My first real job lasted 2 years, in in Sausalito in 1969-71 as a dishwasher and barista at the Trident Restaurant. It was a cultural pivot point, and a SCENE. Full of rock stars and actors and hippies. pleasekillme.com/the-trident/
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I fondly remember the beautiful Trident waitresses. We did take a lot of drugs but we were young. My boss was Lou Ganapoler, but really, I worked for Pierre, the tough-as-nails, old-school chef, who was constantly irritated by all the hippies who worked for him. 2
On my first day of work, Pierre took one look at my hippie clothes and long, long hair and said, in his thick French accent, “You think you are pretty groovy. Well I think you are pretty lousy. So I’m going to call you 'Lousy Groovy.’” And that’s what he called me from then on. 3
The pleasekillme article describes the famous Hell’s Angels fight. I walked into the dining room just as it ended. On his way out the front door, one of the Angels grabbed a hot pot of coffee off of the burner and hurled it indiscriminately into the dining room. 4
I learned a lot from Lenny, one of the hot side cooks. He was a skinny black man with music in his veins. He danced in the kitchen, tossing food in the air and spinning around to catch it on a plate. He told me that restaurants are show business. I was so innocent then. 5
During the year I worked as a dishwasher, a buddy from high school worked the same job, but on a different shift, so we competed. We each tried to outdo the other in GETTING SHIT DONE better and faster. 6
I would wash all the dirty dishes, all the pots, stock the cooks, and then stand around ogling the waitresses. It drove Pierre mad that I didn’t pace myself, and that I would race to just stand around. So he’d come over and say, “Lousy Groovy, come with me.” 7
Then he’d give me 30 pounds of prawns to peel and devein, or a sack of garlic or 50 pounds of onions to prep. I’d race through those jobs then stand around again until Pierre could think up something more for me to do. I loved to make him crazy by working really hard for him. 8
I knew absolutely nothing about food or cooking, but that seemed like the natural next step, so I asked Pierre to teach me to cook. Well, Pierre came up the old school way with a long apprenticeship doing shit work in the kitchen, then years of drudgery on the line. 9
I realized many years later that Pierre was making a cook out of me in the only way he knew how: by busting my balls as a junior worker in his kitchen. But I was a 17-year-old Marin County boomer, and I wanted it all now. 10
I expected Pierre to show me how to cook things. He expected me to pay my dues. He hired me to be his special helper on Mondays, when the restaurant was closed. In his taciturn way, he didn’t “teach" me anything, but he expected me to learn by patiently watching. 11
But the food business was not where I belonged. I went off and tried lots of things before I discovered programming, and then fell deeply into that rabbit hole. 12
But hey, the Trident is open again and you can see the crazy dining room with curvy walls and the painted ceiling. There aren’t any rock stars and the food is nothing special, but you can visit the place that was a cultural lodestone for a few years in the 60s and 70s. 13
BTW, not only was the Tequila Sunrise invented at the Trident, but it was the first bar/restaurant to be called a “fern bar.” Yes, it had lot of ferns, but I’m not certain that’s what the term refers to. 14
Here’s a picture of the Trident dining room I took in 2015. 
