There are a lot of strange people in San Francisco, and if you work there, you soon grow used to occasional peculiarities in your customers; but the girl behind the cash register at Ghirardelli's decided that this took weirdness to new heights. Two executives in tailored business suits were sitting at one of the little white tables in the soda fountain area, glaring hungrily at the fountain worker who was preparing their eighth round of hot chocolate. They had marched in, put down a hundred-dollar bill, and told her to keep the drinks coming. On the floor between their respective briefcases was a souvenir bag stuffed with boxes of chocolate cable cars, and the table was littered with foil wrappers from the chocolate they had already consumed.
To make matters stranger, they had the appearance of junior delegates from opposing sides of a celestial peace conference: the dark one with his diabolic beard and the fair-haired one with his fragile good looks. As she watched, the devil jumped up the second his order number was called and went swiftly, if unsteadily, to take his tray. He grabbed the cocoa-powder canister on his return. Sitting down across from the angel, he added a generous helping of cocoa to his hot chocolate. Then, apparently seized by an afterthought, he opened the canister and shook out a couple of spoonfuls onto the marble tabletop. Giggling guiltily, he pulled out an American Express card and began scraping the cocoa powder into neat little lines.
"Danny!" She stopped the busboy as he came through the turnstile. "Look at him! Is he really going to-?"
He was. He did. The angel went into gales of high-pitched laughter and fell off his chair. The devil sighed in bliss and leaned down for a pass with the other nostril.
"I don't know what's wrong with them," said the girl in bewilderment. "I swear to God they were both sober when they came in here, and all they've ordered is hot chocolate."
"Maybe they just really like hot chocolate?" said the busboy.
-The Graveyard Game
Kage Baker
~~
This excerpt, from book four in my favorite book series ever, is about 24 pages into a massive clusterfuck of intriguing plot.
Clarification: The immortal cyborgs were made immune and highly resistant to any and all know poisons and narcotics, to the point that they could drink straight vodka all night and never get any more drunk than a mild buzz. However, their creators failed to take into account the mild narcotic effect that theobroma cacao has on the human psyche. You know, all those endorphins, the giddy warm fuzzies . . .
So when you're immune to the effects of drugs and alcohol and need to get really baked, chocolate is the way to go.
Seriously, though, apart from the fantastically shameless display of public intoxication, this scene has always been one of my favorites in the series (right up there with the Elizabethan martyr, Victorian espionage agent, and post-modern Surfer/Sailor boy all sharing a body with a holographic pirate). It makes me think, makes me wonder, . . .
What wouldn't you do to escape from the horrors of life?
The Angel and Devil characters above are actually 2000 and 20,000 years old, respectively. I'm in my early 20's. I have to wonder (other than the fact that Ghirardelli's didn't exist until the 20th century) how much it actually took to get these two to go completely off their rockers in public, when they're supposed to be super sly, super sneaky, covert guys and never leave the region of "below the radar."
How much can a normal human being endure before they get to that point?
I was accosted by a young homeless gentleman yesterday. He's only a few years older than I am, but (claims that) he is two years sober following a five-year addiction to hard drugs. His wife has multiple prostitution charges. He's been homeless since he was 18, and his wife is in the same boat. They don't have their kids anymore (well, duh, on that one). He was an English and Philosophy major in a past life, back before everything went to hell.
Really, it was frightening to listen to his story and see how similar our paths are, how easily I could go the same way.
BUT!
He didn't have the shadowy, skeletal pallor of the addicts I pass on my way to and from the bus stop by my house. He didn't have a cloud of bottomless doom following him around like many of the transients who camp out behind the gas station by my work. He actually had kind of a flame in his eyes.
Not like a bonfire flame, you understand. Not some hellish, hopeless inferno.
More of a candle.
It was a really powerful thing to see, in someone who, by all rights, could have easily given up on himself and have society write him off as some other poor sap the system failed.
But he didn't. He has that look, that power, that motivation to get himself out of where he is, to pull himself up by the bootstraps, and his wife, too, and get them to a better place.
I bought the guy a sandwich.
He's so infinitely more inspiring than two lousy immortals getting drunk on chocolate in San Francisco. Really, as amusing as that little scene is, as hard as I laugh every time I read it, it's such a cold, heartless piece of literature. It's horrifying, to look at someone and see them wasting their life and soul away on drugs and alcohol and lack of direction. What does it really take to get to that point? It took these characters two- and twenty-thousand years, respectively. I now know firsthand that we mere mortals can reach that wasteland in less than twenty.
I think that we all have to hit some sort of bottom, so that we can get that direction. So that the direction we can go in is "Up."
Also, please send some good vibes to this guy. I really think he'll recover himself. I think he can get out of the mess he's in. I like to think that, one day, I'll see him on the street, in work clothes, buying some other lost kid a meal because he made it.
He can pass it on.
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