Between Hard Rock Cafe and a Pretty Place

We flew up to San Francisco with our friends Rita and Morry Pynoos for our anniversary weekend.

My wife and I had spent a night or two in San Francisco during the war, but that was before credit cards, and we were very parsimonious.

Like almost every other outbound serviceman, I did take my wife to the Top of the Mark for a final drink before I sailed for the South Pacific. The Top of the Mark was the true jumping off place for the Pacific war.

This time we stayed at the Mark Hopkins, looking down on the glorious view which, though much has changed for the worse since the war, is still one of the world’s prettiest.

As Robert A. Jones noted in his column the other day, there is no longer any contest between San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco is a victim of its own narcissism. San Francisco turned to the past and ignored the future. Now that future belongs to Los Angeles.

All the same, it’s a nice place to visit. From our room we looked down on that imposing brownstone anachronism, the Pacific Union Club. Nothing has changed about it in 50 years, that I know of, except that the entrance is covered by more vines. It supposedly has a membership of 300 of San Francisco’s richest men--the heirs of Crocker, Stanford, Huntington and Hopkins--but I have never seen anyone enter or leave it. I have never seen a face in a window.

Below it lay a pretty little windswept park with stoic women lying about in bikinis, and a block beyond that the gray Gothic facade of Grace Cathedral. Out on the gray-green bay, half hidden by one of the new towers, lay Alcatraz Island with its bone-white prison ruins. One red tower of the Golden Gate Bridge arose, only partly blocked, in graceful strength. One wonders why anyone would ever have tried to escape a place with the view that Alcatraz must have had. Below us the pretty colored banners hanging from the facade of the Fairmont snapped in the wind.

For lunch we took a cab to the Hard Rock Cafe, at Van Ness and Sacramento. “Hard Rock Cafe?” the taxi driver said with disgust. “Forty airports go out ahead of me and I get the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Morry commiserated that maybe his next fare would be to the airport. “No way,” the driver said. “I get back, 40 more airports will go ahead of me. I’ll get another Hard Rock Cafe.”

He said it wasn’t all bad, though. “I’ve been to Sacramento. I’ve been to the Oregon border. I pick up this little lady, she wants me to run her here, there. I do her a few favors, run a few errands. She likes me. She says she’s going out of town. She says she wants me to stay in her condominium. She has this $1 million condo. She gives me the key. She says, ‘I want you to drive my BMW while I’m gone.’ Listen, you think this is some rich old lady? Right? Look at this.”

He whipped out a photograph of a good-looking young blonde. She looked familiar. The photograph was a standard 8x10 studio glossy. Oh, well, San Francisco is a city of fantasies.

Like its namesake in Beverly Hills, the Hard Rock had a long line of young people waiting to buy souvenirs at its doorway store. We had reservations and were soon seated. Being somewhat over 20, I don’t know the reason for the Hard Rock cafes’ success. They are always packed. The decor is early Elvis. The sound is hard rock. The noise level probably deafens employees in one or two years. But there is a sense of excitement about the place, and the food is excellent. Unless you are just out of high school, almost everyone in the cafe will be of another generation.

I couldn’t get a fix on San Francisco because I imagine most of the customers were from someplace else--probably Los Angeles. T-shirts. Jeans. Shorts. Miniskirts. Sweat shirts. Reeboks. In the daytime in the tourist areas you are not likely to encounter any true San Franciscans. They have simply abandoned the city to the tourists.

Going back, our cab driver was Nigerian. He wasn’t talkative. We asked him how Nigeria was different from San Francisco. He thought a moment.

“Warmer,” he said.