Cafe News, Volume 8

          For the most part, a name is a good thing.  It gives you someplace to start, and it helps with communication.  But it comes at a cost.  The name John recalls the ghost of every John who has ever been, is, or shall ever be.  So you can see why it might be hard to keep myself from conjuring up her image at the mention of her name.

          I was in my usual location, somewhere between the white lines of sobriety and stumbling, in a halfway house on the highway to Hell.  For the moment, it manifested itself as a chair at a sidewalk table beneath a green awning.  Really it doesn’t matter where or when.  Like a name, or anything universal, it was always and is forever.

          The drink was scotch, eighteen years old.  Legally, they couldn’t serve it, but the manager and I had an arrangement.  Over the holidays, I had visited Mother and the old man, which for me translates to a terribly uncomfortable, almost painful experience assuaged only by the bottles of top shelf liquor I would traditionally liberate from the dust encrusted depths of the old man’s personal larder.  This year had been exquisitely excruciating, the quality of the salvaged scotch directly proportional to my suffering.  Blake was impressed.  He expounded upon the theme as we poured a couple of fingers and he tucked the bottle into a desk drawer for safe keeping.  Like everything else here, it would be waiting for me should I need it.  That’s the beauty of this place.

          The name was Katerina, thirty two years old.  He called her Katie.  I heard the name before I saw who was wearing it, so at first she was my height and blond.  When I swung my head around in fear and cast my lecherous leer upon her, she looked like Audrey Hepburn in the 50s.  I was drunk, so maybe it wasn’t love, but it was some kind of wonderful.  Her date seated her at their table and ordered pinot with a loud and disparaging superiority.  I scribbled madly in the general direction of my napkin.  It was linen, and Maureen snatched it away from me before I could inflict any real damage.  She tore a page out of the notepad that she kept in her apron but never had need for and slipped it under my pen, French-style, before she disappeared. 

          Of course, I kept squinting at her at regular intervals.  I really should learn to wear my glasses.  People must think I’m mad, constantly leveling narrowed eyes at them and staring with a strained and desperate expression.  Suffice I truly am; they don’t need a bloody billboard.  The poem was exceptional, utterly representative of the volatile synthesis of atmosphere, liquor, and motivation.  Her date was seated with his back to me, and several times she caught my eye with a look that to me seemed to impart vigorously her detached disinterest.  She drank three glasses of pinot to his one and smiled haphazardly in my direction.

          When he asked if he could walk her home, she politely declined and joined me at my table without wanting an invitation or waiting for him to leave.  She ordered another bottle of pinot and told me Lisa was hot.  She was a lesbian, and she hated herself for it with as much conviction as a gutter bum.  We finished the bottle and Lisa accompanied us back to my place.  In the morning, I found two pairs of women’s shoes discarded in front of Brant’s bedroom door.  I wandered down to the café, trying to forget her name.    

          Maybe if you’re lucky, they will name you Steve.

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