California a patchwork quilt of energy fields? Thanksgiving in San Francisco, career begging hub of the USA, home of the upwardly moving homeless.
One of the findings of this Mr Henry Institute sponsored field trip will be that America doesn’t know how to do coffee. It laces its weak filtered coffee with ‘French vanilla’ and other revolting taste additives, including pumpkin!, when they should just quadruple the amount of ground beans.
Espresso is also problematic. Not the black T-shirt and snooty-looks part, but the actual operation of the espresso machine, which is totally absent, by the way, from the vast swathes of America Mrs Henry characterises as “the middle of nowhere”.
In Pismo Beach, California, I place our order for “two small cappuccinos, please” and the sitcom begins. The young man behind the espresso machine stands well back from it, as if it might explode at any moment and is at a loss what to do next every step of the way, which he illustrates by crooking both arms in symmetry and rhythmically rocking his upper body to and fro.
He rotates is entire body twenty degrees left, then right, takes a step back, forward, back. It’s an object lesson in what the presence of compressed steam can do to human resolve.
While he is doing this, a lanky man in his late sixties, white cap, white moustache, white shorts, enters the coffee shop. “Ah, did you guys like find a white plastic ah card, it’s like a credit card kind of thing? I use it as an energy field?”
Any Sydney barista would have ejected the man from the shop, politely if possible, impolitely if necessary, but not our Pismo Beach, black T-shirt sporting no-hoper, who welcomes the lost energy field as a diversion from the espresso machine, which he leaves hissing like a stationary locomotive under full steam to join the sandwich girls, who have gone into a huddle to address the white plastic energy field issue.
They actually take this loony seriously. In this country every person seems to have some personal cosmic relationship or another, with an energy source or with Jesus or some other imaginary friend, but common to all these relationships is that the universe is geared to meet the individual’s personal needs.
There’s not all that much difference between the attitude that allows people to take an energy field represented by a white plastic card seriously and the “Yah-yah-yah” response arising from a bevy of young housewives to the remark “Jesus like really came through on that one for us” by one of them. The cosmic relationship is very personal and it’s there if you want it.
The absence of such a personal cosmic relationship can be used to explain anything that’s undesirable in Amercian society, such as homelessness, mental illness, disability, addiction, you name it. It absolves America from having to take responsibility for looking after the unfortunate. You’re hearing voices? Talk to God.
Los Angeles (which looks like a magnified recreation of Penrith, including and especially the aggravatedly crummy Walk of Fame (High Street) and the Emu Plains Heights on steroids called Beverly Hills (for people for whom Jesus really, really came through) has contracted out its homelessness problems to San Francisco. L.A. moves the homeless on. San Francisco doesn’t.
In San Francisco, the dire consequences of not having a personal relationship with a cosmic entity can be seen everywhere.
The streets of San Francisco are staked out by beggars. You cannot move without being solicited: “Some change please.”
Locals argue that the begging is a profitable commercial operation, but during one brief walk we encountered a filth encrusted young man occupying a street corner, talking to invisible company around him (not God, presumably) while rocking to and fro and flapping his hands. We encountered two people having some quiet time on the foothpath reading the paper and we encountered a woman in maybe her early thirties shouting at the top of her voice, “Fuck your Thanksgiving Day, I don’t want your fucking free turkey. I want to shit in your mouth!” Begging cups were absent.
San Francisco has lots of restaurants, so that no homeless person needs to go hungry. It has year-round temperate weather. The police is not aggressive. That’s why San Francisco has so many homeless. And organised or not, no one lives on the street by choice.
However commendable San Francisco is in the way it deals, by omission, with homelessness, it’s got a long way to go when it comes to coffee. Starbucks is sort of OK, when you’ve been away from Sydney for nearly three months, but the “Two small capucinos, please” I ordered at an alleged coffee shop at Fisherman’s Wharf (equivalent of Sydney’s Circular Quay) were delivered with five minutes between them and there were no artificial sweeteners for Mrs Henry, who watches her figure.
The capucinos at Pismo Beach were delivered simultaneously, after one of the sandwich girls remembered “clearing a white plastic card from a table last Wednesday”, that is, three days earlier.
“Ah, when you say like clear, does that mean that ah it’s like still around?”, asked Mr Loony-Tunes, “coz it’s worth a couple a hundred bucks to me, you know.”
“I trew it in da trash”, said the sandwich girl, mentally resolving, no doubt, to hang on to any bit of non-putrescible waste she finds on tables in future.
The no-hoper barista returned to his steam locomotive and poured our cappuccinos, which turned out to consist mainly of froth.
