That's a Building!

The '89 Quake took down a lot of cool old buildings in downtown Santa Cruz, but the old Palomar Hotel made it through. It took heavy damage, but the owners were savvy enough to fix the old girl up again. Thank God. Is that a building, or what?

The Palomar's architect, William Weeks, was an interesting guy. A respected designer of high schools, post offices, and other staid public buildings, Mr. Weeks just, well, went off his meds and did something a little crazy, a little over the top. The old Palomar is a slick old Deco highrise, no question. But it's a little more. See those little disk-like things down the side of the building?


Yah! The building is covered with conquistadors! You look at the Palomar, and it stares back at you! And the old dining room, now a Mexican restaurant, is a wonderful 20s Spanish/Moorish/Chinese mishmosh of vaulted ceilings, gold leaf, balconies, and peculiar chandeliers.


The Palomar's not a real hotel anymore. The upper floors host a rooming house for people on fixed incomes. But Cruzados still flock to the lower floors for the Mexican restaurant and sports bar, the coffee house, the taqueria, the shoe and hat stores, even the former hotel ballroom. It's a place to meet, a place to hang, a place to see and be seen. The Palomar was, and is, a piece of work.

Ah, but the Palomar was builtl 80 years ago when wild-eyed architects like Weeks could have some fun and make people like it. Here's what people are building on Pacific in 2008.


Isn't it sad? A plastic edifice. Fake stone, fake pillars, no decor. Rhumba says it looks like one of the buildings in a model railroad layout.

And we waited 20 years for this. The building site's been vacant since the '89 quake, and the owners waited until now to rebuild, long after everyone else. To make sure that the rebuilt downtown would take off again before they committed any cash.

So they waited to start until, oh, three years ago. And now there it is, all 50,000 square feet of it ready to go, in the face of a nasty recession. And they want five dollars a square foot. And not a square foot of it is rented. Bad timing...you think?


Plastic, dull, soulless thing made of industrial strength Legos. That's not a building.

This is a building!

Coffee and Koans

This week happy workers are tearing apart our kitchen -- and hopefully putting it back together -- to give us a smart new remodel: more counter space, more storage space, spiffy orange tile, and eco-friendly lineoleum-like flooring.

Thus it's been some few days since Rhumba and I have cooked at home, and we're getting tired of restaurant food, even good restaurant food. Never thought I'd say that.

And so we were at breakfast out today, 7:15 in the morning, and our usual waitress came to the table. She's young, college-educated, and mild-mannered, with a high, breathy voice that you can barely hear over the sound of clattering dishes and conversation.

She's not always a morning person. I know, because she almost missed my coffee cup on the first pour some time back. It was six in the morning and her eyeballs were a lovely shade of pink. No problem, we've all been there.

And today she appeared with coffee, looking a little glazed in the eyes to my mind. So I took the liberty of asking "Are you awake yet?"

"I'm awake," she said. She looked at me with no expression whatsoever. "I'm always awake." She paused for a moment. "Although sometimes I wonder if any of us are really awake."

Did I just meet the Buddha -- with a pot of coffee in her hand?

The Dilated Pupil

So you sweat bullets and write a check for twenty grand to the UC Regents and bring your precious 18-year-old Justin up from Oxnard to UC Santa Cruz to get the high-class education he/she deserves. After all, he's worked so hard to get his grades up, really put his nose to the grindstone.

True, there was that unfortunate incident with the two bottles of peppermint schnapps and the trip to the emergency room, but that was... peer pressure. Yeah, that's it, peer pressure. He's really going to straighten out here.

And then, just as you finish loading his stuff into his new dorm room... you get a load of the Dilated Pupil:




The DP is a new-student guide to Santa Cruz put out by the local entertainment weekly. There's a nice big ad on the back cover from the big local head shop, touting the advantages of "higher education," and instructions on the right way to beg for spare change on Pacific Avenue.

And this shakes you up a bit, but Junior assures you that it's just a stupid magazine and he'll be fine. You head downtown to look around before dinner. Junior and his new roommate promise to meet you over at the Palomar.

So you're up in Camouflage looking at the sex toys (the wife's not with you this trip) when the cell goes off. It's you boy, and he tells you he's going to be a little late, and that's very courteous and grown-up of him to remember to call. And he seems very happy -- he can't stop giggling.

And you're proud. Because Junior's settling in so well.

Selling It

She's about five-foot one of 30-something Celt: waist-length red hair, fair skin, and a lot of testosterone. The test gets her a husky voice, a go-for-the-gusto attitude, slim hips, sculpted arms and legs and a deep chest. Mucho jawbone, too.

She's bold and outrageous, and lot of guys love her. Personally, I think a lot of guys are gay and don't know it. But that's just me.

But she knows how to sell it. It's early evening on Pacific Avenue, and she's patrolling the pavement in nothing but a tight mini-dress and spike-heeled boots with little rims of white lace peeking out the tops. Holding a stack of cards. She heads straight for me.

We know each other a little. And I don't like her much. She's everything we're all supposed to be to succeed in this culture: assertive, not afraid to ask or grab for what she wants, fearless in speech and action. But she mainly sees other people in terms of what they can do for her. And isn't particularly wise.

So she briefly chats me up; she recently bought a restaurant and is trying to rev it up into a hot club: the American dream, being what you want to be, no fear, and all that.

We made polite noises: How ya doing? How's the old crowd? I'm enjoying the restaurant. It's going good. Here, take one of these cards; come in and try us sometime.

And then she's off down the street. A minute later I see her chatting up a couple of college boys who are smiling at the legs, the hair, the chest. She makes sure they get their cards.

I look at my card: appetizers starting at $15, entrees up above $20 and climbing. $5 off every order of $30 or more.

These days? That's just not selling, no matter how bold and assertive you are. Even with high-heeled boots and a thigh-high hemline.

I would no more buy a $15 appetizer than I would invest in stock this week of all weeks, or speculate in real estate. Both of which we've been urged to sink our life savings into these last few years. By people who are bold and assertive and self-interested. And, ultimately, not very wise.

Big Foot vs. the Amazonian Empire

At about the middle of last week the top of my left foot began to feel a bit sore. I toughed it out for a while, even convinced myself that the foot was improving. But by Sunday it had swollen so much that it was difficult -- and painful -- to shove into my shoe. And the sore spot on top had widened into a painful red splotch the size of a beer coaster.

There was nothing for it but to see a doctor. Ew.

For me, going to the doctor is a rare event. Partly because I have good health, partly because I don't like seeing the doctor, and partly because it's almost impossible to get and keep a regular doctor in this town.

Every time I get a regular doctor at the Amazonian Medical Foundation ("We'll take care of YOU!"), she immediately changes offices, goes on extended maternity leave, or follows her bliss to a family farm in southern Alaska.

It's not just me; scoring a regular MD in Santa Cruz is hard for anyone. The old guys are retiring or not taking new patients. The new guys -- well, medicine doesn't pay well here, and the cost of living is high. A lot of them move on after a few years. Or don't come here at all. We don't have enough doctors for the population.

So when it gets sick, a pretty darned large chunk of Santa Cruz goes to a drop-in emergency clinic and takes its chances with the Doctor of the Day. You have several choices: Amazonian Medical has two clinics, and there's Doc-in-the-Box, and even the drop-in/emergency clinic at Dominatrix Hospital.

Sure, quality of care is a crap-shoot at these places, but the price isn't the highest, and somebody will usually see you within, oh, several hours.

So I called in sick(ish) on Monday morning and went over to the nearest Amazonian clinic. They didn't open until nine, so we the afflicted all waited in the parking lot for the doors to open.

Quite a crowd accumulated by the time the lights went on: a bewhiskered old hippie with a broken leg ("I was climbing a tree"), a Latino kid with a big rip down his cheek and the skin hanging loose ("Bike accident", his mom said tersely), and an assortment of unhappy-looking people, all women.

I let the old hippie go through the door first, and since I'd gotten there second I went in second. Chivalry be damned. I wasn't spending all day there. So I walked through the door and into an exam room in five minutes. Sure, I waited 45 minutes after that to actually see the doctor. I'll bet the hippie needed a lot of work. But as these things go, I got off easy.

The medical assistant came in after a few minutes and asked me what my problem was.

"Why don't I just show you?" I asked her. I took off my shoe and sock and presented my swollen foot and its big red blotch.

"Ew!" she said , wrinkling her nose. As a good a diagnosis as any, I suspect, and she scribbled away in her book . "Is your ankle always that swollen?" she asked.

"No, this is new." Frankly, you could barely find my ankle. She took my blood pressure, then my pulse and temperature and blood oxygen.

Then she left me alone sitting on the examination table for 40 minutes with one bare foot. There was nothing to do in there but read a year-old copy of Vogue. So I did, cover to cover: hundreds of pages of anorexic models, dresses like Halloween costumes, articles on dieting and bone density, photo spreads of fashion mavens with gargoyle faces. To coin a phrase: Ew!

I also had time to ponder all the things that might happen: they might decide my foot needed draining and pierce it with a great big needle. I hate needles. There might be surgery. Complications. Amputation. Medical incompetence. I have an active imagination...and that's why I hate seeing the doctor.

Finally, the doctor arrived. At the Amazonian drop-in clinics, the doctors are often young and inexperienced (and female) or older and mediocre (and male). But this one was pretty decent. And it wasn't like the problem was subtle.

"You have cellutis," she told me after looking at my foot. From a distance. She didn't say "Ew," but I could see it in a thought balloon above her head.

"Which means?"

"You have a skin inflection. Something irritated your skin; maybe you tied your shoe too tight and the skin rubbed against the shoe while you were walking." And she talked about reduced blood circulation and other things, and assured me that this wasn't happening just because I was getting old and feeble. And that the infection hadn't resolved into a pocket of pus yet, so there was no use lancing it. I was getting off with antibiotics. I began to feel better.

For a bit. "Now, you may have heard some scary things in the news about something called MRSA..." she began.

Oh God. "You mean the staph infection that antibiotics can't treat?"

"Yes, most skin infections are staph, staph is everywhere. I don't know that you have MSRA, but it's out there, and the penicillins can't handle it. But we've kept our ear to the ground, and we've learned that the sulfa drugs can still work. " And she wrote me a prescription for an old-school non-penicillin antibiotic. And reassured me that it was just a skin infection, MRSA or not, and not the systemic kind of infection that sends people to the hospital or, perhaps, to the morgue.

And that was it. "It'll either work, or it won't," she told me. "You'll know if you're getting better, and you'll know if you're getting worse. If you get worse, come back in."

Pretty stark, but clear. I left, got the pills, took them.

And I'm getting better. The situation's pretty straight-forward: I can find my ankle again; the red spot is nearly gone. And I still have five days on the prescription.

Of course I have no idea what this is going to cost me. I'm sure Amazonian will tell me in the due course of time

I have to admit that I was served pretty well. But this was a simple case, street medicine. They could see what was wrong, they'd seen it before, and they knew what to do. Simple. Somehow I think, for all the wonders of medicine we hear about and read about, this kind of simple medicine is really the only type that we do well. And it's important; people commonly used to die of infections or in epidemics in the prime of life, or have a diseased limb amputated so the infection wouldn't spread, or die of bad water or bad food. The flu took my grandfather when my mother was five.

Those things we've taken care of. And I would argue, those simple things have been the cause of most of our increase in life expectancy. The complicated, state-of-the-art medical procedures -- not so much. Because not everybody gets them, or they turn out to be not such a good idea after all. Like heart bypass operations, where it finally turned out that the bypass arteries tended to brick up within a few years. Or bad drugs that were fast-tracked through approval, like that popular weight loss cure that had to be pulled from the market because it killed people. A lot of people.

I remember spending a lot of time in the hospital last year with my dying mom while the doctors fussed and proposed and tried all sorts of things that didn't work while burning hundreds of thousands of dollar. And I thought to myself, these guys don't really know what they're doing. They're just playing around with their expensive toys and seeing what happens. And there's no one person in charge of my mom's care, no one who'll take responsibility for it.

Because my mom didn't have a regular doctor either, not one who was willing or able to advocate for her. When push comes to shove, there's a lot of that going around. Everywhere. And sick people can't defend themselves against the system very well. It has its way with them, more often than not, and they just end up sicker. And poorer, and maybe even bankrupt.

And so medicine will continue to be moderately useless above the sore foot and injury and infectious disease level (and make an exception for orthopedics and obstetrics and basic yank-the-gall-bladder surgery) until we have a revolution: a revolution not in medicine or technology, but in patient care.

Until the patient is treated as an individual with individual care and individual attention to his needs. In other words, when doctors go back to being healers instead of technicians and corporate employees. And when money comes second, not first, again.

As an aside, my wife just went to Amazonian and was charged $243 each for two consultations (the second was ten minutes, and the MD just read the test results back her). Because Amazonian knows the insurance companies will pay it. And her doctor was, yes, a young female MD who was visibly pregnant, planning to go on leave, and so not available to be her regular MD.

And the beat goes on.

Ew!