There’s this place I’ve been going to in the mornings. It’s on Market Street, a café called the “Little Griddle”, where traditional American food is served. I get there at 845 am, sometimes earlier. I go in, order a cup of hot chocolate and sit for a few minutes. I’m on hot chocolate in an effort to eliminate coffee and it is working. On occasion I’ll sit and observe what’s going on inside and outside. I sit and see the changing face of the city. These faces tend to be (mostly) white and (seemingly) comfortable. The cooks (mostly) are people of color and the cashiers are mostly white. You don’t see a whole lot of black faces coming through the door—except for an occasional muni fare collector or office worker. The type of black folks you’ll typically see are the one’s deemed acceptable. They have the clean pressed clothes, clean pressed minds and attitudes—the type you’d perhaps see in a GAP or Verizon TV commercial—the type that could take to that whiny acoustic guitar shit over a cup of Chai and somehow get a tingling--borderline orgasmic--sensation that is somehow beyond words. These types and their white counterparts give off the ever present insipid vibe that permeates so much of San Francisco today. I sit and watch this very long, very insipid movie before my eyes—a movie with many actors pretending to pretend—a movie with no bargain matinee.
I was across the street from the café the other day. Standing near it was a houseless woman. She looked to have been houseless for a long time, and, judging by the way she held herself, appeared to be in struggle with serious mental health issues. She stood near the wall of the café. One good-hearted woman stopped and spoke with her, then handed her some change. The woman stood there, speaking to no one in particular. Or perhaps she was speaking to the past, the ever present past, reliving arguments and words that never got resolved, back in another space, place or reality. She stood there as the world went by, doing what it does.
And then the houseless lady stepped away towards the curb. Not 30 seconds when by when a worker from the café came out with a red bucket and broom. The worker doused the wall with the soapy water—in all its holiness—and very rigorously scrubbed the wall where the lady had leaned against. He scrubbed and scrubbed with the voraciousness of someone wanting to exorcise every single germ, down to the microbes—as if he were scrubbing away memory itself. He went over much of the wall—more than the woman had touched—as well as a portion of the sidewalk. As I watched this incessant and dutiful scrubbing on the part of the restaurant worker, it struck me as a sort of anal-retentive ritual rooted in some kind of strangeness. I wondered if this ritual ever happened at Burning Man, where the attendees come back in a state that could be described as less than well-scrubbed. But there was something rather sick and disconcerting about this cleansing.
I understand the need for cleanliness. I worked for years with my father in his small janitorial business. But the spirit in which it was done, as i witnessed it, is indicative of a city that is losing its soul; a spirit that is ugly and vile and can't be disguised with disinfectant and air freshener. The whole scene was a metaphorical reminder of the pathological need for cleanliness that those who gentrify our communities and neighborhoods have. The writer Charles Bukowski once said, “When you clean up a city, you kill it”. My father had a word to describe what I saw in front of the café: C-H-I-C-K-E-N-S-H-I-T. I haven’t been back since.