I’ve been sitting here for too long, I used to sit in bars and coffee shops to avoid work or school or other people but right now I’m just sitting here and it’s really been too long. As a student I used to resent those people in bars who could make a pint of beer last for three hours while they read their books and learned useful intellectual facts. I drank too fast of course and never finished chapter two.
I’ve spent years perfecting the skills I need and now I think I have it down to an art form, I grew up, graduated (although not in that order), switched my liquid intake from ninety percent beer and ten percent coffee to the complete opposite and started to drink slower. That envy I felt as a student took hold of me and I felt like I had something to prove to nobody in particular about how long I could make one drink last. I’ve been here three hours, I’m on the same 8 Oz. Americano that I ordered when I came in and I’m proud of it. It’s a good job I tip well or they would throw me out, possibly before I even finish my drink.
So I’ve been here a while, mostly because I’m in no hurry to go somewhere else and its fun to watch people. That’s another skill set I’ve been working on over the short but fulfilling years of my adulthood, “spy training” I call it. Eavesdropping while reading, watching without looking, nosing without being noticed, all valuable. Let me run through the list I’m mentally compiling right now for anyone who’s interested.
The guy in the corner is reading a newspaper, I know because I can barely see him out of the corner of my eye, I’m not being nosy just aware of my surroundings. He’s reading the personals, men seeking men it looks like but I’m not sure, maybe I’m too quick to categorize but that’s the assumption I’m making. I think I jump to conclusions too quickly, my father used to blame me for every missing cookie in the kitchen until I was twenty three years old, it wasn’t always me and I think I’m still bitter. This guy has been here about twenty minutes now and he’s drinking his second iced coffee (too fast you fool). I’m still gathering data on this guy; I’ll get back to him if nothing else catches my attention.
Directly in front of me there’s my main focus of attention, one older guy with a younger girl. I’ve gathered that this is a “date”. He keeps answering his cell phone and saying “I’m on a date” but he keeps talking into his phone anyway and she looks bored. He looks like her father and he’s got plenty of grey hairs. I’m confused by this one. It just looks out of place. His eyebrows are too bushy, that’s a problem for me, always has been ever since I accidentally walked in on my father while he was plucking his eyebrow hairs to thin them out. I’d say it’s another of my obsessions. I keep glancing up at these people and my eyes fix on his eyebrows. I should focus on not drinking my coffee and listen closer to gather the nature of this “date”.
The girl behind the counter is so bored. I can tell because she’s zoned out leaning against the fridge with a magazine that she’s not looking at. She’s been obsessively emptying the tip jar of everything but one dollar after every customer. She doesn’t know if the muffin in the front of the cabinet is bran or chocolate chip. I was hoping for chocolate chip but I’m not going to risk three dollars on a fifty percent chance of bran, I hate bran. Maybe that’s something to do with my father’s obsession with regular bowel movements.
The girl on the sofa is reading a book, I can’t see the title from here but it looks trashy. She’s sitting forward and has the book close to her face. Every page or two she leans forward and feels around the table for her coffee cup blindly as she refuses to take here eyes from the page. It must be a good book.
The people on a “date” are talking about terminal diseases. I have to stop eavesdropping or I’ll feel sick. I hate talking about diseases, I think I’m developing hypochondria; maybe I should look up the symptoms online when I get home. I have a long history with terminal illnesses; they were a sort of macabre interest of mine at one time after the discovery of a web site that detailed all the symptoms of so many weird and wonderful things. I talked about them a lot to my friends but they didn’t seem as interested, I found myself spending too much time on that web site and in the end I went cold turkey and I haven’t looked back since. My father was a doctor you see. It’s his fault.
The guy reading the personals has glanced over at me several times in the last few minutes. I may have been staring into space in his direction while I thought about my possible hypochondria. He’s moved on from the personals now and it looks like he might be in the opinion section, I can’t quite see from here exactly what letter he’s reading but it’s got him all riled up judging by the look on his face. Perhaps it’s an anti-homosexual letter from one of those ultra-conservative types who write to newspapers every week, they’re usually quickly followed by an ultra-liberal letter proclaiming everything the previous writer said to be utter horseshit.
I went through my own period of being highly opinionated while I was a student (of course). I joined a few groups, went to a few meetings, wore a few badges and even went to a few rallies. I had joined up this one group because the girl at the recruiting desk showed a sincere interest in the Ebola virus which I had read about just the previous evening. I thought I’d found somebody who could share my interests while we actively campaigned for something (I forget what). The first meeting was planning a demonstration outside some building or something; they brought out some plywood and buckets of paint and asked if I could help paint some signs, that was the end of my activist career right there – I left right away. You see I have a slight problem with green, I’ve never liked it as a color and it makes me a little queasy when it’s used for lettering. I’m not sure where this little quirk of mine comes from but I think it’s something to do with my father’s first car when I was just a small child. It wasn’t green but I’m sure it was involved somehow.
There’s a new customer, she’s got horrible earrings. That’s about the only thing that catches my attention for the first few minutes of my observation. By the time I’ve taken a few more teeny tiny sips of my coffee I’ve gathered that she’s a tea drinker and likes to pay for things by check which I find refreshingly quaint. I’d never use a check myself of course but I have great respect for those willing to take a chance and go with a classic payment method. I’m a cash only person for obvious reasons.
The “date” looks like its going better, she’s not looking bored any more but I’m sure I saw her glance at her watch. It’s a nice watch, fits her wrist well and looks like it’s reliable, I wonder if it keeps good time. I took a brief watch making class one year as a student but I never actually made a watch, the teacher was a little weird and I don’t think he understood much English but we did play with some clockwork toys and I learned some really interesting Swiss words which I can only assume are offensive. The girl’s laugh is bugging me now, it’s not that it’s fake but it’s definitely exaggerated. I heard his joke and really it wasn’t that funny, worth a chuckle but not much more. I can always tell when laughter isn’t genuine; it comes from a temporary job I once had in a recording studio where we laid down laughter tracks for new comedy shows. I spent four months listening to people laugh, adding a few of my own fake guffaws and chortles and editing out those deep belly laughs that creep some people out. “Nothing but the best quality laughter for our audiences,” our boss used to say while he sat in his mirthless sound proofed office and filled out laughter rating forms. We paid people to come into our studio and listen to jokes then we recorded their reaction and mixed them all together to build all levels of audience response. My family had visited me at work one day and asked if they could be recorded laughing on some of the tracks, I told a joke about a chicken, a pig and a priest and my father didn’t laugh. I quit the next day, fake laughter still bugs me.
The girl with the horrific earrings has sat down with the gay guy reading the paper, I assume they know each other but wouldn’t it be nice if I had been wrong about his sexuality and this is a girl from the personals that he’s meeting for the first time. I hope he’s not too picky in the ear department.
The girl reading her book has just spilled her coffee all over the table and the bored counter girl is rushing over with paper napkins. It almost looks like the girl wants to keep reading her book but feels obliged to help clear up the mess. All the coffee shops I visited as a student had very poor table cleaning service and so I found myself cleaning the table myself when sitting down to save them the trouble. The bored girl it on top of it though, that spillage won’t stain the wood and it looks like the newspapers at the end of the table are unaffected.
I wish I knew what book she was reading over there that’s so good. I don’t read enough books myself anymore, I find my attention span to be a little shorter than I’d like and so books just don’t hold my interest. I started reading short story collections and that worked out well for a while but they just didn’t last long enough.
The “date” couple has ordered a cheesecake and two spoons; I find that a little unsanitary to be honest but the cheesecake does look good. Everybody seems to have their own dessert of choice and I adopted cheesecake as my own around three years ago. Until then I had been a chocolate cake person and cheesecake had held weird connotations for me going back to childhood and the four weeks when my mother was out of town and my father had cooked for us. I bit the bullet one evening in a bar around the corner from my apartment and ordered the cheesecake after dinner with an espresso to sip for a few hours. It took a while to take that first bite but after that I was sold and I claimed a mental victory over those four weeks in late June when I was seven years old. These days I could eat cheesecake three times a day if I had to. I don’t though.
The clock on the wall tells me I’ve managed to make this little 8 Oz. Americano last four hours, which is an all time record for me (and possibly the world). There’s a few sips left too if I really tilt my head back far enough. I’ve been here for too long. The girl at the counter was watched me take my last few sips and I know she’s figuring out my four hour world record in her head as she watches. I’m glad somebody else knows.
My cell phone has beeped a few times in my pocket and I know what’s displaying on the screen. I’ve been putting something out of my mind for the last four hours but it’s time I got going. I double checked my phone and I saw what I expected “7:00pm – Reminder, Dinner with Dad.”
