The Cafe Suite: Table 4 Order# 21

The Cafe Suite

 Table 4 Order# 21

Strange how he found himself in unusual places.
Small cafe. Plain. On River Street.
Strange for him to be here. But then again, he wasn’t so ordinary himself. A bald hair product salesman. Salesmen wear suits. He wore nylon slacks and a GloWeave, button down shirt. Deck shoes completed his ensemble. Male. Unusual.
He was Mr Barren. Or so a badge told the people who carred to look.
Brief case full of a line of hair straigtening, restoring, curling, colour treating, moisture restoring, oil reducing hair products. He could satisfy anyone and everyone. Yet he sat alone. Strange.
He thought about everyone in terms of his fantasy; who could they become? Potential. The hair salesman fixed his tie and sat there, the stranger in a plain cafe. River Street.
He touched his head, where hair should have been but wasn’t. He turned his attention around the room again. He could match the products in his brief case to each person within four seconds flat. He ordered a drink.
Not coffee thanks. Tea.
The waitress brought him tea.
He shifted his attention to her. She looked back. He thought, Shine Serum #403. Matched.
Something, something, something she almost said. He turned away and she said nothing. Strange, she thought. She said strange as she walked away.
He felt the heat from the tea. No milk yet, but he drank it anyway. He stopped. No milk. He recognised an absence.
He became aware that to his left, sat a woman who could, no, should use Curl Intensive Shampoo. She was huddled around her drink in conversation. Beside her, a simple case: Hair Nurture #71. He smiled, wondered if the potential clients noticed.
In a small, plain, coffee shop, he sat.
Had he serviced them before? He didn’t know. Isn’t sure. Strange.
He moved in his seat for no reason in particular. Stopped. Moved again. He felt eyes on him. One deep breath to relax.
This time he stayed still. His briefcase was full. He had enough for everyone in the room but no one seemed interested. No one was interested.
No one.
The waitress returned, he ordered more. An order for a weak coffee was placed. The waitress left again. She starred at him, not sure what to think, but she was thinking. Wondering.
No doubt. No doubt.
He thumbed around in his wallet for a time. He had money. He had checked.
He could hear everything in the cafe; everything. Every echo. Spoons touched the bottom of cups. Now stirred. Now placed back on the saucer. Sitting there. Still sitting there. Spoon bumped and then rattled by a cup on a saucer. Cups touched lips, lips touched cups. Cups back on saucers. Spoons moved again. He heard everything.
Mr Barren placed a ten dollar note upon the table. More than enough. Tip too.
There was a smell now. It has always been there but he has only just noticed. Mocha. Strong rich beans. Javanese, having travelled several thousand kilometeres so he could breath in their smell. In that moment he was in Java.
He could hear things. Smell the coffee and now he could know both form and image. He had learnt something other than hair. He only knew hair.
He picked up his brief case, full of product. Written on the side is ‘Change your hair, change your life!’ but he doesn’t get it. Mr Barren stumbled over a chair infront of him. He clutched his cane and tapped his white stick way through a maze that was this small, strange shop.
He was purgatorying.
Strange how he often found himself in the strangest of places.
Stranger still is that he did not see the child staring. At him. Nor the mother lean in and speak.
Sshh Chris. That is Mr Barren. He believes he is something he is not.
That’s strange mummy, replied the boy.
The waitress spoke. What’s strange is that a blind man’s fantasy is hair product. Then aloud, I’ll see you next week Mr Barren.
He grunted his way onto the footpath.
Tap. Tap. Tap. He was gone.

The Cafe Suite: Doctors Order

The Cafe Suite

Doctors Order

Spit, stained with lies, I am told to lean closer to the microphone.
The smell of instant, cheap made coffee, the sight of a pursed lip. The feel of hungry ears. I retreat.
My arm works allegro with each pound of the pestle, and with each pound I add, imagination blooms; mushrooms. I move a plate closer, empty my work  and I have complete; bacon, eggs, tomato and mushrooms; shrooms. Ostensibly, a healthy breakfast.
My kitchen. My laboratory. Low-light, organic. Dark. Conducive to my line of work.
How long has this been going on for?
The room, dark, smell of coffee, like the kitchen of a cheap drunk. The constable leans forward, enters my space trying to hear my thoughts.
Nothing to hear except Have you ever experimented with LSD? My response.
LSD please, extra hot! I nod, no need to write the order down, I’m on auto pilot. My note pad returns to my pocket. My fingers, fingering in the dark find a pill; small and deceptively simple to make. I put it back. For now. Soy Decafe Late , LSD is on the menu.
Brewed, I slip the pill into the drink. Then stirred now mashed. No sense of art in my craft at all. All business. I serve hot. The response is my artistry; performance art.
I watch as the drink is, as my thoughts are, consumed.
She sits with the cup. Moves it under her nose and breathes in; deep. She knows it’s good coffee; the best she has ever had. Immediately she relaxes. Teeth stop grinding. Legs stop moving. She relaxes. Eyes widen, out of the crevasses made from squinting. She’s relaxed.
I watch the other couple, Bacon, eggs and ‘shrooms. They laugh, unaware of my assistance in their nascent euphoria, not the accidental spilling of their coffee. I laugh. One grunt. Not at them, but at the spilt, bitter coffee. A waste.
Cups are hung in a line. Coffee beans are pilled to the side; ease of access. Spoons; shine, silver.
I watch the lady some more. I like her. Nice glasses and shiny fingers. Relaxed; rendered insouciant. A convoluted mind now a simple device; spoon like; made to be stirred.
There is a line now. People ordering, or waiting to do so. Long thin line; caucasian. Man from the line helps himself to a coke. There’s a smell in the air, hanging, subtly but definitely there. I see several of my customers breathe in through their noses. I watch; one breath. No one notices the smell except me. I breathe in through my nose and I can smell cheap coffee again. Cheap coffee, metallic finish and lies.
I hold the metal jug as I froth milk for coffees; just regular ones. It wasn’t just at night I performed my secret ministry, it was any time of day. But, only for the special ones. With one swift hand gesture I place a white pillow under my tongue. No one notices; the art of deception. It’s soft and I can relax. I relax.
Lights aren’t as harsh, little noise, my world. My world. Coffee, cups, small movements from otherwise still and satisfied customers, dance like. My world. I’m in charge.
A few minutes later in a whirl wind of shapes, colours and passing faces, man with coke says something. Something else and then something about going with him and her, his partner; a constable? For a rest? Something, something and then something again.
Don’t push! Something else.
Their world.
As I lean closer, I tell her only this. It’s probably not true. I always lie.
Lie. I lie. Lie.
My world.

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The Cafe Suite: Order # 76

The Cafe Suite

Order # 76

Cold.
Wet winter rain and Ted Peuterman, fourty three, as tarnished as his name suggests, has one hand on car-keys, one hand in pocket, and makes sound.
Christ aloud and with that epithetical plea, the keys work free.
Hand rummaging, his walk begins. Over three potholes, around a faded give-way sign, across double lines, over asphalt, up the concrete grey gutter, a dirty sidewalk and into a cafe. Onto a chair and the preoccupied hand changes occupation. It steadies a table, shivering in the wind and begins to make good work of a cigarette. Two short breaths in – one long, out.
Ted Peuterman is not a liberated soul. He is not free from guilt, nor is he freed by the complexity of his thoughts. Ted Peuterman is free in the short period between two breaths in and one long, out.
The chair creeks. It is under strain. The sound acts as warning of an impending collapse. Ted likes this chair. It’s cold, hard, stiff and well worn. He finds comfort in the familiarity of that which so easily echoes his own dispositions.
He doesn’t say anything. His soundless complaints about life, whatever that means, are masked by the rain. There are three drops. They follow one another, driving down his face, as if following a map. They are brushed away by one gesture of Ted Peuterman’s tobacco tallowed hands.
Suddenly from a place outside of Ted’s mind moves a waitress. Quicker than usual, she has pounced on his table. For him, her movements are cat like.
He is annoyed by the celerity of her approach and the amount of feeling in her gait; more bubbly than a cake of soap.
Poised and collected, ready to take his order, table three’s order, order #76 of the day, she asks Ted Peuterman, the regular... Latte? She uses inflection.
Ted replies flatly, Bitter. Bitter as you can make it.
The waitress is employed by order #76 for seven and a half minutes, the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee on a Tuesday afternoon. Bitter. She’s gone. One breath warmer than the winter; a winter which encroaches him, creeping to linger in every crevasse, pit, pore and orifice of his worn form.
He watches her.
He wishes for her to fall, to fail. Lips, tongue and teeth mutter, Bitch.
Ted Peuterman thinks in his thoughts that if she were to trip this would be his recompense for a long, cold day. She owes him. She trips and he laughs out loud. One grunt. He owns her.
Ted sits. Waits another seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half-hand-burnt-minutes later, the waitress returns. She clutches a bitter cup of coffee and a burnt hand. Interrupted, a brief dialogue is exchanged, sorry about the delay.
He grunts, you earnt it. The waitress doesn’t understand.
Peuterman goes on living in his own mind. His escape is the newspaper in hand, he begins to read. Back to front the news becomes increasingly dramatic, dark. Purposefully he ignores the western reading path and a creation seeking to satisfy the most cynical of minds is the product. Peuterman flicks past the sports uninterested and removed.
Twenty three year old man driven down by drunk driver, reads the newspaper. One long sip of his bitter coffee is drunk down and he feels a sense of caffeinated satisfaction.
Blind child fatally slain, is the next title. No empathy stands apparent in the fourty three year olds milky eyes. Eyes not moist, but whet to his desire for macabre sombre-sense news.
Public health sector strike in size 42 Times New Roman font.
Another cigarette is found by Peuterman’s ruminant hand. Match struck and he senses the synergy between match head and box. Three headlines later and three pages on, the orotund sounds of the cafe are interrupted.
A ringing. The sound resonates, weaving its way through the bodies and tables, encircles Ted Peuterman, enters and then starts over again. Once, twice and a fifth time.
Closing time. 5 o’clock.
Coffee is cold and Ted too. He works his way toward an end. Through the
upside-down tables, beside a stack of chairs, a pile of swept mess lies slovenly on the floor. He makes sure he walks it back through the cafe. A cavort, dancing to the disorder he so effortlessly composes.
Waitress is nowhere to be seen and Ted Peuterman smiles for the first time that day. The burnt hand seemed to stunt her persistent sense of readiness and now she is nowhere but in Ted’s thoughts.
This thought bubble bursts. Quickly it is replaced by more bubbles, that is the waitress. She came up from behind like a spontaneous case of indigestion. The waitress, from nowhere produces a bill. Three ninety nine plus a thirty cent tip. He gives her three ninety nine, an absence of a tip, and neither smile nor good form. Waitress smiles curtly, unimpressed, pirouettes.
Interrupted by dialogue once more, the waitress hears, Receipt. expenses to account for. Inflection noted.
Ted Peuterman leaves the cafe with a lit cigarette and a receipt. Smoke and ash conspire. He coughs, but maintains eye contact with his receipt.
Ted walks. He walks. Ted Peuterman walks, with a course set. He is the three drops following a map. He is three wet, winter, rain drops.
Ted Peuterman doesn’t see the car. He doesn’t feel it. But he knows it is fast. Suddenly he and the car are one. Then he is none. He is three drops wiped away by the gesture of a hand.
Waitress from the cafe sees him bounce. He owes her. One grunt.
Cold.
Order #76. Done.