Unfinished fictions

Truth be told, I have probably spent enough money to constitute a life savings on coffee at my local coffee shop. I don’t feel bad though, when I fork over two dollars every half hour for a cup of hot, black House Blend. The coffee is organic and fair trade, which I guess makes it taste a whole lot better than the Folgers that my roommate insists on buying and the girls who work at the counter are usually cute and young. And if its not one of the cute and young ones, it’s at least one who is nice and doesn’t comment on how I wore that shirt yesterday or something. I can respect that. Flea wasn’t the cute and young kind. She was young, probably out of the woods in terms of college-aged, but not firmly in the adult years of her life and certainly not cute. She opened on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then the other days of the week, she would show up for a couple of hours and would immediately change the music to Bob Dylan. I hate Bob Dylan. He’s a pretentious, washed-out, Born-Again Christian hippy with bad taste in hats. She loved him, down to the way she cut her hair. I remarked that once.

“Your hair looks like Bob Dylan’s,” I said, awkwardly enough one morning. It was before my first cup of coffee.

“I know,” she said. “House blend, right?”

“Yeah. But why Bob Dylan?”

“I like him. I wish I were him.”

I wasn’t trying to come onto her. I don’t think either of us was attracted to the other person. And that was what we had in common: a complete sense of detachment. I didn’t say that I liked Bob Dylan, or his haircut, or hers for that matter. It was a matter of respect, or not even. The truth was deeper than that, or maybe not even at all. Maybe we were just two people who happened to live in the same big city who happened to find our physical selves in the same place at the same time relatively frequently and decided to base our friendship on a simple coincidence of placement, like sodium and chlorine.

A few weeks and several hundred cups of house blend later, I was back at the coffee shop towards the end of her opening shift. It was a Tuesday and she didn’t even ask to sit down at my table covered in sections from the New York Times; which was stupid because I only ever really looked at the crossword.

“Are you one of those pretentious fucks who buys the Times every day but only does the crossword and only finishes it on Mondays anyways?” Her coffee cup was leaving a ring on the Style section.

“And Tuesdays, and sometimes Wednesdays if there’s nothing good on TV and I have a particularly fruitful night on Wikipedia.”

“I could tell. At least you don’t order lattes. I hate people who order lattes.” I decided that this conversation wasn’t about me at all. It was about her and for some reason I didn’t despise her for this. “Lattes are for people who have never drank a glass of soymilk in their entire life, but for some god-awful reason think that getting soy in their coffee makes them special.”

The more Flea and I talked, the more I learned how many people she hated. Yuppies, corporate types, animal rights enthusiasts, tourists, food snobs, coffee snobs, vegans, elitists, indie rock musicians, people who never went to camp and evangelicals, to name a few. I think more than a few came from a series of broken relationships and the fact that she worked in the service industry. I fell into a few of those categories. I’d never been to camp, for one. This was a fact that was covered extensively one afternoon. Flea was under the distinct impression that most kids needed to be sent away from the comfort of their own home to a place where horny teenagers primarily try to attract each other and only glancingly deal with young children who are sent to the wilderness. I was under the distinct impression that my parents actually loved me and therefore didn’t need to send me to a place that clearly sounded like a complex social hell.

“Plus,” she said one day, slamming down an empty espresso mug, “camp was where I got my first kiss. It was where I lost my virginity; it was like ten years of therapy rolled up into a few weeks in upstate New York.” And for the first time since Flea and I started talking, I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. I bought a few minutes by needing another cup of coffee as well as needing to get rid of a previous cup and stood in the bathroom staring at my reflection in the mirror. Could my life really have been changed if my mother was the kind of person to pack up my things and put me in the care of strange and irresponsible older children? And then suddenly, I found myself back at the table with Flea and a new cup of coffee.

“I need a cigarette. Are you busy? Want to go like get a hotdog or something?” Flea opened up a pouch of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette. I knew Flea smoked because she’d already told me why she liked unfiltered. The tobacco got in her mouth; a quality that had plagued smokers for years and for some reason reminded her of sex because they felt like pubic hairs on her tongue. “Like licking Dame Cancer?” I asked, but I didn’t want an answer. Flea didn’t like to hear that kind of stuff. In addition to being a nymphomaniac in our conversations, hating entire swaths of the human race and playing the saxophone, Flea was a classic case of germ-phobia. She claimed to have come by it honestly, being raised by a Jewish epidemiologist. Legitimate, in my book, but I didn’t understand why she opened bathroom doors with a piece of paper towel even when it was in her own apartment.

She was terrified of getting a cold or the flu but for some reason the other health consequences of her actions like having sex in a cabin at summer camp or smoking cigarettes one after another was inconsequential.

The more I got to know Flea, the more I thought that her existence was contrary. She delighted at handing the cashier her ID when they said, “Can I see some ID for the alcohol, sir?” if only to watch their face.

“What’s your real name, Flea? Your parents couldn’t have hated you enough to actually name you Flea?” I asked one morning after I ordered my coffee.

“Fiona.” The hatred of the name was palpable in her voice. “Luckily, my parents were decent enough to notice early on that I wasn’t exactly the princess type. You know, I kissed girls on the playground when I was in preschool. For a whole year I pretended I was a boy.”

“And so they started calling you by the name of a small parasite. Makes sense. I love your parents.” I started to feign disinterest because it annoyed her and it seemed like the more she was annoyed, the more she said, the more she tolerated my presence.

“They started calling me Flea because I would try to run away.” It was a simple sentence, but filled with an obvious emotional impact. “When I was five, I ran away for ten hours and then I realized I couldn’t ask my mom for money to get food at the 7/11, so I just went to the park and hid in the tube for awhile.

“How did they find you?”

“I wasn’t much of an escape artist and the park was a block from my house. My mom didn’t call the police luckily, but she did decide to scare me into coming home by sending the teenage son of a neighbor to come ask if I wanted a ride downtown.”

“Like kidnap you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the kind of shit you see on that one TV show, Intervention, where the people are addicted and its always explained by some shitty thing that happened to them when they were kids. They were in the special class or they were molested or they saw their dog die or something.”

“I love that show. Makes me feel like I have my shit together,” she said without a hint of irony.