Coffee and Sugar, C. Sean McGee [highly recommended books txt] 📗

standing at the front of his church waiting for a bus to arrive. They all spoke of struggle and burden and slung every word out of their mouths like the swinging of an axe or a deer’s carcass from one’s back to a table. Their eyes looked heavy, weighed down by the sight of things they did not have and their fingers stung, itching for what things they could not touch.

Joao picked himself up from his stupor. There was no reason to wallow, not when the city had so much to offer. All he needed to do was to go out and find some work.

The church was making no money for now and most of their reserve was being drunk away by The Bishop’s floundering; with he, preferring to remain benevolently boozed than to admit that this parody was in fact a failed reality and change his predicament, accepting instead the much fashioned trial of god and penance of fate as a reason to bathe in his own negation.

And Joao knew had had to find a use for himself. He couldn’t find one on the farm; there he had always felt like he didn’t belong; a tomato amongst apples or a y amongst vowels. But everything had a use and a purpose; every bitter end had its sweet reward and he knew that he would find his, in the city; that his niche was something more than a bruised back and blistered palms.

Spirited, Joao briefly checked on his father who was curled up in the darkness, solicited by unconsciousness. He took some money from a small jar beside the bag of stale bread on the counter; just a few coins so he could catch a bus should the need arise. Then, with his money and his good spirit, Joao left the church and strolled down the winding hill alone; engaging himself in wandering stares and vagrant smiles from all of the strangers who passed him by.

The streets were so strange but they were also so fascinating. Even the people, who reeked of precariousness with their questionable squinting eyes and their clamorous irking grins, were visual magnets for his blank cultural canvas. His every sense hinted at him to keep away from their reach but his eyes could not keep him from painting the outline of their presence.

When he reached the bottom of the hill, he felt he had come down from the mount of a concrete jungle, encountering every type of person imaginable with every second seeming so fictional to him, exactly like he had seen on the television. This world was amazing, so full of life and colour; unlike his farm which was starved of dimension and culturally anorexic.

The first place Joao visited was a shop on a corner at the bottom of his hill. There was a large poster on the window advertising vacancies so Joao walked into the store with his smile wide and his mind open.

“Hi, my name is Joao; I’d like to apply for the job. You have a poster on the window. I want to do that job. What is it?” he asked.

“Motoboy? You deliver pizzas on a motorbike. Do you have motorbike?” asked the greasy man behind the counter, flipping the pizza base with his filthy hands as he spoke, catching grains of dirt and dead mosquitos in the mix of flour and dough.

“No” replied Joao.

“Do you have a current license” asked the greasy man, spitting on the table to soften up the dough.

“No. You mean for a motorcycle?” asked Joao.

“That would help also” said the fat man sarcastically.

“No I don’t. I’ve never ridden a motorbike before but I can…”

“Fuck off” said the greasy man now pasting the dough in a thin layer of red sauce and counting the specks of grated cheese that he spread across the base before dumping it into the fire and burying his hands in more dough.

Joao turned to leave and was pushed aside by some larger men as he tried to exit through the door, knocking his head against the wall and being flattened by the weighted stare of one of the men whose eyes spoke of nemesis as if they had shared a thousand of such exchanges in the past.

As he stumbled out of the door a bus approached and pulled up by the curb. Joao didn’t think. He stepped up onto the platform and handed his money to the man at the turnstile and sat himself nervously but excitedly at the rear of the bus, painting every person with an observant brush as he made his way down the aisle.

The windows were stained yellow and brown and through the dark smears he could see the flux of traffic whizzing about; cars and trucks cutting each other off, riding bumper to bumper and motorbikes zooming past, their rider’s feet high kicking at doors and mirrors as they zipped along; their arms waving famously in the air as they cursed silently through their helmets at the drivers yelling back aimlessly through the trail of their fumes; each and every one, pounding on their horns as if it made a difference, exalting their indignation like rice on the steps of a cathedral.

It was all so exciting. The people were so alive and so vocal and they spoke with more than one syllable and they spoke with more than their mere words; they waved their arms over their heads to sing out their dismay, their disbelief and their disapproval, they nodded their heads and flicked their fingers in apposite conduction; inviting other drivers into accepting their grace, they flicked on their lights meaning ‘I give you the right’, they opened their palms as to pick of a fight, but they never got out, they always moved on with a wave of their arm at whoever was wrong.

Joao sat stupid and smiling, like a young child watching an ice cream being poured; his hands pressed against the glass, his fingers spread wide, his mouth agape and his tongue limber in his mouth; almost licking numbly against the stained glass.

He had seen this so many times before on the television and he had sat no different to this, pressing his face against the flickering screen and imagining the feeling that would accompany this sight and now that he was seeing this, living this, experiencing this, the sensation he had longed to acquire was beyond narrative. Somewhere inside of his sub conscious mind, new memories were being formed and his personality was changing, like the thawing of the tundra, he could feel for the first time, his whole body engaged and electric, a part of the universe; an opposable thumb, twitching to lock around anything the passed the lunacy of his sight and feeling for the first time also, himself in colour.

At the fourth stop Joao got off the bus and stood by the side of the road watching the manic bustle of cars, motorbikes, bicycles, buses and above him, queues of aeroplanes and froglike helicopters hopping from one building to the next; the air spinning around his feet, lifting the excitement from his toes to the hairs on his neck which craned into the sky and fluttered like the blades of grass on a river bank, trembled by an evening breeze.

When he turned around he saw another sign on a window offering work. It was a small corner café. Nothing to flash yet at the same time, timely enough to warrant a rows of beautiful people sweeping in from the busy sidewalks taking tables by windows, lighting their cigarettes, drinking beer from small glasses, laughing hysterically and canting jovially; their voices booming over one another, bumper to bumper with every syllable, each and every person talking like they drove, with necessity rolling off their tongues, raising their voices until their throats were red lining; adjacent analogies competing to receive their ovation first.

The men were handsome, striking and particularly alpha, the women; disarming, demure, desirable and dangerous with their looks alone, sending the men into primal debate. And in the mix were down and weary workers, brushing off the dust that painted upon their skin, stretching their eyes and yawning out the day’s argument; a small glimmer of joy brimming in their eyes as more like them gathered around, leaning against the counter, resting their servant limbs and massaging a small glass of cold beer in their fingers.

And as the animated roar built into a deafening exhilarating clamber, there came from the streets the shoe shiners; dressed in shabby clothes, their fight with hunger or drug addiction evident on the scars on their faces and the invisible lead weights that had their eyes low and hanging.

And like a swarm of jellyfish they came, almost out of nowhere, moving into the café and then table by table, they held up their wooden foot rests and dirty old toothless brushes and with saddened starving eyes and acquiescent mouths, they pleaded their service from person to person and they moved quietly like obedient dogs, squeezing past chairs and shuffling up to whoever caught their quiet musings or walked into their stare.

And as quickly as they came, so too were they gone and the spirit of the eve accelerated with the clinking of glasses, the spilling of beer and the raising of voices in jovial cheer.

“My name is Joao. Can I have the job?” asked Joao timidly to the large greasy man behind the counter; his white apron stained black as he moved from flipping burgers to changing notes.

“Do you have any experience?” asked the man.

“No” said Joao.

“Do you know how to work a till?” asked the man.

“No” said Joao.

“Can you work a grill?” asked the man.

“No” said Joao.

“Well what can you do?” asked the man.

“I can make coffee, I guess” said Joao.

The large greasy man paused for a moment scratching his head and straining his face as if a migraine had just camped in his frontal lobe.

“Are you gonna steal from me?” asked the man.

“No” said Joao.

“I’ll have to take your word. The rest I can teach you. You’re hired. You start now. Here, wash these and cut some lettuce’ he said handing stained beer glasses to Joao and ushering him to the sink behind the counter.

“You can call me Fatts” the man said.

“I’m Joao.”

“You don’t say.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Sorry sir, I promise it won’t happen again” said Joao, his honesty secreting like a fevered sweat.

“Don’t apologise and don’t call me sir. What were you raised on a shooting range?” said Fatts with his enormous hands pressed against his state wide hips.

“I’m just being polite” said Joao.

“It’s not polite to make people feel uncomfortable. I don’t want you to lick me with your discipline. Relax a bit. We don’t call anyone sir here, except maybe them” he said pointing put to the small group of police officers walking down the road with their automatic penises loaded in their hands, their berets, tight against their foreheads, cutting off the blood to their rationale and reason while their eyes busied themselves, carving trouble out of the ordinary.

“Yes sir, sorry” said Joao watching the uniformed men walk past and feeling a sensation that felt like the anti of secure, creep and tingle its way against his spine..

“So you have Darwinian hands. That’s ok. Just gotta keep you away from anything fragile. Sweep up the broken glass