66% of THE JO-TEL is “losing it Scalia style”

In college, I never went to San Francisco except on a bus with a bunch of nascent yuppie sorority chicks. I had seen parts of the city but I had no idea how I got there or where Sinbad’s was in relation to the Trap Door and the Iron Horse. When I graduated and matriculated to the smallest room in what was then called “Casa V,” I had to get extensive directions to the building despite having been to four or five parties here. The point being that for some reason, even though I lived in Berkeley for four and a half years, San Francisco was another world that I knew very little about.

I think the first time I heard about Bay to Breakers was when I was working at [Large Evil Corporation] that first year. The British kids had all gone to it and it had rained on them, and there had been a guy in a mask with a huge schlong doing the helicopter dance. It sounded… rainy. Then a year or two later I knew somebody else who was going, and being what I considered a San Franciscan, I was down. Then the weekend in question rolled around and I realized that they were talkin’ about getting up at 6 on a Sunday. NOT LIKELY. Another Bay to Breakers lost in the sands of time.

Then one year the whole Jo-tel decided to go. We made our Underage Drinking Sosiety sign and picked out our little kid outfits. But I was pretty whipped back then and Sunday morning found me lazing in Rockridge, East Bay. By the time The Quail and I met up with the rest of the group (why don’t we call him Thrill on here again?) they were half-way through the park, Shark was naked and beligerent, and the clouds were rolling in. In spite of all of this it was still one of the best days of that year. That day I realized that there was almost no ceiling on this thing. Bay to Breakers could be as fun as you cared to make it.

Last year we did it even better, with two carts, a bigger group, and diapers. My diaper came off near the De Young and I tasted of pure Liberty. That day ended up in naked rain scorning by MUNI drivers and taxi cabs as detailed in the archives, yet it was still up there with Turd Ferguson’s wedding for best of 2006. [The Goose-Turd wedding post is still in the works. Miss Manners says you have a year after the date to write the wedding post. This goes for the India post as well.]

This year we actually got our shit together nearly a week in advance. PETE flew up from L.A. on Friday. Sadly, young Thrilliam was in NYC for the weekend getting a job, but he never seems to get naked anyway, and plus that allowed PETE the use of his bed. I had been talking it up all year to anyone who would listen, and I had managed to convince my little brother to come down from Portland for the weekend. Bain rounded up a ragtag band of misfits including frenchman Le Ben, Nick AKA Pablo Avocado (he’s got guac in his veins), and the V-bird. They arrived in a rental Impala at about 5:30 Saturday morning, and despite the existence of about five couches and two lay-z-boys in the Jo-tel, mostly ended up crashing on the floor because PETE passed out watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force reruns on our living room couch instead of sleeping in Thrill’s vacant bed. And he passed out on top of two pillows. Patsy contributed her own sister Jenny and friend Jessica. There were no vacancies in the Jo-tel that weekend my friends. Many new Jouseguests to add to the list. The stage was set.

The theme this year was Never-Nudes. If you don’t know you better axe somebody. Judging by the captions on random people’s flickr pictures of our sign, a lot of people don’t know. There were many along the lines of “what a relief from all the naked people! lol!” and shit. Wait till the park, fair citizens. Wait till the park. With a lot of help from Reid and Johnny D., I rigged up a tall support for the sign out of 1″ schedule 40 PVC pipe and zip ties. Everyone actually woke up at 6:00 and started getting dressed. Johnny D. drove me down to Embarcadero and dropped me off with the shopping cart (thank you Shark, Patsy, and Trader Joe) and the kegs so I could start putting it all together. We were able to coordinate with cell phones and everyone arrived at the rendezvous point intact and in cut-off denim shorts. Here we added Kristin and a couple other ladies from Bimbo’s 365 club with a family portrait frame. Now I will go into bullet mode.

 

- Barry Balls and other kickball Pedros walked by dressed as a mari-crotch-i band.
- We filed through the maze of cyclone fencing towards the official start. My first B2B starting line! Approximately 2.5 beers deep at this point, 8:00am
- Shark viciously berates the God-squadders with their “The Wages of Sin is Death” placards. A B2B Tradition!
- I had to pee pretty bad at this point, but I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to use a port-a-john on the best outdoor urban peeing day of the year! I hold it till 1st & Howard. Big parking lot, big blue wall.

 
- The sign is working great: 10 ft in the air, we can find our beer after peeing! This is important for me because my bladder only holds one beer.
- We run into Noah’s ark. Soon-to-be-Jouseguest Shannon (red-winged condor) joins us. I kiss Alison, the other red-winged condor. This turned out to be a very kissy B2B.
- Around 5th St. (plus or minus two streets), we find Snake, slithering this way and that. Incredible good luck in finding and running into people we know this year.

- At this point I switch, inexplicably, from present to past tense.
- We’ve also got Steve, Nenita, and possibly other people I don’t remember in our crew by this point. Steve is the guy playing pocket pool in the background of my primal scream picture.
- At the gas station where the route turns right, some 40-year-old women asked us what our sign meant. We explained, then they asked if they could have some beer. Thinking quickly, I said, “OK, but you have to make out with me first.” One of them said “I can’t, but Nancy will! [names have been made up to protect the innocent]. Nancy stepped up and took one for the team. Did I mention that the weather was totally perfect that day?

- We ran into Brooke, Diesel and Salty by Popeye’s Fried Chicken. I was glad this happened early because Brooke had seen us naked last year and it was very traumatic for her.
- Somewhere around here Patsy put an empty plastic ice bag over my head and started choking me on the ground. I made some pretty realistic convulsions and then went still. I think this might have disturbed some people, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
- We charged up the Hayes Hill. Nothing really happened up there that I can recall.
- We rolled down the Hayes Hill. There seemed to be far fewer floats and other large conveyances this year. That was fine, it just made our shopping cart look that much more impressive.

- In the panhandle, I saw my old friend from Wilson High, Trinh. She was also stoked to see the cut-offs still intact. I think Oregonians should be cooler with nudity than they are. Of course, it’s colder up there.

- We rolled up on Kristin’s roommates’ band The New Up just as they were ripping into the instrumental jam in the middle of a Radiohead cover, which caused hard-core dance partying and led to Shark taking his shorts off a good eight blocks earlier than normal.
Round about this time, my memories of events occasionally start to conflict with eye-witness accounts. Let’s press on though.

- I kissed an attractive zombie. Braaaaaaiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnsssssss!
- We ran into Becky B., also from WHS. Her skin-tight 70’s disco pantsuit was in full effect. Goldy, you were there too, and Aunty Em was there, and Toto too!
- Wordpress just eradicated the next five paragraphs. My spirit is broken.
- Let’s try this again.
- So now we’re in the park. We had been walking all morning and we needed a little rest, so we pulled off to the side and sat down in the grass. But then these two guys came over from a nearby group and asked us if we could go chill out somewhere else. Because they had little kids in their group and two or three of us were naked. What the hell, you bring your kids to B2B and you don’t expect to see any naked people chilling out on the grass forty feet away? It’s not like the nudity was lewd or lascivious in any way, that I can recall. We moved across the street.

- There we ran into a group of younger alumni from the fraternity who were dressed as the Tri-Lams from Revenge of the Nerds. But they had beer bongs, so that was cool.
- Meanwhile, my friends Katie and Tim from the India trip (see the upcoming post about the India trip that I’ve been meaning to write) were laughing their asses off at Shark, who spent fifteen minutes running around the lawn to the side of the conservatory of flowers vaulting over unsuspecting people sitting on the ground. Oh yeah and he was naked.
- The kissing started to pick up. I think in an effort to get Shannon to kiss Pablo Avocado, I kissed Pablo Avocado. It made sense at the time. By the way, I’m totally straight.

 

- From now on there is no continuity, just a series of images in no particular order.
- I took off my shorts. I asked Shark where he had put his shorts when he took them off. He said he gave them to Patsy. I think I gave mine to Patsy. I haven’t seen those shorts or that speedo since. However, later that afternoon Reid got a call from a guy who had found my wallet on the ground just as a shady-looking guy was about to make off with it. I got my wallet back from the good samaritan the next Wednesday.
- I also almost lost my phone and camera that weekend. On the Friday night before B2B PETE was in town and we went to this The Bar Book party at Le Colonial. PETE took off his pants and got kicked out. I went back in to get his sweatshirt, took off my pants, and walked out without incident. I think they only had the one employee who knew about the pants rule. So then we walked home with our pants over our shoulders, and then next morning my cell phone was no longer in them or anywhere else in my room. Then Saturday we drank this curiouser, curiouser tea in the park and traipsed around all afternoon. I remembered taking a picture of PETE on Fulton St., and then we got into a crazy cab from Kerblekhistan and went to the Jug Shop to pick up our kegs 5 minutes before they closed, and in the morning I couldn’t find my camera anywhere.
- Then on Monday, after I had sent an email to everyone I know to get their phone numbers again, I found my phone sitting on my bed. No idea who put it there, don’t even care. My camera turned up in the unlikeliest of places — the pocket of the pants I had been wearing that day! I’m an idiot who almost lost his phone, camera and wallet in a single weekend, but didn’t actually lose any of them.
- Just past the De Young, we ran out of beer in our 2nd keg. (To see the keg in question, visit the Jo-tel any time in the next 8 months - the kegs are at the top of the stairs.) We stopped in the field opposite the purple head sculpture and started playing Naked Red Rover. I really don’t know if this could happen in any other major American city. What a town!

- At this point we split up. Shark and Patso stayed by the museum, I went with some other people deeper into the park. Don’t remember a whole lot about it, but reports and third-party photos indicate that there was more kissing, and that some friends of Thrill’s ran into us and were traumatized by the nudity. I remember realizing that I once again had no pants and no access to pants, and then PETE gave me back my long underwear and I think I got some tighty whiteys somewhere too, and we walked back to Alison’s BBQ in the Haight where I was tackled by three girls and forced to wear a diaper, spilled half a beer on the carpet in the hallway, was subsequently slapped repeatedly by Sylvia for said spillage (my relationship with Sylvia is based solely on her having slapped me on all four of the occasions when we’ve met), and generally made an ass of myself.
- Update! Here I rode Alison’s friend’s skateboard for a block or two down Haight.
- Went to Nick & Rusty’s house and played a little ping-pong.
- Got back to the Jo-tel & BBQ’d up some meatloaf burgers and ended the night drifting in and out of consciousness on the Lay-Z-Boy during Poltergeist, which is like four hours long.

Overall, it was another amazing Bay to Breakers. Cheers to all the people who put in the effort to travel to San Francisco for it, front money for the kegs, steal the shopping carts, buy the costumes, print the signs, etc. Here’s what E.M. Forster had to say about the whole thing:

And then the flimsy framework of the court broke up, the shouts of derision and rage culminated, people screamed and cursed, kissed one another, wept passionately. Here were the English, whom their servants protected, there Aziz fainted in Hamidullah’s arms. Victory on this side, defeat on that - complete for one moment was the antithesis. Then life returned to its complexities, person after person struggled out of the room to their various purposes, and before long no one remained on the scene of the fantasy but the beautiful naked god. Unaware that anything unusual had occured, he continued to pull the cord of his punkah, to gaze at the empty dais and the overturned special chairs, and rhythmically to agitate the clouds of descending dust.

-Hip E.