For Thursday, October 22, 1998 Gibbs, Drummer Column, 734 words
50s Style
My wife, Susan, just turned 50. She's been successfully fighting it off for 49 years, but she finally threw in the towel. She asked only that I show her a good time to commemorate the event, and I did, and I owed it to her, big time.
I made a flop of her 40th birthday. I rented a hotel suite in Port Costa sight-unseen and threw a surprise party. All her friends came. The room had vines growing through the window and across the ceiling. The chandelier was hanging by one bolt. The ceiling and carpet had water stains. The couch had a spring exposed. I went into debt, romantically. I have been looking for some way to make it up ever since.
At last, a decade later: redemption. I am out of hock and free again. The story goes like this:
"Whatever you want, sweetheart," I said when the topic of her 50th birthday came up, a year ago.
"I want to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge," she said. "I've never done it, and I want to do it on my 50th birthday.."
"Alakazam," I said. "You've got it."
A month ago I began my hotel research. I had to find us a room in San Francisco that would blow her away. I didn't want a generic Hyatt or Holiday Inn. I didn't want to pay an exorbitant amount of money simply for assurance of pleasant quarters. I wanted to take another risk and succeed. I wanted to find someplace unique, different, quaint, romantic, like I had tried to do with Port Costa.
I hit the Internet. I began at Microsoft's Sidewalk.Com for San Francisco and requested a listing of all hotels. One by one I clicked on hotel web sites and studied their accommodations. I took notes. After exhausting Sidewalk.Com, I searched elsewhere and elsewhere. I studied easily a hundred SF hotels. Just one kept grabbing my attention. I kept going back to the web site for Hotel Bohème.
I liked the site because it had style and tone, not just rates and room shots. It was simple, elegant, informative, and had links to Beat Generation poetry by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Any North Beach hotel that offered poetry on its website, I figured, was worth a closer look.
On my third visit I was sold. The place just felt right. I liked the address: 444 Columbus Street, near Green. I'm 44. It's a '50s style hotel. Susan is 50. She grew up in the '50s. Numerology was on my side. I even liked the phone number 433-9111. The "911" part fit my anxious state. I called and had a long, friendly talk with Caroline at the front desk. She assured me my wife would love the Hotel Bohème. I sensed her sincerity and booked the room.
I did good. Oh, boy. I'm a lucky guy.
Susan had no idea where we were staying until I double-parked on busy Columbus Street and asked her to hop out and check us in while I parked the car. I pointed to a doorway with stairs leading above a block of Italian restaurants. As she stepped inside, a car in front of the hotel pulled out and I got a good spot. It was 6 p.m. The meters were sleeping. By the time I caught up with Susan at the front desk she was weak in the knees. She couldn't keep her hands off of me. It was "Oh, honey" this and "Oh, honey," that. Man, did I feel good.
Our room, like all 15 rooms in the hotel, had a gauze-draped canopy over the bed and a huge European wardrobe. Our windows overlooked the action on Columbus and Beach Blanket Babylon Boulevard. Susan said, "Ooo" about the quilt, and "Ahh" about the lamp, and "Mmm" when she smelled the soaps. I did too.
We dressed for dinner, stopped for complimentary sherry in the lobby, and asked Bruce the manager for advice on restaurants. "Trattoria Contadina," he said in more words. "It's one of the best." We nodded, and a phone call from Caroline got us prime-time reservations.
Bruce and Caroline did good. Oh, boy. They made me a luckier guy. The food was fabulous and the waiters sang to my wife.
The bridge walk the next day was a personal experience. It was a time to reflect. You had to be there.