters and malicious thieves. These guys waited by roadsides and at intersections with “cloning devices” that eavesdropped on signals and could easily capture a phone’s unique information, which could then be quickly reprogrammed into a new phone. Seriously! Now said phone number would be associated with two devices, and unbeknownst to the legitimate bill-paying Cellular One customer, the other phone would then go off and place calls to Mexico, Canada and Timbuktu. All of these calls, local and otherwise, would show up as massive (and very expensive) surprises on the monthly bill. This would, of course, immediately prompt a fretful and angry call into Cellular One from the legitimate bill-holder.

After my initial company training, I was told that I would be leading 8 call center representatives on the “Reactive Fraud” team. We would “react” to people whose phones had been cloned. I’d sit in a cubicle with my reps — later this became a pod-like “hub” in the center, with all of the reps in a circle at smaller desks around me — and I would intelligently coach them on bettering their craft, using my accumulated six years of wisdom from answering phones at Monster Cable. I was also warned that my job had very nearly been given to Kathryn, who was the team’s “Lead” (sort of an associate manager or the team’s Vice-President), and that she was none-too-happy for having lost out on a promotion to the job in favor of this new guy from outside the organization. As I came to find out, neither was my new team.

So here’s what I walked into. Cloning fraud was totally out of control, and angry bill-receivers were calling up en masse to scream at us — “I didn’t make these calls to Mexico!!!” etc. We had eight reps answering calls, but when those reps were all on the phone, calls into our “queue” would stack up, while callers listened to inane hold music. When there were ten calls in queue, a scary red light on the wall would light up, and someone would have to mute their line and yell “ten calls in queue!”, just in case there might be someone available, eating a snack or otherwise ignoring the tense pandemonium of the Reactive Fraud call center.

Like a doofus, I saw my main job as hustling these reticent phone-answerers into their headsets as fast as I could. My secondary job, green and inexperienced as I was, was to “listen in” on their calls, then coach them during quiet periods on what they might have done better to resolve the customer’s concerns, or how they might have shaved a few seconds off of the call in order to more rapidly answer another one. I decided that the Cellular One Reactive Fraud Supervisor would need to be friendly but tough, a straight-shooting customer and company advocate with a smiling face. Even as I eavesdropped on your every word, then gingerly picked apart your faults, I’d be your friend — your buddy — the best goddamn supervisor you’d ever had.

Yet what I didn’t do was answer calls, even when the light glowed hot red and bedlam ensued. I totally talked the talk without walking the walk. Why not? I guess I felt at the time that it was “below” my lofty perch as a newly-minted supervisor. I not only wouldn’t walk even a millimeter in their proverbial moccasins, I also had something of a fussy, perfectionist orientation at work back then that almost certainly rubbed some people the wrong way. I had even taken a work-administered personality test that flat-out called me a “perfectionist”, and it wasn’t described as being a desirable trait. This, I’m certain, came off in how I coached and managed the team.

A team that was already peeved that Kathryn wasn’t their leader now found an instant way to dislike me, and rightly so. I divined a chilliness bordering on hostility from most of them even after only a couple of weeks, and this truly pained me, so I made more than a few ham-handed attempts at “team building” to overcompensate. These mostly went nowhere, and likely made things worse. They ranged from forced “Hey, how was your weekend?” talks to morose team lunches that I tried to liven up with jokery and witty banter. I wore my weakness and nervousness on my sleeve, and even I was very aware of it at the time.

I never really figured out if Kathryn helped to rally the troops against me, but I do know that 3 employees, led by a rep of mine named Ann, went to my boss’s office to tell her just how awful I was. This then resulted in a “performance talk” between me and my boss. Ann — wow. She really, really hated me, and absolutely dripped contempt every time we talked. Was it unfair? I certainly thought so at the time — but I’m not so certain of that now.

I struggled with maintaining my serious I’m-here-to-coach-and-develop-you job role with my more natural state, which is to want to get along swimmingly with everyone. I tried to raise the meek defense to Stephanie, my manager, that at least some of my 8 employees liked me — Wayne did! Amy did! I was told, with regard to Amy, that “everybody already knows she’s your favorite”, which I had no intelligent retort for, because this was in fact true.

Very quickly, after another complaint from an employee, I was put on an “action plan”, the failure of which to fulfill would result in my termination. This was devastating. The job not only paid well, it was in one of the hottest industries on the planet, and I’d just gotten serious with a new girlfriend (now my wife). We were looking into moving in together and building a life together, as one does. I’d been, if not a “rock star” in my six years at Monster Cable, a highly-regarded employee who got really good performance reviews and had almost no friction with anyone, neither bosses nor co-workers. To now be called out as a “bad manager” was dumbfounding.

Worse, my eight reps were about to become twelve reps. My reactive fraud team soothed angry bill-receivers down by explaining cloning fraud to them, then “writing off” (zeroing out) their entire bill, rather than have them pick through the bill line-by-line saying “this one’s mine; this one’s not mine” and so on. Yet there was also a Proactive Fraud team on a different floor. These 4 reps were led by a cowboy boot-wearin’, pickup-truck drivin’ dude named Tim, whom they all adored. These reps had a magic terminal that they used to look into call activity as it was happening. They’d pick out those numbers that were spiking with calls to Mexico and elsewhere, then proactively call the customer to let them know they’d need to change their phone numbers. Back then, that really was the only way to stop it — change the number, which is what my reactive fraud team did as required.

I was informed that the Proactive Fraud team would now be mine as well, and that they were moving to our floor to sit with my other reps. You can imagine that this went over like a fart in church when Tim had to break it to them. At least two of the new women on my team, Julie and Rhonda, were vocally clear about how displeased they were to have to work for me.

Thankfully by this time, in early 1996, I had gathered my wits somewhat and returned some small semblance of pride. I was now personally answering calls, sometimes when there were even less than ten sitting in queue. I was able to share and revel in the lunchtime tales of some of the morons who called us, such as the reactive fraud call I once took in which the caller, whose bill I refused the write off in full, prodded me with “The fact that I have an MBA doesn’t impress you? The fact that I have a juris doctorate doesn’t mean anything to you??”.

Most importantly, I was off of my action plan, having successfully “resolved my issues”. It wasn’t easy, and it stressed me out no end to have to win over the reactive team while integrating the highly resistant proactive team. I wasn’t sleeping well. Julie, in particular, was consistently “snippy” and overtly hostile with me, but now that I finally had a little wind at my back, I was able to authoritatively remind her what her job was and what was expected of her, without having to worry about it boomeranging back on me. Somehow, just as the management books said it would, this approach worked.

As 1996 rolled on, the job actually became something approximating what I’d hoped it might be. We changed our name to the Fraud Resolution Team(we made it up ourselves), and the team continued to expand with the further snowballing of cloning fraud. I became somewhat proficient in providing constructive call feedback and performance appraisals to my team, even at the cost of having to silently listen into their calls via my on-desk monitoring device or in a special “call monitoring room” that the company provided. I twice caught one female employee engaging in exceptionally filthy sex talk with a boyfriend on the phone, talk so over-the-top that I decided it better to just pretend it never happened and to refrain from bringing it up.

Another employee of mine was more problematic. While he could be outwardly charming and fun, he often brought a massive chip on his shoulder to work, which then infected his calls. I’d listen in to him actively arguing with customers for no good reason, or ignoring their concerns by changing the subject — even going so far as to flat-out hang up on them during difficult calls. Now it was time for me to put together an “action plan”, which I sweated and agonized over because it was likely to lead to my having to fire him. We endured this sort of tense tête-à-tête with each other for about a month, and somehow I got out of canning the guy by quietly pawning him off on another department by arranging for a transfer (!). I still feel a little guilty about that one.

After my abysmal start in 1995, the comparatively better 1996 gave way to 1997, when I announced to my boss that I’d be leaving Cellular One in the late summer to get my MBA at the University of Washington in Seattle. I’d talked with some of the happy marketing people upstairs, and found out that they were doing much more creative & interesting work than I was, and were simultaneously making a great deal more money. They told me that an abrupt career change at that point in my life, aged 29, could be smoothed out by possession of an MBA, and while I’d much rather have gone back to school to study global literature, journalism or political science — really, just about anything other than business — I’d felt my path had already been set, and my risk-averse nature pushed me out the door toward my fate.

I never picked up a phone in a call center again, nor told anyone else how they might do it better. I never again found myself shamed and stained by an action plan. I learned a few things about what not to do as a newly-hired manager, which came in handy later on, particularly on one relatively recent occasion in which I again stepped in to lead an existing team of ten people.

Cloning fraud itself began to fade as new digital technologies were adopted both in the network and in handsets themselves, and as I was leaving Cellular One, the world was agog about the runaway success of the most advanced phone to date — the Motorola StarTAC, a flip phone with limited “SMS” capabilities. I cut virtually all ties with anyone and everyone at Cellular One, as I still held onto residual paranoia about what I envisioned was a widespread perception of my managerial incompetence, something that I’m now pretty certain I was merely imagining.

The whole experience seems to have been one of those trial-by-fire toughening events that make a life what it is. In the grander sweep of things, it was a decidedly minor bump in the road that I reckon I’m glad happened when it did, even if I’m still totally pissed at myself for not grabbing that tenth call in queue, thereby maybe avoiding the whole fiasco in the first place.

Admittedly, my first choice for fast food work in 1984 was at the Princeton Plaza branch of McDonald’s, also for $3.35 an hour, which was the era’s bottom-floor minimum wage. After straight-up hiring me during my initial interview — warm, pimple-pocked bodies always welcome — McD’s, alas, only gave me three hours of work per week for my initial month. My weekly gross of $10.05 just wasn’t going to cut it, even in that Reagan era of low taxes and high margins, so I quit McDonald’s before I’d even scraped my first grill or wrapped my first Filet-o-Fish.

Wienerschnitzel were more than happy to bring me aboard the team, however, and they threw me as many evening and weekend hours as I could handle. The chain, some of you may remember, was once called Der Wienerschnitzel. This is the place my dad used to take us to in the 1970s in Sacramento, a hot dog palace with a massive triangle-awning design (much like the old International House of Pancakes) and yellow-and-red color motif (representing mustard and ketchup, one presumes). The company did away with the “Der” in 1977, it is said, because their German conjugation was stupefyingly incorrect; it would have been rightly called Das Wienerschnitzel, but the place I toiled at seven years later was merely christened “Wienerschnitzel”, as it is to this day.

They were, and remain, “The World’s Largest Hot Dog Chain”. While they kept several varieties of hamburger on the menu, including a rye-bread-meat-&-cheese delicacy known as the “Patty Melt”, Wienerschnitzel was all about the dogs, and for what it’s worth, those dogs were fairly tasty, as harmful calories go. There were 5 core dogs during my day: the simple “Mustard Dog”, as no-frills as you’d imagine; the “Kraut Dog”, a nod perhaps to the company’s mangled faux-German ancestry; the “Chili Dog”; the extremely popular “Chili Cheese Dog”; and my hands-down favorite, the relatively healthful “Deluxe Dog”, which included mustard, onions, two tomato slices and a bun-length dill pickle tucked behind the meat. We had fries, we had drinks, and that was about it, save for a gross batter-dipped “corn dog” on a stick that only a handful of children very rarely ordered.

My first exciting day on the job — on any job — nearly got me canned before my 4-hour shift was even done. I was shown how to man the “french fry station”, in which my responsibilities were to pour frozen potatoes from a plain brown bag into a basket, then drop the basket into a fryer for two minutes, then salt the resulting fries profusely once cooked. More importantly, I had to listen to the audible orders called out by the cashier (“Three chili-cheese, two large fries, one patty melt”) for my lone cue word — fries — then scoop them into either a large cardboard holder (you know the kind) or a flimsy paper bag.

As you’ll see from the image to your left, french-fry scooping is totally and unfairly a right-hander’s game. I happen to be left-handed, and I’m embarrassingly uncoordinated with my right. Within minutes I was slowing down orders and angering customers as I fell way behind in my scooping, prompting the mealy-mouthed boss, a balding, middle-aged nincompoop named Dave, to patronizingly swoop in to “school” me on how to properly shovel french fries into a bag. I was trying to do everything with my left hand, and it wasn’t happening. “Is this even going to work??”, an exasperated Dave asked, rhetorically. Luckily mercy — or the pain of having to fire and hire yet another teenaged moron — intervened, and Dave hrumphed and mumbled his way into an immediate “lateral transfer” of me over to the drink station, which is where I wanted to be anyway.

Ah, drinks. Working the soda machine was home for my first 4–6 months at Wienerschnitzel, and it was glorious. I stood immediately to the cashier’s left. She’d slide over the paper receipt, I’d eyeball the various requested sizes of Dr. Pepper or Coke or Sprite, and I’d then position the appropriate cup under the nozzle after filling it halfway with ice. That’s it. Self-serve drink stations hadn’t been invented yet, or rather, were only situated at places like 7–11. It was way better than working “in the back”, flipping burgers or squirting mustard on hot dogs. I got to interact with the customers, too, and it turned out I kinda liked that.

Granted, my interactions with the hoi polloi were usually of the “a little less ice/a little more ice” variety. San Jose has a heavy Mexican immigrant population, and one time a young Mexican guy came in and looked me dead in the eyes & said with the utmost gravity, “Give me lots of ice”. I duly responded, yet when I handed him over his cup he retorted, “I said lots of ice, homey — I don’t want no snow cone”. Still one of my favorite customers of that or any other era.

We moved a great deal of high-fat caloric product, especially during meal times. Wienerschnitzel’s “rush” was an all-out war to quickly feed legions of people, and it could get really stressful. Thus, those of us who “closed” — working until the store shut down at 11pm, plus another hour to clean up — relished the relatively peaceful late nights for all sorts of hijinks and shenanigans. There was a oafish guy whom we worked with named Ralph who told the assembled crew one night that he’d actually drink the grease trap — the accumulation of hamburger drippings and fat runoff — on a dare. Not for money, merely on a dare. I believe I actually made the initial dare, which was rapidly seconded by all 4 of my remaining co-workers, at which point he loosened the metal contraption from beneath the grill, hauled it outside behind the store, tipped the contents into his mouth, made one swallow, and promptly barfed. And yes, his name was Ralph.

Late nights were also when the drunk-driving customers would stagger in. One night the cashier position was being womaned by a sassy Latina named Deena, and I was again working to her left, pouring drinks/snow cones. Two disheveled alcoholics shuffled in, and one proceeded to order, “One cheeseburger, dropped on the floor”. We both engaged in some customer-friendly double-takes and polite clarifications — “Sir, can you please repeat your order”; “Sir, that’s not something that we serve here”; “Sir, are you sure that that’s what you’d like” and so on. Once he’d confirmed his demand, we were absolutely going to ensure that supply kept up; or rather, Deena was, as she first loudly announced the exact order on her microphone to the entire staff and all Wienerschnitzel patrons, then proclaimed “I’m going to make this motherfucker myself”. She then strolled back to the hamburger station, grabbed a waiting cheeseburger with the flipper, lifted it high above her head, and slapped it down hard onto the disgusting tile floor, the same floor that Ralph, myself and others had been striding across all night. After putting it on a bun and dressing it just so, she then delivered it directly to his table, rather than calling him to the counter, which was truly customer relations above and beyond the norm.

I, like Deena, used my burgeoning skills to eventually graduate to direct customer relations, and for a time I was the only male cashier on the Branham Plaza Wienerschnitzel staff. My winning personality and customer-centric charm may have been a factor; more likely, I had not yet succumbed to any graft nor embezzlement outside of the odd Deluxe Dog, and therefore could be trusted handling small bills. I had a high school friend also named Dave who’d come in after football practice, and he would routinely proceed to order (and eat!) 2 hamburgers and 3 hot dogs in one sitting. I may have occasionally cut him a deal or two on that extra chili-cheese dog, but I think manager Dave found me to mostly be “on the level”, even if I couldn’t scoop a fry to save my life.

I bungled the biggest opportunity presented to me, however, and it’s something I deeply regret to this day. As McDonald’s had its clown and Burger King its king, so Wienerschnitzel too had its mascot — “Der Wiener Dog”. One Saturday it was announced by our new manager Kim that Der Wiener Dog himself was going to be spending the day waving at cars on the corner of Pearl & Branham in San Jose, which meant that an employee of Wienerschnitzel at Pearl & Branham was going to be spending his or her day holed up in the Der Wiener Dog costume.

The only criteria for the role was that you had to fit into the thing, and as it turned out I fit into it perfectly. Immediately overcome with a rash of hormone-surging teenage embarrassment — “this is so lame” etc. — I announced that I wouldn’t do it, no way. Thankfully, my co-worker Debra was another person whose shape filled out the costume as remarkably as mine did, but I proceeded to watch her with envy from my cashier station all day as she handed out lollipops, danced with children, and flagged down Camaros to pull into the parking lot for 2-for-1 chili cheese dogs. I was so instantly filled with regret for passing up this golden opportunity to break from the norm that for years I told a “white lie” (OK, a bald-faced, straight-up lie) to friends that I, indeed, had been the Der Wiener Dog for one unforgettable day. But no.

Around the time I was going to the Valley Christian High School Senior Ball with my co-worker Cheri (more about that here), I came upon my one year anniversary as a Wienerschnitzel employee in good standing. My reward for my year of service was a raise — a whopping ten-cent raise from $3.35 to $3.45 per hour. As would become my annoying stock in trade in subsequent jobs, I immediately argued to Kim that my immense contributions to the firm were outsized relative to those of my slothful co-workers, and that I deserved at least a twenty-cent boost in my hourly enumeration. Rebuffed, I quit Wienerschnitzel without so much as two weeks’ notice, choosing to meekly call in my resignation from the comfort of my familial home rather than bombastically give it face-to-face to my exploitative corporate overlords.

I never worked in food service again. Perhaps Kim blackballed me. More likely, once I graduated to lucrative $4 per hour phone soliciting jobs, there was no looking back. Wienerschnitzel, including the location at the corner of Pearl & Branham in San Jose, survives to this day, although as a lesser light in the pantheon of American fast food. I dropped by there a couple of years ago for old times’ sake (and because I was hungry as hell) after visiting my parents. They still have all the same hot dogs, and a whole lot more. They’ll now even put chili on your french fries — something we didn’t have the gastronomic foresight to even suggest to management! I excitedly told the young man at the drink station that I’d once held his job, over 30 years ago (!), in this exact same location, in that exact same spot, doing the exact same thing behind the same Wienerschnitzel counter…!

He told me “that’s cool”.

I didn’t even want to go to my high school’s “Senior Ball”, but I ended up going to two of them — mine, plus a bizarre, Christian-themed non-dance at Valley Christian High that turned out to be even more demoralizing than my own.

These blessed events occurred during the Reagan-era 1980s, somewhat after the values of traditional male/female courtship had started to crumble, even while the codified rituals of mating remained. I had totally bailed on attending my end-of-year Junior Prom the year before, in 1984. I told myself at the time that this was because I was too much of a self-identified “outsider” to actually care about what the normal kids thought was important. Perhaps there’s even a bit of truth there, yet it’s much more likely that I either couldn’t identify a likely date, or I was too chicken to ask one to accompany me.

What I mostly remember about the Spring of 1985 was how much I thirsted, yearned for high school to be over with. Matriculating from San Jose, California’s Gunderson High and getting the hell out of town and high-tailing it to college had reached a fever pitch, yet there was the informal yet significant pressure of the vaunted “Senior Ball” to contend with. Alas, I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor any likely candidate to become one at that juncture, and this caused me much internal consternation, frustration and even embarrassment. Perhaps college might bequeath the debut of my inner lothario, as I was mere months away from embarking on a move to Santa Barbara to attend the University of California (spoiler alert: it mostly didn’t).

As Gunderson’s Senior Ball approached, I contended with some very gentle parental pressure to attend (“It’s your last year — why not attend? It’s a tradition” etc.), which my internal teenage guilt and shame thereby magnified into some pretty intense pathos, forcing me into a tortured corner of my own making. I was going to have to do this thing, because damn it, I’m worth it. I’m a totally normal late-adolescent. Totally normal. I can take a foxy girl on a fabulous dress-up date. Oh, but girls mostly ignore me. I’ll probably be laughed at when I ask someone. Wait — what if I’m mocked by dudes for whom I’ve chosen as my date? Then what?

This sort of ping-ponging internal monologue was a shining hallmark of my adolescence. With hindsight, I’ve learned that this certainly was in no way unique to me. By the time I actually gathered the gumption to ask someone out, the 12th grade gossip mill had already churned out many of the names of whom was taking whom. Like a baseball draft, we were already down to the 42nd round. Virtually every girl I personally knew was “taken”, and those who remained either couldn’t hit the fastball, only had three of the five tools, or were too frequently fooled by the off-speed pitch. Or I was too lame and superficial to see the “lady” hiding inside of the girl.

But wait! Dawn Collins. Dawn was a junior (i.e. an 11th grader), the sister of a classmate and sort-of-friend of mine, Brian Collins. At this writing both reside in the where-are-they-now files, and appear to be completely unfindable on social media or the internet writ large (I tried really hard, for about five minutes). In 1985, Dawn Collins was an out-of-my-league beauty who, unlike most 16–17 year-olds, actually smiled at me in the halls and laughed at my rare and feeble attempts at humor in the infrequent moments that the two of us socialized.

I grappled with a massive bout of nervousness regarding how I might be perceived for inviting a mere junior, let alone Dawn Collins, to go with me, which reflected the tyranny of small differences in numeric age that are endemic to young people in my culture. Overcoming this, I somehow phoned to ask her to accompany me to the 1985 Gunderson High School Senior Ball, and to my delight and terror, she politely and immediately said yes.

Honestly, that’s pretty much the high point of this part of the story. Any ideas I had at all about what I was supposed to do in this scenario — the boutonniere, the suit, the etiquette of appearing at Dawn’s house and meeting her parents — all came via careful coaching from my parents. All I remember is the tension. Dawn and I pretty much ran out of things to talk about during the 20-minute drive it took to get to the hotel where this thing was being held, yet she was extremely gracious and cool in the face of what was clearly not destined to be the proverbial Night To Remember for either of us. The theme of the dance, in fact, was “One More Night”, after the recent Phil Collins hit of the same name. Indeed it was merely one more night.

There was some awkward 80s dancing, some fancy food on my plate that I didn’t eat, and this lone picture that you see at the top of this page. I recall sitting at a circular table with fellow students who weren’t my friends or even acquaintances. One of Gunderson’s few African-American students, a funny dude named Derek, broke a Hoover Dam-sized wall of tension by loudly complaining to a waiter about the rare meat he’d been served by proclaiming “This thing is still mooin’!”. Those seconds were the first, and possibly only, time I actually felt comfortable the entire night.

If Dawn and I talked again during my last two weeks at school outside of brief pleasantries, I really don’t remember it. There was no after-party, no chugging wine coolers in the parking lot, no rented limo to take her down to Santa Cruz to make out on the beach, nothing like that. My lasting impression of her was that she was a hell of a “good sport” for accompanying me to something I had no business attending, nor any true desire to attend.

However, there was yet a second Senior Ball to take part in! In the week before mine, I was demurely asked by my Wienerschnitzel co-worker, Cheri, to accompany her to hers. Cheri — whose last name I’m sure I knew at the time, but don’t recall now — had the stones to actually ask me to my face, unlike me, who resorted to nervously calling Dawn, despite seeing her repeatedly at school every day.

Now I don’t pretend to know how it really all went down, but given the lateness of her invitation — the Valley Christian Senior Ball was only two weeks away — I got the sense that this time it was me who was the godforsaken 47th-round draft pick. Never mind asking out a junior, how about the dorky guy not from your school, from the greasy fast-food restaurant you worked at – a guy whom you’d never even flirted with before? Cheri was a shy, pretty, sweet and very Christian girl, and I have to believe that she too was suffering from the same internal torture/pressure I had.

I liked Cheri, I really did, but I was thrown totally off guard by her invite — which I of course accepted immediately (hey, I’m not a total heel). Perhaps I didn’t spring into action right away, or maybe it was her fault for asking me so late, but by the time I made it to the rented-suit store to grab something to wear, the only thing left was a foul, loud burgundy suit. Ashamed, I rented it nonetheless, hoping against hope that others might show up at Valley Christian’s soiree with the same color suit. (One other doofus did, but everyone else kept to smart & classy gray or black suits).

I’m able to call up even less about this event than my own, save for one jolting surprise. After the initial hors d’oeuvres were served, my extensive Senior Ball experience had trained me to expect that this was when we’d begin our dancing, likely to the Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Eurythmics hits of the era. I hated (um, hate) dancing, but you know — at least I had a little bit of recent background in Senior Ball dancin’.

Instead, a motivational speaker climbed up to the podium, and proceeded to deliver a stem-windingly unbearable thirty-minute speech about accepting Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior Into Our Hearts. As if these poor urchins weren’t suffering enough! Having been an atheist from the age of five, albeit a terribly naive one who didn’t expect such a performance at the Valley Christian High School Senior Ball, I quickly lodged a muffled complaint with Cheri about this turn of events. She didn’t exactly scowl at me, but she was decidedly less than pleased. I was not the Dawn to her Jay. I was, unfortunately, the Jay to her Cheri.

There was a dinner, I believe, and then a disturbingly quiet car ride home. Cheri never talked to me again at work (sensing a trend here?) aside from grunts of begrudging recognition, and then the summer was upon us. We both quit Wienerschnitzel right after the Ball and got on with real life, getting ready for college or to better ourselves with one last summer job.

I’d have passed on both of these things had I foreseen both my eventual discomfort and the anticlimactic nature of these Balls. I hold few regrets from this time, aside from wholly normal longings of the “if only I knew then what I know now” variety. I’d have brimmed with self-confidence, charm and outstanding sartorial choices. I’d have rejected the dog and pony show of the Senior Ball, and invited Dawn Collins — and hell, probably Cheri too — to drink Rolling Rocks behind the Oakridge Mall with me instead.

Maybe if they ever turn up on the internet, someday I will.