Acid001
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Linear Perspective
When I was studying for my journalism BA, I worked part-time at a café that ran at a loss because the managers were too hip for profit. One opens and closes every year in every city: the produce was exquisite, the coffee fresh and smuggled from deep in the Colombian underground, but the prices were insane and suited only to a clientele of five or six regulars who ate and drank themselves broke out of consumerist loyalty. Anyway, I applied for the job because it was a ten-minute walk from the flat I was sharing with four of my friends from my high-school.
They turned me down at first. I wasn’t really expecting much; my CV was practically blank, and I didn’t have good grades or references to lean on. But mostly, I think they couldn’t afford staff. They were polite and apologetic and offered me change for a taxi home.
No, I replied, I only live around the corner.
It’s getting dark, they said, Arty can walk with you; he’s going that way anyway.
Arty, it transpired, was their sole employee: kitchen, coffee and front-of-house. Of course I declined the offer, but ten minutes later Arty and I were walking down the cobbled roadway swathed in idyllic pink sunset, moving slowly and making small-talk like new lovers too sober to hold hands.
Well, that’s how I saw us. The thought never occurred to Arty. I found him intense at first, but he was so confident in himself that the ice couldn’t help but melt. He was about my age, and full of words and concepts. He talked about the waves of ailing sunlight diffused by atmospheric moisture and turned pink; he talked about linear perspective and why the sides of the pathway seemed to converge on the horizon. I knew that if we’d met in high-school, my friends and I’d have hated him on principle. But when we arrived at my front door after a handful of minutes, I found myself regretting the parting wave I’d had to give this good-natured philosopher.
Arty ran into me the next evening as I was walking home from uni. We didn’t talk for long; he just smiled sweetly and told me to come to the café whenever I was free, so we could negotiate my timetable.
I’ve never been certain how Arty got me the job, or why. I guess he liked me. And, hell, he must’ve been lonely on his own in that desolate shop. I worked weekdays from three til close, all day during summer, and I looked forward to it. That’s what I miss the most, I realise now, about that naïve prelude to the real world: the ability to earn money and enjoy it. I thrived on our conversation; I would complain about life and boys and college, and he’d listen and guide me through these travesties with wisdom from Nietzsche or Bentham or Freud. I asked him a few times which uni he studied at; he always found a way to avoid that line of conversation.
We had a busy day one hot summer at the end of my first year. It hit us like debris from the sky, and was just as unexpected. Tensions were high for both of us; we weren’t used to the heat or the work. I took orders and he prepared food, that was the system, but it got muddled in the stupidity of the situation. I found myself in the kitchen, throwing wraps and sandwiches together and spilling jars of olives along the ground. Arty was memorising the orders and dictating them to me. I told him to write them down; I think I screamed it at him a few times. He refused to touch the pen or the order pad. Mistakes were made, customers were neglected, meals were returned. By lunchtime, we had to tell everyone to leave.
I haven’t seen Arty for years, but I think of him whenever I see a bright-eyed kid in dirty clothes collecting welfare money, or working some senseless job for less than the minimum wage. I think of that boy with all those brains in his head who should have gone to university but spent his best years working behind the counter of a failing café, sacrificing his own wage so that his managers could afford to employ for him a friend, all because through some quirk of neurology he was unable to write. He had brilliance behind his eyes, but he couldn’t put it on paper. And, through years of being known by his peers as illiterate and stupid, neither did he want to. My life and career have been founded on the staggering power of the written word, but when it comes making or breaking humans, its light is pale and weak beside the destructive supernova of the spoken one.
And as I watch those poor kids in the street through my thousand-dollar lenses and think of Arty, I feel so damn guilty.
< Message edited by Acid001 -- 11/22/2011 3:52:16 >
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