Spandex Capers
an excerpt

It’s called Baghdad by the Bay. It has street hills so steep you walk them at a slant, slantier than rain falling in the wind. Neighborhoods are named Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill, and North Beach, which is not quite a beach, but a neighborhood for the sailors who came once and come yet, to spill out of their ships and meet up with rough women and get plenty to drink and eat. The piers of the Embarcadero are lined up at the foot of Broadway, the financial district equally distant, just down Kearney. In the days of the three martini lunch, that sector too found its way into the clubs and eateries of
Broadway, more frequently than today.
North Beach kept its edges rough as the palms of the deckhands who swarmed the strip called Broadway, bars becoming nightclubs, and growing between and among them the iconic habitats of the beats; coffee houses & bookstores, and the restaurants, many now gone.
The Alibi club is in the heart of Broadway, a cigar store on one side, sports bar on the other. It is to Broadway strip joints what the Mark Hopkins is to downtown hotels- a place that has stood up to time. In the case of the Alibi, it has stood up, turned its backside, lowered its panties, and slapped itself provocatively on the fanny, whereas the Mark Hopkins coyly and privately turns down the sheets and places a chocolate on the linens. If the Mark is an elegant old dame, fitted with brass and crystal and serving up ancient armagnac, the Alibi is a chorus line without the chorus, a lineup of touch-me-not showgirls who put the t in tease, and the house drink is beer, not that you can’t get a martini.
Welcome to the Alibi club, circa November 2007. Welcome to San Francisco, Baghdad by the Bay. The stock market has descended from its all time high by over 1000 points, and it’s not going up anytime soon. George W. Bush is in the White House, or out at his converted pig farm in Crawford, Texas, sighting on armadillos and lulled by the cicada chorus of wordless voices. The real estate market is non-existent in that houses are no longer sold, but foreclosed upon. Those who are not being financially drawn and quartered in the economic sector are filling cruise ships and night clubs, restaurants and ball parks, and getting ready to spend a couple billion dollars on holiday gifts, and more than the loose change in their pockets fanning their girlie fantasies at the Alibi.
The Alibi Club is about to get two new dancers, and while most of the patrons of that gin joint would not be kicking them out of bed, it is highly unlikely they would ever find them there in the first place. It is the foulness of the market that will bring the latest pole dancers to the Alibi, that and the infectious sense of adventure that tends to accompany endorphin highs.