Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [30]
The Bay Area was good to me.
I intended to be good for it.
For meetings with strangers in public places like coffee shops, I like to wear a rose between my teeth. I talked Loco Larry the sign painter into providing me the rose for my preliminary checking out of the PI from Vulture. Larry was in a cooperative mood. My right cheek got a quality flower in fifteen different colors, the lips its calyx, the left cheek its thorny stem.
The Boss Bean is the kind of benign place where a salesman in shirt and tie doesn’t stick out any more than a Schenectady runaway with a psychedelic rose on her face or a bag lady in sweats. You don’t have to have shrapnel-studded brows or Mohawk hair. Nobody shoves around nobody else’s aura. Everybody’s made welcome to the Bay area. If you just hiked in from an aw-shucks county, the blackboard menu’ll clue you in on cool, foreign pronunciations. Example: AU LAIT (o-lay) $1. 50. The only other time I’d been inside this café had been with Archangel Gabe, and he’d walked out after I’d pointed to the menu and ordered the o-lay, muttering (much as Wyatt might have done, come to think of it), “And why not ole! Fuck the Haight, it’s strictly for whitebreads!”
I pushed poor Wyatt out of guilt range, and ordered an ole and a bagel at the counter.
“Cool, “the kid behind the counter said above the whoosh of steamed milk.”I like the way you say it. Makes for a fiesta in the head.”
I carried my coffee and bagel to the row of tables by the wall-to-wall glass sliding door and took possession of the only table for two left overlooking Waller Street. Then I shifted my chair around and scanned faces for one that had “gumshoe” glowing in invisible ink on its forehead. None of the coffee-drinking males looked the right age. They still wore their baseball caps backwards, had too many rings in their lips and lobes. An HIV test came back positive on my right, and on my left a techie argument about too many Asians making the Internet boring. Two men in hard hats strode in for take-out lattes. Another seedy row house being gentrified, more Haight natives being expelled. An old man in winter coat, fur cap and galoshes loped in. He carried his own mug. It had a Yale logo. “How’s it going, Lionel?” the kid behind the counter chatted as he filled the mug. “The Martians treating you any better today?”
A car honked on Waller, kept honking. A woman in a shapeless dress of expensive linen looked up, frowning, from her paperback. She was frowning at a yellow VW bug honking at a double-parked panel truck. The truck was Loco Larry’s. The woman went back to reading The Portable Chekhov. She caught me staring, got up and grabbed a postcard advertising Tanqueray gin from a rack of freebie postcards and scribbled something on it. Then she popped the book into a canvas tote, gathered up her dirty glass, plate and fork and stacked them in a plastic bin that had a PLEASE! Magic-Markered on its side, stalked past my table, dropping the postcard on the floor near my feet, pushed the sliding glass aside and left the café. I didn’t have to crane my neck to read her message: Read “The Kiss” and Die.
On Waller the driver of the VW bug had given up honking. I watched him sit on the sidewalk and do what looked like yoga breathing exercises.
A tall, bald man came in, wheeling a bike. He had the shaved legs of a competitive bicyclist. He didn’t go to the counter and order an herbal tea as I’d expected. He came straight to my table. “No fun when you make it easy.” He grinned