Note: a little fun this morning with a piece envisioning Jimmy Breslin writing about lunch with Herb Caen at Tadich Grill…
I went to San Francisco to meet a man who writes about the place the way a guy writes about a woman he still wants to sleep with after thirty years.
His name is Herb Caen. He has been telling this city about itself every morning since before most of the people reading him were born. They call him Mr. San Francisco. In New York we don’t hand out titles like that. In New York you earn the right to be called a son of a bitch, and you take it as a compliment.
We met at Tadich Grill. Open since the gold rush, and it still looks like it never got the news that things change. Dark wood. White tablecloths. Waiters old enough to remember when the bridge was new and still sore about it. The fish comes out of the water and onto the plate without a lot of conversation in between.
Caen was already sitting when I got there. Neat. Jacket. That California tan that never quite goes away, like the sun signed a contract with him. He stood up and shook my hand like a man who has shaken a lot of hands and still means it. I ordered a martini, because when you’re in another man’s town you drink what the town drinks, even when the town is wrong.
He had one too. Stoli, twist. He called it Vitamin V.
We talked about columns. About writing for a city that never sleeps against writing for one that takes long naps in the fog and calls it lifestyle. I told him New York will rob you and hold the door on the way out. He said San Francisco smiles while it’s doing it, then writes a nice item about your necktie.
He works in three dots. Little pieces, one after another, like a man feeding a parking meter all day instead of buying the car. Gossip, jokes, the name of whoever just opened a place on Union Street. I need more room than that. I need to turn around. He said my way was fine if you like carrying a piano up the stairs every day. I told him his was fine if you don’t mind never sitting down long enough to find out what you actually think.
The sand dabs came. Caen looked at his like a priest looks at the host. I ate mine like a man who skipped breakfast. Everything on that table was good — the bread, the butter, the light coming in off the street looking like it had been there as long as the wood and knew it.
He leaned in. “You know the difference between our two cities?”
I waited.
“In New York, the people are the story. Here, the city is the story. The people just get to live in it for a while.”
That’s a hell of a thing for a man to say about his own hometown — that the place is bigger than everybody in it, including him. I told him about the man who dug Kennedy’s grave, the one nobody else thought to ask. Caen nodded. He understood the assignment. It was the only time all lunch he didn’t have a joke ready.
We stayed too long. The martinis did their work. Outside, the fog came in soft and certain, the way it does out there, like it’s been rehearsing. Caen put his coat on like a man who has never once been in a hurry. I put mine on like a man who has somewhere else to be, even when he doesn’t.
On the sidewalk he tipped his hat. An actual hat. Nobody tips a hat in New York anymore. We’re too busy hailing something.
“Come back,” he said. “The city likes company.”
I walked toward the cable car line, the fog thick enough to make the streetlights float like they’d given up on the ground. Two men, two ways of loving a place. One writes it in little pieces that catch light for a second and go dark before the next one starts. The other digs until he finds the one man nobody else remembered to ask about, and doesn’t stop until the shovel hits something.
Neither of us was going to change. Neither was the city. That’s probably why we got along.
I caught the cable car and rode it a few blocks just to feel it move under me, the way you touch a thing to make sure it’s real. Behind me somewhere, a man who’d spent his life telling San Francisco it was beautiful was walking home through the fog he’d helped invent — which is either the best job in America or a life sentence, and he never once let on which.
I never did find out if he got tired of saying the same true thing a different way every morning. I didn’t ask. Some men you let keep their secret. Besides, I had my own city waiting, and it doesn’t smile at you while it robs you. It just takes the money and tells you to have a nice day.
