Sunday, April 12, 2020

Thirty Years on a Hook by Peter Romanowsky Life on San Francisco Bay in the Sixties Chapter Tewenty Three....rough and unedited...to be continued

There is a point living on an anchor that you begin to make friends with the flies and the spiders first, then cats and dogs and always Seaguls and this is my longest and oldest of my Seagull friends and I call him Gorgeous Gearge or King George of the Seagulls,  because he is larger then his spouse and they mate for life and he is the undisputed boss of the waterfont of Sausalito at the ferryboat landing and has been there for years and they live married for up to fourteen or fifteen years like Geese and Swans and Wolves by mate for life and no like some humans and as I have written before while looking for a dog to adopt I found an abandoned human being and child of God forsaken on the mean streets of California, when one is homless in paradise. Another friend or aquainatace I had was Greg and please excuse the photo for he would not let me take is picture without giving his his fingers and not even with a picture of his mom, he told me once and his mom was a decent hard working person and single mom to two sons from two different husbands and worked at the Army Corps of Engineers  in Sausalito, at the famous Bay Model of San Francisco and was quite the story teller, but the one I listened to first was how he said he was cook Meth in the mountains of Santa Cruz California in his biker days before he lost his divers license over a drunk driving ticket and never drove again, because it was to bard to make DUI classes and pay for them at the same time. He said that in his San Jose and and Santa Cruz mountain  experiences chopping Harleys and cooking meth some killers shot him multiple times and killed his wife and he survived and showed me, what looked like multiple gun shot wounds and he said that he had tracked down two of the killers and killed them and only one left of his his hitlist and it's hard not to believe what he said with the scars on his body for my dad had scars also fro. the Winter Wars, when Russia invaded little Finland and he defected to the West, with the rank of an officer and the reasons that I am writing about Gregg is because he was such a part of the waterfront of Sausalito and an Anchorout also and part of the history of the waterfront and San Francisco Bay. He told me he was raised or lived in Newark New Jersey and during the face riots in the Sixties he used to climb over tanks to get too groceries for his his mother no doubt. But beacause he got in trouble occasionally with the law or drugs he was sent by his mother to Synonon,  a  drug rehabilitation colony in West Marin County in California to get straightened out and he said that he was beaten by fellow drug rebates who were running the place known mainly as a Heroin or other hardcore drug addicts and not that I have ever thought of him or that he was an heroin addict and yes he was a lover of meth, when I knew him late but he always seemed to keep it under control and never saw him acting like he was a meth head of something but always seemed focused on something like getting even or revenge for  something a lot of the time but was a great animal lover in fact his name was called the "Animal" and he especially liked my first dog Caji and my second dog Diamond and claims to have taught it to bark out loud when first arriving in Sausalito for the doggie was so culture shocked that she was very shy and bewildered and silent on fire arrival to the best of my memory and anyway she has become the most barking little dog on the waterfront of Sausalito and anyway I remember when things were going really downhill for the the "Animal", for had gotten a job as a bouncer and cleanup man at a local yacht club and lived there also in the basement of the floating yacht club on  barge. He practiced shooting his bow and arrow there  weight lifting and martial arts type weapons ? Anyway he was quite happy for a long time and even  bought a houseboat barge and eventually moved everyhing he owned onto the delta style houseboat, after he lost his job of which made him very bitter, but was handling it alright and being happy on his houseboat anchored on the bay and  rent free and was proud to show me his little treasures like laughing little toy and furry creatures and when a terrible storm came from the south his floating home sank and he believed that another boat drug anchor and hit his boat and I saw the tug that drug past my boat and off into the dark and I called the Coast Guard and but they could not find the boat in the dark, wind and rain in the might and was in waters to shallow for rescuing on the night and went up on the beach at Blackies Pasture with no one on boat and damaged its rudder and the steel tug finnaly went down off Ocean Beach, off San Francisco with its Skipper,  my anchored neighbor and went down with his ship after a wave slammed him against his boat and hit his head and his first mate began swimming for his life towards shore and a para surfer flew out to  rescue him. Greg was very upset about his houseboat sinking and had bitter feelings about the Mariner that went down, with his ship in that late rincident, but I didn't think the tug sank his home for I saw it pass his boat, that he was not on that night also. Every five years a monster storm hits the bay with sixty mile per hour or more sustained winds and over a hundred mile plus gusts. My neighbor who lost his life lived lived on one of John Waynes boat a modified WW11 subchaser, like the one he had also in Southern California. The boat was destroyed by Bill Price the harbor administer for the Richardson Bay Regional Agency, after its Skipper, when down with his working tugboat, while trying to retrieve his working powerboat that broke lose and went out of the bay and as afore mentioned lost his life in it's rescue attempt, off Ocean Beach and in spite of its historical value and he also destroyed the Western writers Zane Gray's yacht that was converted into a fishing boat and then a livaboard anchored boat, that broke lose in a storm also, even though it had wood beatles, it could have been saved. The problem has been that perfectly good boats have been and are still being crushed instead of giving them too Mariners living on the bay in exchange fort thier battered  and wornout boats in exchange for a decent boat to live and work on, plus it's bad for theover all environment destroying good boats that will be taken good care of in exchange for boats that will be crushed anyway so two boats are eventually lost ...to be continued 



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