Smaller Crowds These Days

The garlic fries at Braindead Stadium are much larger this year. You can see two kinds in the photo, the lighter garlic fries in the front and the darker ones (deep fried for two hours instead of an hour and a half) in the back. There are so many fewer fans in the park these days that they've lowered the price from $7 to 75 cents a bushel.

There were 30,000 announced in attendance at Tuesday night's game, but it didn't look anywhere close to that many. In previous years the place would have been jam-packed.

Just like the subway to the game -- practically empty. Of course, that may be because the sucker was moving at 1mph most of the way, when it wasn't jerking to another stop in the tunnel. Smart people probably got off and walked.

Plotnik's dentist, Dr. Flossem, says his business is 'way off too. He and all the other dentists in the office have taken a cross-the-board 20% pay cut. Preventive dentistry, apparently, is doing fine but people are putting off those extra-whitener cosmetic jobs.

There are 24 floors in the 450 Suffer Building with at least ten doctors per floor, most of them dentists. The floors are usually filled with technicians and hygienists in white lab coats passing unhappy clients with worried looks on their faces. They still have an elevator man directing people onto the six banks of elevators on the Art Deco ground floor. But yesterday 450 Suffer was empty. Plotnik had an elevator to himself, all the way up to Dr. Flossem's office on the top floor.

He thought: what if this elevator were filled with people with swine flu? Or swine?

He also thought: this would be just like Al Queda. They hate us and they don't eat pigs. Put a disease into a pig and all the pig eaters will perish.

But the elevator went up so fast Plotnik only had a bit of time to realize Osama's evil plan wouldn't touch the Orthodox Jews, and that would never do. And the Brisket Flu wouldn't bother Hindus. He'll have to huddle with Mullah Omar and come up with another idea. Then the door opened on the 24th Floor.

Dr. Flossem cleaned Plotnik's teeth and complimented him. True, Plotnik had flossed 300 times the two days before his appointment, but Dr. Flossem is usually in a hurry. A compliment is new. They must be desperate not to lose their old, valued clients.

Afterwards, Plot stopped in front of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel to talk to his old friend Laban, the doorman in the red Beefeater costume. Laban never has time to talk, what with all the people arriving and all the other people leaving, and his cell phone ringing and taxis honking. Yesterday, one man was leaving but nobody was arriving. Laban leaned against a pillar. He and Plot had plenty of time to chew the fat.

Laban's getting bigger every time Plottie sees him. Once the most feared basketball player on the Saturday morning court, Laban has put on maybe 75 pounds since then. Laban was a linebacker in High School. Now, he's one of the three men in the red suits in front of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

The taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel were all reading newspapers as they hunched behind their steering wheels, looking up every thirty seconds or so, perhaps dreaming of the doorman's phantom whistle. Plot wheeled his bike between parked taxis and down Powell Street, dodging the cable car tracks as he said hi to Ralphie.

Plot never rides down a hill anymore, a little one like Powell Street or a big one like Sanchez Street, without Ralph Hager in his head. Admittedly, Ralphie rode a whole lot faster than Plotnik, but Ralph's dead now, and was paralyzed for a dozen years before that. Ralphie lives somewhere under Plotnik's headband, near his right ear, calling out: "Slow down, knucklehead. Trust me. You're not in that big a hurry."

Market Street had little traffic at 10am, but the City Hall Farmer's Market was far from empty. The outdoor Wednesday market is close to the Vietnamese Tenderloin and not that far from Chinatown. Asian women thronged the half a dozen stands where other Asian women were selling treasured green Spring favas and huge bunches of mustard greens shooting forth spikes of yellow flowers.

Local schoolkids and their teachers use the market as a field trip.

"Look, Maria, that's a carrot."

"Ca-rrrro?"

"Yes. Car-roT." The young teacher bites off that final T, the one that doesn't exist in Guatemala.

These tiny, innocent boys and girls, some holding little strings that tether them to the child in front of them, some with untied shoelaces, some with unsnapped velcro, some with runny noses and a few with scarves covering their impossibly thick, black hair, all have special power. They look up at the hardboiled merchants, who got up at 2am in Fresno or Hanford or Visalia to load their trucks and drive to the market to be set up by 6am, and won't leave until 5pm at the earliest, and who generally have about as much patience and compassion as a box of spoiled shiitakes. But -- you know, kids.

"Here, dollink," says the normally sour Russian woman who sells oranges. "Take taste."

The little boy in the rumpled white school uniform shirt and blue pants grabs the piece of seedless tangerine, looks at his teacher, who nods, so he swallows the fruit, and then an enormous smile, big and round with happy eyes and two or three teeth missing, captures his entire face.

"Dass good," he says.

"I know," she says.

OK, Plotnik lied. Those aren't garlic fries. They're sweet potatoes at the Farmer's Market. But you knew that.