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

“It’s ok Fatts. I won’t tell anyone. She looks sick. Is she sick? She looks hungry. Is she hungry?”

“Just go away,” screamed the eight year old boy in ire disgrace to the only person he had ever called a friend, “I want to be alone” he continued in broken and tear laden speech.

“I’m sorry Fatts. I just want to help” she said.

“I don’t want your help. I don’t want to ever see you again” he yelled.

The girl left, crying into her hands as Fatts turned to his mother on the floor who was shaking uncontrollably.

“I think I wet myself again. Can you change me?” she said.

Fatts sighed.

As he changed his mother and wiped her clean, he thought of the only friend he had ever had, staring at him mockingly and he knew she wasn’t like that. He knew that she cared but it cursed him for her to see him like this, nursing his drug afflicted mother, cleaning her soiled panties, wiping dried urine from her legs and now, mixing heroin in a spoon and sticking old rusted needles into her veins because she couldn’t do any of it herself.

When he returned to his own sight; back in the instant of a moment, he watched the same wide eyes looking at him wishing him away as the uniformed man with his finger rubbing against his weapon took him away in a firm handshake and guided him through the store room door and when the handle clicked, Joao looked down at his fingers which had; in the extent of his delusion, placed grain by grain, the fine dark powders into the filter.

He took the boiling water that sat on the stove beside him and slowly, gently and delicately poured the water along the sides of the filter so that again, the fine grains of his struggle folded over themselves and stained the water with the burden of his silent trouble; the water boiled just right so that it wouldn’t burn or denigrate any of the grains more than the truth of his soul required them to be.

Joao turned to take from the far end of the counter, the small container of sugar; the one had had prepared himself the day before, pouring it with kind gentility in his heart into a container he had cleaned with his own hands so that it was free of the grease and plume of the stresses and cynical passage of spoons that shovelled copious amounts of sweet obscenity into stained glasses of vatted mediocrity.

As before, he let his mind wander as his fingers slid into the grains and felt their way around the image and emotion playing out in his mind. He thought about the kind and sweet moments that filled Fatts’ eyes and the reserve in his soul, those moments that made all of the bitter ones much easier to stomach.

The first image that played in his mind was of Fatts lowering his massive upper body to unhook the small but sturdy latch at the bottom left corner of the metallic grey roller door at the entry to the café. The sounded of the latch turning caused him to smile, not because of the sound of twisting metal scratching against a worn hinge, but because it was followed by the brisk shuffling of worn shoes on broken cement; the sound of joyous expectation scratching away the binds of beleaguering disappointment as an old man; the same old man who slept on his steps for the past ten years, threw off his heavy stinking blanket, woken by the sound of twisting keys and turning locks and jumped to his feet in celebrative joy and just as the old man shuffled excitedly; expecting to see the welcomed grin of Fatts, so too did Fatts, twist nervously at the key and snatch at the lock, hoping to hear the excited shuffling of feet and then, when the door pulled high and the sun burst in the darkness, to see the old man’s smiling face with his single wobbling tooth shouting good morning through the thick brush of his straw like beard and his husky voice shaking off the night’s trouble with a comical and solicitous murmur.

Joao wore the same momentous grin on his face as his fingers worked seemingly with their own independence, picking at each grain, finding the ones that magnetised to the joy that sang in Fatts’ heart and that corralled to the theme of a metal latch twisting and turning.

He took the cup in his hands and softly blew away the steam that spelled from the top whilst slowly twisting and turning hands as if he were trying to gently and patiently find his favourite song on an old vinyl record.

As his hands turned, so too the grains danced to the song of his heart, each finding a path of its own inside the bitter struggle of Fatts’ soul, choosing to settle where each grain thought that it needed to settle, being only where it belonged.

When the coffee was done, so too was the secrecy in the store room and the two men came back out into the now filing café where tired eyes were straining over distant chalk boards debating their morning feed. The uniformed man joined his subordinates with his wallet in his back pocket seeming larger than when he had entered before. Fatts watched him leave almost insultingly and as quick as it had appeared, the anger in his eyes vanished and he was again making robot sounds and swishing his body about like a giant crane winning the smiles of customers and most importantly, garnishing the widened smile of Joao who was walking over to him now with the cup of coffee.

“Great,” he said, “this is just what I….ahhh…”

He shut up.

When the coffee touched his tongue, the whole world seemed to vanish and all of the wrongs that he had been sweeping away and washing down the street were no less stained in his mind than they were on the broken cement at the foot of his café.

As the first sip eased down his throat he felt his own soul stretching out his skin, making every nerve tingle and as he cast out a relieving sigh, he felt that very soul embracing him in a warm ardent hug and it spoke to him and introduced him to his shadow and he saw his shadow for the first time and it invited him to dance and with every sip, he was taken in familiar arm, dancing in the whim of eternity where god itself hummed the echo of his dancing feet as they shuffled and tapped upon the golden floors of heaven.

Joao watched on in distant celebration as Fatts drank from the essence of his own life, reliving every secret he had abandoned deep in his memorial regret and listening to the faint whisperings of his childhood that he had ushered into absolute silence and so too; in that very same moment, tasting the sweetness ingrained in the unexplainable sensations that he was unconscious to when all of his senses aligned in one repeated moment, crouched over a rusted lock with the passage of dawn at his toes.

Feeling dizzy, Joao sat down on a stool to catch his breath leaning his head over his skinny legs, resting his hands onto his knees, staring idly at the floor and heaving in and out like an old work horse retreated in its stables. His mind was light and fuzzy and his head felt like he was being pricked with a thousand tiny hot pins and very soon this sensation swept down the entire of his body until; while fastened in his absent stare, he wiggled furiously his sleeping toes to rid them of the sensation and convince whatever demon were trying to possess his sleeping body that there was still someone at the controls.

Joao felt like this after every coffee that he poured. At first it was a light and intermitting depression, a warmth in his mind that streamed through his veins and tickled his toes. It was the kind of warmth that weighed his blood and made him feel heavier and more aged and it was a feeling that always passed, generally quite fast like a sizable wake trailing from the side of speeding craft or the sadness that follows the death of a pet as behind an incident, sometime is taken to extract the fibres of love from one’s heart and set its spirit free.

As Joao sat heaving on the stool, he was being swept up by the wake of Fatts’ struggle and it was so unlike any he had felt before. He wondered for a moment if this was normal, if other people experienced what he experienced and how they kept their head above this torrent of sadness.

“Are you alright Joao? Do you feel sick? You don’t look so good, why don’t you lie down for a moment” said Fatts helping Joao off his stool and taking him into the store to lay down on a pile of coats and kitchen shirts.

As he was being carried along, Joao’s eyes followed the ground and the back and forth of Fatts’ feet, stretching out in front of his sight and pulling the world beneath them as if he didn’t move himself, he was so strong and gallant, so heavied by his youth that he made the world move for him.

He imagined that his legs must be so strong to carry so much sadness and shame in his heart but that none of this was his fault and that a man as kind as Fatts should not feel shame for something he did not bring upon himself, something that he willed to change and for being able to see and still love and care for; in his junky mother, a thread of goodness that was enshrouded in a thickly woven tapestry of decrepitude and despondent and irreversible self-abandon.

“Thank you Joao. That was a wonderful coffee. You have quite a gift. Would you like to work the counter?” asked Fatts.

“Really? Yes, I mean I’d love to but maybe not all the time. I get tired after I make a coffee. I think I’m not good at it. My mother says I am like an appendix, completely useless and the only time you notice me is when something is wrong. I guess she’s right, I mean look at me. I can’t even make a coffee without feeling sick” he said.

“Do you actually believe that? That’s you’re useless?” asked Fatts.

“I guess so. Mother would know. And daddy, he went to school and all. He can write good and really read and he says the same thing. I was no good on the farm, just kept getting in the way. I used to make everyone coffees though” he said.

“Oh yeah,” said Fatts enthusiastic “and what did they think?”

“I never told them it was me who did it. I watched through the broken kitchen window. Watched them all drink their coffees every morning and night and they really enjoyed it, but if they knew it was me who did it, I don’t think they’d like it as much.”

“Suggestion is a heck of a thing. Don’t feel off. What you have can’t be taught or learned in school. And what’s the point of being smart enough to read if everything read makes you dumb. Do you know what a fifty one percenter is?” asked Fatts.

“No I don’t. Is it like math or something? Do I need it to work the counter?” Joao asked unartfully.

“Not at all. This is something you don’t wanna be. Something that everyone is, a fifty one percenter. There was an old proverb I always liked. Made me feel good about my simple education. It says that ‘it’s better to be untaught than ill-taught’. Basically means it’s better to know nothing and figure things out by yourself than to learn the wrong way by someone who was probably taught the wrong way and to not know something right. You see, everyone in this city is a fifty one percenter. What I mean is that when they were in school and university, they were all content, no not content, they were relieved to get fifty one percent in all of their exams. You see, all that’s important in this world is certificates. A certificate looks like a hundred percent. You see someone with a doctor certificate or a lawyer or an engineer or something like that and you assume the certificate means they have a hundred percent knowledge but they don’t. In fact, all of them are fifty one percenters. In university they either struggled to keep up with the knowledge or they were swept up by the ‘the world is yours’ mentality and spent their time in bars, growing beards and debating dead philosophers as if it actually matters. Then when it came time to their tests and exams, they all scraped