Street Light City : Part Two

The coffee is hot and the air is steamy. The waitress, tired face and slow body, wipes a nearby table clean, cleaning fluid piercing my red eyes. I stroke the left side of my face a couple of times, feeling what felt like wrinkles at twenty four. Almost slipping into a deep sleep, a voice startles me.

‘Hi’ presents the voice, from a petit young girl of nineteen or twenty, long, curly brunette hair with brown eyes and great lips. ‘Do you mind if I take this seat?’ She asks, gesturing to the vacant chair opposite from me.

‘Sure, no problem’ I reply, unknowing of what made her want to sit at the same table as a stranger at 4AM. Plonking down her large, patterned handbag in the centre of the table, making my coffee shake and spill down the side of the mug, she takes out a metal stirring spoon for her tea.

‘I’m sorry to be intrusive like this, it’s just that its four thirty in the morning, and you seemed the least likely guy in here to rape or murder me, appearance wise’

‘You made the right choice, I have never done either of those things’ I reply, smiling but unsure if I should be.

‘That’s a relief’, she laughs back. ‘Places like this can get kind of creepy at night’

Just as she finishes speaking and starts to take a sip of her tea, a small, unshaven man with long black matted hair and a sharp beard stumbles past our table. Wearing a grey worn out old overcoat and a menacing smile, he screams out: ‘FUUUUUCK!! I LOVE PUUUSSSSYY!!!!

‘See what I mean?’ The girl whispers.

‘I do’ I mouth back, trying so hard not to laugh.

We talked for about forty minutes, her releasing most of the words. I learned her name was Gloria and she was twenty years old and from California. She was down here to study at film school. She was staying at her friend’s house and had to leave at an unholy time of night after an argument broke out over her friends fiancé, something, she said, that happens on a regular basis. She was heading back to her apartment and decided to get something to drink, hoping not to get raped or murdered. Another ten minutes or so went by of her telling me about the asshole of a teacher who attempted to feel her up at lunch today, until she turned the spotlight on me.

‘So what are you doing in here so late?’ She quizzed me, staring into my eyes.

‘I just wanted some coffee, maybe some cake’ was my lame response.

‘Oh c’mon, I sat here because you looked like the guy least likely to kill me, not because you’re perfect and vanilla’ Teasing me with a child like grin.

‘Okay, I’ve had a strange few months, probably destroying a marriage and my job in the process’ I blurt out, telling practically a stranger what I haven’t told closest friends. Saying this out loud made me appreciate the full capacity of my problem, too.

‘Ooh, juicy!’ She mocked, smiling and patting my hand as she took another gulp of tea.

Four more cups of hot beverages later, I had told Gloria about my affair with my married boss, my dead end job, my failing and fading dream of becoming a writer and the reason why I hate birds.

‘You’re even more fucked up than me’ she summed up.

‘I suppose I am’ I replied, smirking.





Waking up the next morning, alone this time and in my own bed, my spirits seen to have been raised even thought I have a piercing ache in my head, a hangover from the half bottle of rum I polished off in the early hours of the morning after returning from the diner. It’s nine thirty AM and I had to be in work forty five minutes ago. Searching for the phone to call in sick, I prepare myself for the possibility of speaking to a woman who I had sex with the previous night, to complain I wasn’t feeling too well. It was likely she would answer the phone, even thought she was the boss and has a secretary. Claire always liked to take control of something, no matter how menial or redundant, maybe that’s why she slept with me. Plus she was probably wondering why I hadn’t shown up at work yet, or replied to her late night text message she sent me, so dirty that I almost ran into the truck sat in front of me at a red light. The office was engaged and my nightmare call was off for a little while, so I decide to take a shower. Standing in the damp cubicle, the stream of hot water clearing and cleansing my mind like a gush of moral liquid, I relax and close my eyes, thinking of her great ass. I have lived here in this small apartment for two years, escaping my parent’s house and months of sleeping on different but all uncomfortable sofas at friend’s houses. This place has one bedroom, big enough for me, one single bed and possibly an alarm clock, with a rather large kitchen area and an acceptably clean bathroom. I sometimes wonder if I could move into the kitchen to sleep, but it would be a long, hard, real mans job of ripping out and reinstalling all the appliances, laying new floors, not to mention the impossible task of squeezing my bed through the small, slim doorway of the current bedroom. I still love living here, though. I have spent many nights, spread out on the sofa, drinking, smoking weed and listening to sixties rock and roll vinyl records given to me by my grandfather; who also supplied the record player that sits by my only window, with views of the next apartment blocks grey wall. Perched on an old coffee table facing my black, lumpy but relaxing sofa, is my second hand 19 inch TV. I purchased this at a local used electrical goods store down the street, where my radio also originated. My computer, the only thing new in my apartment, sits in the corner, surrounded by a jungle of stacked paper and notebooks, all the great novels that I have started to write and ended on the fourth or fifth page, short stories and poems written at three AM after hours of intoxicated thinking. Next to this mess I find my bookcase, an equally compelling mess filled with great works of literature to Berlin city guides to biographies of Jim Morrison, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, city blocks of old newspapers and magazines. The scent of the page creates another dimension around the bookcase, drawing me in and making me forget.