A Girl Called Destiny

I am in the car, driving Downtown, with Stephanie, Pete, and a girl called Destiny, and in the boot of the car are salads and tuna sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottles of water that we are going to give out to the homeless people of San Diego.
'Okay, we are Team Awesome,' says Stephanie who has long brown hair and a big smile, and whose car, an Audi, we are in, 'and here are the rules for Team Awesome. We stay together, we don't engage in conversation, we don't wake people who are sleeping,'
Then Stephanie starts the car and tell us more rules, while at the same time, driving, laughing and shouting about pedestrians.
'Oops,' she says, 'I don't want to be an arsehole who runs over pedestrians, that would be so totally not cool,'
Then she yells at someone to get out of the way.
'Out of the way, areshole,' she says, and laughs and turns the corner.
Then she asks us what our names are, and we all call out our names again.
Pete says Pete, Destiny says Destiny, I say my name and the Stephanie says hers again.
Then Stephanie asks us all what we do.
Pete says he's an arborist and Stephanie says cool.
I tell Pete and Destiny and Stephanie what I do and everyone says 'cool', but we don't get around to what Destiny or Stephanie do because we haven't gone very far before Stephanie sees some homeless people and is parking the car and yelling 'WOOH', first stop, let's roll, let's rock out some SALADS,'
Then Stephanie tells us we have to hurry because we are parked in a disabled parking space and she is not disabled.
'Clearly,' says Stephanie, running on the spot while putting bottled water into a hessian shopping bag, 'I am NOT disabled, so we gotta, like totally roll on this one,'
For the next 10 minutes we walk from homeless person to homeless person offering the salad in polystyrene containers, the tuna sandwiches, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the bottles of water.
'You want some dog food?' says a woman a who has no teeth, and no dog that I can see, 'Someone gave me so much dog food,'
Stephanie smiles and laughs and says 'WOOP, no thanks, you hang on to it, we've got dog food' and walks on.
Then we go back to the car and, while we are driving around looking for more homeless people, Stephanie talks about how she's becoming Jewish because she's marrying a Jewish guy.
'I call it How to Become a Jew School,' she says, of the classes she is taking to convert to Judaism.
Then she tells us how expensive it is to become a Jew, $2.500 a year for temple fees, another $500 for ground fees, $250 for classes but that he fiance's father, who lives in Beverly Hills and is 'minted', is chipping in.
'You should see the temple,' Stephanie tells me and Phil and Destiny, 'it is BEAUTIFUL,'
Then, just as Stephanie is explaining the similarities between Buddhism and Judaism, and telling us that Jew school is on Thursdays so she won't be able to do the homeless food drop for 6 months while she becomes a Jew, sees some homeless people gathered at the side of a windowless convenience store, and parks the car.
I look out of the car window and see, on the footpath at the side of the convenience store, a very fat black woman in a white dress, sitting in a wheelchair.
In her white dress she is glowing under the light that drops on her from the one light on the street.
On the ground, in the shadow around her, people are lying on dirty piles of blankets.
On the corner there are more people standing around a rubbish bin.
'Wooh, let's rock those salads,' says Stephanie and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny get out of the car and cross the street and ask the people standing around the rubbish bin if they would like a salad.
Some say yes and we give them the salads.
Then I ask the woman in the wheelchair if she would like a salad.
'It's the only thing we have left now,' I tell her and she smiles, says yes, she would like a salad, and then says 'bless you,'
And then I offer a salad to a woman lying on the ground next to the woman in the wheelchair.
The woman on the ground says yes, she would like a salad, but she doesn't move to sit up so I put the salad on the ground next to her and she says 'bless you,' also.
It is night now, and except for the light falling from that one street lamp, it is all dark around us.
So we walk around, handing out the salads until all the salads are gone and then when we have no more salads we cross the street, get back into Stephanie's car, and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny go home.



spikyheart.com
tonilebusque.com

United...by my hunger.

After I got in an argument with the steward who told me that United Airlines no longer did vegan meals, the people in the seats around me started handing me their unopened salads.
First it was the man behind me.
'I heard what she said to you,' he told me, 'and it's not true they don't do vegan meals anymore, it's an option on their website,'
I said thanks and took the salad from him and he said, 'And the guy next to me hasn't eaten his, I'll ask him if you can have that, too,'
I said thanks again and a few moments later he gave me that salad also.
Then the man across the aisle, the man with whom I had swapped seats because he had longer legs than me and needed an aisle seat with no seat in front, handed me his salad also.
'I feel bad,' he said, 'I feel like I stared all this,'
I laughed and said, 'No, it isn't your fault. United screwed up my meal on my way over to the UK, too. I don't expect any better from them, which is why I've brought an emergency bag of bananas from Tesco with me,'
Then the woman next to me, who was from Sunderland, and whose husband I had been earlier talking to about tattoos, gave me her salad as well.
'He's already eaten his,' she said, of her husband, 'otherwise you could have had his as well,'
I laughed and said never mind.
And then another man across the aisle from me gave me his unopened salad, too.
And then the steward came back, bringing me another salad.
I told her thank you and started to open one of the salads.
But once it was open I realised I had no cutlery, so I walked to the back of the plane and asked the same steward for some cutlery.
When I got back to my seat I started to eat some lettuce, but one of the tines of the plastic fork broke off, so I ate the contents of the 1 provided and 5 donated salads with my fingers.

In the morning, just as the plane was getting ready to land, the purser came down to see me and give my vegan breakfast.
The purser, a very nice middle-aged woman who gave me her email address, explained to me that my vegan meal had been given to the wrong passenger, the passenger seated next to the man with with long legs with whom I had swapped seats.
I looked over at the woman who had eaten my meal.
Her hair was grey and cut into a bob and she was wearing some kind of white eye shades that looked like furry swimming goggles and she had some kind of expensive looking ear phones over her ears.
She must have known she'd eaten my vegan meal because special meals always come out first.
She must have known she wasn't eating the common chicken and pasta or fish and broccoli.
She must have known she was eating someone else's meal and she also must have seen the confusion going on around her whilst I was arguing with the steward and whilst people were handing me salads from all over the place.

But I didn't really mind that she'd eaten my vegan meal.
Because the ratio of arsehole to kindness on that United Airlines 10.25 morning flight from London to LA had been 1 to 5.
RESULT!

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tonilebusque.com