Recruitments

She had auburn hair & bangs and wore the little floral dresses that say free spirited, but her lanyard and her business end said she was only there for coffee & appearances. Her companion was shorter with little glasses & clean poufy upswept hair, terse mouth, and pant suits. They worked for Dangerzone as I liked to call him, the lobbyist who was 400 lbs and a walking widowmaker heart attack. They’d come up the bar for coffee and play their routine. Auburn said “What about her?” And Pouf said with a shake of her head,” No everyone knows everything about her life.” See Auburn was an orphan & well, the thing about Dangerzone is he needed to own you. It’s easy to catch on to these things behind a bar with a fish bowl of the same fish swimming in and out for years.

I’ll never forget the day he was confronted by a man in blue jeans and a light blue shirt and a yamulke but I’ll call him Cowboy. Dangerzone had a woman at the table which he appeared to be interviewing. Cowboy came up to the table and confronted the man for sweeping up his friend into well, the dangerzone. I took a picture. I remember thinking, what is this? What are these people about? I recall bringing a coffee delivery over to their office, and well, the relief in leaving the bagels and carton of coffee behind as I went away told me something I needed to know. I knew I wanted to be back at the coffee shop watching from behind the counter, instead of in an office. Another way to say it is:

The field needs you & you need the field. The back of the coffee shop was my field. Here’s where Grace would take out the trash, smoking a cigarette, her face broadcasting the feeling like years can just hurt through the beauty. Or I’d wave at Steve the lawyer who would just continue in his measured way in-and-out through the back door so well-used that the wood had a soft-greased look. They moved blessedly on their tracks, and life was self-limiting and contained it seemed. While I had been the subject of what I overheard from Auburn & Pouf’s summary statement, I might have added to their list of demerits that my knee-high suede boots with the cigarette pocket & snakeskin polyester dress wasn’t really a shoo-in either for whatever they suggested for the office job. What I wanted, was to see art. I wanted to watch their drama, see the artists shuffle in, see the customer on a Thursday night and be walking in on the jazz of “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” I wanted to be a very small footnote and for an iota of time, I was. I missed their recruitment & I missed the next too.

I’ll just call him Steven. They’re all Stevedores. Steven had the greasy hair that reminds me now of surgeons. I suppose 12 hours under a hot light makes you sweat and the slight curl that comes back in through your product, well his had that. I saw his Clark Kent face that had driven from DC to this Asian-Fusion bar. I still see it alongside a memory of a desire to sit in the pink-black glow of the night tracing my fingers across the lines of the Gulag Archipeligo. He asked me if I thought most people are stupid. He told me all I’d have to do was be able to write. His card went neatly into my red wallet. White. Black letters. Blue pen. It’s not hard to say then why I didn’t call. The next morning I had to work, serving Dangerzone his breakfast. I’d bring him the espresso eggs and cheese, toast and scone, orange juice and coffee with a tiny pitcher of cream and ceramic sugar caddy with a neopolitan trio of sweeteners and set everything in front of him in the window seat table. He’d sweep his hands out from massive shoulders and a thick glossy neck saying. “Put it in the danger-zone.” I’d walk away in my suede boots and green skin-tight pants, leaning into the black granite counter waiting for an order. I was all about those boots