At the Coffee Shop, Part 3

Debbie Reynolds and her son are arguing.

“How could you do this to me?” He leans dangerously over his buttered bagel. “I would never do this to you!”

Debbie is staring over his left shoulder at the coffee shop menu posted on the wall. Today’s special is half a tuna salad sandwich, a bowl of tomato soup, a medium drink and a tiny, organic apple.

“Never!” he says.

Debbie--my name for her--is a stylish 80-something-year-old whom I see, with her son, every day at the coffee shop. She is perfectly coiffed and made-up, a vision in pastel slacks and a flowery blouse. She wears long earrings and many bracelets, and her small teeth are very white. She bespeaks the elegance of earlier days.

Her son, not so much. He is paunchy, red-nosed and veiny. He is constantly on his cell phone and has a homeless look to him, and now that he wears a new haircut, he looks like a homeless man with a cell phone and a new haircut. He has only spoken three words to me since I’ve started coming to the coffee shop. He told me, “I’m from Brooklyn.” At the time I didn’t know whether this was a secret code phrase like, “I’m a friend of Bill’s,” or “Boolah boolah,” so I smiled and nodded. A few days later I noticed both his jacket and the T-shirt he wears say Brooklyn on them, so I guess his minimal utterance was simply a statement of fact.

In time he quiets down a bit and Debbie says, “I didn’t mean anything by it.” She is cutting her morning scone with a knife and fork, making tiny, bite-size pieces. He is stuffing most of the bagel in his mouth and chewing with his mouth open. She dabs at her lips with a paper napkin. “It’ll be all right. I’m sure.” He shrugs, unconvinced.

 

In the booth behind mine I can hear a women hissing into her phone. “All I want is the truth!  The truth! Not lies!”

She’s also in her twilight years; she wears no makeup and her hair is a frizzled grey mass wrestled into a bun. There’s a cane on her table, a copy of the Falls Church Tribune, and  several noted scribbled in pencil. She’s a regular too, there every day at 6:45, which is generally the time I arrive after my session at the gym.

“Why is it so hard to tell the truth, I ask you? Why? Why?”

The last why is a plaintive moan.

I could probably answer her question. People lie because they can, I think, and once the lie is out there, it breeds other lies. I say nothing; my explanation would be less than satisfactory.

There are other regulars too, including a mean-looking motorcycle cop with a shaven head and a jutting chin. He wears shiny black Gestapo boots that stop just short of his knees. He comes in everyday with another cop, a young girl with a shoulder patch that reads “Parking Enforcement,” and I think that can’t be much of a fun job, handing out parking tickets in a small town.  Once I approached them wanting to ask if they could arrest the coffee shop manager for playing really horrible music early in the morning but when I got near their table the mean-looking cop glared at me and I thought better of it, so the music continued, a teeth-grinding all-string version of Guantanamera played really loud. The cops weren’t listening, I guess.

Today the neck-brace lady was there too. My African friend behind the counter said she apparently tripped over her shih tzu and severely damaged herself. The shi tzu had two broken ribs and healed quickly.  

 

 

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At the Local Coffee Shop

Almost every day after the gym I stop by one of those franchise places where you get a free cup of coffee after you’ve been there 23 times. The breads and bagels are good and fresh but the service is generally awful. Efficiency experts have not yet discovered this place where a line of more than three customers creates anarchy and consternation among the help, unless, that is, The Crew is there.

 

The Crew, The Clan, The Gang, is what the people behind the counter call a group of Senegalese and Cape Verde employees who, when it is their shift, manage to create order out of chaos. They’re as fast as the outmoded equipment lets them be, friendly, and helpful.  Three of them speak French, which I greatly enjoy, and their main complaint is that management seems to pass them over when it’s time to select a supervisor. Members of The Crew, though more efficient than anyone else there, have endured a series of bosses who seem to know very little, and care even less, about running a fast food place. In the past few months, I’ve seen a variety of American, Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian managers pace about importantly without, as far as I know, adding one iota of efficacy to the running of the place.  Abdul, who was there for three weeks supervising and spoke halting English, never quite managed to get a handle on the cash register.  He once tried to charge me $27.53 for a cup of coffee. “C’est un bordel,” says my Senegalese friend Mamadou. An impolite way of saying, things are a mess.     

 

I always try to get a booth, and I’ve become familiar with the regulars. There’s a woman I call Debbie Reynolds, there every day to meet a bearded older man who is constantly on the phone and pays no attention whatsoever to her. Debbie, it’s obvious, gets up at dawn to put on her face, do her hair, and choose her jewelry. She calls me ‘honey’ and I’m not sure when that started, but I like it.

 

There’s a tall man of indeterminate age who stares at the fire in the centrally placed gas fireplace. He knows my name--I’m not sure how--and is there every time I drop by, regardless of time. I suppose he could say the same thing about me. He never reads or eats, and is one of the few people there not wearing ear buds. I wonder what he thinks about, beholden as he is to the flames.

 

In the afternoon there’s a bunch of kids from the nearby Catholic high school. It’s refreshing to see them in their school uniforms without one pair of flip-flops or a single baseball cap turned sideways.    

 

And as always, there’s a dozen or so men and women attached to their laptop computers. Some also have Blackberry and iPhones at the ready so their tables look like messy display stands at a second-rate electronics show.  

 

Aside from the doubtful service, the only thing that bothers me greatly about the place is that it uses pagers to signal when your food is ready. Personally, I don’t find that the buzzing sound of a hundred angry wasps does much to foster my appetite, and I wish they’d find a warmer, friendlier way to tell me my meal is at hand.

 

Recently, one of these things came alive on a nearby empty table. It kept buzzing furiously for a really long time. No one paid attention. The longer it was unattended, the louder it got. I tried to get the staff’s attention but The Crew wasn’t there and so chaos reigned. I picked up the buzzer and dropped it into the recycling bin. Debbie Reynolds gave me the thumbs up.

 

I’m not sorry at all.