Put a lid on it
Los Angeles isn't perfect, and the New Yorkers who keep moving here love to tell us so
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It was a dark and stormy…
Well, shit, it was raining, OK?
And there I was standing under the awning of a tiny coffee stand on Ventura Boulevard, trying to keep dry while the barista worked his caffeinated magic.
“Shit, dude, I’m sorry, but we’re out of hemp milk,” the barista said.
“No worries. Do you have an alternative-alternative milk?”
“Yeah. Oat and almond.”
“Oat for the win.”
“Good call, dude. Oat steams better. It’s my go-to for lattes, after hemp, of course.”
Did the barista use the last of the hemp milk on his latte? The question ping-ponged around my caffeine-depleted mind, but before I could investigate further, the barista announced the second roadblock.
“Crap. I’m out of lids.”
No hemp milk. No lids. What kind of coffee stand was this barista running?
“I gotta go to the storage shed.”
The barista threw his coat over the register, closed the order window, and left the stand, shutting the door behind him. On the one hand, I understood the need for security. The mean streets of the San Fernando Valley teem with thieves who will steal anything that isn’t bolted down. On the other hand, this coffee stand seemed to be out of everything worth stealing.
“Is he coming back?”
I turned around to see a man wearing a Yankees cap.
“Yeah, he needs lids,” I said. “But there’s no hemp milk, just FYI.”
“No hemp milk. What about oat?”
I didn’t want to make any promises, not the way things were going. So, I shrugged and said, “there’s room under the awning if you want to get out of the rain.”
I moved to one side of the awning so that the stranger in the Yankees cap could get out from under the rain, without violating social distancing measures.
“This place is always out of something,” he said. “They wouldn’t last a week in New York.”
“Yeah, but their coffee is amazing.”
“Real Catch-22,” he said. “Love the coffee, but they’re always running out of shit.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a real Catch-22 or not, but I didn’t want to get too literary, not before coffee. So, I said something innocuous about the rain.
“What is it about Los Angeles and rain?” the stranger asked. “It’s like everyone loses their minds when it starts raining. It’s just water.”
It’s true, I thought. We’re desert people. If we’re not squandering water by turning almonds into milk, we’re freaking out about the raindrops that turn our freeways into slip ‘n’ slides. Water just isn’t our element. But you should see us when the winds howl, the fires rage, and the Earth shakes. We’re not exactly “LA Tough”—whatever that means—but Angelenos abide.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I left New York,” the stranger grumbled.
“The weather,” I joked.
The stranger did not laugh. Instead, he lectured me about how our bagels “suck.” Then he called our pizza a “joke.” These are common charges leveled by New Yorkers who move to Los Angeles because they’ve run out of people to complain to back home. After they bitch about our bagels and pooh-pooh our pizza, they start in about how there’s no culture here, and how LA isn’t a “real city.” It’s a genre of complaining, and the stranger in the Yankees cap knew his tropes well.
“What’s with Dodgers fans?” he asked. “Show up in the third inning, leave in the seventh.”
The barista returned and said, “Oat milk latte, coming up, dude.”
“And don’t get me started on strip malls,” said the stranger in the Yankees cap.
I obeyed the stranger’s warning, but he started his strip mall rant anyway.
“It’s just one strip mall after another,” he said. “Nothing but suburban sprawl.”
Maybe so, I thought. But I know some pretty great strip malls where you can get Oaxacan food, do your laundry, buy weed, grab a boba tea, get your phone repaired, and treat yourself to a mani-pedi. Maybe none of that amounts to a “real city,” but damn it, Los Angeles is my city.
“Here’s that oat milk latte, dude.”
The stranger stopped his strip mall rant. His eyes zoomed in on my oat milk latte, perhaps the last oat milk latte of the day, depending on the supply situation. In that instant, I imagined the stranger was contemplating the harsh taste of steamed almond milk, and the even more brutal possibility of a latte with animal-based milk. Would supplies last? Only the barista could say for sure.
But one thing was certain. The barista had come through for those who abide. At long last, he had finally put a lid on it.
LA is dope. He's right about those bagels, though...
We don't get many New Yorkers here in New Mexico, but we do get a lot of California and Texas transplants, which the locals are never happy about. Texans are interesting because they tend to complain about how everything they encounter isn't as good as it is in Texas (so, like, go back??) but the Californians seem to take a more colonial approach. They just bring California with them wherever they go, which sometimes manifests in pretty cool vegan juice bars or hot yoga studios, but then also manifests as sky-rocketing rent prices. "Mmm, smells like gentrification!"
State cultures are funny. The U.S. really is just fifty rats in a trench coat.