Sir Charles

Years ago, I saw Ray Charles perform with the San Francisco Symphony. As he sang Your Cheatin' Heart, mine soared as my mind wandered. I thought of Hank Williams, the much-beloved troubadour and son of Alabama, who wrote the song.

I mused as to how he or the myriad sons and daughters of the old south who idolized him during his lifetime (1923-53) might regard such a thing as a blind, black man singing one of ol' Hanks songs with a symphony orchestra in San Francisco.

I reckoned some might interpret it as a sign of the end times. Others might don robes and light crosses. Still others might be as third-world refugees from a natural disaster, bewildered by the annihilation of their world.

I lived down south years ago, and after a significant period of adjustment, I came to the realization that there is much there to emulate, envy and admire in the Land of the Old Confederacy. But issues linger, and there are a few areas where…

I’m sorry, but I must admit that it warms my heart and excites my soul to see an ignorant redneck baffled by the progress of humanity.

So, you can imagine my delight at the absolutely delicious prospect of prospect of Charles Barkley running for Governor of Alabama.

Imagine... Charles Barkley sitting behind George Wallace's old desk. This isn't forty acres and a mule, this is flying pigs, snowballs in hell. Mark Twain once said that the onlkly difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be plausible. This is Big Jim goin' to da Gubnah's mansion--and somewhere Mister Twain is having a good chuckle.

I am further enlivened by recent evidence supporting the possibility that such a thing might actually happen: Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Al Franken... Barack Hussein Obama.

Throughout his career, Barkley argued that athletes ought not be considered role models. "A million guys in jail can dunk a basketball,” noted the inimitable Round Mound of Rebound. “Should they be role models?"

In 1993, he wrote the tag line for Nike’s "I am not a role model" ad campaign., and stirred further controversy in averring, “the media demands that athletes be role models because there's some jealousy involved. It's as if they say, ‘this is a young black kid playing a game for a living and making all this money, so we're going to make it tough on him.’

“What they're really doing is telling kids to look up to someone they can't become," he wrote. "Not many people can be like we are. Kids can't be like Michael Jordan.”

This stand prompted former Vice President Dan Quayle to praise Barkley's oft-ignored call for parents and teachers to quit looking to him to "raise your kids" and instead be role models themselves, as a "family-values message."


On the heels of this modest controversy, I found my self walking one night through San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district, a veritable Mecca for hookers, pimps, junkies, drifters, gangsters, parolees, lost souls and various and sundry down-and-outers from all over the world. To extend the metaphor, the Kaaba of this tawdry precinct is a once-renowned porno multiplex and fetish bazaar called The Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater.

Venerated by some as the birthplace of modern pornography and extolled in apocrypha as the most licentious establishment of its kind outside Amsterdam, Mitchell Brothers’ (as it is locally known) had been a bug-light for the lurid since the 1969 when stag-film impresarios Jim and Artie established their strip club/porn theater/film studio at the bustling corner of O’Farrell and Geary Streets at the bottom of Nob Hill.

Unlike most of the rundown, boarded-up and forbidding haunts that inform the sketchy atmosphere of the neighborhood, The Mitchell Brothers’ was lit up like a Broadway theater, with a Vegas-like marquee and a retinue of presentably imposing doormen arrayed like palace guards behind velvet ropes out front. A favored resort for bachelor parties and the like, taxis and limousines lined-up in front of this curious landmark discharging and retrieving the convivial and depraved from all walks of life.

Playboy Magazine bestowed its imprimatur upon the enterprise, prompting fringe celebrities, fashionable poseurs and well-heeled degenerates to mingle in the vicinity; a predictable coterie of scandalized citizens and aggrieved clergy loudly bemoaned this affront to humanity (thereby amplifying the PR blizzard) and, viola, it was a singular, only-in-San Francisco scene, one of the preeminent wonders of the off-brand world, and a tourist destination rivaling the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf.

So, there I was, ambling past the Mitchell Brothers on a random Thursday night, making my way back home from my bartending gig, taking in the local color, minding my own business. The Mitch was its usual self, kinda pathetic once you get used to it: Conventioneers steeped in bourbon, stumbling in and out of cabs; homeless vagrants and horrific prostitutes bumming change, offering discounts and evading exasperated bouncers; and, of course, the VIP crowd: preening and strolling to the head of the line.

That’s where I saw him, Charles Barkley—a study in conspicuity bathed in neon and resplendent in a luxuriously roomy, ocher suit, lingering unselfconsciously under the marquee. As with all basketball players, he is much larger in person than one might imagine. The likes of Shaquile O’Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skew the perspective and make big guys look normal-sized and normal guys look small. Charles is a large man.

He stood with his back to the street, graciously chatting and with the hoi polloi. From such an angle, the bald head was the primary identifier. But still, it seemed so improbable that a guy of his stature would be seen so publicly, mingling with the riff-raff at the Mitchell Brothers’ on a random Thursday night. So, I decided to verify. I sidled through the crowd to get a better look. It was closing time, so the crush was on between the doors and the curb. Before I knew it, I was almost in the man’s pocket—much closer than I'd intended. I didn’t want to seem nosy or judgmental.

My proximity startled him. He shot me a sideways glance and accurately sized up the situation. He took my measure with just a soupçon of condescension, and looked me dead in the eye.

“Told ya, I was'n no fuckin’ role model,” he said. Then he went back his autographing with the wry smile of a man wondering why folks still don’t believe him.

For those who fret over the dearth of political action after this years election: take heart--we've still got Sir Charles for Governor of Alabama. This oughta be great.