December 2006 Archives

Gift-wrapping and presentation is a big part of a Keane family Christmas. At some point in the distant past, my older sister Megan developed an interest in origami and began shaming everyone with her holiday presentations. First it was standard origami flowers, but grew more elaborate every year. She started making her own wrapping paper, attaching folded paper animals to the packaging, and generally making all of us look like chumps. The high point came when Megan gave me a video set of The Usual Suspects, wrapped in paper adorned with Verbal Kint's various monologues (my favorite part was the flap that read "Orca fat") and topped with a paper coffee mug and fake coffee spill.

My little sisters and I could not compete with that, nor could we even try. She was years ahead of us. We had neither the discipline nor the fine-motor skills to catch up. So, we focused on making funny cards.

I don't mean to condemn the artistic skills of my younger sisters. Both of them can draw, and both can wrap competently. I had to rely on jokes envisioning the North Pole as Pleasant Hill, and insults to other family members because I can't even draw a car.

Eventually, cards became more anticipated than the gifts themselves. We used to stay up late on Christmas Eve to finish wrapping presents. Now we stay up late desperately coloring in our cards, figuring out just the right colored pencil to best complete a rude caricature of Grandma. Grandma is not allowed to see many of the holiday cards.

In the same way that punk rock emerged as a response to the perceived excesses of 1970's rock, our bare-bones holiday wrapping aesthetic was a direct answer to Megan. It only got worse over the years. One year, all my gifts were wrapped in the Sunday comics. Another year, I used aluminum foil, which was both gross and mildly dangerous to the recipients' hands. For birthdays, no one bothered to wrap gifts, choosing instead to fold the presents up in blankets or towels we found lying around the house.

This year, Molly has broken new ground by wrapping her gifts in ads. Not even magazine or newspaper ads, but rather Safeway mailers. She confessed that she had to do a lot of double- or triple-wrapping, because she managed to find wrapping material that was somehow less solid than newsprint. My gift was wrapped in the back pages of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, perhaps to indicate that, were I disappointed by my gift, I could console my myself with an Asian Muscle Massage at competitive prices.

"Wash your hands after you unwrap the presents," she warned. "I found that Guardian in the recycle bin."

Since Molly lives in a forest, works at a homeless shelter, and makes approximately $12,000 per year, not counting her food stamps, we don’t mind her limitations. Her cards featured no art, just top ten lists. The "cards" were actually just scraps of paper she’d torn off the bottom of her mail. Her lists went over well, especially the two that dealt with an agreement between my parents that my father can wear a particular ugly sweatshirt in the garage, but not in the house.

Molly has raised the bar severely for future Navidad cards by using actual trash. There's no way my wrapping is getting fancier, so I am already planning for next year, when my family members will get cards written on torn pieces of men's underwear I buy at Goodwill. With a faded Sharpie, I will scrawl, "This Christmas, you can kiss my ass". And it will be beautiful.

Earlier this week, my favorite taqueria in Pleasant Hill burned down after a fire in the attic. I've eaten at El Tapatio at least fifty times in my life, so it's sad to know it's now merely a burned-out shell of its former self.

El Tapatio was located only a few blocks from our high school, across the street from Diablo Valley College. That shopping center was nowhere near upscale. Some saw the whole center as only a shortcut to the more expansive mini-mall behind Golf Club Road, which featured a Safeway, a Baskin-Robbins, a Round Table, and a McDonald's. However, the center had two of the most important restaurants of my formative years, El Tapatio and Chef Burger. El Tapatio was for the afternoons, and Chef Burger was for breakfast and late-night dining. Our visits to Chef Burger grew so frequent that one friend eventually created a pager code that simply meant, "I'm at Chef Burger", like a late-90s version of the bat signal. (For the record, the code was 777-187).

Thankfully, the fire was contained at El Tapatio, and did only minor damage to its neighbor, Kelly-Moore Paints. As far as I know, Chef Burger was unharmed, but the bizarrely-named Little Galloping Treasures Coffee Shop may have some smoke damage.

Before I started going to El Tapatio, I rarely ate Mexican food. My parents never took us to Taco Bell. The most south-of-the-border cuisine we'd experience was when Mom and Dad got the mega-bag of tortilla chips from Costco. It was freshman year of high school when I first discovered the finest taqueria in the Greater Pacheco area, if not all of Contra Costa County, Los Panchos. While Panchos made a huge and delicious burrito, it wasn't a place where one could sit down and have a meal. Chances are, you were going to consume that burrito outdoors.

El Tapatio was classy. It had comfortable leather booths, air conditioning, and cocktails. I went there for the first time after some kind of Drama Department activity, along with my friends Cody, Dan, and Ashley. I remember that Dan ordered the virgin strawberry margarita that first day. When I visited El Tap as a legal 21-year-old, I ordered a real strawberry margarita, and it just didn't seem right.

The wait staff was always unflinchingly polite and well-dressed, for what appeared to be a family operation. I was served by perhaps four different waiters over a five-year span. After a while, I never even opened a menu. I knew what I wanted.

I always got the Tapatio Lunch Special, and nearly always chose a pork burrito. You got an enormous burrito, beans, rice, AND two tortillas with this order, all for a heavy discount, if you ordered it before 3 pm. My friend Dustin also ordered that every time. We didn't realize it in the pre-9/11 era, but we were pre-emptively declaring our patriotism through swine consumption. When Dustin and I would re-visit El Tap after being away for months, it was always embarrassing to leave a half-eaten burrito, when in our primes it would have been fully devoured in half the time.

El Tapatio served two kinds of salsa. One was tasty but mild - your standard red gringo tortilla condiment. The other variety was green, and extremely spicy. Granted, I didn't eat much Mexican food, or much spicy food at all before I started going to El Tap. However, this green salsa was so spicy that one chip dipped in the stuff put my taste buds out of commission for the remainder of the meal. Even after I'd gone to college and started eating more piquant foods, the green salsa was still too much for me.

The salsa became an initiation rite for when I brought new people to the restaurant. Once, I offered my sister's boyfriend ten bucks if he could eat the entire container of green salsa (He got through one spoonful before quitting.). Typically, we'd sit back and let the newbie try the green salsa on his own. Sometimes we'd pretend to dip chips in the toxic green, to sucker the rube further. Then we'd wait as the n00b tried to hide his sweating, water-guzzling, and tears before pointing and laughing.

This did not work on our friend Long-Hai. Perhaps because of his Vietnamese parents and childhood exposure to curry powder, Long-Hai did not find the green stuff especially spicy. He did find it delicious, however.

For years, El Tapatio had a large banner advertising its Sunday Champagne Brunch. The banner had been printed out on a dot matrix printer, likely no later than 1987. Often while dining at El Tap, sitting under the banner, we considered buying them a real sign. Hell, we could walk two storefronts over to R Computer and print out a replacement sign there. Still, we never did, probably because we ended each meal in food-induced semi-comas.

In later years, El Tapatio began chasing other revenue streams. They still had machines to dispense candy or stickers near the door, plus the small display for anti-DUI chewing gum, but they needed more. So they began selling ad space on top of their tables. It was a strange dining experience, with local realtors Don and Norma Flaskerud stared up from the table. It's the only restaurant I've been to that featured tabletop ads, though one of the ads on El Tap's tables assured diners that this would be advertising's future.

I hadn't been to El Tap in quite some time, but it's tragic to think that I never will again. The owner has vowed to rebuild, but fire inspectors have called the damage a "total loss". If they rebuild it, I'll be in line at the grand re-opening, particularly if it's before 3:30 and I can still get the discount on the Lunch Special.

I always find it reassuring to have my personality validated by science. That's just what happened in a study conducted by Jennifer Bosson and associates, on the subject of "negativity friendships". According to Bosson, close friends are more likely to share the same negative opinions than they are to share positive feelings. As someone who is basically a mean person at heart, Ms. Bosson's findings are reassuring.

"'It's not that we enjoy disliking people,' Bosson, a social psychologist at the University of South Florida, says. 'It's that we enjoy meeting people who dislike the same people.'"

I could have told you this. I don't know about you, but there is nothing more exciting to me than when someone prefaces a comment with, "I'm not trying to sound mean here, but..." It's even better when there's a big group. Everyone's eyes light up. They are eager to hear smack-talking, but they're even more eager to hear if you're going to insult stuff they also hate. The weird downstairs neighbor who is constantly cooking cabbage? The Matrix sequels? Beanie caps with bills and the people who wear them? Bring on the hate.

I have a pretty good track record making friends with people from my improv classes. But however much I might enjoy performing with someone, or how much respect I have for their talents, the real bonding always occurs after class, usually over beers, when one person finally has the courage to call out the old guy with bad breath who does a Southern accent in every scene. Only when we have identified some mutual scorn can the real friendship begin.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the world of standup comedy. When I first began hitting up open mics, another comic encouraged me to attend more regularly, saying that both she and her friend liked my material. That was flattering, but it was what she said next that really grabbed my attention. "And that means something, since we're both, well, haters." Haters. I didn't know these people, didn't know their routines, but I did know that I wanted to hang out with these haters.

Even now, nothing bonds comedians quicker than a shared realization of someone else's awfulness. Tonight, I sat through an endless lineup of mediocre comedians, with virtually no audience aside from those same mediocre comedians. Most people were figuring out their set lists instead of listening to the performers, but since they'd heard most of the material before, they wouldn't have been laughing anyway. Basically, everyone was minding their own business until the last guy got up.

The first minute of his set was uneventful. Then, for no discernible reason, he unzipped his fly, and pulled a rubber chicken out his pants. Suddenly, everyone was looking around, trying to make eye contact with someone else, to silently ask, "Did he just pull a rubber chicken out of his pants? What the hell is going on here?" It wasn't a negativity friendship yet, but negativity bonds were forming, like the Keane children halfway through a holiday hike.

In conclusion, you may catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but you'll create more fly friendships with vinegar.

"What the hell was going on with that vinegar?"
"Blech."
"I'm not trying to sound mean here, but I hope the fly who led us here gets swallowed by an old woman or caught in a honey trap."
"You know, we should hang out some time..."

Former Giants shortstop Jose Uribe passed away Friday after a car crash in the Dominican Republic. Uribe was on the Giants from 1985-1992, and one of my favorite players throughout his San Francisco career, both for sparkling glove work and his silly-sounding name. Maybe it was my unfamiliarity with how to pronounce Spanish vowel sounds, but "Jose Uribe" ranked up there with "Renaldo Nehemiah" and "Manu Tuiasosopo" among the greatest names of mid-80s Bay Area athletes.

The Giants acquired Uribe after the 1984 season, in exchange for the team's best player, Jack Clark. The trade was a historically bad one for the Giants. Besides Uribe, they got pitcher Dave LaPoint, who went 7-17 in his one year with the team, Gary Rajsich, who hit .165 and was released by July, and David Green, who hit five home runs in 100 games while playing first base. Jack Clark led the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series, while the Giants lost 100 games. Meanwhile, Uribe took over the shortstop job and changed his name from Jose Gonzalez, which made him literally a player to be named later.

The 1985 Giants were a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad baseball team, and also the first baseball team that I remember clearly. Perhaps this has something to do with the low expectations I feel for my favorite baseball squads. I watched the 1984 World Series, but the old scorecards I have indicated I feel asleep by the fifth inning most games. (Said scorecards are primarily notable for the different ways in which five-year-old Sean attempted to spell "Kurt Bevacqua".) While 1985 was a bad year, a few developments indicated that better years were ahead for the team.

Most notably, the Giants selected Will Clark in the amateur draft. Later that month, the team released Duane Kuiper, and Mike Krukow took over his post-game show radio duties, which would have implications for their TV broadcasts for years to follow. In September, they hired Al Rosen and Roger Craig as GM and manager, who immediately transformed the team. And in the first week of the season, Jose Uribe took over as the starting shortstop.

The real significance of Uribe's arrival was that he displaced incumbent starter Johnnie LeMaster, AKA "Johnnie Disaster". LeMaster was so hated, he once took the field with "BOO" on the back of his jersey in place of his name. Though I was only six years old in 1985, grown men openly cursed in my presence if the subject of LeMaster's inept hitting or fielding came up. It was as if Neifi Perez fielded like Edgardo Alfonzo. Playing Uribe sent a message - This team might suck, but at least they were going to suck differently.

I think I might have been drawn to Uribe because his baseball skills paralleled my own. He couldn't hit the ball out of the infield, and neither could I. Uribe always knew where to throw the ball, he snagged difficult ground balls, and he turned a ton of double plays. This made me a valuable Little Leaguer at age six, though much less when I got older and other kids figured out how a force play worked. The 1985 Giants weren't much better than a Little League team. Just like my own Sun Valley Urgent Care-sponsored team, the Giants needed, more than anything, a guy who could at least be counted on throw to the right base.

Uribe was part of a great young infield in 1986, with Will Clark, Robby Thompson, and Chris Brown (who once missed a game because he "slept on his eye funny"). Brown was replaced by Kevin Mitchell the next year, and eventually Matt Williams, but the other three guys played together through the 1992 season. It was a remarkably stable infield, and one with excellent defense. Some people might argue that Williams would have been more valuable if he'd never moved from shortstop to third base, but it was Uribe's defense that made that shift defensible.

Ultimately, Uribe will be remembered for his his name, and the chant that went along with it. When he came to the plate, or turned a difficult defensive play, fans would chant "Oooh! Ree-bay! Oooh! Ree-bay!", a call-and-response chant akin to UC berkeley's "Go! Bears!" cheer. It was a fun way to handle what for some fans was probably a challenging Spanish name, and to distract fans from Uribe's inevitable rally-killing strikeouts.

This chant was also responsible for the dumbest fan cheer I have ever heard. It was 1989, and I was at a Giants game with my dad. Uribe came to the plate, batting in his customary #8 spot. The guys behind us seemed particularly enthused to join in the "Oooh! Ree-bay!" chant. After Uribe miraculously reached base, pitcher Bob Knepper came up, and the fans behind us were still psyched. Here was their cheer:

"Oooh! Knepper! Oooh! Knepper!"

Rest in peace, Jose Uribe. Here's hoping the angels are chanting your name at the pearly gates, and that they don't switch to, "Oooh! St. Peter!" after you enter.