I have talked with my doctor about the literary abuse of children related to me by hired ghost writers who never knew my late sister, Christine Rosamond Benton. One lured my sixteen year old daughter, Heather Hanson, away from me so she and her stage mother could be in the rival biography. If we (my family) went by the reality outsiders put on our plate, then in the photograph above I am looking at Christine, suspiciously. Is she competing with me? Is she hiding herself, and her masterpieces in the closet, because our Mommy only wants me to be a famous artist?
“Who – me?!” I’m not rendering drawings of horses in the closet. Where did you get such a fantastic idea?”
The look I am giving my sisters, is saying;
“Look, Christine. I concede you are a better artist than I. Why don’t you take some of your work to the local art gallery and see if they will sell your work. Once again, we have no cereal for our milk.”
Mark’s look is saying;
“For once I have to agree. My lunatic brother is right. You know it’s a plot, they making sure we never have cereal and milk at the same time!”
Here is Julie Lynch who published a book about our family.
THE BEGINNING: Oakland, California
If Christine’s parents had embraced her talent, there might be existing works from her childhood, but this was not to be. Fearing that Christine would steal her brother’s spotlight as the family artist, Christine’s mother, Rosemary, forbade Christine to draw at home. The only time she could express herself was at school or in her closet, by flashlight, when everyone else was asleep. Though we don’t have images to prove it, Christine’s kindergarten teacher has said that, by age five, Christine was already drawing with adult skill. She can remember Christine’s pictures of animals having near perfect detail and perspective.
In addition to oppressing Christine artistically, Rosemary also dominated Christine with physical violence. Trying to support four children with only a high school education and little help from her alcoholic husband, Rosemary was often enraged. She took this rage out on Christine and Christine’s earliest known works reflect it. In Teenage Drawing II, her subject is reticent and withdrawn. In Teenage Drawing III, the woman looks shocked and angry.”
Let me make this perfectly clear. I use this blog as a form of therapy. Ghostwriter, Tom Snyder, lifted my story about the day VW got a big fishhook under his kneecap while we were fishing at Drake’s Bay. Rosemary had to drive Vic’s new VW Van. She did not know how to use a stickshift on the floor. We had to go up a steep windy dirt road. At a hairpin curve, Rosemary stalled the van. When she got it back in gear, she popped the clutch and the tires began to spin. We were going backwards towards the hundred foot cliff. Christine started to scream……..I am going to leave this tale for my book, movie, or, series!
Vic had to go to the hospital. He could not work for a week. I believe this is when Vic’s Girl Friday bought her blue Ford Anglia. She had found a job. I suspect Uncle Vinnie bought it for her. Vic would steal it, and go off to drink with his cronies. They rally missed him – and his money!
After coming home and finding there was no food for the four Presco Children, Rosemary got back in her Anglia and sped off to Oscar’s. She parked in the back parking lot, and walked around the block. Vic’s ex-secretary opened the bar door, and as she rushed past our boss, she grabbed the twenties he always lay out for this War Buddies. He paid them to listen to his fake Iwo Jima story. Rosemary took about a hundred dollars to Lucky Supermarket and came home with the most bags of groceries we ever saw.
Come Christmas Time, it was Fight Week. VW Rosemary fought over their children – constantly. They let us know it was all – our fault! The truth is, our Family Business – was a bust from the get go! The President of Acme Produce was a lunatic! We did out best to fix him. Then, my daughter brought Psycho Billy into our live in order to get hi fixed. She wanted me and Vicki to invest in Psycho Billy’s Bar&Grill. I kid you not!
Our boss was not home for Christmas. Two days after all the kids in the hood had their merry celebration, VW wakes us and orders us to empty the van of a shitload of cereal boxes. We did so with glee! We were always running out of cereal. There were about sixty boxes. There was just enough milk for the First Enjoyment. We eagerly take our first bites, and we wanted to spit out our good tidings! The cereal was very stale!
When we found Wayne Glendenning’s father passed out on the bed in the basement, we got the big picture. Vic’s drinking buddy was in the cereal business. He was required to clear the shelves of dated boxes. I suspect he had a shit-load of boxes at the Glendenning house where food abuse went on, too.
“Here Vic! Take some cereal. You don’t want to go home empty handed!”
Picture two drunks going out to the garage at the crack of dawn and dig out cereal boxes for the Presco brats.
The world famous artist, Christine Rosamond Presco-Benton, began her autobiography with the fight we had over the last of the milk when we were twelve and thirteen. Christine spent a fortune on three therapist. Snyder claims my sister did not feed my niece. He said Vic’s daughter kept coming home with bags of groceries. When her maid said there was no room in the refrigerator, this most highly paid woman artist in the world, commanded;
“Throw away what’s there to make room! Must I do everything around here?”
I just discovered Wayne died in 1983. He was the baddest party guy in school. The Hell’s Angels tried to recruit him, along with the Draunch brothers. Wayne had hanger-ons. One of them got rude with me, and told him off. He ran ad got Wayne to beat me up. When he saw it was me, he turned and walked away. I am sure he heard VW’s sad story about the time I pulled a big knife on the Captain, and made him leave the house. Vic told his bad-ass Mexican friends about it, and they gave me the moniker ‘Rosemary’s Baby’.
I see a Netflix series…’Oakland Bad Ass’.
Rosemary Presco was the real Bad Oakland Ass. She fled to L.A. when she got busted for making porn movies for Big Bones Remmer, the only known Mafia. There was talk about the Presco Four going into an orphanage. Four months later, Rosy’s Ford Anglia has piled Vic’s Brats into her car, and, its off to Hollywood!
John Presco
Copyright 2019
Why Oscar’s Bar & Grill?
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Chapter One
My man in San Francisco, Spooky Noodles, rang me up last night and gave me a heads-up about the closing of ‘Oscar’s’ in Berkeley. I am going to have to send Spooky official Bohemian Adoption papers, because he recalled the name Oscar’s, and that it was important in Presco lore, which is like Rosamond lore, being, my father was a Bohemian-Beatnik, who admitted Jack London’s novels ‘Sea Wolf’ and ‘Martin Eden’ were his guides growing up – after his father ‘The Gambler’ abandoned him at the age of three.
Victor Hugo Presco had a brother named Oscar who owned a famous interior decorator firm in SF. When the brothers had a fight over their partnership, Hugo dropped out of society to live in a tar-paper shack under the Carquinez Bridge. Victor took his sons there, once, to show Hugo his grandsons. We said “Hello” and that was that! I was utterly impressed that my grandfather lived on a houseboat in a authentic Shantytown.
Only a Beatnik would take pride in driving around a red truck like the one above. We didn’t own an automobile. When the Prescos went to visit Grandma, Vic stacked some wooden crates on the bed, and fastened them down with an old smelly tarp, and real hemp rope. In our cubby hole, Mark and I had nowhere to hide as one car after another lit us up with their headlights.
“Are those….Oakies?”
“I heard they are filming a new John Steinbeck movie in Roseville.”
So I googled Oscar’s on Lakeshore in Oakland – not in Berkeley – and learned my father’s home away from home had closed, too. To my wonder, someone managed to locate and save what looks like promotional photographs of this lounge with piano bar, when it first opened. In looking at the Portuguese brothers who owned this swank establishment with a German name, alas, I get it, what made my father tick!
Being an only child raised by a domineering and protective mother, Vic Presco, had doubts about his manhood. Did he have sissy, homosexual, tendencies? He gripes about having the lack of a fatherly influence. More than anyone I ever met, Vic butchered Freudian psychology.
“Your mother and I did not get along because she wanted to wear the pants in the family.”
Did Vic worry about Rosemary making him wear a dress? Of course she did. This is why my father hung out in Oscar’s, with ‘The Brothers’, his surrogate family who listened to him bitch about his wife, and how she turned his children against them – and made them sissies! Hanging around a bunch of dudes in a bar, was ‘Vic’s Cure’.
Vic’s main job was to un-sissify his two sons. This is why we waited for Captain Vic out in the truck with ‘Acme Produce’ stenciled on the two doors. Starting at eight and nine years of age, we were awoken at 4:30 A.M. and were down in Oakland’s Produce Market before sunrise. We worked as Lumpers till 6:00 P.M. and then sat in the truck till around 9:00 P.M. till her emerged. We last ate around noon. Sometimes the Captain would have a big Oskie steak. As an only child, he did not like sharing his best food with his wife and four children, because, that was not how he was raised. Being utterly selfish was being manly in Vic’s eskewed view of the world. Being a generous human being, made me a sissy.
So, like hungry dogs, his son’s steady gaze was fixed on the front door of Oscar’s that was padded with red leather, and held fast by big brass studs. The flashing neon-sign is burned into my soul. If he came out and caught us getting some shut-eye while on watch, we were severely humiliated;
“What are you two doing – playing grab-ass!”
Why pay good money to go see a shrink when you can work out your mental illness on your small children. Watching the Sopranos is to see what that would have been like for the Big Baby in the family, if he had a therapist. Vic would parade us around the real Italian families that had produce markets, with sons in their twenties – who looked like they wanted to kick Mr. Presco’s ass!.
Trying to be a man in the 1950’s, was very surreal, because the armies of the world had drafted, boys in their teens. And when the war was over, they did not have a clue. Many war stories were shared in Oscars by men who had been – over there. As they droned on, there was a sexy singer by the piano singing patriotic tunes, while overly dressed citizens raised their Martinis, and guessed what it means to be a grownup – with children.
The divorce rate – soared – when mothers realized the fathers of their children would never grow-up. All this identity crisis was fueled by the drug, alcohol. The Souza brothers owned nice homes by providing men a place to get a buzz on – outside the home – at ten times the amount of buying a bottle at a liquor store. If marijuana had not come along, we might be buying a healing elixir at the Heath and Wellness Lounge with Healing Flame and Space music. How about a tranquil waterfall with a statue of Buddha?
And what’s with the mural of the three elephants? There are famous muralists in my family tree. Was this mural – saved? Three pink elephants in the ashtray. A trinity? Could it be…..these are the elephants from London’s semi-autobiographical novel, John Barelycorn? If so, what an incredible archeological find! Note the guitar shape in back of the bar where dance the three elephants to unknown music, while lined up on the neck, are glasses of mixed drinks. Hippies have not yet been invented!
Jack London and George Sterling lived a mile up Lakeshore in Piedmont, one of the wealthiest communities in the Bay Area. Here dwell college educated businessmen who may have read London’s books, and got it, what this local modern décor is all about. Did they understand they were being given literary and Bohemian permission, to tie one on, and show-off their knowledge around the large circular fireplace?
““the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.”
And look at that kidney-shaped piano bar! Is that Eunice Steele playing the eighty-eights while her fans sit safe and secure in heavy-duty splayed legged bar stools covered in real pink elephant hide? Who was the interior decorator? Was he famous, or did the Souza brothers hire some kid fresh out of college? Why don’t we have the answers to my question? We spent trillions of dollars and twenty years forcing our culture on the Iraqi and Vietnamese people, and no one could pay some Beatnik goof ten thousand dollars to go around Oakland with a notepad and camera?
“Too late! All gone!”
If this is a authentic Jack London connection, it would be huge in putting together the history of my late sister, the famous artist ‘Rosamond’ who had two galleries in Carmel where George and Jack helped found the Bohemian Scene there. What I am suggesting, is, Oscar’s was a high-class Bohemian establishment. Are these the real clientage? Or did the Souzas hire them out of central casting, and bring them up on a train? Maybe they came over on the fairy from San Francisco, they enticed to do some slumming in Oakland? Did the Brothers tell the elite there was going to be a secret pot party after the shoot?
“Those Portuguese. They always get the good stuff!”
I own the privilege of being a historian who witnessed the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. All the history from now on will take place in the Informational Carnival Freak-house. We will pay to enter, eat the cotton candy, ride the scary rides, and get suckered once again into going for the ring toss to win a bowl with a gold fish! But, there is no EXIT. There is no going home………..again! Even the places we did business will never open their doors the same way.
Ray Bradbury, got it right! Rod Serling now comes onto our computer screens to inform us all the Souza Brothers were reptiles from another planet. Hark, is that the ironic lady laughing at Playland at the Beach? She mocked us as we lost another summer vacation to tyranny. While all the children on our block went outside to play, Mark and I were already at work, struggling to get another one hundred pound sack of potatoes up on the flatbed. When we got home about 9:30 at night, Rosemary looked alarmed, she searching our souls for any sign we hated them, hated her, as she heated up a pan of cheap hot dogs and German sauerkraut. We ate as fast as we could so we could rush upstairs and go to bed. We enjoyed six and half hours of oblivion before we awoke to another day’ nightmare.
There is a Lost Youth story, here. But, the only ones who lost their youth – for sure – was my older brother, and I. We will never reap our revenge, sit at the bar in our golden years, having a Oskie steak….. all to ourselves.
The Confederate flag in South Carolina comes down, and, it is official: We are a World of Lost Causes, but, there will never be another Oscar’s, a great place to cry in your beer.
Oh…and you didn’t have to go outside to smoke.
John Presco
Copyright 2015
“Seeing pink elephants” is a euphemism for drunken hallucination, caused by alcoholic hallucinosis or delirium tremens. An early literary use of the term is by Jack London in 1913, who describes one kind of alcoholic, in the autobiographical John Barleycorn, as “the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.”[1] A reference to pink elephants occurs in the 1941 Disney animated film Dumbo. Dumbo, having taken a drink of water from a bucket spiked with champagne, begins to hallucinate singing and dancing elephants in a segment known as “Pink Elephants on Parade“.
Pink elephants do exist in nature, as it is possible for albino elephants to be pink, as well as white.[2]
In 2008, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin used the phrase “pink elephants” to refer to Pro-life Republican women such as herself, Carly Fiorina, Sue Lowden and Jane Norton.[3]
Oscar’s was a restaurant with fireplace and piano bar owned and operated by the Souza family, which was located at 3285 Lakeshore Avenue, in Oakland, California. Currently, there is a Gap store in the former location of Oscar’s.
The brothers were John Souza, Frank Souza, Mac Souza, Jim Souza, Carl Souza, Tony Souza and Clyde Souza. They ran Oscar’s during the 1940s and 1950s. 2 Oscar’s was in business from 1945 until about 1984.
Food at Oscar’s was American Cuisine, with the famous “Oskie” Steak which cost $3.50 in 1974. Eunice Steele was the piano-bar artist for over 25 years. Oscars was home to entertainer Danny Marona for about half a year.
https://localwiki.org/oakland/Oscar%E2%80%99s
Oscar’s, the iconic Shattuck Avenue restaurant, is not long for this world. The restaurant, a Berkeley institution since 1950, will close in the next month or two, reports Eater SF. In its place will be the first Northern California outpost of Washington, D.C.-based Sweetgreen, a “seasonal fast-food chain.”
Oscar’s has primarily been a burgers and fries destination for Cal students and others looking for a no-frills carb fix for the past 65 years. Owned by the same family for many years, the corner restaurant, at 1890 Shattuck Ave. at Hearst, feels much as it probably did when it opened, with its scalloped roof overhang, vintage signage, laminate-topped tables and white globe lights. Berkeleyside spoke to owner Scott on Tuesday, but he was reluctant to comment on the news, saying just that he was not the forthcoming type. “I’m not a warm and fuzzy guy,” he said.
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/05/26/oscars-hot-dogs-to-close-after-65-years-in-Berkeley/
Rosamond Press 
Reblogged this on Rosamond Press and commented:
My brother and I were encouraged to have a sibling rivalry so our parents could study how that felt for them when children. Vic was an only children and Rosemary had not brothers. I talked about forgiving my parents with my therapists. “How did that go?” “Why should I?” was my answer.