Aaron

A short time after I had put my fashion merchandising career to rest – a decision helped along by 55 hour work weeks and a stringent requirement to wear nothing but flip flops and pooka shell necklaces, along with the fact that I really disliked sleeping over at the office between shifts – I took an assistant manager position at a “Yes, we’re corporate, but at least we’re not Starbucks!” coffee establishment. While Tully’s may have been the punk counterpart to Starbucks, in the grand scheme of things was about as punk as a throng of Blink 182 fans fighting over fuzzy wristbands at the local Hot Topic. Though many people in my demographic can claim to have worked in the coffee business, not everyone can say they’ve handled the stresses of Dow Jones- inspired madness. San Francisco’s financial district boasted a coffee shop on every corner, sometimes with two Starbucks facing each other from across the crowded streets, yet there never seemed to be enough to go around. At 6:00 am, smartly dressed Charles Schuab employees and fashion-forward Versace reps would line up in two rows at our front doors, and then the chaos would begin. For over four hours straight, the lines would cycle nonstop through the store like ribbon in a typewriter. Five of us would would crew the store, two taking orders and serving pastries, two running separate espresso machines, and one brewing coffee and tending the condiment stations. Drink orders were shouted out above the din of cell phone chatter and espresso grinders. The mornings were a high wire balancing act; the afternoons were disaster control.

It was during this time that I met Aaron, an intimidating Mexican with heavy, black rimmed glasses and a creepy mustache, made even creepier with the knowledge that he had been recently released from prison after serving time for Grand Theft Auto. He didn’t always have the glasses – they were prescribed to him sometime after he was hired because he had been having trouble reading thermometer readings. It took some of our more crass customers a few days to adjust to them, but Aaron’s excellent customer service skills helped shorten the time considerably. If he overheard any sort of negative remark about his glasses (or anything negative at all, for that matter), he would immediately stop what he was doing, step back from the bar, and size up the customer. He had no problem offering to deliver physical abuse from across the counter. Sometimes, he offered to come around from behind the counter because he wanted to deliver his message in a more personal manner. It didn’t happen a lot, and the people he terrified usually deserved it, condescending assholes that they were. But it did happen enough for me to know that I couldn’t ever stop him from doing what he did. Not even the threat of him losing his job could stop him from from losing his cool. Convincing him to step out of of his corporate apron was the best I could do. That’s not to say that the customers didn’t like him. They just learned that Aaron needed a certain measure of respect. Once that was out of the way, he was the best barista a person could ask for. If Aaron was sick, customers grimaced. Sometimes, people would elect out of coffee for the day, they were that reliant on his barista skills.

Opening the store wasn’t usually my concern. I was a mid-shift person, showing up 8 or so, just in time to handle the brunt of the rush. It wasn’t until I took an opening shift that I found out he worked the majority of every morning stoned out of his mind. Walking from the bus stop in the predawn hours, a guy on a bike collided with me, knocking both of us to the ground. “What the fuck?!” I shouted as I got to my feet. The first thing in my head was that I was being mugged. My hand was bleeding and I could feel a big scrape across my temple. And there was Aaron in his khaki shorts and a white shirt, scrambling up. “Oh, man, my joint!” he said.

“Aaron?! Fuck… you nearly killed me!” I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead, looking for blood in the dim streetlight.

“I know, I know… sorry! My joint! Shit… I lost my joint.” We searched the sidewalk for it, finally spotting the crumpled thing lying next to the storm drain.

“You get high before work?” I asked.

“Every day, man. Every day.”

“Why? I mean – how?” I said. It’s not that I didn’t know why people got high, it’s that I didn’t understand how a person could keep track of all those drinks and recipes without getting lost. It was nearly impossible as it was, and being high certainly couldn’t help any.

Aaron laughed so hard that he doubled over with his hands on his stocky knees. “Shit, Pretty Boy.” (Pretty Boy, by the way, is how he referred to me most of the time. At first I didn’t care for it, but it sure beats being called Cracker.) “Have you been paying attention to those fuckers who come in there? I’d kill somebody if I wasn’t high.”

A few weeks later I gave in and got high with him at work, but it was a disaster. I spent most of the morning in a blanket of confusion, trying vainly to keep up. There was just too much information to be processed. By the time I went home, I had managed to burn myself several times, both on steam wands and by spilling hot liquid down my pant legs. It was the last time I did that, though that didn’t stop us from the occasional Bloody Mary, Mimosa, or – far more appropriately – Irish Coffee.

Even being high didn’t stop him from chasing down homeless thieves who scammed our tips. One day he chased a sticky fingered thief down an alley and hit him until the money was returned I think he realized then that he wasn’t really cut out for that line of work, though I don’t think any of us are. In Aaron’s case, he never felt that he fit into that neighborhood. He was a brutish car thief trying to turn his life around, but he was surrounded by stiff people in crisp oxford shirts.

“I’m not pretty like you are,” he said. “You talk to these people about fashion and that shit, and they wonder what you’re doing here. They wonder when you’re get out of this place and go do something that you’re interested in. They don’t think that same things about me. They know this is the best I can do.”

I wonder if he saw their hypocrisy. He would ride his bike back to the dirty part of the Mission, stopping by the neighborhood taquiera to get a burrito and smoke a bowl. The others would drive their BMWs back to the Marina, mixing martinis and snorting coke in their overpriced apartments. They both did the same things, I guess, but the people with money looked better doing it.

It was sad when he finally moved on. Some of our customers never came back after his departure – their loyalty had been to Aaron and his service, and not to our ridiculous Tully’s coffee philosophy. They didn’t care about which indigenous people grew coffee beans or which skilled tradesman had hand roasted it, they really only cared about the guy making the drinks. He stopped in a few weeks later to let us know where he had ended up. His penchant for hanging out at the 24 hour porn theaters at Market and 6th had opened up new employment opportunities. (And apparently an even more generous side of his personality as well. For Christmas that year I received some free passes to the viewing booths, had I ever found the need to see hot girl on girl action. My girlfriend got a discreet, chrome vibrator that conveniently doubled as a key chain. “How did he know?” she asked me.)

It was nearly two years before I saw him again. I had been bar hopping in the Lower Market with Darryl, making way with a skunk-striped member of his entourage. We were regrouping at Arrow Bar when someone shouted, “Hey! Pretty boy!” at me, something that in San Francisco can mean a great many things. But of course it was Aaron, smoking a cigarette in front of the theater. Neon signs lit the world around us as people passed by – most of them drunk, or homeless, or both. He gave me a big hug, and we stood there talking for awhile. Eventually, we had to move inside because he was on the clock. We kept talking, the whole time he rung up magazines and videos for shady guys in trench coats. I had always thought that the “weird trench coat guy in the porn store” was some sort of urban myth, but that night proved me wrong. As it was, the conversation lasted so long that by the time I left, Arrow Bar had closed and any chance of more conversation with Ms. Skunk Hair was gone.

Aaron told me that he only had another week left at the theater. His daughter was getting older, and he was having a hard time telling her just what it was that he did for a living. “What am I gonna tell the fucking PTA, man? I’m working the late shift at the porno shop?” Better for him to go find something at least mildly respectable to do, he had said, even if it was pushing a mop or becoming a bike messenger.

I ran into him several months later while getting lunch downtown. He was working at a bread company, getting up early and still getting high, but he was really happy with what he was doing. He got left alone most of the time, so the customers never had the chance to irritate him. He was happier still that he had quit the theater, because of what had happened at the end. A large drug bust happened on his last day of work; something having to do with a rival Oakland gang setting up whomever already worked the neighborhood. The streets were filled with police officers arresting nearly everyone they saw (for nearly everyone in that neighborhood was doing something wrong) and throwing them into waiting paddy wagons. “Fucking cops all over, man. You should’ve seen it. It was just a sea of blue uniforms and flashing lights.” As soon as the dealers and cops had been cleared out, the Oakland gang showed up and took control of the area. Of course, this only lasted the night. The incarcerated dealers had always had an understanding between each other. The Latino dealers got a certain corner, the black dealers another, and the Samoans, their own. (I never quite figured out how the Samoans would make good organized crime figures with having to move that all that bulk around. It couldn’t have made them good at running from the cops, but then again, maybe there’s a reason that George Lucas made Jabba the Hutt the way he did.) The intrusion of another gang in their shared territory – a gang from Oakland, no less – was something that they wouldn’t tolerate. The night after the initial raid, retribution took the form of gunfire. I have no idea how many people were hurt or killed, but the evidence of violence was everywhere. The theater’s windows were shattered by bullets, and the clerk – Aaron’s replacement – had been shot twice.

“That would’ve been me,” Aaron said. “That would’ve been me. I know that guy was lucky, and I know that people tell me that maybe I might not have been standing where that guy was, and that I wouldn’t have been hit or nothing, but I know I would’ve. I got bad luck, man. Bad luck. I’d have been standing there and been shot, and probably be dead. And somebody would have to tell my baby girl that her pop’s been shot at a fucking porno theater, and that’d be bullshit, you know?”

I don’t think I saw Aaron after that. It wasn’t out of conscious choice; the two of us just didn’t have anything in common and we moved in different circles. I packed up and left SF for Cleveland a short while later, and like so many people I’ve met in my life, I simply forgot about him. But for a few years, he made me laugh. Sometimes he scared me, too, but usually I was laughing even then. I hope he’s well.