It’s time for another story pulled from a Saturday Odds & Sods post. This one is fairly recent but it’s an old story that is linked to last week’s deeply stupid true crime story.

Here we go again:

In the early 1980’s my first wife and I lived in a swell apartment on Bush Street in San Francisco. It was the opposite of the dump I described last week. The building was beautifully renovated and our flat had a Murphy Bed in the living room for guests. The downside was a lazy hippie manager named Michael something or other, man. We called him the Hippie Manager, man.

I did, however, remember the address, 1137 Bush Street. I’m not sure where the pictures I had of it are or if they were ever digitized so I stole a real estate listing picture for the featured image, but it looks the same. It’s the building in the middle.

It was a three-story walkup and we lived on the top floor. We were across the street from St. Francis Hospital. There was another less salubrious neighbor: the Unification Church had a pad for its members a few doors down. We were forever being invited over for mac-n-cheese by the Moonies.

I love me some mac-n-cheese but why not Korean food? I know why: Mac-n-cheese is comfort food and they wanted us to be comfortable before snatching our souls. We never accepted the invitation.

On the next block there was a small grocery store called the Owl Market. It was run by a gruff Korean guy who hated the Moonies as much as I did. That’s why he stopped grunting and began conversing with me.

One night I was in the Owl Market when we saw a Moonie snatched by deprogrammers. I turned to the proprietor, whose name I’ve forgotten, and said, “One less Moonie to invite me over for mac-n-cheese.”

He nodded, grunted, and said, “Try it with kimchi sometime. Makes it fit for a Korean.”

I’m not sure exactly how far the Moonie crib was from us. It might have been Two Doors Down. The last word goes to Dwight Yoakam.