Pit Stop
by Jeremy Kaufmann

I walked into a Starbucks. Well, no, I didn't walk. I staggered. I was freezing. My angry stepdad tossed me out on my ass, my car was still hemorrhaging oil after $300 of repairs, and I was broke. I walked about a mile to find a damn Wells Fargo to get out cash to pay off my girlfriend's brother. Halfway back the rain started. This wasn't regular rain. This was ice cold and the wind was positively shooting at me. The right side of my face went numb almost immediately. I held up the morning commute by trying to cross a freeway onramp without looking. It's not like I could look. The rain was pounding on my eyeballs.



By the time I got to that Starbucks in Milpitas, I must have looked like hell. My clothes were drenched. Hell, my shirt was soaking underneath my jacket. The knitted hat with the cat ears that I swiped from my girlfriend was a good example of the absorbency of yarn. I pulled up a chair and tried not to shiver.



I looked around. This place wasn't even a real Starbucks. It was half of a Starbucks, conjoined with a gas station. The kind of people that hang out in a Starbucks aren't even my kind of people when it's a nice, downtown San Francisco Starbucks. I don't even like coffee. Sometimes I drink tea. My carefully cultivated indie rock snobbery positively hates chain cafes anyway. By rights I should have been in Berkeley, bitching with fellow intellectualistas about socialism and Bush's crimes against humanity.



Instead I was leaving a puddle in a half-gas station, half-Starbucks. I tried to tell myself it was just one more step to fame and glory in the promised land of Hollywood, but the fact is that I'm not na•ve enough to buy into that line in the first place. I wasn't expecting instant celebrity. I wasn't expecting celebrity ever. I was expecting a vicious, bloody fight that leaves me ruined and broken, clutching futilely to the remains of a modest dream.



Call it hyperbole. Call me melodramatic. I'm not one of those kids who thinks I'm gonna move to L.A. and become a star. Hell, I'm not even one of those effete artistes who thinks he's gonna go to L.A. and shame Coppola. I just want to be a screenwriter. Can you even name the guy who wrote the last movie you saw? Me either. even if I'm grotesquely successful, fame and riches are not in the cards.



I tried to hold a newspaper still enough to read it so I could avoid buying anything. I was reading about Nelson Mandela's son dying of AIDS. I was reading about a Tsunami destroying vast quantities of Asian land and also Asians. I was reading about carnage. Did that make me feel better? Did I feel my own problems were insignificant? Uh, no.



Now a girl in the offensive green Starbucks regalia wound her way around the room like one of those fucking mechanical ballerinas you see in movies that feature old clocks. I was sitting there, trying to get smaller, trying to hold the paper higher, trying to stay focused on the newsprint. Africa has a problem with admitting it has an AIDS problem. South African president offers condolences. Tsunami. Indonesia. "Would you like a free sample?"



Son of a bitch! I just knew she was going to come over to me. I didn't want a fucking sample, but I wasn't drinking anything and I was in a cafe. "I guess so. What is it?" I was thinking, "I hate coffee. Please don't make me drink coffee. When is he getting here? I need to get in my car and drive before it breaks down." She grinned like an idiot and I knew she was thinking, "Why isn't this creep buying anything?" or "I hate this job," but instead of demanding I purchase something, she told me it's like hot chocolate, but made with dark chocolate. Well. Not coffee.



I took a sip.



No, you can't sip this. That's like saying I took a sip of oatmeal. In fact, this chocolate sludge was thicker than oatmeal, but I was cold and it was warm. She showed me her teeth again and asked, "How do you like it?" I was thinking, "Did you guys pulp Count Chocula?" but I said, "Uh, this is okay." I hoped she'd leave because I don't want to order an entire cup of chocolate the consistency of tar. I was staring at her stupid green plastic name badge and the silence hung in the air pregnant with absolutely no meaning.



I remembered my prop and shoved the newspaper in front of my face. When she still didn't leave, I offered a completely insincere, "Uh, have a nice day?"



Finally she left. I read the comics. I used to get up early on Sunday morning to read this garbage? I thought Garfield was funny. A fat orange cat going, "Hey human! I'm still quite rotund and bitter! enjoy my raw feline ability to do nothing!" just doesn't move me the way it used to. Maybe I'm not mature. Maybe the comics just blow. Maybe everything was better when I was kid. Then again, when I was a kid everyone at school took special care to make me feel worthless.



Where the hell was he? I tried to look at my watch but I don't have one and my cell phone was a little plastic corpse in my pocket.



Mandela's son was still dead from AIDS. The tsunami still loomed large in someone's incoherent home video.



And the car got there.



Six months later I was sitting in another godforsaken Starbucks, this one surgically grafted to a bookstore. Do I have a job? No. Will another human being I'm not having sex with ever look at my screenplays? No. And the hat with cat ears smells.