No. 170 - Tonga Room, San Francisco
My thighs were on fire — the slow, searing burn born of climbing San Francisco hills and the previous night’s assault of cheap beer and even cheaper whiskey. My insides felt dry-rotted, like a hollow log left too long in the sun. Still, I climbed — counting the steps like an oxygen-starved Park Avenue doctor on Everest.
ONE–TWO–THREE–FOUR…
ONE–TWO–THREE–FOUR…
All the while wondering, just like the ill-equipped M.D., why I got myself into this mess, I shifted into Parris Island mode: LEFT, LEFT, LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT. Then, for my own amusement, I belted out a basic-training cadence:
I DON’T KNOW BUT I’VE BEEN TOLD, ESKIMO ___________ (see Full Metal Jacket if you don’t know the rest).
On and on it went, as I cursed the decisions I made the night before…
“Never again, Evans!”
“Four cigars a night is your limit.”
“No drinking with homeless poets!”
Through the sweat and self-recrimination, my heart pumped sludge-like blood to my extremities while my eyes stayed fixed on the mirage ahead: a tiki paradise in the basement of a hotel.
I’d read about the Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar at the Fairmont Hotel a week before my trip. Always on the hunt for dives and oddball gin joints, I’d perused an article about a former basement swimming pool turned indoor lagoon — complete with a floating band and a menu heavy on rum. Onto the to-do list it went.
By the time I arrived — five o’clock sharp — the place was empty. The servers had just crushed out their cigarettes and were bracing for the nightly parade of tourists and the same tired questions. I, however, had no interest in small talk. I came to drink a metric ton of rum.
Still sweating from the climb, I unbuttoned my shirt a notch, fanned myself with the menu, and ordered without looking up: “Bring me your strongest boat drink.”
Moments later, a coconut the size of a soup bowl landed in front of me, bristling with fluorescent straws, a kabob of skewered fruit, and a purple umbrella. I have no idea what was in it, but the first sip was a revelation. Within minutes, my thighs felt like they’d been kneaded by a Russian masseuse, and my headache dissolved into a warm morphine tide.
The band was tuning up on the floating stage when the storm came. Out of nowhere, rain poured from the ceiling. Thunder rolled over the speakers. I was in the basement of a hotel, but I could’ve sworn I’d been dropped into the South Pacific.
Drink number two — easily four or five shots of rum — went down as smoothly as the first. By now I was untethered, the room pleasantly adrift. I claimed a corner seat shaped like the bow of a ship and watched the band make lazy loops around the lagoon. Tourists piled in. The rain kept falling. I kept drinking.
By my fourth cocktail — this one served in a ceramic tiki totem — I’d surrendered to the evening entirely. I tipped big, staggered out with a lei around my neck, and climbed Powell Street toward Vesuvio for a nightcap. It wasn’t even 6:30.
The next thing I remember, I was on my cousin’s porch in Berkeley with a bottle of wine, talking about everything and nothing until three in the morning, while she wondered where her vagabond of cousin had gotten knee-walking drunk.
