For a major metropolitan area, San Francisco is quaint in a lot of ways. One such way is the fact that it is very difficult to find food after the bars close. I’ve only been to New York once, but Manhattan seemed to have no problems delivering mediocre quality food to me during the wee hours of the morning. But if you’re drinking in, say, the Sunset and you want something to eat at 3 am, you might have to trek your ass over to the god-damn Marina just to get some Jack in the Box.

North Beach, however, has long been a bastion of multiple late night eateries that specialize in pizza. North Beach is also a bastion of pretentious literary landmarks, strip clubs, and ridiculously crowded breakfast places, but I digress…

So now The City is apparently considering a proposal to force all business, including the pizza places along Broadway, to close at 2 am.

So there was this one weekend when the wife (then, the girlfriend) was out of town for work. It just so happened that one of the guys from my soccer team was also “off-duty” as he called it, because his girl was back in Texas visiting her family.

So, of course, it was decided that we were going to get drunk. Steve came over and we went to get dinner at The Sausage Factory (and don’t bother pointing out the ridiculous irony that there is a restaurant called “The Sausage Factory” in the heart of the Castro…) before heading off to North Beach to meet up with some of the other guys from our team.

I think I had a beer with our meal.

I know that when we got to the first bar, I had two (more?) beers. This first place was pretty nice, but located in an alley, for some reason. We didn’t stay there long and headed off to another bar a few doors down. Once here, Steve says something like, let’s do shots. I’m pretty sure I convinced him to do a round of Jaegermeister, because that’s one of the few hard alcohols I can tolerate in shot form. So at this point I’m pretty buzzed and Steve says let’s do another shot, but something different than Jaeger. I was probably open to suggestion at this point because I only half-heartedly opposed, even when Steve ordered Wild Turkey…

And the next morning I woke up somewhere that I didn’t know…

Luckily, it turned out to be Steve’s apartment. My recollections of a majority of that night are so insubstantial that the term hazy would be a gross exaggeration.

I know at one point I had my arms around one of my teammates and was saying something like, “I love this team!”

I was told, though I don’t remember, that I threw up in the middle of a crowd outside a pizzeria at 2:30 am.

So what I’m asking is, if San Francisco shuts down the North Beach pizzerias at 2 am, what will drunken amateur footballers do with themselves when they are so drunk that they can’t stand on their own accord?