Hollapeño

Pia Hinckle

Word Count 1544

Holly moved in across the street when I was 10. She was a dead ringer for Tatum O’Neil in Paper Moon (who was our age and had just WON AN OSCAR) and wore a Puka shell necklace that I immediately coveted. She was from a faraway land called New Jersey. Our dads had set us up. We sized each other up on the sidewalk in front of my house on Castro Street.

“I bet you can’t do this,” she stuck out her pointy pink tongue, made a cannoli out of it, pulled in the tip, and then turned it into a three-leaf clover. My green eyes widened.

“Bet I can,” I said, staring right into her brown eyes. I didn’t know the tongue could do such a thing and had never before tried it. Her eyes widened.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can do that too,” she said.

We linked arms and went off to find discarded cigarette butts on the street and then smoked them pretending to be Angie Dickinson in “Police Woman.”

Holly lived with her dad Paul, a writer friend of my dad’s who was also a stand-up comedian, in a dark studio apartment in the bottom of a big white Victorian on the corner of Beaver and Castro Street. Holly loved the seeming normality of our two-story Victorian house, where my mom cooked dinner most nights, and the family sat down to eat at a candlelit dining room table with linen napkins. Paul was a bachelor with a mostly empty minifridge who didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. Holly practically lived with us, spending most days after school, dinners, and weekends. My dad christened her The Third Daughter.

With my house as home base, we walked down the huge Castro Street hill to the Eureka Valley Rec Center, where we took tennis lessons and pretended to be Billie Jean King and Chrissie Evert; hiked up to Corona Heights and took ceramics, astronomy, and gems and geology at the Junior Museum, where we also volunteered in the mini-zoo to rake out the cages of owls and ravens who couldn’t fly and fed big hunks of carrots, piles of lettuce, and mysterious feed pellets to raccoons, mice, Guinea pigs, and ferrets.

Holly had a skateboard with wide green wheels made of polyurethane, which had just come out. When I asked my mom for one, she immediately said no. I had no idea where I could buy one, but BIG RED, my new favorite cinnamon gum, had a skateboard offer. So I took all my saved-up Christmas and birthday money and all my gum wrappers and mailed them to Los Angeles. Four weeks later, my board arrived. It was bright red plastic with the words BIG RED in raised black grip lettering spanning the board. We would practice wheelies and spins in front of my house, then skate to the southeastern corner, the top of the super-long and super-steep block of 16th Street, sit on our boards, and bomb all the way down to Vikings Big Subs using our Keds for brakes. One time, we saw a film crew and recognized Karl Malden and Micheal Douglas (such a fox) standing on the steps of a Victorian filming an episode of “The Streets of San Francisco.” We got off our boards and hung around. Then Holly went right up to Douglas and asked for his autograph. “Me too, please,” I said behind her, wishing I was that brave.

Paul sometimes wrote articles for my dad, who was editing City Magazine of San Francisco for Francis Ford Coppola. The offices were in an old brick building near North Beach, and we spent a lot of time there, waiting for my dad, who was always, always running late. Holly and I would play “magazine” in the art department. I was the editor, Holly the reporter, and my sister the art director. We produced STARS magazine, which looked like a hand-drawn Tiger Beat with cigarette ads. We used the lightbox, a sea of colored pens, X-Acto knives, clear tape, and the massive Xerox machine to make color copies, which we sold to our parents for $2.

After meeting our dads’ very funny friend Margo St. James (who was campaigning for prostitutes rights with her group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), we decided to dress up as prostitutes for Halloween. We looked like 1920s flappers with blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. “Trick? Or Treat?” we would cackle and pout our lips and lift a hip, before we collected our candy. Paul thought this was so funny he put the story in one of his comedy routines.

One time, Holly and I performed with Paul at a benefit to save the Goodman Building from being torn down. He billed us as “Paul Krassner and Dusk,” in a nod to Tony Orlando and Dawn, the hit TV variety show. I remember feeling unbearably self-conscious in my high ponytail, Gap t-shirt, bell-bottom jeans, and platform Candies, trying to imitate Holly’s on-stage confidence while swirling our matching feather boas. My parents watched as we swayed behind Paul in the bright spotlights as he told the story of the happy mice that freely roamed his apartment. He was a pacifist and couldn’t kill a fly, much less a mouse. One day he opened his desk drawer where he kept his pot stash and found totally stoned mice sleeping amidst pot seeds, crumbs from a pot brownie, and many, many mouse turds. On cue, Holly and I sang:

Mouse turds,

doo wop doo wop,

mouse turds,

doo wop doo wop

I admired the freedom that Holly seemed to have. She didn’t have a mom telling her what to do, and it seemed to me that she could do whatever she wanted. She set her own bedtime, did her homework when she wanted, saw friends or spent the night at their houses when she wanted. She got good grades, shopped, cooked, and did the laundry. My mom always said Holly was very mature for her age because she had had to take care of her half-brother and other kids when she was younger. This was why she left Holly in charge, she said, even though she was only 386 days older than me.

Jerry Garcia’s girlfriend, Mountain Girl, had been stashing some pot at Paul’s house, and there were piles of paper bags filled with it all around his desk. Holly snuck out a baggieful while Paul was out and brought it over. We barricaded ourselves in my narrow bedroom and rolled 100 joints while my sister banged on the door, demanding to know what we were doing. After threatening her with various tortures if she squealed, Holly and I went down the hill to Castro and Market streets and started calling out, “Joints! Joints for a dollar!” We made a fortune–almost $40!

She was very close with her dad and told him everything, even about boys and drugs and sex, none of which was ever discussed in my house. Paul was out most nights performing but gave Holly his full attention when he was home with her. My dad was always at the magazine, or in New York, or “out” and when he was home, he never asked me how I was doing and seemed uninterested in spending time with just me. Paul featured Holly stories in a lot of his comedy routines and writing. Sometimes, she got mad at him for publicly sharing things he hadn’t pre-cleared with her, but I thought she was lucky that her dad found her interesting enough to put her in his work, something my dad never did.

When Holly went to live with her mom in LA for high school, we stayed in touch by writing long letters, and she still came to our house every Thanksgiving.

In our late 20s, we were both back in San Francisco and started a book project together, “Daughters of the American Revolution,” about growing up with 1960s radical fathers. We never finished it, but I loved writing about our adventures and our odd families. She nicknamed me “Pimento,” and I called her “Hollapeño.” I was writing for an alternative weekly newspaper, and Holly was working for a PR firm, so we joked we would start our own communications firm and we would call it “Hack & Flack.”

In my 30s, I married and became a mom. Ten years later, Holly, now living in Napa, did the same. I wrote her a letter of support for the adoption of her baby girl Talia, telling them the truth: Holly has always been a mother. She just needs a baby.

When my dad died in 2016, after a grueling decline, Holly showed up for the long Catholic funeral and then MC’d the open mic storytelling we held in the alley next to the bar for his wake. Afterward, she came to my house and crawled in bed with me to watch “San Francisco,” the 1939 film with Clark Gable and Jeanette McDonald that was one of my dad’s favorite movies. She held me as I cried, and then we told my kids stories about mouse turds, Thanksgiving pranks, and 40 years of friendship until we peed our pants from laughing.

Pia is a recovering journalist, writer, editor, open-water swimmer, and small business owner. Her writing has been published in Alta Journal, The FruitGuys Magazine, and The Dolphin Log. She is a co-author of The Court That Tamed the West: From the Gold Rush to the Tech Boom (Heyday). Currently at work on “Pia & The Elephant: A Daughter-Father Memoir,” about growing up with her buccaneer journalist dad. She lives in San Francisco with her entrepreneur husband Chris Mittelstaedt and their deaf basset hound, Toby.