Barbary Coast Ranger

I’m walking around Russian Hill with Amy, and this is before we spent all afternoon drinking, and two things jumped out as noteworthy.

1. There seem to be a lot of missing pet flyers up around town these days and . . .
2. The big set of paw prints we saw

We’re walking past a car when Amy stops and points at the car’s hood. You can see paw prints outlined in the dust and dirt and Amy, who has two cats, says “Those are way too big to be a cat’s prints.”

I lean over the hood and say, “But dogs don’t usually jump up on car hoods . . . ” and we look at the prints and then look at each other and say “Coyote.” Suddenly all those missing pet fliers made sense.

Coincidentally, I was in Texas later that week and saw a display on critter footprints out at McKinney Falls State Park. The coyote prints sure look like what I saw on the hood of that car. Hold on to your yip dogs Russian Hill: Wile E. is on the prowl and your dog is not nearly as fast as the Road Runner.

Picture credit is from emdot on Flickr under creative commons attribution copyright. No it was not taken in San Francisco and, like an idiot, I forgot to get pictures of the prints on the hood of the car.

Two couples having dinner at Harrys on Fillmore in San Francisco:

Couple #1: Our retirement plan is to win the lottery; what’s yours?

Couple #2: Jump off the [Golden Gate] Bridge.

Couple #1: You win.

San Francisco is a city with great history and historical characters but neither the history nor the characters are, shall we say, evenly distributed. Noe Valley, home of the door with this historic plaque, evidently prides itself of being a quiet neighborhood.

From the back of the 41 Bus:

Woman: “. . . and then we’ll go out. We’re normally out till 4 or 5 in the morning . . . ”

Man #1: “That’s pretty late.”

Woman: “Yeah, plus he likes to be in bed by 10, especially when he’s going to be drinking the next morning. Ohh, this is my stop.”

Woman gets off bus.

Man #2 to Man #1: “Dude, you should set that up.”

Man #1: “Well, we’re both married to other people . . . ”

Man #2: “Dude, but it’s San Francisco.”

Man #1: ” . . . plus we work together.”

Man #2: “Oh! Triple whammy.”

The Barbary Coast Ranger’s deadfall of the week is: Li Po.

Li Po is what a Chinatown bar should look and feel like, so it’s all the more amazing that it actually exists in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s a little seedy, a little exotic, and, even though half the juke box is Chinese songs, Patsy Cline was playing when sweetie and I walked in.

Li Po is actually the name of a famous Chinese Poet. I’m not sure if the bar is actually named after him, but it seems likely since Li Po was “. . . best known for the extravagant imagination and striking Taoist imagery in his poetry, as well as for his great love for liquor.” [Thanks Wikipedia!]

The interior is perfect: old Chinese themed murals, faded under a thick film of nicotine from the days before cancer scared us, huge lazy Chinese lantern lamp shades that look like hot air balloons that dropped in and have been promising to float away after ‘just one more beer’ for the last 30 years, and an impressive Buddha shrine in the corner. There’s an area of red vinyl booths in the back that give the area an incongruous look, like you’re in a swank, 1930’s Shanghai Denny’s.

You may walk in and find a tourist asleep with his head on the bar, as we did, but locals wander in too. Li Po is dark all the time and has a the required arcane path to the restroom that feels like they white washed the old route to the opium den downstairs.

San Francisco, which packages and sells its past with the best of them, conveniently omits the Barbary Coast from much of its history. An area world famous for drugs, prostitution, violence and liquor is commemorated with . . . a pastry shop that isn’t even in the Barbary Coast: instead it’s just off Union Square.

It’s tough to pick just one or two things to say about how the coast was, but Asbury once again rises to the challenge with this:

The crime and debauchery of the early days of the Barbary Coast was accompanied by the gurgle of enormous quantities of liquor . . .

He goes on to point out that, in 1890, there were 3,117 legal places selling beer, wine, and booze, one for every 96 residents of the city. There were an additional couple thousand unlicensed speakeasies bringing the number to one for every 60 people or so. Thirty years later, when prohibition went into effect and the city’s population had more than doubled, the number of licensed alcohol sellers still did not exceed 3000.

They were some drinking, whoring, violent fools back on the Barbary Coast and their bawdy history is commemorated with . . . a pastry and coffee shop. That’s just not right. On the upside, it is supposed to be a pretty good coffee shop though.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is both an aesthetic and engineering marvel, and is justifiably famous for these qualities. These same qualities, however, make it a mecca for jumpers. Walking across the bridge, one sees these signs at frequent intervals:

I’m a little ambivalent about suicides: the right to kill yourself is murky ground for libertarians. The tragedy of this plaque, on the North End of the bridge, is however unarguable:

Two year old Gauri Govil was walking across the bridge with her family in 1997 when she tripped and fell through a gap between the metal I beams that separated the sidewalk from the roadway. It appears that this had simply never happened before so the gap had not been regarded as a safety hazard. She didn’t fall into the water, she actually fell on to the ground, which brings up an interesting point:

You always think of jumpers going off the middle of the span into the water but, if you really want to kill yourself, it seems like you’d be much surer if you go off the bridge onto the rocks at either end:

I guess, however, that if you were willing to do this, you’d just as soon jump off a building onto concrete. There must be something about landing in water.

A lot of people do get talked down. I found out about this, and about one guy who did it over 30 times, through a previous blog posting.

Eastern European IT Consultant Girl out with American co-workers for happy hour at in North Beach:

EEITCG (loudly): I love money!

(awkward silence ensues)

EEITCG (still loudly, as if it explains everything): I’m from Eastern Europe!

(awkward silence continues until someone jumps in with a “how about those Mets!” style change of subject)

later on in a separate conversation about how there was a basketball team staying at her hotel:
EEITCG: They’re nice, they’re just freakishly f^*king tall . . . they scare me.

Murio’s is dark all day with no pesky sunlight allowed inside. To brighten up the interior, Christmas lights are up and on all year round. My bartender has a spiked mohawk and is handing me a 24 ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This is my favorite Haight-Ashbury dive.

Murio’s tends to be full of bikers, stoners, people who dress like they are a week’s minimum wage away from homelessness and so on and so forth. It is however a friendly and fun loving dive. The only guy who’s tried to steal from me in San Francisco was actually the best dressed guy I think I’ve ever seen in Murio’s (curiously enough, the only tagger I’ve seen in San Francisco was a well dressed white guy too, but that’s another story . . . )

The music is pretty good: San Francisco mohawk types tend to know their rock, rockabilly, and punk pretty well. Murio’s also has the ceiling papered with caricatures of locals, often with witty comments appended by the one being caricatured. My favorite was “Thanks for the double chins, F^*k you.”

Oh yes and, in the true dive tradition, the bathrooms are frightening, especially if you’re sober.

Given that San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was rife with crime and criminals, you’d expect it to be a rather well armed place and you’d be right.

Cops on the Coast beat were selected for being big men and were armed with the nightstick and pistol, familiar today, and also with a foot long knife for close quarters work. One policeman became famous for allegedly cutting the head off a thief who was caught robbing a store.

Rangers, hoodlums, and criminals also carried guns but favored truncheons, brass knuckles, large knives (often worn around the neck or under the arm on a lanyard) and slungshot which is, of course, why slungshots are illegal in many cities to this day . . .

Wait, go back: not a slingshot but a slungshot?

This was actually a favored weapon of the 19th century ruffian but it fell out of favor in the early 1900s and, between then and the advent of the internet, could be considered obscure.

The Slungshot was, fittingly enough for the coast, nautical in origin. Sailors needing to heave lines used a knot called a Monkey’s Fist (or Monkey’s Paw). This knot, tied at the end of a rope, added weight and made it easier to throw.

In the spirit of Kaizen, some genius realized that tying the monkey’s paw around a lead shot, such as would be used in the grape shot many sailors were familiar with, would make it even easier to throw. Maybe by accident, maybe by design I assume that shortly thereafter some other genius realized how much it hurt to be hit by such a slungshot and a weapon was born.

A slungshot was a short length of rope with the shot, in the monkey’s fist, at one end and a wrist loop at the other.

The slungshot was silent and easily carried. It could be thrown into a victims face, rather like a yo yo or like snapping a towel: you held on to your slungshot using the wrist loop so that you didn’t loose it and could, instead, just reel it in and then hit the other guy again. It could also be used like a medieval flail for just whaling on people. A few intrepid souls still make them:

In modern times you’ll see something that looks very similar to a slungshot, except without the shot, used as a dog toy or, interestingly enough, as a parachute pull cord (the Monkey’s Paw is easy to grab and pull).