Starbucks, the Gateway to San Diego, Chapter four.

Starbucks is the gateway to San Diego. Tourists, workers and the homeless make up most of the population as the city outgrows its shoes and it is impossible to find parking, with new parking meters funding many programs. It sits on the corner of Kettner and Broadway, a baseball toss to the Santa Fe Station and a few steps to the buses and the trains.
    Today, as usual, I am in the mood for a chocolate drink. It is only five thirty but I am an early bird. .I need to see the morning sun and begin to sing,  Baby It is Cold Outside.  I skip down the steps of  the  YMCA, turn right and walk across India Street. I trip over a few bikes and shopping carts as one is folding her sleeping bag.
    I order a small hot chocolate and take up my roost beside the windows  with a view of the  Bank of America and the many briefcases and yellow helmets that have come from the Coaster trains. A few briefcases enter and get in line. The yellow helmets are beginning to build a new Superior Court building, and almost all are tall and rugged Latinos. A bit of irony, but a block from this new edifice sits a  federal prison made up mostly young Latinos. Heroin and other drugs were there source of income. (We will speak about this building later.) 
    Those who live in Tents on Harbor or Pacific are the first to toilet and buy a drink.  One drink entitles them to all the amenities of this famous coffee shop. Across from me sits General Taylor, or ah he looks like one out of the Civil War.
     General Taylor is tall, bald and has grown well manicured whiskers. The sun's rays reflect off his head   His feet are at least a size fifteen and he dresses immaculately. He wears stylish white sports socks sneak out of his fashionable sandals.  He has three satchels and a lab top. He scrutinizes the many messages on his computer. He looks like he could have been a sailor on the good ship Moby Dick sailing out of Nantucket.

I pamper my hot chocolate and watch the workers, many from across the border, pile on the 992. Thousands enter San Diego each day to work at domestics, cashiers, restaurant helpers, or inside hotels. They are the girders that hold up the stockings of  San Diego. Buses take them to their place of work.
    "Hey, can I bum a cigarette off of you."
     "Not today...try me tomorrow after i get paid....Top of the morning to you."
  Now a multicolored beanie, with flaps comes my way, just after the Escondido bus takes its passengers thirty miles to one of San Diego's first gambling clubs, Harrahs.
     "Hey can I bum a cigarette off of you?"
     "Here is a quarter...Gave up smoking long ago." (Not finished or edited yet. sketch written in 2011.)