ROV lunch

ROV Lunch
Challa Tabson
TREC SF
Golden Gate Ave
10-20-02



Sunday afternoon, typical October day, sort of chilly in the autumn air but for the haze of sunlight fogging its way across the concrete jungles here in the Tenderloin downtown San Francisco.

The food line stretched almost around the football-size city block. Here in the city of angels and saints life is full of ironies. Because some three hundred of us are having our lunch here at St. Anthony soup kitchen. I consider this kitchen the best there is anywhere west of Timbucktu. Like I have been walking the length of the city's Golden Gate Ave. up from the Ocean Beach district of foggy Sunset down hill, barely brushing pass city hall by a couple odd blocks, dead-ending right here between Market, Jones and Taylor streets. But the lines are moving slowly but surely, like a chain gang I join the rest of humanity, quietly hoping there will be enough for me, too.

A fellow traveler was inquiring what the menu for the day was going be, but his palatial inquisitions felt on deaf ears. A menu could be had as soon as one is ready to be handed over his or her food ticket just before reaching out for the food tray. It will be the only meal I will get the rest of this day; there is no mistake my place in line. Silently I hoped for the usual leftovers-of bread and fruits. Some three hundred hungry mouths will compete for the same breadbasket.

I trailed behind a man closer to my age, who seem to do a better job hiding those visible marks of growing older. Roughly forty-five minutes through the journey around the block, without invitation, he faces me in sudden conversation. He had conceived or discovered a new way to clean his ragged snaked-skin leather jacket. It seem he just had an internal combustion standing next to me, for he began explaining the process, and he went as far as pulling off the jacket and hanging it over to me for assessment of its density, stench, and quality.

An old timer rushed out from the exit doorway and was getting back in line, when the starving inquirer made one more try for real answers to our mystery lunch Sunday afternoon in San Francisco. Intent on maintaining my place in line without some default, I only listened to the old timer's marching vocal pronunciations along with his bohemian appearance.

A casual friend I had not seen around for some time since my one of my predictable evictions was loudly surprising me with a teddy hug; he was now a she, although prettier than most female regulars. By then, a call was announced for the next fifty and so we shuffled down the hallway leading into the dinner hall.

I could only wait to swig my plastic cup of fruit punch. Before accepting my food-pan tray, I thanked each one of the service men and women dishing out the trays of food with a nod or smile. I was especially proud to see a former neighbor we share same floor at one of the San Francisco's downtown residential hotels. My contact with him was the very night he got back into society long after twenty-three years in federal prison for murders he claims never committed.

Soup kitchens like this one is all I can really count on for my daily meals as a homeless resident San Franciscan. I am not your common tourist. Here is where I have called hometown for many years. Not that there is any shortage of restaurants in this greatest of cities. Often I ask myself why I should take upon two part time jobs, given I will afford to pay for living cost with, my sub-standard income, amounts to a residential hotel room without cooking space or a private bathroom!