This morning I went in for a job interview at the café down the block from me. I had been attempting to write a screenplay there for a few days, but wasn’t making any money doing it – in fact, I was spending a good deal of money on lattes to justify my presence. I had an unsettling interaction with one of the other customers the last time I went to write. I’d gotten used to a constant level of muttering, tutting and shrieking that came from the regulars, who occupied a vast majority of the tables. There was something striking about the collective energy of the room. It could have been the smell, which is the kind of distinctly human odor that points to bad health and low self esteem. Or the way people sit, hunched desperately over their notebooks, laptops, and dioramas, with eyebrows fixed like low-hanging beams. You can almost hear the noise of all of the tiny scuttling thoughts.
I attempted to borrow a chair from a man with erect white hair and a hanging purple face. The man was writhing furiously in his seat, in the same way he often does. He’d been there every day since I started going, testing the tolerant, squeaking confines of that chair. To myself, I referred to the table where he always sits as his ‘writhing desk.’ In front of him, a sign read: MAN AT WORK. DO NOT SPEAK TO HIM. There was an empty chair beside him, and no chairs at the one free table next to his. So, despite having read the sign, I whispered, “Do you just mind if I grab this?” as a perfunctory gesture, at the same time as grabbing the chair. I was hardly starting a conversation. But, without looking up, he grunted and threw his cold brew over me. My clothes were soaked. There was an almost miraculous lack of acknowledgement from the surrounding patrons. The waitress ran over, shushed me like I was a horse, although I was not speaking, and shooed me away with a napkin.
“That man threw his coffee at me,” I told her, in case she should need to know.
“I know,” she said, with a smile of understanding, and started toweling me off with her apron. The man grunted, so she jumped away from me like I was something she’d been caught stealing. She hurried back with a replacement cold brew, then turned to me and whispered, “He is allowed one attack drink every day with a free refill. He knows, now, that he has to behave.”
The waitress wiped two sweaty strands back out of her face, smoothed them down into her ponytail. She had really good skin. “Goodbye,” I told her. Her sigh followed me onto the street before the chiming door shut behind me. My first thought was that I’d never return to the café, but then I couldn’t get that place out of my head, with its chiming door and its stench of armpits and ideas, its vague trappings of horror. And when I saw a HELP WANTED sign yesterday, marking the end of the good skin waitress’s tenure, something told me to go for it. I was laid off four weeks earlier. My unemployment had been sitting too long, observed but untouched, like a rotting vegetable.
When I walked in this morning, before the café opened, I was greeted by a short, somewhat chiseled French man. He had a very small mustache, waxed at the tips, and his skin was mustard brown. Although he must’ve been sixty, there was something very powerful about his forearms and his feet when he walked. I felt him look me up and down, lingering for a quarter of a second on my neckline.
“You look like a waitress,” he told me.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, so I added, “I would love to be one.”
“Well, we can maybe do that.” He grinned at me. He had a thick accent and a low voice. “What’s your experience?” Esses fell very heavy on his rectangular lips.
As I listed my jobs, he twisted the ends of his mustache inquisitively. “I have great customer service skills,” I told him.
“How is that?”
“Well, I guess…”
He looked at my face so matter-of-factly, with sentient and reflective eyes, it was like he could see more clearly than other men, and relished the gift of sight. He was a couple inches shorter than me, and stood with his face squarely opposite mine, as if to test whether I was symmetrical. He was a geometric man with a square head and dark thin hair, combed backwards and into a side part. “I guess,” I continued, “I never let people upset me. Because, if I don’t know them, I’m not bothered by what they think.”
“What if they think you should be fired?”
I hesitated.
“That’s what happened to the last girl,” he said. “A blonde girl. She just left. Our best customer threw coffee at another customer. Some silly person that was disturbing him. He’s been here every day for the last eight years, but he says that she prioritized the other customer’s feelings. He comes to me and tells me he wants this waitress fired. What would you do if you were me?”
“I might be nervous to let that man into my business. He sounds violent.”
“He is always the same. His violence can be managed.”
“But why manage it?”
“Take a seat, Ms. Deet,” he told me. “Have I told you my name?” I shook my head, feeling embarrassed that I hadn’t asked.
“It is Hector.”
Because the café was empty, it felt much larger than usual. The walls and the floor were all panels of wood. You could imagine you were below the deck of an old ship, except for the front wall, with the door and the windows, and a strip of exposed brick behind the counter.
“You like the brick, huh?” He asked, proudly. “I can tell you like it.”
I was now seated at a little round table. He stood in front of the table with his hands on its edge and gazed upward momentarily, at a light fixture above.
“That’s not good,” he said, pointing. His face suddenly grew serious. “Do you see that up there? Is that cobwebs?”
I looked upward into the hanging lamp and noticed some strands of dust over the bulb. Hector was already pacing around, looking for something. He opened a closet next to the espresso machine twice, and the second time he found a bucket of rags. He came back over with a rag in his hand, stood on the chair across from me, and climbed onto the little table. Clearly, although he said nothing, he was expecting me to hold the table in place, because it wobbled violently until I seized it. Above me, he reached towards the lamp. “This is no good,” I heard him mutter, about the dust. I felt compelled to shout something cautionary, watching his legs stretch and tremble, but I didn’t want to offend him, and he didn’t want cautionary words. I felt part of myself endeared by his vulnerability. His small, old butt shook beneath well-tailored pants. My arms strained against his shivering weight. If I wanted, I could’ve tipped him right over and ended his life. He seemed to think only of the bulb.
When he was done, he climbed down and wiped his forehead, now visibly sweating. I felt guilty, suddenly, for not having offered to clean the light myself, even though no one is supposed to do dangerous cleaning for a man who hasn’t hired them yet.
“I want my café to be just right for the customers,” he said. “They are about to come in. You will meet them. They are always the same ones. If you are going to work here, you have to learn them. Usually it starts out with –”
As he said it, the door was thrown open and a man sprinted to a back table. It was the same man who had dressed me in his cold brew. Thankfully, he took no notice of me. He whipped out a notebook and a sharpie and started humming. “It stays hot when the weather is not,” he murmured, half-musically. “It stays hot when the weather is not!” This time with a slightly clearer melody.
He stood up the sign (MAN AT WORK. DO NOT SPEAK TO HIM) with his right hand, and with his left, he began scribbling: SELF-INSULATING SOUP, JINGLE & RECIPE. In five broad parallel strokes he created a bar along the page and stabbed music notes onto it. He wrote: 1. BEEF BROT– then ripped the sheet out of his notebook suddenly, screaming with rage, and started writing something else on the next page.
“You should go pick that up.” Hector pointed at the piece of paper. “Put it there.” He pointed at a safe in the back of the room.
“Should I ask him what he wants?”
“No,” said Hector. “You have to know what he wants. You cannot disturb him. He wants a cold brew. Around September, his order will change. You will see.”
“Why can’t we disturb him?”
“You have to understand,” Hector replied, putting his strong hand on my shoulder. “He is a man tormented by himself. He lives in the unending prison of his own mind. I do not think he sleeps.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, afraid.
“Every idea he has is brilliant.”
“Every single one?”
“Every single one. But he’s having new ones all the time. Imagine what that is like,” he urged me. I looked over at the man with electric hair and haggard cheeks. His eyes looked like they were giving off smoke. “He lives in the beginning stages of a million different magnum opuses. If he is ever away from his notebook for a second, lives might be lost. The next great play might not be written.”
“Have any of his ideas ever been used?”
“Sure they have. But only if someone can get them out of him. A man with a hat came in one day and left with a crumpled up ball of his notepaper. Now Dreamworks is doing a new movie with one of his ideas. Called Dreamworks’ Everything. Have you heard of it? Everything is anthropomorphized? Food, money, tables, cars, the ground, the sky? The protagonist is a rain boot that ends up traveling the world?”
I shook my head.
The bell chimed again and another man walked in. “Mon dieu, this guy,” Hector said quietly, and shook his head. “Bring Jeb his cold brew. It’s in the fridge. He likes almond milk. Fill the cup halfway with ice. Then I’ll tell you about this next one. He makes noises. Don’t be scared.”
The man who had just walked in, a huge sweaty man with tiny circular glasses and a beanie, started coughing the fluids from his throat up into a sketchbook. “He’s an artist,” Hector told me. “He is into… what is the word… he calls it… oh, byproducts. He thinks the only true product is a byproduct, or something. Go ask what he wants.”
Hector showed me how to make a cappuccino as a woman walked in sobbing.
“Good morning, Sharon,” he said.
“Isn’t it lovely out?” she managed, before collapsing into a chair and spilling tears across the table. “Perfect for poetry.”
Sharon wanted carrot cake, and as I walked back from her table to stand behind the counter with Hector, he registered a worried look on my face. The morning surge picked up and more people started to chime through the door, assuming seats at small circular tables, opening up laptops and sighing deeply.
“You will get to know them,” Hector assured me. He hadn’t yet hired me, and I hadn’t yet agreed to work there. “I have always worked hard to have a business. It is not the most amazingly successful business of any of my friends,” he said, his voice almost growling for emphasis. “My family know that I do okay over here. They have a business back home, in France. A big business. A department store.”
“Cool.”
“I always wanted to be like that. But the customers in this neighborhood don’t want normal things. They are dreamers and creeps. Do you live around here?”
“No,” I lied.
“Well, you may have noticed that this is not a regular restaurant,” he said, trilling the double ‘r’s. “I have a café of rascals and horrors. Freaky people. Every morning, I stock my café with the finest beans, the finest treats, so that they will come. When I hear the door chime, you will see me smile, because I’ve been expecting them. These are dangerous people. Do you see that man over there? He draws the same face over and over again. It is a person he has never met, but plans to meet one day, and defeat in a battle. This woman,” he nodded towards a nearby customer, “is writing the story of her life as it happens. She has been writing about writing in this café for twenty years. One of her books is named after me. Hector the Handsome. It is not published.”
“Have you read it?”
He shook his head. “I will never get involved with these people’s lives. Like I said, it can be dangerous. But while they’re under my roof, their lives are mine. I think of myself as a sort of collector, you see. I am a businessman, yes, but first and foremost, I am a collector. I grew up collecting dragon’s eggs.” He wasn’t smiling.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, fake ones?”
“It’s what I used to call the bird eggs that I found in the meadow. You know birds are the closest living relatives of dragons?”
“Do you mean dinosaurs?”
“Yes,” he nodded at me as if he was teaching me something. “This business is my finest collection. I will teach you the line-up. That girl chewing up my napkins is writing about vampires. Ah. Each new customer is worse than the last. It’s what I’m proudest of.”
I thought of my screenplay, which had been about two naked women with arm casts attempting to share a can of Pringles. “Are they so bad?” I asked Hector. “You insult them, but at the same time, you need their insanity.” Coffee and ideas flowed in and out of heads around me. It didn’t seem to matter who was pouring and who was drinking. The whole business ran on insanity.
“They do not know that they will never be anything. They can’t make anything of value,” Hector said, grinning a cold, lipless smile. “They are stuck here. You will see.”
I looked around at the artists he’d caught in this aromatic glue trap of a business. I couldn’t decide whether they all had jobs – night shifts perhaps – or whether they were wayward aristocrats. I needed their money desperately, to make art of my own, but where was their money from, if not art? It is strange, in New York City. Money is always moving everywhere around me, and I need it, but no one ever has enough, and the channels it moves through are narrow, rapid and perplexing.
“They may not make anything of value,” I said, “But they are the people who give you value. Your collection.”
He chuckled a little. “I always think that is interesting. When you take something into your own context, you tell its story, you increase its value. The flower is not the artist, but the man who paints it. The stamp is not a collector.”
“All of your customers are telling stories, too,” I said. The broad man with a beanie sneezed into his hands and wiped it on his pages. “In their own ways.”
“My customers tell their stories because they need to. Some stories are put together like a good piece of furniture. The art happening in my café, no no, not so. It is more similar to a man trimming his nose hairs or crying himself to sleep. I do not believe these people have the ability to do anything else with their time. They make things compulsively. They are indistinguishable from the things they make. I am not like this. I acquire things. But I am not what I acquire.” He pointed at them. “They are what I acquire.”
“Does it matter why someone is telling a story?” I looked down at my hands. “Or how much of themselves they use?”
“Aha! It does not. But these people are probably not telling good stories.”
“Yeah,” I shrugged, “Probably not.”
“But my project is good. Don’t you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re hired,” he said, and he shook my hand.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, “But I have to decline.”
“What for?” His eyes and nostrils widened with surprise. The complete circles of his irises became visible in skirts of white.
“I have just realized that the world is full of strange café managers, and I’d like to meet more of them.”
“Oh,” he chuckled, and the offense on his face relaxed into a look of tender resignation. “You’re collecting me, now, are you?”
“If only I had a jar big enough, Hector.”
“You would need a very big jar for me. Very big.”
The life I am looking for may not exist, but to give up on searching would be to give up completely. He winked, and I waved, and he smiled, and I left.