When Lady Luck smiles on you...

I went through a stretch when I was fifteen years old when I dropped acid every morning. First I'd eat breakfast. Then I'd catch the 18 Sloat bus. Somewhere around the Mexican restaurants & cheap detailing shacks on Noriega I'd pop the little yellow pill. The first faint waves of wah-wah-wah would hit as I was running up the front steps of Lowell high school. Then around 2nd period English, the hallucinations would kick in.

I mostly went to school because I have an ingrained respect for education. I come from a long line of high school English teachers and college professors, after all. But on those few occasions when I was feeling particularly rebellious I'd skip breakfast and hop off the bus at the San Francisco zoo, across the street from the Doggy Diner. The Doggy Diner is a now defunct restaurant chain whose signature was a giant revolving basset hound head in a chef's hat. Its clientele was just as sleazy as its food – on any given morning while I scarfed my poisonous hotdog, I'd get to eavesdrop on pimps, pushers and hookers as they reviewed their business stats from the night before. After breakfast, I'd pop my little yellow vitamin and begin the hike back up along the water's edge towards Playland At the Beach which was a particularly seedy amusement park on the far western edge of Golden Gate Park complete with all those status details – tawdry signs, animatronic human caricatures, rides designed by Stephen King – that made contemplating one's own ego death and inevitable mortality an absolute pleasure.

(Playland was ultimately bought by an eccentric millionaire named Jeremy Ets-Hokin, who tore it down and erected condominiums in its place. Jeremy Ets-Hokin had drug problems of his own. Thus a year or so later, I had the opportunity to attack him viciously in a Synanon game for despoiling a cherished childhood landscape after his wife and my mother, respectively – they were not the same person – committed us there. See? Everything comes full circle.)

Anyway, I hadn't thought about Playland in years. So you can imagine my emotions standing outside that anonymous storefront that those of you who live in the East Bay have driven past a hundred times when the front door opened and I found myself at… Playland Not At the Beach. That's right, JDK's business partner, a very genial but wildly eccentric gentleman had bought up many of Playland's signature props including Laughing Sal, the robotic harridan who used to preside over the funhouse. "Let me take you on the tour," he said and led me around through rooms and rooms of robots under dust sheets and penny arcade machines, though he wouldn't let me in the room where his eight cats hang out. The weirdest thing was that the storefront looked small from the outside but once inside, the place seemed to go on forever.

"Gotta penny?" he asked. "We'll see if Lady Luck is smiling on you today."

"That's not necessary," I told him. "I always take Lady Luck's smile as a given. Otherwise, I'd have been dead a long time ago."

Anyway, it was a very trippy environment for going through business spread sheets.