I go to a coffee shop to write because I cannot be trusted alone in my apartment with access to naked boobs and butts one page over. Forcing myself to be proactive brings me in contact with the general public; something that’s always made me feel uncomfortable. Right now, as I write this, a gentleman is sitting to my left who smells like an antique store specializing only in loose-lidded mason jars of collected jissom and sweat. Alone in my apartment, I can deal with a bad smell, because, despite the conditions, I thrive in solitude. Here, nostril-to-elbow with a pine green sweatpant bedecked man, I want to bark at him to find another seat. This is an ongoing tension felt whenever venturing outside. Last week, a kid dressed head-to-toe in faded black, looking like a dumpy Danzig complete with long hair, but styled in the manner of Venture Bros. character Brock Samson, took the chair right of me.
No sooner than falling back into his seat did he lean forward, wave his meaty hand at my ears and signal for me to take my earbuds out. He noticed, under my sweater, I had a Ramones t-shirt on. “Nice shirt, man. (Bringing his hands together to make the shape of a teepee and resting them on his chin) Would you say Jim Morrison, or Iggy Pop was the first punk?” Inhaling deeply, I breathed out a long, heavy, short response. “I don’t know.” This, apparently an invite to lecture me on what his views were no matter my answer. I stopped him mid-delivery and . gestured at the phone I was using to thumb my thoughts into. Instead of the normal adherence to polite manners, he moved to his endgame topic generator. While unzipping what resembled a black, adult Trapper Keeper, with eerie confidence, he said, “Let me ask you: do you know what Runes are?” Out of the binder came a book on Runic study. The sort of book you find in the dusty shelved schizophrenia-magnet section. My stomach lurched. I gave him a dumb, off-the-top of my head definition. He answered with haunting calm: “Mmmm… you can say that. You can also say… ” I cut him off. I couldn’t do it. My fortitude for these encounters stopped holding together somewhere around the third woman breaking my heart. Getting back to work, plugging the buds back into my ears, I noticed he was staring at me. Taking notice of his creepiness, but still ignoring him, I now saw his lips moving in a intense quiver. Curiosity takes no days off for observing potential comical crazy. I turned the volume all the way down on my music. Spewing through clenched teeth was what sounded like magic incantations. When another customer came in and took the seat next to Chubby Danzig, he hit him with the same spiel about Runes. This victim (whose name I learned from eavesdropping was Mark) having the kind of patience reserved for mental health practitioners or someone on a morphine drip, actually entertained the questioning for more time than this psychopath deserved. The new participant, realizing, by broaching the subject matter, he’d locked horns with a conversational Satan, saw his out when two lady friends walked into the coffee shop. He motioned for them to grab a table on the other side, a safe distance from cult-ish babble. An obstacle is not looked at as a barrier in the mind of crazy. When a wedge appears, the momentum for crazy gets turned all the way up and is spit out in one unfortunate direction or other. Fat Danzig started snarling sharply, “MARK,” followed by the spell-chanting I noticed early. This went on in shifts for about thirty minutes, ignored by Mark every time. Thankfully, the cold-shoulder quelled the attack. His last insane act was to lean into a broom-pushing barista and coldly whisper loud enough for the hairstylists at the salon next door to hear, “Did you know, I was born with Revolution brewing in my blood?” And then, because nothing says Revolution like an obscene, uneconomical vehicle, exited the shop, peeling out of the parking lot in an F150.
Taking his place, awhile later, was a cute girl. Earbuds still in, I could hear faint coughs over the music I was listening to. It just so happened I had a package of cough drops in my jacket. I thought long and hard about it and decided I would push forward where I’d normally retreat. Waiting for her to cough 318 more times, I took one bud from my ear and said, “Hey, uh, I don’t mean to be a creep, but I couldn’t help but hear you coughing. Would you like a lozenge?” Which, after a statement bearing the charge of not being a creep, saying “lozenge” out loud is tantamount to hoisting a giant red flag carrying the word CREEP in big block, black letters across it. She was nice, though, and smiled warmly, accepting my offer. Surprisingly, this led to conversation. Poor college student. Likes to read. Self-described nerd. Studying business marketing. In the last fifteen years, I may have only approached two, or so women and asked them out. More my now irritating self-involved alienation provoking it, I decided a chemistry existed based on our conversation, and I asked her if she’d like to hang out some time. And she declined in the same manner she accepted my solicitation of a cough drop: politely.
Here’s how and why I realize I’m a piece of shit: had Plump Danzig taken a seat next to me, cracked a college text book, and let off an intermittent series of alarming coughs — there’s no fucking way I’d have offered him any sort of medicine even if I carried a giant supply of a cure for the common cold like some sort of shitty pharmaceutical Johnny Appleseed. Had the good-looking girl filled the seat next to me and opened with a question about what I knew Runes to be, I’d have shaped both my hands into a teepee against my chin, inched to the edge of my chair toward her, and blurted, “RUNES. Tell me everything you know.”
Out of one, many.
Out of each scenario, after analysis, I usually wind up being a loutish dick.
