February 26 2003

GUY AT THE farmers market told me they'll make steel drums right here in the city here, sometimes.

"Where?" –"Top of Mount Davidson," he said. –Well, pounding out and firing up old oil barrels on an urban mountaintop sounded all elflike and magic foresty to me. I knew I wouldn't see anything, but I just wanted to go up there and look around and, you know, imagine. Smell the smells, maybe chuck a rock, piss on a tree ...

I didn't even know if I knew where Mount Davidson was, let alone how to get to the top of it, but I guessed I could always get me a Sherpa.

On the very day I laid down my crutches and walked again, I was bumming around town with country music legend Earl Butter. We had breakfast at Just for You and then went to the flea market, and then to the Park Bench Cafe, and then we didn't know what to do after that.

"Know any Sherpas?" I said.

He didn't, but he thought he knew where Mount Davidson was, and had in fact been to the top of it himself, he thought. He remembered a place to park and a footpath to the summit, but we couldn't for the life of us find none of the above.

I'm not even sure, in retrospect, that we ever exactly found Mount Davidson. We found Twin Peaks. And then we found Twin Peaks again and again and again, from different angles. And then we finally worked our way into the Sunset and up something else that wasn't Twin Peaks, I don't think. We kept going up and up, looking for a place to park and a footpath, and when we started finding empty oxygen canisters and skeletal remains, we decided to turn back.

"Not everyone makes it their first try," Earl Butter said, consolingly. "The important thing is to be smart and keep your chin up. Be proud of how far you got."

Then we started talking about lunch. Earl Butter thought he remembered seeing a good-looking little place on the corner of Taraval and Twenty-Somethingth. When we got to the place he was thinking of, it was good-looking enough, but it was a Laundromat – so we turned around and headed back toward 19th, where there are lots of good-looking restaurants that are actually restaurants.

I particularly liked the looks of a little hole-in-the-wall called the Bay Pastry, Coffee and Dim Sum. In the window of which we stood for a long time, tugging on our beards, looking at the menu. It was as if we had come down off the mountain into a different decade, going backwards. Everything was a buck-something, or two-bucks-something. Dim sum stuff was like 50¢. Nothing was three dollars, I don't think.

When we were all done pinching ourselves, we went in and ordered: fried rice and an egg roll ($1.70), chow mein and three dumplings ($2.30). We also got shrimp cakes for I don't remember how much (cheap), and the guy gave us a couple of dessert things (free). They were like little tiny pastry pies with yellow stuff in the middle, and, sadly, they might have been the best part of the meal. Can't say for sure 'cause neither one of us touched them. Our appetites were ruined almost as soon as we sat down with our tray full of paper containers full of some of the sorriest Chinese food either one of us has ever witnessed. Mind you, Earl Butter's from Utica, N.Y, and I'm from Youngstown, Ohio, so we've witnessed some sorry-ass Chinese food in our day.

Well, what do you want for a buck, two bucks? you say.

Not much. But we do ask that please can't everything please be at least hot. Please. I wanted so badly to love this place. It seemed like a good little place, the prices ... The guy working there seemed like a good guy. He tried. He put the shrimp cakes into a microwave. Maybe he forgot to turn it on.

The fried rice and the chow mein came out of steam-table bins, but there must not have been much steam under them. The chow mein was coated with congealed yuckiness.

The dumplings came out of one of those big round bamboo layer cakes, and they were, well, lukewarm, I guess. The shrimp one was actually edible. Of the other two, one had warmish ground pork in it, and the other had the same, only I'm not even sure it was cooked.

We saw an old guy outside going through the trash, and we tried to give him our whole meal, but he didn't want it either. After that, we went and found a hill, Golden Gate Heights, and we climbed up the steps to the top and I peed on a tree.

Bay Pastry, Coffee and Dim Sum. 1018 Taraval (at 20th Ave.), S.F. (415) 681-6814. Mon.- Tues. and Thurs.-Fri., 7 a.m.-6 p.m.; Wed., 7 a.m.-2 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 7:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible.