So many Speedo jokes at Aaron Peskin’s birthday roast

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At the 60th birthday roast/fundraiser for Aaron Peskin, current president of the Board of Supervisors and candidate for mayor, there was a nearly-but-not-quite-life-sized cutout of Peskin in a Speedo, replicated from a photo shoot for a long-ago magazine profile of Peskin during his first run as board president. There was the decadent interior and terrible acoustics of the St. Joseph’s Art Society building. There were people in immaculately put together designer outfits, and people who looked like they had dressed to help unload a truck. There were too-injured-to-live-in-the-wild cherry-headed conures from the Telegraph Hill parrot flock, whose cackling reverberated through the building.

And then there was former mayor Willie Brown, Jr., onstage, calling Peskin a pain in the ass, right in front of Peskin’s mother, Tsipora (who seemed, on the whole, unimpressed).

“I have never been to anything where you only gave 500 bucks,” said Brown, referring derisively to limits on individual campaign donations that were reinforced by a citywide ballot measure in 2019.  “Why would I show up for 500 bucks? It was Peskin who put that $500-a-pop on the ballot. And I know why he did it! He did it because he feared that I will become as wealthy as Daniel Lurie!”

Peskin and Brown’s enemies-to-frenemies storyline began with a fateful encounter in the ‘90s. As Peskin put it shortly after Brown’s speech, Brown was “really tight with Rite Aid and running San Francisco like a company store.” When the pharmacy chain announced plans to open a new location on Washington Square in North Beach, Peskin and a group of neighbors set up a meeting with Brown to voice their displeasure. It was a rare moment of unity for what had been a fractious community.

“The Telegraph Hill Dwellers have never gotten along with the rest of the hill neighbors,” said Peskin. “Nobody liked the North Beach Chamber of Commerce. But they all agreed that they didn’t want that 24-hour Rite Aid.” At the meeting, Brown dismissed their concerns, adding that if they didn’t like how he was running the city, they were free to run for office and try for themselves. “And I DID,” said Peskin, gleefully.

“He really, really drives some people absolutely crazy,” Brown added. “Because he literally reads everything contained in any document. If any of you know about me, I am of the opinion that you don’t want to deal with anybody who reads.”

“Willie and I suffer from Stockholm Syndrome,” said Peskin. “We ended up being captives of one another, and we started to identify with one another. You know, back in 2003, he threatened to kill me. I called the cops. Those were simpler times. I think we were fighting over a tax-reform issue, and I was sure that he really wanted money for his Brioni fund.”

“In the world of politics, when you find somebody who’s really smart, and able, in every way they are your enemy,” said Brown. But, in recent years, Brown added, he’d come to enjoy Peskin’s company, meeting up with him for the occasional coffee at Caffe Greco in North Beach. “I’m amazed, because I just assumed that he would never pay for coffee,” said Brown. “I was wrong.”

The spectacle of Peskin paying for his own coffee was too much for Brown not to use as leverage to prank him. Brown began to tell his buddies at Glide Memorial Church that if they went to Caffe Greco when Peskin was there, Peskin would buy them coffee, too. “There’s no way he would embarrass me by not picking up the tab,” said Brown. “That’s the kind of guy he really is.” Brown did, however, observe mayoral candidate Mark Farrell accepting a free coffee from Caffe Greco staff. “Which instantly said to me, ‘not him.’”

That opposition to Farrell doesn’t translate into support for  Peskin’s bid for Room 200, though: Brown is all-in for Mayor London Breed, a protege who served as an intern in his administration and has come up in politics with his support. She is “easily the best candidate,” Brown said at her kick-off, before issuing a warning to Peskin and her other opponents about the crowded and boisterous room of supporters: “I hope their spies deliver the truth to them.”

Brown described Peskin as surprisingly difficult to outmaneuver even before he was elected to the Board of Supervisors, then proceeded to gloat for several minutes about the North Beach parking garage on Vallejo, in which he tussled with Peskin over whether demolishing a privately owned parking garage and replacing it with a larger, city-owned one was in keeping with the city’s transit-first priorities.

“Somebody told me, ‘Aaron Peskin is going to kill your project.’ Many of you heard that, I’m sure. He’s killed a lot of your projects. I was determined to teach this young whippersnapper a lesson.” When a court order allowing the city to remove the buildings on the parking garage site dropped at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday, Brown used what he described as “my relationships in the Chinese world” to get a group of contractors to demolish all weekend, before Peskin could file a court order on Monday morning to stop it. “Peskin had finally been vanquished!” Brown said, cackling maniacally.

Nonetheless, said Brown, Peskin showed up at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new garage. “Everybody looked at me and said, ‘Why is he here?’” said Brown. “I said, ‘If you have a future, you better hook up with him.’”

The other roasts were similarly gentle, as the genre goes. “It kind of pisses me off that I was only told one thing about my remarks tonight,” said former supervisor Bevan Dufty. “I could not say the words ‘Aaron Peskin’ and ‘Speedo’ in the same sentence.”

Dufty then launched into a long story about attending a charity event for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation’s after-school program. Peskin stopped by the event and, upon learning that the fundraiser was auctioning off the right to throw civic leaders in to the pool of the Phoenix Hotel, borrowed what Dufty euphemistically referred to as a “budgie smuggler” (Australian slang for “Speedo”), blithely stripped down and changed into it in front of a horde of shocked twink swimsuit models, and joined the auction.

“Most of the people that year had gotten tossed in the pool for $3,000 to 4,000,” said Dufty. “Aaron came up and he had a developer that hated him so fucking much, he put $20,000 right down. He says, ‘I don’t even care if you give the money to the kids or not. I want to throw this fucker in the pool.’”

“This is the best part,” added Dufty, “as an outsider, of Aaron’s life. We’re all witnessing somebody who is their authentic self. He has gone through a lot. He has patience. Absolutely, I want that budgie smuggler in the mayor’s office.”

Malcolm Yueng, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, also cited the Speedo photo, which he described as “seared into my damn brain.” In Chinatown, where people are more likely to recognize Peskin by sight, but not remember his name, Peskin’s nickname is “the bearded one.” Yeung suggested rebranding Peskin as “the bearded panda man,” undercutting Mayor London Breed’s victorious China panda trip. “I just want to say, Madam Mayor, we just roasted you!” yelled Yeung. “Who’s gonna be the panda bear now?”

“Lastly,” said Yeung, “I want to clarify why I’m able to be here. As an SF Commissioner, and as a 501(c3) executive director, I know that I’m prohibited from helping any local candidate to raise money for their campaign. I agonize over this, because this is, after all, Aaron’s 60th birthday. So I’ve worked out a solution. Anyone who feels inspired by this introduction to donate should send their donation to a new charity launched by Mayor London Breed. And the charity is called ‘Build a Cage to Lock up the Bearded Panda Man in the San Francisco Zoo Fund.’”

After the speeches were over, after Peskin blew out the 60 little rainbow candles on an enormous strawberry-and-melon sponge cake from the AA Bakery on Stockton, someone walked around with a stack of birthday fliers made by Paul Sherman, one of Peskin’s friends from grade school. On it was a photo of a teenage Peskin looking eerily like a young Steve Jobs. He is leaning back in a chair, eyes closed with one hand stuck in a box of Ritz crackers. Over it, someone has drawn on a thought bubble with the words, “I’ll be mayor when I’m 60.”

“Happy birthday, Aaron” read the flier, with an earnestness that seemed both naive and necessary for the long months ahead. “May all your wishes come true.”