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James
May, a 25-year-old political science major at Berkeley, is fast
asleep in Jack Kerouac Alley underneath some flattened cardboard
boxes he has scrounged from a recycling pile next to City Lights
Bookstore.
Walking down the alley carrying coffee
and doughnuts, Jesse Austin braces himself against the chilly, early-
morning air. It’s 4 a.m. May and Austin, both 25, are friends.
They attend the same school and share the same apartment in Berkeley.
Austin delivers a few kicks to the cardboard
covering his friend, sets the coffee and doughnuts down and waits
for May to wake up. They’re killing time before Vesuvio’s
bar opens in North Beach.
Vesuvio is among a dozen or so San Francisco
bars that throw their doors open early to welcome those, who, for
whatever reason, need something stronger than coffee at 6 a.m.
“It’s usually people that
have been up all night, people that are on their way to work, or
people that don’t have a life or don’t have a home,”
says Desiree Sherii, a 6 a.m. bartender at Diva’s Nightclub
and Lounge.
On this crisp Saturday morning a diverse
crowd in varying states of consciousness is spilling out of Vesuvio.
A gray-haired man is passed out facedown at a table by the door.
Sharply dressed men, off work from late-night North Beach strip
clubs, sip whiskey and chat with bartender Dave Grant. A woman dutifully
helps her elderly Chinese husband up to the bar so he can order
a drink, then stands behind him, gazing disapprovingly over his
shoulder as he finishes it.
On a pair of barstools at one end of the
bar, bike messengers “Slick” Nick Clayton, 51, and P.S.
Claw, 43, are drinking red wine, beer and Fernet Branca.
“I ride around five days a week
and I get real drunk on Friday nights,” Claw says, his voice
trailing off.
“We’re screw-ups, but other
than that we’re OK,” Clayton explains, hoisting a shot.
“This is breakfast at Vesuvio. We’ll go home and go
to sleep after this.”
At the opposite end of the bar, Austin
and May warm up with Jameson Irish whiskey and beer.
“We were in Oakland tonight and
decided at 3:30 in the morning that it would be a good idea to get
a cab and come to the city,” Austin says.
May’s motivation for coming to the
city at 4 a.m. and falling asleep in a cold alley is bluntly pragmatic.
“It’s being an alcoholic,”
he says, drawing a laugh from his friend. With the early morning
light growing brighter by the minute, he adds, “It’s
just another night.”
***
A healthy, well-scrubbed looking
crowd spills out of Starbucks at 18th Street and Castro on a blindingly
bright Monday morning. Twenty feet away, the steam rising off of
their coffee cups is replaced by plumes of cigarette smoke billowing
from a group of men standing outside Mix, a neighborhood bar.
The men, a group of older gay males, call
themselves “The Breakfast Club.” They look out for their
own, calling to check up on friends who haven’t shown up.
Breakfast consists of strawberry sugar wafers, microwave popcorn
and tortilla chips accompanied by ranch dip and salsa, washed down
with booze.
Frank Peterson, 84, has been coming to
this same spot, which has had various names and owners, since 1949.
His partner, Bill Reque, who worked as a freight forwarder in the
’50s and ’60s when San Francisco was a booming shipping
port, remembers a time when early morning drinking was socially
acceptable.
“Those longshoreman and truck drivers,
thousands of them, were really good customers for the bars that
opened at six o’clock in the morning,” Reque says. “If
I had to find some walking boss, I’d head for the nearest
bar to look for him. I’m trying to deliver papers for shipping,
and the guy would be in a bar.”
Richard Uland, a retired cop with the
San Francisco Police Department checks out the beat that he used
to walk back in the ’70s. Today he is delivering fliers around
town to let friends and acquaintances know about the funeral for
his mother, Mary Louise Uland, who died of cancer the week before.
“I come here in the morning,”
he says, “because they open up at six, and when I’m
on my bike ride I can stop and have coffee.” Uland appears
unfazed by the fact that Mix is a gay bar. “It doesn’t
matter what their persuasion is, they’re just old-time retired
guys,” he says.
***
Sandwiched between Fire Station
3 and a corner liquor store on a grimy stretch of Post Street, Diva’s
Nightclub and Bar bills itself as “The Premier Transgender
Nightclub in San Francisco.” Posters advertising upcoming
shows hosted by smiling transsexual divas with names like Little
Khim and Shelly Wilde hang in the brightly lit, mirrored lobby.
On a gray Monday morning, that sense of
cheer has a hard time penetrating through to the windowless bar.
Bartender Desiree Sherii fiddles
with the volume on a stereo pumping out 50 Cent and obscene remixes
of Britney Spears hits as an Asian transsexual with a harried look
on her face digs a nervous path between the bar, lobby and sidewalk.
Business is slow. Two male patrons, one young and the other older
and in an electric wheelchair, sit silent, nursing drinks.
Sherii, a pre-op transsexual who has been
living as a woman since she was 18, left New Orleans for San Francisco
four years ago.
“I got drunk one night, left the
bar, and here I am,” she says.
Now 26, she is on her second day as the
morning bartender after a three-year hiatus.
“My boyfriend works mornings, so
now we have time to be together,” she says. “I’m
not a morning person, but you can see how busy it is.”
Her biggest problems are loiterers, drugs
in the bathrooms and prostitution. Right on cue, she turns and yells
at a man standing in the lobby.
“You gotta get out of the lobby.
You can’t do that in the lobby.”
Sherii won’t elaborate on what the
man was doing. Instead, she utters a racial slur that’s all
the more surprising because there’s a black man seated four
feet away from her. When another black man enters the bar a few
minutes later, Sherii engages him familiarly in conversation.
***
Since opening in 1942, North Beach
bar Gino and Carlo has been a gathering place for the area’s
Italian-American community. Autographed pictures of Jake “The
Raging Bull” LaMotta and Frank Sinatra cast benedictions on
early morning pool players. Obituaries and death notices of people
with deep ties to the neighborhood and the city are tacked to a
bulletin board near the front door. Mary Louise Uland’s death
notice is among these.
“It’s a neighborhood bar,
kind of like Cheers,” says Greg Hearn, 56, a bar back. “The
mailman comes in, police come in.” The neighborhood beat cop
he’s been chatting with downs the last of his coffee, gathers
his citation book, police hat and nightstick from the chair behind
him, and heads out the door.
Laid off in December, Hearn found a new
job at Gino and Carlo, his regular haunt for the last 20 years.
“As the bar back here five days
a week,” he says, “I do the ice and get the booze for
the bartender.”
In between runs to the corner store for
Campari, the gray-haired Hearn sits at the bar, drinking pints of
Budweiser.
Hearn, 7-year-bartender Silvio Maniscalco
and many of the patrons say Gino and Carlo hasn’t changed
over the years, and they like it that way.
“People come in until they die,”
Hearn says. “They just keep coming in until they pass off.”
***
While the rest of the city angrily
slams snooze buttons, the denizens of 6 a.m. bars slam shots of
whiskey. Out on the sidewalk, dour-faced men and women trudge to
dead-end jobs, no doubt bitter that no matter how early they wake
up, someone already has the jump on them.
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