Dr. A has carried me back to old Virginny for a family visit. It’s my first car trip since before my major illness. I was nervous going in, but I did okay.

Thoughts of family have put me in a retrospective mood, so I’m republishing two San Francisco stories that began life as Odds & Sods segments. They became story time posts in 2022. I’m a compulsive rewriter so I cut the introductions from that year but kept the featured images and musical last words. It turned out well: The third time seems to be the charm as the saying goes.

The featured image by Tony Bennett has nothing to do with either post but he’s the man who left his heart in San Francisco, so it works for me.

We begin with a piece about some of the worst neighbors I ever had. Bros were the same back then as they are today. Mr. Truck was the ultimate bro.

Sunset For Mr. Truck

For several years, I lived in a tri-plex with some roommates in the Sunset District of San Francisco. The apartment was kind of a dump and we found ourselves in the middle of a running battle between a gay couple downstairs and some bros above us.

The bros were loud and deeply stupid. We called one of them Mr. Truck because, well, he had a truck at a time when urban pickup trucks were less common than they are today.

Mr. Truck was loud, moronic, and monosyllabic. One day we awakened to him fighting with one of his roomies. All he said was, “PROBLEM. PROBLEM.” It felt as if we were in the middle of this cute pop tune of that era:

Then there was the memorable occasion when Mr. Truck told his roomies to, “Fuck off. I’m getting a blow job.”

I am not making this up.

My then roommate James and I adopted a stray black cat who James insisted we name Spiny Norman after Dinsdale Piranha’s imaginary hedgehog friend. I went along because I was a Monty Python fan as well. Kitty looked nothing like this:

Unlike Dinsdale, I never nailed Mr. Truck’s head to the floor, but I was tempted.

Here’s the point of the story. Surprised there’s a point? Me too. After two years of putting up with the bros upstairs, things deteriorated in the building. One of the bros had relatives on the police force, so they never responded to calls. We warned the landlord that the bros were unhinged and possibly violent, but he just wanted his rent checks.

I moved elsewhere with my girlfriend and future first wife, leaving James and Spiny Norman behind. Not long after that, Mr. Truck died in a car wreck and his roommates trashed their place, even throwing a sofa through a window onto the sidewalk below. The window was closed; they smashed it and every other window in their crib. I was too young to call the slumlord and say, “I told you so, asshole,” but wish that I had.

End of this deeply stupid true crime story.

The last word goes to Graham Parker with a song about urban stupidity. D’oh.

Next, we have another tale of bad neighbors. It was published the week after Sunset For Mr. Truck.

Moonies Over The Owl Market

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.