Vinnie's Liquid Lunch | By Bernard Ohanian

I’m not the first, nor will I be the last (although I might be the last before he actually turns 50), to note that choosing one meal with Vince-–just one--is a fool’s errand. In my case, I could choose pizza in Brooklyn; Indian food in Manhattan; shishkebab, made by my father, in Duarte, California; or one of many burrito runs in the Mission. I could even choose the time we stopped for a date shake on a drive from LA to Joshua Tree, and our intrepid reporter asked the lady serving this fabulous concoction, “Say, what do you put in those date shakes?” She looked at him as if he had come from another planet (and let’s be honest: it’s hard to imagine Michigan and the Mojave actually being on the same planet) and said, slowly, as if perhaps her audience was too dense to understand a word said at normal speed, “Dates.” For our hero’s sake, in fact, she dragged the word out as if it had two or even three syllables.

But my favorite meal with Vince, and one we shared often, was entirely liquid. (No, no, not that kind.) In the early 90s, maybe even the late 80s, Vince and Bill Shapiro and I met up every Saturday morning in the Mission, at a schoolyard around 23rd and Fair Oaks, to play hoops for a couple hours with some neighborhood guys. The weekend stretched out before us like Eliot’s patient etherised upon a table (can someone please explain that line to me, by the way? It’s never made a lick of sense): we didn’t yet have kids to run around to birthday parties and soccer games, or homes that needed matching furniture. We were just guys in our early 30s, running and jumping (when we still could) and sweating and goofing and swearing--our weekend time all ours to spend as we pleased (or at least so it now seems through the hazy gauze of memory, etc.). So when each week’s games were over, we’d repair across the street to one of San Francisco’s ubiquitous corner stores. We’d each buy a big bottle of Gatorade, maybe a banana and a chocolate chip cookie, and sit outside on the sidewalk, leaning our backs against the store’s wall. Then we’d tell stories (with occasional glimmers of truth) and laugh and bust on each other and gossip about the San Francisco publishing industry and talk about girls. And an hour later, or maybe 15 minutes, or maybe two hours, we would spring to our feet, not yet creaky, and know something too sappy to say then, and too clichéd to say now (but what the heck; I’ll say it anyway): the process that forges lifelong bonds out of shared experiences--even experiences that seem trivial, by no objective measure life-changing--is a treasure, and a mystery, and a great reason to wake up in the morning. Maybe we were just three guys playing basketball and drinking Gatorade, but it sure felt--and still feels-–like a lot more to me.