Magic in "The City": A San Francisco Story

By Jim Riva

The Center for Magic Carpet Studies and the National Magic Carpet Reporting Center feed the frenzy that follows the publication of flying-carpet stories by Marty Janko of Portland and Amanda Olsen of Seattle.
Some historians buy into it and think that flying carpets may have played a part in history, such as Pheidippedes’ ‘run’ from Marathon to Athens, Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina, and Napoleon’s escape from Elba.
A physicist at the Livermore National Laboratory wants to get a piece of an alleged flying carpet so he can run tests on it and see if there is some alloy or resin that can somehow emit wavelengths capable of interacting with certain electro-chemical processes of our thoughts.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science dismisses all claims about flying carpets and offers ten million dollars to anyone who can bring them one. The notorious Mister Hung, kingpin of the Wah Ching syndicate in San Francisco, proceeds to offer twenty million dollars to anyone who can bring him one.
Ed Harrington, an SFPD detective nearing retirement, gets assigned the job of keeping Mister Hung from getting his hands on a flying carpet, which he thinks is absolute nonsense. But with a wife who went through a post-menopause metamorphosis and is now a full-fledged Santeria priestess with a sacrificial altar in the living room, what’s a little more nonsense? Besides, Ed is now just counting the days till retirement, when he plans to buy a big fishing boat and live by himself in the San Francisco Bay.
So Ed and his assigned partner, a flamboyant, transgender policewoman, go through the motions and stake out Mister Hung’s shop in Chinatown, where just about every nut-job in the city is bringing a rug that they claim can fly.
Could there really be a flying carpet out there? Ed is about to find out, and his skepticism is about to get blown to smithereens.
Set in San Francisco in the spring/summer of 2013, Magic in “The City”: A San Francisco Story (Book Three of “The Magic Carpet Trilogy”) is a laugh-out-loud, action-packed adventure that reaches deep for the child inside you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Riva
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005274894

Jim Riva

Jim Riva was the class clown in his boyhood days. He became a serious student of philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels before coming to the philosophical conclusion that the best outlook on life is to take humor seriously.An off-the-beaten-track world traveler who spent the better part of fourteen years in Japan, Jim has written nine novels that fall into the Humor category and more than thirty-five audio sketches that are on The Champion of Reason Podcast.He lives and laughs (and continues to write) in Oregon with his Japanese wife and their daughter.

Book preview

Magic in The City: A San Francisco Story

Book Three of The Magic Carpet Trilogy

By Jim Riva

Copyright 2013 Jim Riva

Cover art by Satoshi Uegaki

Photoshop work by Juliáe Riva

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I could not have written this story without the help I received from Kevin Bell.

MAGIC IN THE CITY: A SAN FRANCISCO STORY

CHAPTER ONE

(April 1st, 2013)

I was standing outside the Hall of Justice, smoking a cigarette and listening to the baseball game on my phone. It was opening day for the Giants, the World Series champion Giants. They were playing in L.A. against the Dodgers. Matt Cain was throwing against Clayton Kershaw and it was scoreless after two innings.

I would have been watching the game on ESPN, but I had an appointment scheduled for 2:00. That was fine; I liked to listen to Kruk and Kuip call games on the radio.

A commercial for United Healthcare made me think about the mental health of my crazy-ass wife. That broad had been getting goofier by the day and was on her way to being as nutty as Emperor Norton.

We first met at the Top of the Mark, and although our conversation there seemed to go around in circles, we elevated the level of our conversation on our first official date—at the Cliff House. One thing led to another and we, Ed Harrington and Suzanne Flitcroft, ended up tying the knot in a civil ceremony at City Hall, just like Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe.

A successful real-estate agent, Suzanne was imperfectly fine until 2009, when menopause kicked in. Then she went through a series of transformations until she was now a god-damn Santeria priestess with a god-damn altar in the god-damn living room.

I had been sleeping on a couch in the den, biding my time until July 28th, when our only child, Dean, and his partner, Justin, were planning to tie the knot one way or another, depending on how the Supreme Court ruled in late June on same-sex marriage. July 28th seemed to be as good of a date as any to finally move out.

The Santeria priestess could keep our house in East Bay. She paid for most of it anyway after buying it from Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship fame. All I wanted was a buyout of $65,000, which I figured was half of what I needed for a good, used, 38-foot Hatteras that I was planning to park in Richardson Bay and call home.

My pension with the San Francisco Police Department would be more than enough to keep me living on the water and fishing my days away. Thanks to Gavin Newsom’s push prior to the 2007 gubernatorial election for a 23% raise (over four years), which was on top of the passage of a 2002 proposition (Proposition H) that increased police pensions to 90% of their final salary, I could pull in a pension from age 55 of almost $100,000 a year.

All I needed to do was to make it to retirement without any incidents that could jeopardize my pension. An incident two months earlier