It was Herbie Goldstein, may he rest, who had turned him on to the onion bagel, back in the days when Vegas was still Vegas and not Disney World with crap tables. And back when Herbie, all 375 pounds of him, was an unlikely player and unlikelier ladies’ man. They’d been up all night, hitting the shows and clubs with a couple of gorgeous girls, when Herbie had somehow pulled into his orbit. They decided to go out to breakfast, where Herbie talked a reluctant Frank into trying an onion bagel.

“Come on, you guinea,” Herbie had said, “stretch your horizons.”

That was a good thing Herbie had done for him, because Frank enjoys his onion bagels, but only when he can buy them fresh-made at that little kosher deli up in Hillcrest. Anyway, the onion bagel-egg sandwich is a highlight of his morning routine.

“Normal people sitdown to eat breakfast,” Donna told him.

“Iam sitting down,” Frank replied. “Sitting down driving.”

What is it Jill calls it? The kids these days think they invented doing more than one thing at a time (they should have tried raising kids in the old days, before the disposable diapers, the washer-dryers, and the microwaves), so they came up with a fancy name for it. Yeah, “multi-tasking.” I’m like the young people, Frank thinks. I’m multi-tasking.

2

Ocean Beach Pier is the biggest pier in California.

A big capitalT of concrete and steel jutting out into the Pacific Ocean, its central stem running for over sixteen hundred feet before its crosspiece branches out to the north and south an almost equal distance. If you decide to walk the entire pier, you’re looking at a jaunt of about a mile and a half.

Frank’s bait shop, O.B. Bait and Tackle, sits about two-thirds of the way up the stem on the north side, just far enough from the Ocean Beach Pier Cafe so that the smell from the bait shop doesn’t bother the diners and the dining tourists don’t bother Frank’s regular fishermen.