A Plan Is Afoot

I got it in my mind that I was suffering from a surfeit of distractions, and I decided to try an experiment. I would take a leave of absence from the coffeeshop, I announced to no-one in particular, and spend as many hours as humanly possible in my 'office.' (I'm forced to put 'office' in quotes because it was essentially what you might call a shed, or more charitably a garage, if your car was about twice as wide as a standard entry-level gas lawn mower. It had electric power for the word processor and various pieces of nearly-useless trash arrayed around which could be fashioned into a desk, chair, guest seating, drink table, night stand and what have you. There was a smell like a mulch pile passing the critical point at which 'mulching' is code-language for rotting. This is probably because that exact biochemical event was happening on the other side of a less-than-airtight wall behind the shed-office.)

Taking a leave of absence from a gigantic chain coffeeshop was easier than I thought. Getting fired, was what you might call it. Ten years ago when I worked for this same gigantic chain coffeeshop, they didn't feel so gigantic. They seemed to care about me, and we were always talking about 'having fun' and eating muffins and danish after fraudulently reporting that they'd fallen on the floor or spoiled in some other way. This was when there were only a handful of outposts of this gigantic chain in my particular neck of the woods. This most recent go-round at gigantic coffeeshop chain (GCC) was my third, and if I wasn't management material by this time, I was destined to be a bench-warmer forever. So I told my manager I needed time off and he handed me the restroom key, which is attached to a comically large (but no less frequently stolen) defunct home espresso machine. People attempt to steal this prop twice weekly. I asked why he gave me the restroom key.

"You've got to clean the mens room. That hobo showered up in there again this morning."

"I want to talk about my leave of absence."

"Good one funny guy. Restroom stinks, get on it."

That was pretty much it. I took the enormous key fob and the key and went into the restroom. The hobo hadn't showered in there as much as it appeared he had essentially exploded. There was hobo-related paraphrenalia everywhere. This included nineteen gold-toe socks laid out on a long piece of unbroken craft-colored paper towels. They were drying. After a few seconds of staring at the socks, I noticed that one of the stalls was occupied.

"Roy?" Roy was the fourth street person who had adopted this location as his home-away-from-home. Homeless people trace a lazy arc from recently on the street to hard-core hobos which frequently tracks closely with a declining mental capacity. The last three hobos had become more and more deranged until we had to ban them. Roy was early in the cycle, which was reflected in his commitment to keeping his nineteen socks clean.

"Hey, my man, you have the time?" Roy was shoeless but fully clothed, sitting like a buddha on the toilet, which didn't have a lid. It appeared he had somehow made the toilet into a chair be adding something rigid over the top of the bowl, and a surprisingly dainty cushion.

"It's like 10:45, Roy. We talked about getting out before the rush ended and all those old biddies come in for the cappucino hour, guy. Come on."

"Socks are drying, my man," Roy's stories were likable enough, though they had become a little repetitive. He said, 'my man' a lot, and left the impression that he hadn't exactly been living the high life before his recent turn to the streets.

"Well hey, let's get everything but the socks packed up and give the bathroom back to the paying customers, okay?" I was a little irked mostly that my request for a leave of absence had been essentially ignored. I'm not 19 years old or anything. This manager is like twenty-two months older than me, and boring as shit to boot. But perhaps my annoyance telegraphed over to my encounter with Roy, the toilet-dwelling hobo. I don't really recall.

In any case, he got weird at this moment, perhaps forecasting a steeper than expected decline into madness, which would be a sad thing. His face went expressionless and he said, like he was on a sitcom full of twenty-somethings, "You've changed, my man. You've changed."

I didn't know what to say, so I muttered something like, "Allright," and left the restroom. I recall that Django Reinhardt was playing on the carefully programmed ambient music which was conveniently packaged and available for purchase next to the register. The track was "How High The Moon" and it was scratchy. I took my apron off and handed it to my colleague working the register. She said, "What the fuck," and I left without saying goodbye.