My mother, my dog Jenny and I drove from my mother’s house on the Navajo reservation to San Francisco to visit my sister who was living with my aunt Sally. We stopped in Las Vegas and I won about fifty dollars playing video poker because I was scared to hit the black jack table and we took Jenny for a walk around the Hoover Dam parking lot and we stayed in a pretty scary motel in Bakersfield. I remember the traffic picking up about fifty miles outside of Frisco and the one - way streets and double - parking on hills and the city was dirty and windy and almost but not quite cold. We went to Alcatraz on a boat and my sister worked on pier thirty - nine in a little shop that sold over priced junk and I bought some bunk hash from a bum on the pier. My aunt threw a party one of the nights we were there and there was dope but not enough and one of the girls attending said she slept with Richard Brautigan and I don't know if she was bragging or making a point or stating a fact and as a matter of fact I saw a movie about fishing in Key West that he and Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane had bit parts in and according to what I saw if I was a girl I wouldn’t sleep with any of them even for money and the wind blew hard enough they had to close the Golden Gate bridge and my mother, my cousin and I had to get into the city to meet my aunt and some of her friends for a birthday party for her boyfriend and we had to drive through Berkley and it took forever. We ended up in a fancy joint and had a real nice dinner and one of my aunt’s friends said that an hour lunch break was not enough to satisfy her Pac Man fix. The next day I went to a MC Escher exhibit and my sister and a distant relative and I took the Bart under the bay to Oakland for a Grateful Dead show and we had to leave early to catch the Bart back and we stayed in my mother’s gay cousin’s boyfriend’s apartment and the next day or a couple days before we drove up to the top of a mountain and walked through the Presidio and went to Stinsin Beach and took Jenny for a walk beside the water. On Christmas morning my aunt's boyfriend gave me a bike racing hat that I thought was pretty cool but I had no where to wear it because I think bikes are for children and teenagers that don't have driver's licenses and on the way back to Arizona my mother dropped me off at my father’s condo in Telluride and my dad said where did you get this hat and I said Sally's boyfriend and my dad asked if he was a fag and and I said no he's cool and after spending a couple months with my father and his crazy wife I ran out of money and could not find a job and drinking in the Fly Me To The Moon Saloon wasn't free so I joined the Army and twenty years later I picked up a girl in my cab and asked her where she was from and she said the Bay area and I took her to a hotel in Chandler and we sat at the pool and talked for a couple hours. She told me I couldn’t come up to her room but she gave me her phone number and told me I should visit and I showed up about three weeks later with a six pack of Heineken and slept on her couch and the next day we went to San Jose and went from mall to mall returning stuff she bought but didn’t want and went out to dinner in a sports bar. I had fish and chips and a couple beers and she had two pieces of pizza and four glasses of wine and I thought she was going to get a DUI on the way back to her place or crash the car. I thought that’s just my luck cause I figured she would let me sleep in her bed that night anyway she got us home and we slept together and I remember her walking around the next morning in her panties and a T shirt and smoking cigarettes in the backyard and it was always windy. My aunt invited us over for super and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to come with me but I think she was scared if she didn’t I wouldn’t come back and she was probably right. We were early so we killed time in a tavern in the woods and a bar on the bay and my uncle cooked us a vegetarian dinner and I talked to him about the Giants and he told me that there is no way the American people will re – elect George Bush and I left the next day and haven’t been back. A couple years later the girl called (I don’t remember her name) maybe Maria and she told me she was driving to Texas and that she would like to stop in Phoenix to see me. I told her I was married but I wasn’t but I am now to a girl who grew up in Frisco a small town in the Rocky Mountains and she loves San Francisco and she would like me to take her there but I would rather go to Milwaukee .
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