Coffee

1

The air was sharp and crisp when I slid open the window.  Leftovers from the night's free fall sprinkled down the side of the gritty, brick complex and absorbed into the cracks.  Clouds slid by easily and felt like I was trapped three thousand feet higher than I actually was on the fifth floor.  It was a Tuesday, nearly three in the afternoon according to the clock that sprawled on the floor next to my mattress; it was morning in my head.

Leaving the house was always a great chore, three cats matted with dirt and sweat would always trail me and try to trip me up when I walked down the stairs; darting for the heavy steel door that kept them prisoner.  I automatically kicked the nearest one out of the way and the rest scattered deeper into the complex, hoping a nice patron would come along soon.

November 16th, I think.  It was the day I got paid and one of the days I always met him for coffee- used to meet him for coffee.  It wasn't really meeting so much as it was buying coffee at the same dilapidated stand on the corner every other morning.  We both had a love for cheap sludge, as I recall.  I always paid my dollar and left immediately after (to try and catch the bus that left around the corner- I never made it in time).  He always dawdled behind, staring at the cups stacked in neat towers peaking above the withered price board.


"'Ullo," he would say, voice thick with fog.

"Hello," I would say, without looking up.

"The weather's looking good today, maybe some sun later," he never looked up.

"Yup," there was never any sun.

"Don't miss your bus," he would remind me, as I would walk away.

"I won't," I always did.

I tried asking him once what he was staring so intently at every morning.  He could only give me a shrug and I thought I might have seen 'Twenty-four' silently slip across his lips.  I tried asking the man selling coffee once what the man did while he was standing there.  The man would shrug and tell me, "Drinking coffee, same as you."

He wasn't there that day, the 16th, a Tuesday.  It should not have surprised me; there are other stands.  There are other things to be doing besides staring at cups and drinking coffee in the rain.  I paid my dollar and the man said to me, "He's gone, ya know."

"He's not here, I can see that."

Shaking his head, he continued, "Walked in front of a bus yesterday.  Right here.  Piss poor for business, no one wants coffee after a man paints the asphalt like that."

"Mmhm."

2

The room was always drafty.  The windows probably left over from the original crap design of the building.  After twenty-seven years it would make sense to replace them; but we weren't paying for comfortable room.  We were paying for the decrepit man in front of the cracked blackboard, for him to write numbers on it and wheeze instructions to the two-hundred students crammed into squeaking metal chairs that were missing too many screws.

For an hour every day the only sounds were the scritching of pencil on paper, the squeak of the chairs, and his wheezing that muffled out any thoughts he had.  Occasionally a chair would collapse.  No one paid attention, anymore.  The person who fell took a seat on the stairs with the others who had lost seats.

Everyday he came to sit next to me with a cup in hand.  The contents smelled like bile, but he could only grin as he sipped at the cup.  Even with stench creeping over to my area and turning my stomach, I could not help but feel pleased he was there every day.  The professor's wheezing inhibited any understanding by anyone; except my neighbor.

The lines in his notebook were stuffed with problems mirrored on the blackboard, with the solutions neatly scrawled below them.  He was always more than happy to turn his notebook my way so I could glean some knowledge from the whirlwind in his head.

At first I felt guilty for taking all his work and regurgitating it as my own.  I tried to talk to him, to befriend him, as payment for my copying.  But we could never hold a conversation.  He said he always listened, but his eyes bounced off every imaginable surface in the room, never resting for more than a few moments.  

If his eyes weren't moving, his hands were.  He had a set of used color pencils with him at all times.  First he would arrange them in order of color, spending excruciating time trying to decipher which blue went before which purple.  Then he would arrange them according to length, carefully lining the bottoms so he was sure just how long they really were.  Then there were several other patterns that made no sense to me, but were certainly not random.  It took me awhile to realize his actions were always purposeful, even when nothing important was accomplished.

His topics were never much better.  If he did offer up something to discuss it was short lived before he took up another thread of interest and spit it out.  Turning the conversation over and over and over until there was no sense in any argument made.  It was exhausting and I gave up trying after awhile.  But he never stopped showing me his notebook.

I was upset the days he never showed up; not because I missed his companionship, obviously, but because my one connection to understanding was lost, and now I would be behind.

In November he stopped coming to class altogether.  The 16th was the first day of his absence; we had a quiz, and I turned the paper black with eraser smudges since he wasn't there.  I was planning to scold him the next day for missing it; I had already figured out exactly how it would play out.

First I would ask him, "Where were you yesterday?  We had a quiz, remember?"

"I know, but I was sick/had a doctor's appointment/my mother died," were some of his responses.

"Oh, I'm sorry.  Are you feeling any better today?"

"Yes, much better," and he would pull out the colored pencils.

But he never showed up.  He didn't show up for the rest of the week.  I could feel my stomach turning and turning each day after that Tuesday, even without the putrid cup he always brought with him.

On Saturday I had to study.  It seemed obvious he had dropped the class or finished it early.  Neither one would be surprising.  Sitting on a cinder block for a chair I wrote and erased and wrote and erased, getting no where and achieving nothing.  The TV had been on for most of the day, who's sole purpose was to block out the sound of traffic that leaked through my curtains.  A name slipped from the announcer's lips that sounded incredibly familiar; was that his name?  We'd introduced ourselves once, but his name had long fallen out of my head.

Turning to look at the screen I saw a large bus flickering and a crowd of people pointing at a long, red streak that that lay next to it on the curb.  Monday's date blinked steadily in the corner of the footage, clearly from a handheld camera.

I had to start a new piece of paper for my homework problems shortly after; too many smudges and wrinkles on one sheet.

3

I spilt my coffee that day.  You scoff and say, 'That's nothing to complain about.' But when you only buy good coffee once a month you're damn right I'll complain about losing it.  I'm not even sure if you could call the crap I usually drink coffee.  I think the grocery stores just dig up dirt from the lot behind their building and stuff it into cans.  Disgusting.

But this coffee, this coffee was the stuff of dreams.  With actual milk and you can even watch them make it, right in front of you.  Grinding the beans, pouring the water, steaming the milk; it's a twenty minute wait every afternoon 'cause of the damn yuppies that buy this stuff every day.  They huff and puff and complain about the wait, I even saw one throw their drink at the girl behind the counter saying it wasn't sweet enough.  They should try dirt sometime, then they'll learn to appreciate it.

So when I say I spilt my coffee that day, you're damn right I'm going to make a fuss.  I was late coming home that day, too.  Everything was going smoothly, when the bus lurched and screeched to a complete stop.  It sounded and felt like we hit something.  At first it was the boiling coffee pooling in my lap that made me leap out of my seat shouting bloody murder.  Then I was shouting bloody murder at the asshole who stopped the bus so suddenly.

There was a scream from the very back of the bus, and rush to look out the window.  I looked out myself to see what all the fuss was about. They didn't lose anything important.  They were just tossed around a bit.  A few broken toes is nothing to shout about.

The people on the sidewalk had all stopped; staring at the bottom half of the bus.  Some pointing, some crying, I saw one woman vomit and could feel my own stomach flip as the stench crept in through the open windows.

"Attention, passengers.  It seems we are having some technical difficulties at the moment.  I ask that you please remain in your seats until I tell you otherwise," the driver announced with the sort of monotoned, practiced drawl that comes from dealing with the general public too long.

"What the hell is going on!" A man in front of me, demanded.

"We seem to have hit someone."

"I see no car! You're saying some guy just walked out in front of you?  Or did you drive up the curb to hit him!" The man shrieked again, his eyes bloodshot and nearly popping clean off his face.

"Sir, remain seated," the driver repeated and stepped off the bus without another glance.

Knuckles white, cheeks red, the man sad down again, then turned to me, "How do ya like that?  Some guy wanting to kill himself, eh?  Well that's fine, just don't do it in front of my bus!"

I nodded, "Spilt my coffee and everything."

"A damn shame, fucking world has gone mad when you can't take a bus home without worrying about some idiot trying to kill himself."

"Yeah," I answered, trying not to look out the window.