Corporate Coffee Blues

Late morning at Lombard’s Coffee. Liam Mulcahey hates his job, hates the fact that he wakes up at four a.m. Monday through Friday, that he’s in bed by ten o’clock each work night, that he falls asleep in bars on the weekends while out with his friends. Anna never wishes him a good day — he showers, gets dressed, preps the coffee maker for her morning, still three hours off, all while she lays unmoving in the bed, her thin lips open just a crack. He missed the bus this morning — the 90 Owl comes at 4:40, not 4:41 or 4:42, but 4:40, leaving him to walk two dozen blocks from Bay Street to Pine before the sun crawled up in the East. Alcatraz Island slumped behind and below, its roaming spotlight illuminating not the sleeping hills of the city, but rather the fog that rolled in from the Pacific each evening, thick. He greeted Blake, his slump-shouldered co-worker, at the door. Blake had graduated with his BA in English Lit, and had been slumming it in the mornings with Liam, himself a college dropout.

But now, as he pounds on the door of the café’s lone restroom, an apprehensive mother of three standing behind and far too close to be comfortable, he debates emptying the contents of the store safe into his bag and getting the fuck out of Dodge. Stop at home, grab some clothes, leave a goodbye note for Anna and just get gone. But instead, he drops his knuckles from the door, turns to the fretful mother and asks, “Are you sure you saw someone come into the bathroom?” Mom’s clutching one of her brood to her chest, the toddler’s head bobbling over the edge of her shoulder. For an instant, Liam worries that the child will spit up onto the floor, but a quick glance at the carpet changes his mind. Two years of spilled coffee and blueberry scone particles ground into the fibers. The vacuum cleaner had been broken for months, and corporate was just too cheap to replace it. “Try sweeping it with a broom,” his District Manager had written on the acquisition form. “Mom bounces the kid in her arms, and his head changes altitude with each up! up! thrust of her shoulders. The woman nods, agitated, as she steps backwards and pivots on her ankle, sending the kid into another slow spin. She motions with her chin to the crumpled heap at the table in the corner — Mop Top.

“That one came out of the bathroom,” she says, “and then his friend went in with the key. He’s been in there twenty minutes now.” Liam had already forgotten about the pair. They had walked in the glass doors, hazy against the reflected sunlight off the windows of passing cars. Blake had groaned to Liam’s right, throwing his palm out to the glare. The first guy staggered in and stumbled over the tree by the doorway. The shop has three — count ’em, three — plants, all of which smell like a Chinese rubber factory. The guy stood up and steadied the rocking tree with his hand, then wiped the shock of dark hair from his face with his forearm. A sheepish, crooked smile grew across Mop Top’s face. He ran his hands down his chest, straightening his plaid western shirt, snaps straining so tight that Liam had imagined Mop Top’s shirt splitting open, shooting clasps across the shop. His friend was tall, skinny, with a head that seemed a size too big for his rail-thin body. He gave Liam a winning smile, and for a second the guy looked like Topher Grace but with better posture, a Topher Grace who’d chosen Harvard over acting. He wore a green hooded sweatshirt under sport coat. A white shirt and black tie poked out beneath. “I’m… sorry about my friend,” Topher had explained with a wave of his hand, “He went to the eye doctor this morning, and has had trouble maneuvering around ever since. Eye drops.” He shrugged, and his smile grew even broader. Mop Top stood staring at the tree, still wobbling slightly. He reached to steady the tree and managed to send it shaking again, and Toph shot another goofy grin at Liam. “Trees, people. You know — they kind of look the same.”

“So, uh,” Blake said from the bar. “I’m going on break.” He turned his head to the pair, then back to Liam at the register. “Yeah. I’m going on break.” Liam pursed his lips, locked eyes with Blake. And Blake just smiled, holding that gaze. Liam rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to his customers. Topher ordered a coffee and Mop Top asked for the key to the restroom, and within minutes the pair had slipped from his mind as, by ones and twos, he waited on the last of the morning’s customers, signaling the daily pre-lunch break lull. Mr. Kravitz strolled down the sidewalk and tied Sir Edward to the tree out front, and then that harried woman with the Disney sweatshirt wandered in, dragging her three screaming children along by their sticky arms.

Liam sighs and feels the quiver of his lungs, shallow and weak. If he were a bird, his song would be the death cry of a pigeon in the street, too many cigarettes and not enough exercise. Too many slices of the iced lemon loaf in the morning, or the white chocolate scone. What he wouldn’t give to have eggs in the morning, or pancakes, anything but more fucking breakfast pastries, day in and day out. He feels for the key chain hanging from his belt loop, fingers pressed against cold, reassuring metal. One last series of raps against the door, each knock hollow and metallic. The keys — three for the store, three for his apartment, two for the parent’s house back east — they jingle like wind chimes, the single key clattering its way into the lock. Liam glances at the mother, her eyes wide and apprehensive. He twists the key with one hand and pushes the handle down with the other shoving the door open against the resistance of the hydraulic door closer. This is what he sees:

The bathroom is square, and small. Not cramped, just small, maybe ten by ten, a solitary toilet in the far left corner, the sink directly beside. A trash can in the far right of the room. Topher lies on the floor, head and shoulder disappeared in the tiny space between the toilet and wall. His torso appears at the toilet’s porcelain base, stretches out away towards the opposite wall. Topher’s legs would be spread eagled in a wide V on the tile floor, were not his jeans and underwear tangled around his ankles. His penis rests limp against the rust red patch of his pubes. A gleam of light from the corner of Liam’s eye — he sees a syringe dangling from the kid’s open left hand, palm up toward the ceiling. Oh God, not today, Liam thinks. Why is that every. Fucking. Day. Here is filled with such utter bullshit? Last week a homeless woman had shit on the sidewalk right in front of the store. She’d dropped her pants, calm like she was in her own living room, then dropped a log out of her ass. An old woman had started screaming. A few before, a tranny hooker had made off with the tip jar, shorting the staff some forty bucks. And who could forget the hookers a block over? They’d gotten so used to seeing him on his way to work in the morning that they’d long ceased to waste breath offering him their goods. But one morning, he’d come in to find a group of them circled around a brand new employee, a smiling 18 year old named Jessica in her first year at State. They’d asked her what she thought she was doing, hanging out on their corner, and she, being a naïve suburban girl alone in the city, had told them that she was “going to work.” There was always something happening at the coffee shop, and none of it seemed to be any good. Liam stands speechless in the small restroom, only some four paces away from the unconscious addict, and finds himself performing simple arithmetic in his head. Sixteen fifty or so an hour times forty hours a week… that’s like six hundred dollars. Six hundred times four is 2400 a month, times twelve is like… Math had never been Liam’s strong suit — he’d repeated Algebra I not once but twice — and the numbers move like granite slabs in his head, clicking into place with an almost agonizing slowness.

“I make less than a high school teacher,” he mutters aloud. “An elementary school teacher.” The light flickers above the sink, and Liam catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, backlit from outside, his face sallow and tired in the mirror, in the ugly tint of the incandescent bulbs. Lookit all that gray hair, he thinks. It flashes in the dim sunshine. He closes his eyes tight and prays to a God he no longer speaks to, but when he opens them again a moment later, Topher is still unmoving on the ground.
“Oh, why won’t somebody please kill me?” he asks his reflection.
The woman calls from outside. The door is still open, resting its weight against Liam’s back. “Is everything okay in there?” She leans forward and cranes her neck in an effort to see over Liam’s shoulder. He shakes his head and steps outside, letting the door sigh to a shut with a simple click. He clenches his teeth and smiles, and can only imagine what he must look like — a scene from a movie where a man bites down on a leather strap as a surgeon extracts shrapnel from his bleeding ass. The woman recoils a measure.

He feels the saliva slick against his teeth start to dry, he’s been smiling like this for what seems like minutes. The woman stares at him. He grins at her for another eternity while the cars coast dull and lazy along Van Ness like suds slipping down the tub. “I have to call 911,” he says at last.

The mother’s eyes dart to the bathroom door, then to Liam, her children, and then back to Liam. “Oh,” she says. She glances down at the bubbling, burbling bundle of love in her arms, face sticky and brown with chocolate smears. The baby girl hiccups and points to Mop Top.

“Bleh!” the girl says.

Liam rushes around the corner to the bar, and the smile drops from his face as soon as he does. He reaches for the cordless phone, on a shelf beneath the register. Mom gathers her bag and her jittery children (one of the boys has a finger wedged so far up his nostril that Liam wonders if the boy isn’t perhaps trying to touch his own brain), and it’s out the door for the entire family. Liam stands alone in the café, phone to his ear.

The operator is a woman, not that it matters to Liam any. Because it doesn’t. Liam doesn’t want to be there regardless — he doesn’t give a shit if the operator is male, female, or tri-sexual cyborg. She asks him what the emergency is. He says that there’s an unconscious junkie on the floor of his coffee shop bathroom, and that this has never happened before, and he’s not quite sure what to do about it.

“Is he breathing?” the voice on the other end asks.

“I don’t know!” he says. She asks Liam to take his pulse. Liam says he doesn’t want to. The voice on the other end says that it’s kind of important that Liam check to see whether or not Toph is breathing. “But he’s not wearing any pants!” Liam moans. “His junk’s just hanging out and, I mean, you can’t see it, but I’ve practically gotta straddle this guy to do what you’re asking me to do.”

Liam compromises by putting the toilet seat down and kneeling on top of it, crouched down so he could wiggle his fingers under Toph’s nose, feeling for breath. Toph’s mouth opens a crack, and Liam catches a faint hint of breath escaping from between the kid’s lips. “Yeah, he’s breathing,” he says, and the voice on the other end of the line says that that’s good, breathing is good.
Within minutes Liam hears sirens in the distance, and seconds later both an ambulance and a full-on fire engine are racing through the intersection. SFFD paramedics barge through the door hauling enormous nylon duffel bags. The coffee shop is not large, set up like a capital “L” lying on its back. Two tables to the left against the window, another four to the right where the room angles off towards the restroom. Liam shuffles his hand through his hair, brushing it back from his face, standing as far out of the action as he can be, never feeling as removed as he’d like to be. They ask Liam about Mop Top, still face down on the table in the corner. Liam fills them in as best he can. Fucking Mop Top used the bathroom, came back to the table and went on the nod. What else is he supposed to say? Junkies are everywhere in San Francisco — you can’t avoid them. Just last week his friend Cristina had left her apartment He gives them a weak, confused shrug? The first paramedic, a burly guy with a thick brown mustache and a USMC tattoo on his forearm, shrugs at his partner, a lean black man with tired eyes who probably was about punch out for the day when this call came in. Liam is embarrassed to be wasting their time, and wishes he could squeeze between the molecules of the window glass and escape to the street, odorless and tasteless, like asbestos. The tired medic — Rogers, Liam thinks he overhears — hoists Mop Top into an upright position, holding the boy’s limp head upright. Liam notes that the medic is wearing latex gloves — they stand stark white against his dark brown skin. The other medic, Mr. Mustache, scoots the table over a few inches. Its thick metal base drags against the carpeting. Another pair of medics check on Topher, their radios crackling into bursts of static-filled dialogue.

“Kid, wake up,” Mr. Mustache says, but of course Mop Top doesn’t wake up. His mouth is slack-jawed and open, his mouth like the slit of a piggy bank. Mr. Mustache is one knee before Mop Top, pen light in latex-clad hands. He presses his left palm against Mop Top’s forehead and uses his thumb to pull back the boy’s eyelid, shining the penlight into the exposed pupil. He releases the eyelid and it snaps shut. He clicks off his light and looks up to Rogers and shrugs. Rogers shrugs back. Mr. Mustache gets back to his feet, leans in, and gives Mop Top a light slap across the cheek.

Mop Top doesn’t respond.
Mr. Mustache pulls back farther this time, slaps him harder across the same cheek, but still no response. Mr. Mustache reaches back as if to grab something from a shelf or scratch his own back, the kind of itch that you just can’t reach, but he’s just winding up. Liam’s eyebrows shoot high up on his forehead as the medic swings his arm around in a wide arc. Mop Top’s head spins to the right with the impact, a loud, flat snap in the quiet drone of the brewers and the cooler. Even the music, a corporate soundtrack piped in by satellite, exists in a plane far removed from the world where Liam stands with his hands shoved into his khakis, stained with both coffee and bleach.
Rogers points to the bathroom door. “The other guy’s in here?” he says, and Liam nods, not bothering to reply. He watches Mr. Mustache unload a barrage of open-handed slaps to Mop Top’s face, collision of palm to cheek like the snap of a snare drum. Liam’s lips tremble, and he finds that he cannot stop an awkward grin from spreading across his face, sliding from cheek to cheek like a fault line. Rogers catches the look on Liam’s face and shrugs it off as he enters the bathroom; like he cares about the opinion of some lowly java jockey. Truth be told, Rogers doesn’t much like his job either, having lost the thrill and pride of saving another human being’s life alarmingly close to the beginning of his career, but that doesn’t mean he’s got to take judgments from some washout in a dead job. Liam’s eyes wander out the window, catching vermilion-on-white bus rattles along Van Ness, suspended from taught cables that span the intersections and streets like black-wire spider webs. Sparks pounce from rear-mounted antenna as the bus continues on its way.
Mop Top is starting to come around. His lips move like newborn animals still learning to walk. A pool of saliva trembles and threatens to slide from his wet lips. Liam watches this with disgust, and he understands what people mean when they say, “It’s like watching a train wreck — you can’t look away.” Mop Top head rolls about on his shoulders, and stream of saliva seems to jet from his lips, tumbling to the floor. His head tilts back again, and the thread of drool goes with it, swinging before his chest like a shining, silvery wrecking ball. The strand whips against his jaw and snaps, collapses in on itself as it tumbles to the floor. The kid raises a marionette hand and wipes at his mouth like a flag caught in a springtime wind. His eyes open, but awareness of his situation is nowhere to be found. The EMTs check a few more things while mumbling to each other in strange bursts of staccato nonsense, then hoist Mop Top to his feet. He wobbles but remains upright, and the two escort him through the lobby and out the door. Liam watches this all in awkward silence. What exactly is he supposed to do in this situation — go fill out invoices, restock the shelves? Should he pay attention to what’s happening in his own store, just a few short steps from the counter where his business cards sit in a tray. Lombard’s Coffee, Liam Mulcahey, Store Manager. Does what passes for a salary require him to give a shit about what happens in his own house?