The first time my friends LK and Cassandra came down to visit Rhumbe and me in Santa Cruz, LK said: "This is a young city, isn't it? Where are the old people?"
The four of us had been wandering around downtown Santa Cruz, hitting the bookstores. It was early afternoon; the sun shone, and perky college students and baby-faced teens crowded the sidewalks. Grey heads were hard to spot.
Well, we have a university of 15,000 hormonally stoked students and a population of just 55,000. And we're a resort and beach town, Santa Cruz draws a lot of surfers and slackers, mostly young. Youth is what you see on the street, in the restaurants, in the theaters: teens and twenty-somethings.
But there is a second city, a second Santa Cruz, that looks much different. The second city is defined by a simple fact of physiology: that young people stay in bed until 9 or 10 am, if they can, but older folk easily rouse themselves to go out at five or six in the morning.
Before 9 am, Santa Cruz belongs to the grey.
It's 7:10 at Zachary's downtown on a weekday. Zach's is open, but just barely. Tinny jazz from the satellite radio feed floats through the cavernous dining room. Sluggishly, dawn light flows through windows and spills across ranks and rows of empty tables. At wide intervals around the room, grey-bearded men sit alone at tables with newspapers, coffee mugs, and bowls of nine-grain cereal. A single waitress mopes around the floor with little to do.
Rhumba and I are not quite so grey as the others, though we're getting there. We seat ourselves at the counter as always: at the counter, coffee is never more than a raised finger away. The counterman, stubbly-faced and gaunt in a Cisco Systems windbreaker, can't seem to get our orders straight. That's all right; he's young, he's barely awake. The greybeards out on the floor are reading about politics and working crossword puzzles, but at his age you're lucky if you can tell left from right at 7 a.m.
The most interesting people always sit at the counters; that's an eternal truth that I just coined a minute ago. At any rate, our counter buddies today are a backpacker of mature age in an open-style ski mask, the kind with a circular cut-out for the face; a short, stout woman with a gypsy look to her and a thick book to read; and the Old Hustler,all iron grey hair and leathery skin. He came here after the quake to sell drugs, a youngish hustler at the time; and I don't think things went so well. Seventeen years later, he looks 40 years older. He still hustles, but legally. Well, probably legally.
Outside the sky lightens, but a bank of clouds low in the east delay the sunrise. Pastel-colored shards of cloud drift across the dim sky. And it is cold. Walking up from Zach's there's almost no sign of life except the Metro transit center; it's a no-work day for most people. A few well-wrapped commuters stand like sentinels at the bus lanes, waiting: thick, sturdy, middle-aged.
There are a few younger people out at this hour. A couple of them lay still asleep in doorways. And a group of three wanders down the street holding sleeping bags and sacks full of their belongings from whatever culvert or brush patch or unlocked shed where they spent the night. There's a limit to how well you can sleep with no heat on a cold night; they look tired and old.
We stop briefly outside the lobby of a low-rent office building tenanted by two-man techie startups, cheap lawyers, and nonprofits. I always like to see who's on the tenant list, because it changes so often. I peer into the lobby through the glass door, but the list is just too far away; hope against hope, I push on the door. And it opens! At 7:30 in the morning! I look closely at the door; somebody has wound a folded strip of paper through the complex electronic timelock mechanism to keep it from engaging. The air is warm in the lobby; stairs beckon to the second floor; and I know there are bathrooms up there. Somebody has beaten the lords of technology with a tiny piece of paper and, most likely, got himself a heated place to sleep last night. I wonder how long this state of affairs has existed.
As we pass Cathcart heading north on Pacific, we see a few more pedestrians: all alone, none young. Occasionally a northbound car drives by slowly, its occupant always a single middle-aged man in casual clothing. Weird pattern; but then, looking up the street, there's a cluster of parked cars and a person or two, two blocks up. Ri-i-i-ght: they're heading to Starbucks.
Starbucks isn't the only coffee house open this early, but the parking's easy and it's across the street from the Palomar Inn, a six-story SRO hotel occupied mainly by the elderly and disabled. An elderly man dressed like a Japanese sage -- slippers, open-armed blue robe and loose slacks, and a magnificent bush of white hair tied back behind his head -- drifts out of Starbucks and back to the hotel with a steaming cup of caffeine in his hand. Two battered fifty-something men in colorless clothing bring black trash bags full of -- something -- out of the Palomar and load them into the back of a battered old Volvo wagon. Musical instruments? Their life's possessions? Hard to tell. I've known one of them casually for ten years, but they're gone before I can catch up; doors slam and the Volvo motors away, wheeping rust from beneath grey primer.
A few hearty souls hang out in front of Starbuck's, sitting at the little tables or leaning against their cars, chatting. Some of it drifts over to us as we pass by: "Whaddya mean, I can't bring my dog down here? THAT'S FOCKED!" Well, I didn't say it was polite chatting. And yes, it's illegal to bring your dog to Pacific Avenue, even on a leash. There was a reason for that, once, but the ordinance is overkill. We're not always good at nuanced solutions here in Santa Cruz.
As we drift north, the sun finally rises above the eastern clouds. Pacific Avenue is still dark, but the sunlight catches the belltower and cornices atop the St. George Hotel and outlines them in gold. At the top of Pacific, the sun catches one of the gold-colored stone bears that guard the third floor of the Flatiron building, and brings its every line and curve into high relief. It is California, after all: what better sign of the new day than a golden bear?
Below, a homeless man rouses himself from his night-time squat in the front door of Wachovia Savings. Across the street in a vacant lot, a wild-hair man raves to himself as he stuffs his belongings into -- yes -- a black plastic bag. "I walked by her house!" he shouts "I walked by her house! I walked by her house!"
The day begins in earnest, but the Second City, the Grey City, still has hours to live. The old still rule the supermarkets; they shop early, and even find older people waiting on them at cash registers: the store veterans always get the early shifts at supermarkets. (Because it's a quiet shift, and they've got seniority; and because they're awake and never fail to show up because they've been partying 'till 4 am.)
And the cafes still belong to the over-fifties, as does Dog Beach and West Cliff Drive, where they're taking their morning constitutionals. I will swear to you: if some theater instituted an 8:00 am early show, an audience would appear. And it would be mostly grey.
Sure, on any given weekday the young march off to school and to work pretty early -- earlier than they'd like, that's for sure. But they're shut away in buildings and factories, or sealed into cars inching over Highway 17 to the Silicon Valley. But in the public life of the city, the street life, the older folks, the lost folks, the people with no particular place in our whizzing, shiny, grinding machine of an economy, hold center stage for now.
You may go to San Francisco or LA for the weekend, or to Tahoe; but if you've never been, I suggest an early rise some morning and a quick trip to the Second City. Why not? It's just outside your door. And, I'm sure, some of you have never been there.
The four of us had been wandering around downtown Santa Cruz, hitting the bookstores. It was early afternoon; the sun shone, and perky college students and baby-faced teens crowded the sidewalks. Grey heads were hard to spot.
Well, we have a university of 15,000 hormonally stoked students and a population of just 55,000. And we're a resort and beach town, Santa Cruz draws a lot of surfers and slackers, mostly young. Youth is what you see on the street, in the restaurants, in the theaters: teens and twenty-somethings.
But there is a second city, a second Santa Cruz, that looks much different. The second city is defined by a simple fact of physiology: that young people stay in bed until 9 or 10 am, if they can, but older folk easily rouse themselves to go out at five or six in the morning.
Before 9 am, Santa Cruz belongs to the grey.
It's 7:10 at Zachary's downtown on a weekday. Zach's is open, but just barely. Tinny jazz from the satellite radio feed floats through the cavernous dining room. Sluggishly, dawn light flows through windows and spills across ranks and rows of empty tables. At wide intervals around the room, grey-bearded men sit alone at tables with newspapers, coffee mugs, and bowls of nine-grain cereal. A single waitress mopes around the floor with little to do.
Rhumba and I are not quite so grey as the others, though we're getting there. We seat ourselves at the counter as always: at the counter, coffee is never more than a raised finger away. The counterman, stubbly-faced and gaunt in a Cisco Systems windbreaker, can't seem to get our orders straight. That's all right; he's young, he's barely awake. The greybeards out on the floor are reading about politics and working crossword puzzles, but at his age you're lucky if you can tell left from right at 7 a.m.
The most interesting people always sit at the counters; that's an eternal truth that I just coined a minute ago. At any rate, our counter buddies today are a backpacker of mature age in an open-style ski mask, the kind with a circular cut-out for the face; a short, stout woman with a gypsy look to her and a thick book to read; and the Old Hustler,all iron grey hair and leathery skin. He came here after the quake to sell drugs, a youngish hustler at the time; and I don't think things went so well. Seventeen years later, he looks 40 years older. He still hustles, but legally. Well, probably legally.
Outside the sky lightens, but a bank of clouds low in the east delay the sunrise. Pastel-colored shards of cloud drift across the dim sky. And it is cold. Walking up from Zach's there's almost no sign of life except the Metro transit center; it's a no-work day for most people. A few well-wrapped commuters stand like sentinels at the bus lanes, waiting: thick, sturdy, middle-aged.
There are a few younger people out at this hour. A couple of them lay still asleep in doorways. And a group of three wanders down the street holding sleeping bags and sacks full of their belongings from whatever culvert or brush patch or unlocked shed where they spent the night. There's a limit to how well you can sleep with no heat on a cold night; they look tired and old.
We stop briefly outside the lobby of a low-rent office building tenanted by two-man techie startups, cheap lawyers, and nonprofits. I always like to see who's on the tenant list, because it changes so often. I peer into the lobby through the glass door, but the list is just too far away; hope against hope, I push on the door. And it opens! At 7:30 in the morning! I look closely at the door; somebody has wound a folded strip of paper through the complex electronic timelock mechanism to keep it from engaging. The air is warm in the lobby; stairs beckon to the second floor; and I know there are bathrooms up there. Somebody has beaten the lords of technology with a tiny piece of paper and, most likely, got himself a heated place to sleep last night. I wonder how long this state of affairs has existed.
As we pass Cathcart heading north on Pacific, we see a few more pedestrians: all alone, none young. Occasionally a northbound car drives by slowly, its occupant always a single middle-aged man in casual clothing. Weird pattern; but then, looking up the street, there's a cluster of parked cars and a person or two, two blocks up. Ri-i-i-ght: they're heading to Starbucks.
Starbucks isn't the only coffee house open this early, but the parking's easy and it's across the street from the Palomar Inn, a six-story SRO hotel occupied mainly by the elderly and disabled. An elderly man dressed like a Japanese sage -- slippers, open-armed blue robe and loose slacks, and a magnificent bush of white hair tied back behind his head -- drifts out of Starbucks and back to the hotel with a steaming cup of caffeine in his hand. Two battered fifty-something men in colorless clothing bring black trash bags full of -- something -- out of the Palomar and load them into the back of a battered old Volvo wagon. Musical instruments? Their life's possessions? Hard to tell. I've known one of them casually for ten years, but they're gone before I can catch up; doors slam and the Volvo motors away, wheeping rust from beneath grey primer.
A few hearty souls hang out in front of Starbuck's, sitting at the little tables or leaning against their cars, chatting. Some of it drifts over to us as we pass by: "Whaddya mean, I can't bring my dog down here? THAT'S FOCKED!" Well, I didn't say it was polite chatting. And yes, it's illegal to bring your dog to Pacific Avenue, even on a leash. There was a reason for that, once, but the ordinance is overkill. We're not always good at nuanced solutions here in Santa Cruz.
As we drift north, the sun finally rises above the eastern clouds. Pacific Avenue is still dark, but the sunlight catches the belltower and cornices atop the St. George Hotel and outlines them in gold. At the top of Pacific, the sun catches one of the gold-colored stone bears that guard the third floor of the Flatiron building, and brings its every line and curve into high relief. It is California, after all: what better sign of the new day than a golden bear?
Below, a homeless man rouses himself from his night-time squat in the front door of Wachovia Savings. Across the street in a vacant lot, a wild-hair man raves to himself as he stuffs his belongings into -- yes -- a black plastic bag. "I walked by her house!" he shouts "I walked by her house! I walked by her house!"
The day begins in earnest, but the Second City, the Grey City, still has hours to live. The old still rule the supermarkets; they shop early, and even find older people waiting on them at cash registers: the store veterans always get the early shifts at supermarkets. (Because it's a quiet shift, and they've got seniority; and because they're awake and never fail to show up because they've been partying 'till 4 am.)
And the cafes still belong to the over-fifties, as does Dog Beach and West Cliff Drive, where they're taking their morning constitutionals. I will swear to you: if some theater instituted an 8:00 am early show, an audience would appear. And it would be mostly grey.
Sure, on any given weekday the young march off to school and to work pretty early -- earlier than they'd like, that's for sure. But they're shut away in buildings and factories, or sealed into cars inching over Highway 17 to the Silicon Valley. But in the public life of the city, the street life, the older folks, the lost folks, the people with no particular place in our whizzing, shiny, grinding machine of an economy, hold center stage for now.
You may go to San Francisco or LA for the weekend, or to Tahoe; but if you've never been, I suggest an early rise some morning and a quick trip to the Second City. Why not? It's just outside your door. And, I'm sure, some of you have never been there.
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