Oakland McDonald's

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Martin Hash
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Oakland McDonald's

Post by Martin Hash » Sun Feb 14, 2016 6:51 am

I grew up Mormon, which had its advantages & disadvantages. I never smoked but I also never drank coffee. Not drinking coffee is particularly onerous where I live in the Pacific Northwest because endlessly discussing how good your coffee is is the local past-time. I didn't even drink Coke so I had no idea how much caffeine could raise your grade point average. A few times during the decades I tried to get into the coffee habit: I'd stand in those long lines at Starbucks, pay a ridiculous price then load it up with cream, chocolate & sprinkles because, damn, that shit was bitter. My forays into coffee-drinkerhood never lasted more than a couple weeks but I did start drinking Diet Dr. Pepper, and found out those stories about caffeine were all they were chalked up to be. I'm kinda sorry I missed it, I coulda used the back-in-the-day.

As a regular Sunday McDonald's goer while raising my kids, and not liking the food, I'd try their new menu items, and when ice-coffee came out I gave it a try: pretty good, hardly bitter at all. After a few ice-coffees I went ahead and moved into the big leagues & tried the regular $1 coffee and liked it. Finally, I could look forward to having a coffee every morning, and no matter where we go, we make it a habit of finding the closet McDonald's to start the day with coffee & a breakfast burrito.

During Med School rotations in E. Oakland, my wife Gwynne & I were staying in a cheap motel so that I could walk past a McDonald's to the hospital where I worked. It was certainly the shabbiest McDonald's we'd ever been to: the floor tiles had swatches of different colors where they've been replaced after a riot, the naougahyde seat upholstery had holes in it, the table tops are chipped & had cigarette burns, the large plate-glass windows were boarded over & had big cracks in them, the place was always dirty even after mopping up, and homeless people sat in the seats all day, their head on the table sleeping, their carts beside them. No napkins, condiments or ice without asking, and you had to have bought something. Of course, the drink dispenser is behind the counter, but you do get one refill. The bathrooms are unlocked by city ordinance so they are unusable: no toilet paper or paper towels, the mirror is broken, the handle on the faucet missing, no toilet seat, smells like rancid sweat, the floor covered with water from somebody taking a sink bath. Contrary to the Harlem McDonald's that has all Black employee's in a Black neighborhood, the Oakland McDonald's is all Hispanic. Some of them speak English. Prices are the same though and they had the coffee.
Oakland McDonald's 1.jpg
Gwynne would walk with me in the morning as far as McDonald's. We tried to get there just as the place opens at 6am. The other early-morning customers are Asian, read Chinese newspapers & speak something Chinese-sounding: they don't speak English at all. There's another White guy, over 100-years old, who walks shakily & bent over from his house just down the street where he lived his whole life. The homeless people know him, and talk at him but he doesn't say much in return but they seem to be used to it. This particular morning nobody was on the streets: apparently George Zimmerman was found innocent of shooting Trayvon Martin & folks who lived in Oakland knew that was going mean riots. We could see a crowd gathering outside while I was drinking my coffee. To our surprise, the crowd came inside & started chanting something. I couldn't tell what they were saying at first but eventually I could make it out as, “hey, hey, look around, Oakland is a union town” in a Spanish accent and the signs were all in Spanish. There was a lot more going on but I had finished my coffee so I went to work: it was going to be a busy day in the ER.
Oakland McDonald's 2.jpg
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