Richard Pryor | Tiburon | Alcatraz island | North Beach

We lived in Tiburon, in this little house. There's a great restaurant in Tiburon called Sam's Anchor Cafe, which is still there. It's a seafood restaurant that my father liked because you can sit outside, on the warm days, or inside. It's just an old-school seafood-and-hamburger place, and my father loved the hamburgers.

When friends come to town, where do you suggest they stay?
There's the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins and the St. Francis. Those are three of the old-school hotels.

Where would you start your day in San Francisco?
If you head north, there are the old coffeehouses, like Vesuvio. It's truly an old Italian neighborhood. In the morning, you would see the old Italian guys having a double espresso. I mean, they were doing cappuccino when there were people coming looking for gold. [He continues in a gruff gold miner's voice.] "What is that?" "Steamed milk!" Vesuvio was the first place I ever saw a foosball machine. Then, later on, those became hip, but it was like, "What is that?" "Foosball!" With real guys hanging off a pole.

If you were to keep walking down from North Beach, you could see Alcatraz Island, right?
Yes. I went there with Richard Pryor because he had a weird request. Before he died, his wife said, "Richard really wants to go there and see Alcatraz." I said, "All right. We'll set it up." His MS was pretty powerful at that point. We got a plane and a bus, and we hooked up with the ferry so they could give him special wheelchair access. The wonderful thing is our guy was a big fan, loved all [Richard's] comedy. And he gave us the special tour, the back history. How the Bird Man of Alcatraz really was a [jerk]. He was not the kindly, good man that they portrayed him as. The sad, kind of brutal thing about Alcatraz is it was within hearing distance of the city. So the guys there, on any night, on a beautiful night, could hear music. And especially on New Year's, they could hear people really enjoying themselves. That's a double whammy. You could rub it in that way. "You ain't getting this, boys!"

Because you're behind bars just off the coast of the most beautiful city in the world?