Raising a glass to the end of the road

By Greg Zeman
The Guardsman

As both a news editor and a columnist, I haven’t always lived up to my admittedly lofty aspirations.

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.”

In defense of my column and section: You can pull images and text from both of them quite easily, using silly putty. And with a little effort and patience, they can also be folded into a hat or a sailboat.

Oh, by the way…

Maybe it’s because I always write this column in the wee hours of the morning — after drinking hard liquor all night — but I almost forgot to mention that you’ll never see me again, at least not round these parts.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still see me at City College. In fact, thanks to all the time I dedicated to The Guardsman, instead of transferable credit class work, I’ll probably get to stay here even longer than I had planned.

Vesuvio

North Beach gets a bad rap, and it totally deserves it.

The “best” bar there is Vesuvio, a crumbling, tourist-infested monument to its own bygone social relevance.

This place shamelessly exploits the reputation of its long-departed “regulars” and its incidental proximity to City Lights bookstore in a desperate attempt to up the “cool” factor by making it look less like what it is  — a watering hole for Midwestern families lost on their way to Joe’s Crabshack.

The fact that Ken Kesey dropped acid there on occasion is pretty unremarkable — is there anywhere in the Bay Area that he didn’t?

And yes, Jack Kerouac and other beat generation luminaries drank here once upon a time, but I’m pretty certain they’d promptly vomit if they saw who drinks there now.

I considered channeling William Burroughs, typing a bunch of hyphenated obscenities on a typewriter, cutting them out individually by hand with a straight razor and using rubber cement to reorganize the pieces into a monolithic vulgarity to describe this place.

But then I ran out of Benzedrine and bug powder, so I decided to just say Vesuvio sucks.
So now we’re going back to the Lower Haight to drink beer!

Toronado

The Toronado is named after a car you are definitely not cool enough to even imagine yourself driving, so don’t feel bad if this bar intimidates you when you first walk in.

First things first, there is no liquor there. That isn’t a typo or a drunken hallucination on my part, they seriously do not have any hooch.

That said, whereas most bars have 10 or 15 beers and get away with boasting a “wide variety,” this place does like I did when I turned 21, and buys gallons of every kind of beer imaginable.

On an average day, they have about 200 kinds of beer available, with roughly 20 on tap.

Don’t go there and ask for PBR; they will seriously yell at you. In fact, don’t go there for anything you’ve already had. Just think of this as the Ocean Avenue Books of beer and get lost in the pursuit of unexplored brews.

As my final farewell to you, let me leave you with these words from Winston Churchill, a famous drunkard and British person who looked like a silly little bulldog.

“I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

At least that’s what I tell myself.

By the way…

If for some reason you don’t drink alcohol (and I highly recommend you start soon, because things are only getting worse) there’s something special and free for you on the corner of Scott and Waller, not far from the Toronado:  a labyrinth.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and I’m sorry for putting the image of David Bowie wearing impossibly tight, shiny pants in your head, but this isn’t a gigantic maze with an inappropriately attired Muppet fairy king or an axe-wielding novelist with cabin fever in it — it isn’t a maze at all.

You can get lost in a maze, and I wouldn’t do that to you. A labyrinth is an open “path” on the floor that has lots of twists and turns. But there are no wrong turns — it all leads to the same place in the center. I guess that’s a little fatalistic if you take it too seriously, but it’s a fun way to meditate and kill a few hours.

And if you have been drinking, you can still walk it, provided you can still walk.

Speaking of which, there’s another one a block up California from the Tonga Room at Grace Cathedral — actually, there’s two; one inside the church and one out front. So if you’ve been enjoying the tropical scenery down the block and decide that it’s sacrilege to stagger into a cathedral to get your kicks, there’s option B.

Then again, if you decide that option A is more your speed, you have my unequivocal, non-denominational blessing.

In the words of Father Sinatra, “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”

Amen Frank, Amen.

Brass Tacks:

Vesuvio 2/5

I mean, you can purchase liquor here, and there’s a place to anonymously yell at people, so two points, but just barely.

Toronado 4.5/5

Half a point off for lack of booze, which incidentally can be procured a stone’s throw away … but I don’t want to give away the precise location of my 12/5 star, top secret hideout in the Lower Haight, so I aint’ naming no names.