I was sixteen when my father divorced my mom and began taking me to a nice restaurant every month or so to check up on me and see what I was doing with my life. One evening, he took me for steak and lobster at the Rusty Pelican in Jack London Square. Our curvaceous blonde waitress was in her mid-twenties and wore a red-and-white striped tube top. She was unbearably attractive, with her natural smile and gleaming white teeth. I was flustered by the fact that I was too young for her and forlorn because I had a deep-seated conviction that I would never be suave enough to attract a woman of her beauty. The longer she stood before us explaining the day’s specials, the glummer I became, as if I were catching a glimpse of a kind of beauty that would be forever denied me.
I was too distracted by the smiling waitress to care about the menu’s specials. Awkward and depressed, I managed a perfunctory order of a seafood platter and a Diet Coke while examining my biceps to see if they had grown since my earlier workout of preacher curls and “Arm Blaster” curls.
Looking back, I now realize that the Rusty Pelican was more than a restaurant. It was a powerful message decoder, transmitting strong signals and frequencies of desirable manliness. If I played my cards right, I could become the ultimate man. As evidence of my success, I would be in a relationship with a woman who looked very much like our server, and I would take her to this very restaurant, the Rusty Pelican.
Consider the restaurant’s name. The Rusty Pelican suggests a wealthy, rakish chap who dresses informally as a sign of rebellion against social norms and as a way of flaunting his unapologetically lascivious nature. In other words, the Rusty Pelican is a variation of the Billy Goat. He’s the same rogue with a different appellation. The Rusty Pelican and the Billy Goat are both iterations of the Satyr, the half-man, half-goat whose libido is unstoppable. Combine this tireless libido with enough money to afford a Porsche and a blonde who wears the kind of tube top displayed by our server, and you were living the 1970s California Dream.
This was the context in which I needed to understand my father’s interrogation of my future plans as he took me to a seafood restaurant. Was I getting my chess pieces in order so I could achieve the California Dream? He didn’t have to spell it out. By taking me to the Rusty Pelican, he was showing more than telling.
He himself was living the California Dream. Recently divorced and dating a twenty-five-year-old blonde, he drove a silver Peugeot and lived in a luxury condo. He frequented swanky restaurants or barbecued swordfish steaks on his Hibachi. Now he was taking me to the Rusty Pelican, where I might be inculcated with the lifestyle values that would motivate me to get a college education and live the dream.
If I worked hard enough, I might conform to the archetype of the Rusty Pelican, that casually dressed dandy who doesn’t take life too seriously, lest deep, possibly troubling thoughts interfere with his hedonistic enterprise.
As I eventually made my way to college, part of me aspired to become Rusty the lascivious pelican, but I was pulled by other forces as well. Franz Kafka’s dark imagination, Dostoevsky’s philosophical obsessions, and Rachmaninoff’s melancholy piano compositions made me a brooder. When college girls smiled at me, I often turned the other way, not because I didn’t like them but because I was too disorderly and fragmented inside. Unable to become whole, I was terrified of intimacy, so I languished in solitude.
It took me several years to develop the social skills to date, and even then I fell far short of the Rusty Pelican’s confidence and insouciance. I was less the Rusty Pelican and more the Clipped Pelican, an injured bird with a wing that didn’t function.
Forgive me. I’m taking the metaphor way too far. I don’t even know how I got here. I simply had a pleasant memory this afternoon of that blonde server in the tube top. I wanted to recreate that moment and feel close to her again.
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