Like I do most late mornings, I awoke in pain.

It had nothing to do with falling asleep in my recliner – that thing is more comfortable than most beds. Unfortunately this is my life now and something that I have to deal with. The muscles ache, the places where I have been shot ache, the bones ache, and I feel a lot older than my 42 years.

I actually started hitting the massage parlors when I was still a cop as a way to ease the aches and pains. Sure, you can recover from getting shot, even multiple times, but eventually your body is going to remind you that it isn’t what it once was and for me that started in my early 30s. The happy endings and the fuckings are just a welcome side-benefit.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m wealthy. Rich. I’ll get to all of the reasons to how that happened to an ex-marine and ex-cop shortly, but to put it simply I earn over $350K per year in interest alone so I live pretty high. I have a high-rise condo just South of Market Street, season tickets for the Giants just off the 1st base line, season tickets to both the Symphony and the Opera, and a standing order for tickets whenever a great jazz artist comes to town and plays Yoshi’s. I have even attended the Black and White ball twice – going stag both times.

I generally eat out and not in my place, own two cars and have parking spaces for them, go to the theater regularly, and am sometimes written up as one of the “available ones” in the local gossip rags.

Once, about 4 years ago, a real newspaper article got written up about me and how I live by one of those rags as a follow-up to the circumstances under how I got rich. The reporter at the end opined that the right woman could possibly get me to give up my massage parlor hobby. Only if that woman is one hell of a massage therapist herself. I wake up most mornings in pain and I didn’t get a massage last night so I was creaky and cranky.

It was just before 11am so I had gotten about 5 hours of sleep. Not bad, for me. Good days I get 6 hours. Bad ones I don’t sleep at all. They come in about equal numbers these days.

I have to take acid-reflux medication these days (one of the side-effects of getting shot in the stomach that no one tells you about) and that had to be taken on an empty stomach so I wasn’t going to get breakfast. There is a place about 4 blocks from my home that has the best doughnuts on the planet, but they’d be onto lunch by now and their lunches were hideous. I took my medication, cleaned up in the living room, and then got a shower. By the time I was dressed I knew I could go get some lunch, so I did just that – heading for the Embarcadero.

I decided that I wanted a steak with Portobello mushrooms, so I headed to Perry’s. After that I could go to the YMCA a few doors down and soak in the Jacuzzi on the 2nd floor. That would help the aches and pains. Yes, I belong to the Y and not some fancy gym. It’s not too far from home and no rich asshole ever asks me about my scars.

Of course I noticed the tail. Even though I was an unlikely suspect I hadn’t been ruled out for obvious reasons so they assigned someone down low in the pecking order to surveillance. They were subtle, but I’m trained in this sort of thing too and I spotted them almost the moment I started walking towards the restaurant. I had to feel for them a bit. Perry’s isn’t cheap and there is no fast food anywhere near where I had my lunch. They didn’t come into the Y despite the fact that I could have easily shaken them by leaving through the garage. I didn’t bother.

They were still parked outside when I emerged from the gym, a lot less achy and much more refreshed. I waved and nearly laughed out loud when one of them tentatively waved back. I flagged down a cab and had him take me to the Haight.

It’s not easy to find a good record store anymore, not in an age where everyone listens to compressed digital crap. Give me vinyl records every time. I have a pretty good collection and I augment it fairly regularly. Today I was in the mood for some jazz and the only real place to find that would be in the old Haight-Ashbury district of the city. Thirty minutes later I was browsing my way through some Stan Getz and Marty Paich classics while my chaperones were waving hippie away from their car.

After browsing and buying for an hour or so I walked to this dive bar called Maggie’s that’s smack dab in the middle of it all and got myself a martini. Yes, a martini in the middle of hippie central. The bartender here will kick your ass out if you order some fancy drink that comes with fruit and umbrellas. People always think of San Francisco as a leftist elitist town, and it is, but when it comes to drinking we’re dirty and two-fisted and can out-martini any Manhattan shitheel you can name.

I had three.

I’m actually not a big fan of drinking in the afternoon but I had an ulterior motive here – I wanted a cab to get back home again. While living downtown makes cabs easy to get there is no way you’re just going to get a cab off the street in this neighborhood, so I had enough to drink where I could convince the bartender to call a ride for me. It took about 20 minutes but when it arrived I tipped well, got into the cab and made it home by 5 PM. I put the Stan Getz album on the stereo, cranked the volume up to eleven, popped a beer and sat in that great chair to watch the sun set, and maybe doze a bit before heading out for the night.