"THE TROUBLE WITH CALIFORNIA IS ALL THE DAMN RIFF-RAFF,” said George. I don’t really remember if his name was George or not but he looked like a George so why not.

  George was a rotund gentleman (from Texas originally but Arkansas most recently), a few years north of 65, with thinning, dark grey hair streaked with white. He wore a white cotton button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone and another tuft of grey hair peeking out over the V of his shirt. His sunglasses alone cost more than everything I was wearing.

  We were sitting on a green bench on the sidewalk, watching the chattering clumps of people, mostly older people, wander by. He was waiting for his wife who was browsing through one of the overpriced bauble shops that line the streets of Downtown Palm Springs.

  “Palm Springs used to be nice,” George kept on, “Bob Hope had a house here for chrissakes. John Wayne used to come here, real classy types. Now you go out in the desert -you don’t have to go that far- and you see these people out there living like goddamm animals- half crazed on amphetamines and every other damn thing. It’s disgusting. Makes me sick.”

  George appeared to be a man of strong opinions.

  I’m not a man well suited to taking strong positions in conversation. It makes my voice shake and my palms sweat and I become suddenly very aware of how large my tongue feels and has it always felt that big? Because now that I’m thinking about it it’s very uncomfortable -like having a constant mouthful of floppy sausage- and I wish it would go away but now that I’ve noticed it I can’t un-notice it and I will spend the rest of the day awkwardly smacking my lips and waiting for my brain to stop making me miserable on purpose.

  Besides, I had the sneaking suspicion that I was exactly the sort of riff-raff that would make George turn his nose up. I had rolled into Palm Springs the evening before with $40 in my bank account. $40 is nothing to sneer at in some cities but in Palm Springs -heck, in California- I might as well have had a pocketful of tissue paper.

  I had found a corner space in the back forty of the local Home Depot parking lot and slept there. Home Depots are good for that because by the time they open for business, the day-labor guys are already congregating in little huddles, sipping coffee with their tool belts on, so there is built-in vehicular camouflage for those of us that happen to be catching forty winks on the sly. I planned to stay there for a few more nights before bucking town.

  I doubted George could appreciate that kind of parking lot savvy, so I kept my choice of accommodations to myself.

  “Me and my wife have been coming to Palm Springs for years -years-and every year it gets worse,” George continued, “These Californians need to get their act together- elect some politicians that actually give a damn about cleaning up this state. It’s getting so bad this might be the last year I even come here.”

  He said it like a threat and that’s exactly how he meant it. But it was probably a lie. It’s been my experience that, whether it’s a Walmart or the state of California, the people who are loudest about “taking their business elsewhere” are the ones least likely to actually do so. The people who really want to go somewhere else just… go somewhere else.

  The ones that talk it about it all the live-long day are the ones that want to be recognized as important; they want the power that comes from slowly putting a foot down on that all important cash-flow lifeblood until businesses or towns or whoever throws themselves prostrate to beg for mercy from the almighty consumer.

  I guess that’s the natural confidence that comes from a society that has beat the last four generations over the head with the mantra “the customer is always right.” I mean, sooner or later, the brutes are going to look around and figure out, “Hey… that’s me. I am always right!”

  That’s especially true in tourist Meccas like Palm Springs.

  The native Palm Springers (Springists?) feed on a steady diet of tourist cash like grizzly bears on rutting salmon. It’s a matter of survival. And it’s not just grumps like old George and his lady. The town population spikes nearly 150% in the winter months as the snowbird swarms flock south in search of sunny weather. Around 1.6 million tourists wander through Palm Springs in a typical year.

  These are not small numbers. Without those sweet caravans of geriatric pilgrims, there is a very real threat of Palm Springs withering back into the one-horse desert village from whence it sprang.

  It’s not a bad system, as systems go… but it does invite the unhappy consequence of giving old grumps like George the power to sit on your benches and throw proverbial stones.

  About that time, George’s wife made her appearance. She was a gentle-looking woman with round features and bright eyes under the floppy brim of a weaved sunhat.

  “What did you get?” said George, his tone the caricature of a disapproving husband, half-comical, half-serious. The wife smiled and flashed a bracelet on her wrist. I saw something glittering there in the afternoon sun. George stood up and made a show of inspecting the outstretched wrist.

  “And how much did that cost?”

  “I don’t know,” laughed the woman, “Sixty, I think? I’m on vacation, don’t make me think about that! It’s locally made, you know.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Well, if it’s local,” said George in a tone that very much suggested he didn’t put much value on the word “local” for anything, much less arts and crafts.

  “I’m just crazy about this locally made stuff,” said the wife, “I just want to do my part to support local artists, you know?”

  George introduced me as “the kid” he’d been “shooting the breeze” with. I told her it was nice to meet her and gave her a smile that I hoped was one of my less riff-raffy ones but I don’t know how well it came off. I had spent the previous night stretched out in the back of a minivan, after all, and I’ve found that women have a better intuitive sense for things like “classiness” and “good-smellingness” than men do.

  “I’m dying for an iced caramel macchiato,” said the wife, after introductions had been made, “Is there a coffee shop somewhere around here? I need to get out of this sun for a bit.”

  “Sure,” said George, “I know a place right down the street.”

  “Mind if I tag along?” I asked, “I don’t really know my way around yet.”

  The prospect of serving as tour guide in his winter-quarters stomping grounds must have appealed to George. He smiled broadly and gave an exaggerated wave of his arm.

  “Follow me!” he said.

  George led the way down the sidewalks of Palm Springs. Contrary to the leisurely stroll I had anticipated, I quickly found myself struggling to keep up with him.

  He may have been forty-some-odd years my senior, but the man was in his zone. He plowed ahead like a man on a mission, ducking and weaving around other clumps of meandering senior citizens like a hound on the scent.

  He was walking wilder than most drunks drive so I guess, in hindsight, it was really only a matter of time before something went wrong.

  After a few minutes, he led our little party zooming around a corner too fast and yelped when some kid sitting on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette nearly buckled George’s knees with his face. George managed to pull up short before he went sprawling but the near miss didn’t do his mood any favors.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said at the kid, “You wanna get run over?”

  The kid looked up at him, blinking and bewildered, his cigarette burning low in his fingers. He was unshaven but too young for his beard to be anything but a patchy mess of wild blonde hairs. He had a dirty baseball cap on, mostly straight, over an unruly mop of curly hair.

  “People are trying to walk here!” said George.

  “And we don’t want to smell your filthy smoke.”

  The kid just kept blinking at him and rather sheepishly crushed what was left of his cigarette out on the pavement.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “This is why you’re not supposed to be sitting on the damn sidewalk,” said George, “Can’t you read?”

  George was referring to the white metal street signs that sprouted out of the pavement every thirty feet or so at that time that read something to the effect of, “If you sit on the sidewalk it’s illegal and we will find you and we will fine you and your little dog, too, God help you.”

  I may be misremembering some of the words, but the point was pretty clear: Palm Springs doesn’t want your ugly butt planted on its pretty streets.

  This was several years ago now; it should be noted. Things are a little different now, I hear, but back when I was loitering around town, Palm Springs was still pretty excited about it’s new “Sit-and-Lie” ordinance.

  Ostensibly, the ordinance was to promote foot-traffic flow on the sidewalks and prevent pedestrian congestion. In reality, everyone recognized it for what it was: an attempt to get those dirty transients out of the public eye.

  Their dirtiness didn’t sit well with the all-important consumers who wanted their Palm Springs to be the shiny, palmsy, good, old-fashioned classic Americana they remembered from the year before. And the year before that and the year before that all the way back into the Bob Hope days.

  Coming all the way out to paradise just to see some… homeless guy trying to sleep curled up under a drinking fountain kind of ruins the whole appeal. It’s a dirty, nasty bit of reality trying to creep its way back into the Palm Springs fantasy and the consumers wanted exactly none of that.

  Thus, the Sit-and-Lie ordinance heralded something of a victory for people like George over the forces of riff-raff.

  From what I hear it’s gone now or completely unenforced. That doesn’t surprise me. It always seemed to me that trying to fine someone money for sitting on a sidewalk because they didn’t have money sounded like an exercise in futility from the get-go.

  Felt a little too much like punishing the poor for being poor. And then making that punishment taking away the thing they don’t have that makes them poor in the first place.

  At the time of this particular personal experience, the Sit-and-Lie Ordinance remained very much in effect and Palm Springs wanted you to know it. Apparently, it hadn’t had much effect on Smoking Kid and that really riled George right up.

  “Can’t you read?” he was saying.

  “Sure,” said the kid. But he didn’t stand up. George bristled and made a needlessly exaggerated show of stepping around the kid, glaring at him the whole time like some icky he might get stuck on the bottom of his shoe.

  George’s brush with danger had worked him up into a royal huff and even as our journey resumed, he kept muttering to his wife about “bums and smokers cluttering up the streets.” For the rest of our walk, though, George’s pace was much more restrained.

  A few blocks later, George raised his arms triumphantly. We had arrived at last. At Starbucks.

  I guess you could say I was surprised. When George had said he “Knew a Place” with the air of authority reserved for a natural-born Palm Springer, I had imagined some kind of cozy little local joint where gentleman in cream suits sipped Americanos from dainty little cups. Maybe Robert Downy Jr. is there. Maybe he drops his sunglasses and winks at me as I walk in. I don’t know. Its Palm Springs, anything could happen.

  But no, it was just a Starbucks. A very busy Starbucks at that. A line of bobbing heads stretched out of the main doors and halfway down the block. Mrs. George clearly wasn’t the only one hankering for a macchiato.

  “There’s a line,” said Mrs. George.

  George’s arms dropped, defeated.

  “Well do you want coffee or don’t you?”

  The wife folded her arms and watched the line. After about two minutes of contemplative silence, we all watched the line shuffle forward a step or two and then settle back down into apathy.

  “Hmm,” said the wife.

  In the end, the wife decided against the coffee after all. Poor George. All that sidewalk-rage just to fumble it in the end zone. He gave me a sweaty grimace and an exaggerated shrug as if to say, “The fickleness of women, amirite?”

  He gave me a little wave and without another word the two of them turned and sauntered off down the street. That was the last word I ever exchanged with George or his wife. It was a long awkward experience and I admit to a certain sense of relief when they finally wandered off without me.

  Without much reason beyond having nothing else to really do, I walked over and claimed my place in line.

  Might as well get the coffee, I figured.