Outside the
auditorium the gaggle of primarily white men in 300+ dollar raw denim and
vintage sneakers smile and pat one another on the back and some hug and talk
big about angel investors and start ups and wink and nod and head straight for
a line of waiting luxury buses outside to ferry them back to Silicon Valley
from this field trip to the city. Amelia M., though, makes a b-line for Mission
street, eyes on the patterned industrial carpet and then the neatly poured
concrete outside the Moscone Center and doesn’t look up until she’s at least 30
feet from the glass doors so she can finally light up an American Spirit. She
types feverishly into her cell phone, one handed, while the cigarette burns to
a nub. Then with a look of surprise, or contempt, lights another. Of course one
of the men from the lecture sidles up next to her, asks if he can bum one,
pockets an e-cig vaporizer and begins with a grin to remind her of the speech
she is already trying to forget into her notes.
“Talk about ‘old
guard’ right?” He says.
Amelia, well practiced
speaking with tech-nerds, pours first kindness, “can you imagine being at the
head of that table? I mean, having everything you can imagine. Endless.
Limitless…stuff and junk.”
He
nods.
“So
what happens to all the people who aren’t at the table, who don’t have the
food?” Amelia asks. “I mean, pragmatically speaking, if we have to accept that
some people have limitless desires, and mathematically speaking there’s only
one seat at the head of the table, then what?”
The
grin quivers.
“So
just who gets to sit in that seat?”
No
more nodding.
“I
can guarantee that it’s not me,” she says. “Or you. And certainly not Mister
Endless-Table-PhD.”
“It
was just a philosophical trial. Food for thought, if you will.” He appears
pleased as a peach with the pun.
“Food
is not philosophical. People need to eat. And if only one fat motherfucker gets
to sit at that table, then the rest of us starve.”
“I
don’t think he was being literal.”
“He
may not have been pedantic, but he most certainly asked us to recognize just how
fundamentally fucked up these greedy Wall Street fucks are. And to leave if we
didn’t agree that endlessly feeding our needs and wants at the expense of
others was a flaw. A flaw I see as psychopathic. Right? But then nobody left. Not
one of you. Point literally made.”
The
grin chews on this, briefly. “Or he was hoping to distinguish that it is okay
to want, and to get what you want, as long as you maintain some reasonable
limits.”
“I
didn’t hear that,” Amelia raises her voice. “Even if that were so, that he was
somehow advocating for some limited amount of greed, at whose expense?”
“Look.
I get where you’re headed with this. But I’m not the enemy in his fairy tale.
It’s not like I’m taking food out of someone’s mouth just because I’m paid well
for my expertise.”
Amelia
crushes the butt of her cigarette on her heel, drops it in her bag, hikes her
multi-colored tights up and smooth’s the crease in her threadbare corduroy
skirt. “No. You certainly don’t steal food from their mouths,” she says and turns
from the twit with one of her smokes smoldering in his hand as the 14-Mission
bus pulls up at the corner. “You’ve intercepted it all at the market.”
Amelia
races to the bus, next in line behind Santa.
