Attempted murder at the 500 Club

It’s out in the open now so I can confirm that yes, in fact I am a lawyer. I began my career long long ago as a criminal defense attorney (more on which later) and I began THAT career as an intern at the San Francisco Public Defender, where I hoped to get a job one day (and almost did, also more on which later). And it was in that capacity that I had a brief and tangential connection to one of the weirdest cases that you will ever hear about.

San Francisco in the 90’s was a fucking VIBE man, and if you were here then you know what I mean. This was the pre-dot-com-crash era; in fact, it was the pre-dot-com era. The Internet barely existed. Remind me to tell you about the local chat network you could access by putting quarters into a computer at a coffee shop in the Lower Haight sometime. We got our movies from Blockbuster and 12-packs of Henry Weinhard were like six bucks and everyone smoked.

One of those club nights was Mushroom Jazz at the Cat Club, a weekly event launched by Mark Farina that quickly became legendary. And that was where three guys stopped one night in 1994. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events but this crowd also stopped at the Drunk Tank, which was the actual name of a bar on Market Street at Laguna and which very little evidence of survives.

I’m not going to use their actual names here because this was a long time ago and people deserve to move on from their misspent youth and at least one of them, I think, is dead. You can easily find out who I’m talking about though. One of the guys, in fact, is mentioned in this fantastic Rachel Kushner article in the New Yorker about growing up in a San Francisco that no longer exists. He was a bouncer at the Crazy Horse, a strip club on Market that still exists, so far as I know. (In quoted pieces below I’ve shortened his name to H.)

These guys ended up at the 500 Club on Guerrero in the early morning hours and there began a confrontation with Fidel Joshua, the unfortunate victim in this case. As described in a Chronicle story at the time:

They shot pool for a while, then about 1:15 a.m. Joshua decided to play the jukebox. But a woman customer already had put coins in the machine.

"I wanted to know how many songs she was playing," he said. "I didn't want to waste my money since the place was going to close in 45 minutes."

Joshua said he went to the booth where the woman was sitting with three men and asked how many coins she'd put in.

H, he said, then shouted a racial epithet - "What, n- - -?"

"He slammed me with his fist," said Joshua, who is black.

Joshua said the other two men started punching him and his friend, knocking his friend unconscious. Joshua fought back, then staggered to the sidewalk where, he said, H stabbed him twice.

Horrifying. The bouncer was arrested I think the next day at Crazy Horse. One of the other guys involved in the fight was arrested sometime later, and became a client of the attorney I was interning with, and that’s how I came to meet him in the San Francisco County Jail at 850 Bryant. I don’t remember much about him except he was quiet and seemed genuinely sorry to have gotten mixed up in this. That doesn’t mean he was blameless, it just means he was human.

BUT WAIT, the story gets even weirder. While he was awaiting trial, H, who was being held at the OTHER SF jail, in San Bruno, ESCAPED from the jail. From the Chronicle again:

On Friday morning, during a recreational break at the County Jail - where the Sheriff's Department keeps its prisoners - H scaled two separate jail fences, draping his jail-issue orange shirt over the razor-wire fences. His bloody, torn shirt was later found on top of one fence.

No one saw him jump the fences, but he was spotted running west toward Sweeney Ridge, a series of wooded hills that separate San Bruno and Pacifica.

H managed to elude search dogs, a Coast Guard helicopter and more than 50 officers, including sheriff's deputies and police from Pacifica, San Bruno and the U.S. Park Service.

Deputies still don't know how he got to the Mission District, where he was provided with a change of clothing and a place to clean up.

Crazy, huh? BUT WAIT IT GETS WEIRDER. Because you know who helped the police find H? Fidel Joshua, the guy he stabbed! Seems Joshua was at Kilowatt and started talking to a person who turned out to know H and followed that person to an apartment building on Guerrero and called the cops. The cops hang out there and find H trying to sneak into the building. He ended up getting six or eight years or something like that for the stabbing. He died in 2004, I don’t know of what.

Joshua is like a sad Zelig who keeps mysteriously appearing in San Francisco lore. In 2022 he was working security at the Main Library when he got attacked by a pit bull. Man, I would not want to work security at the Main Library.

Drunk Tank is long gone. Cat Club is still there and amazingly still hosting 1984, a weekly 80’s-themed dance party I remember going to in the 90’s, which means now it’s celebrating 40-year-old music. Crazy Horse is still on Market. 500 Club is, of course, thriving and mostly stabbing-free.

I’m still here. I didn’t get that job with the San Francisco Public Defender; hilariously, they offered it to me after I had already accepted a different job. It all worked out, though.