Sometimes I forget that I really am pretty weird and my experiences are fairly far afield from “normal.”
This girl who I vaguely knew from the coffee shop showed up one day and said she thought her mom had died that morning and I figured she was probably overreacting so I said I’d go check with her and it turns out her mom HAD died but we honestly weren’t sure when it had happened so I lifted her off the bed and attempted CPR and then ended up having to talk to cops and this poor girl’s family for HOURS as she called her dad and brothers and the cops wanted to know if the mom was on any medications or if she had been depressed and I was like “I have no idea, I had literally never met the lady and I don’t even know the family’s last name, the first ever full conversation I had with the daughter was this morning.” And apparently THAT was super suspicious or something.
So anyway that was a rough day and the next day I go into the coffee shop and the manager (who is basically never in) comes over and says “Debbie says you had a rough day yesterday.” And I was like “uh, yeah. It was pretty weird.” And then he was like “Debbie says that you handled it really well. And that you filled out an application to work here a couple weeks ago.” And I was like “I guess?” And he was like “Okay you can do a training shift today and you’re on your own tomorrow. We don’t normally hire people under 21 and we don’t normally hire regulars so don’t fuck up.” (I was 18)
So I started working at the cash-only coffee shop that was patronized exclusively by the weirdest people in town (who had all slept with each other, had no money, and had the most drama of any group I’ve ever been part of) and was used to launder money made by the owner’s cocaine sales for the local gang.
The first shift I worked alone was the next night and when I called the manager and told him one of the regulars had been chasing people out of the parking lot to sell meth the manager told me to ban him so I was like “Hey dude, manager says you’re banned” and he was like “You’re a fucking cunt and I’m going to wait until you’re alone and I’m gonna fucking kill you” and then he drove around the block about twenty times and screamed “cunt” out the window every time he passed by where I was cleaning the patio.
One of the regulars, who was a nearly-seven-foot-tall hacker and gunsmith who worked graveyard in Hollywood, waited around for me to finish closing and then offered to drive me home because otherwise I’d have to walk three miles alone and there was that whole “circling meth dealer” thing going on. I decided to take a chance on getting a ride from tall, dark, and scary and that paid off pretty well because it’s been fifteen years and I’ve been married to that tall weirdo since 2011.
And that’s how I got my first non-porn job.
#she… #thought… #her mom had died? #and she went for #coffee???
Everyone who hung out at this coffee shop was in some way or another the weirdest person I’ve ever fucking met.
Like the evidence she presented for “I think my mom died this morning” was “She didn’t wave to me like she normally does when I was leaving the house and it didn’t strike me as odd until just now.”
Like that’s why I agreed to go check, I was really pretty sure she was just being paranoid and needed some mental health support not some “Oh god I’m sorry your mom did actually just die and I need to coach you through a 911 call and hold your hand while you tell your dad over the phone that his wife is dead” support.
But then again her mom had been dead for. A PRETTY LONG TIME. By the time I got there. Long enough for blood to pool on the lower part of her body, which I didn’t realize until after I’d moved her off the bed and attempted CPR because the room was very dark and also lined floor-to-ceiling with stacked newspapers and magazines so I didn’t really see what we were dealing with until the girl opened the curtains and I realized that her mom’s face was half green and purple with pooled blood. (I, uh, maybe sometimes still have nightmares about this because the whole thing was note-for-note like a scene out of Se7ev except for shit like her boyfriend and his roommates showing up to comfort her and also hauling along a cat carrier full of very pissed off cat which wasn’t like a scene from Se7en it was just an additional layer of surreality on an already very surreal day - said boyfriend also yelled at me for saying I was going to call another coffee shop regular to come get me because “this family doesn’t need this kind of chaos and attention right now” and I was like “you brought three people here and also I don’t have a car and I’m miles away from home so unless you’re calling me a cab I am getting THE FUCK out of here and this other coffee shop regular is the least likely to cause a scene”)
So there’s a very reasonable possibility that this girl was very, VERY aware that her mom was dead but needed to go get somebody to help her process this and understand that it was real because fuck it, I can see having a little bit of a mental break and needing to GET AWAY and get another, potentially saner, human to verify before I started really internalizing what had happened in that situation.
But still, I don’t know how long it takes for blood to settle in a body or what the sleeping arrangement was with mom and dad but daughter and I got to the house at around noon, she’d come to the coffee shop at around 10 (we had to spend a long time convincing her to call mom’s cell phone and the house phone and then convincing her to go check and she wouldn’t go alone so that’s why I went) so if mom died in the night I don’t know why nobody noticed until at least 10am.
Anyway then the girl and her boyfriend showed up at the coffee shop later that night and she said she wanted to talk about LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE so we distracted them by talking about the best way to shave genitals and, protip, don’t use clippers on your junk.
One time one of my coworkers came in to open and somebody had broken into the patio and moved all the furniture to the perimeter to better frame the giant stinking shit they’d taken in the middle of the floor.
This coffee shop was the only place I’ve ever had to come in and clean tampons off the ceiling.
At some point our coffee maker just stopped working so one of the shift leads brought in his grandma’s Mr. Coffee.
That same shift lead once randomly shut down the coffee shop all day because he needed help editing his chapbook because he’d gotten a contract with Crown Publishing. That same dude skipped out on paying rent for his apartment for like three months because every time the owner came by to ask him for his rent his answer was “Fuck you, I saved a baby” because he’d saved a baby from a fire. Eventually that was his answer to every criticism and it was still relentlessly charming until he became the night manager of a Denny’s and then it was just kind of sad.
My elementary school DARE officer came in at one point because of “suspicious activity” because cops were always coming in for suspicious activity to see if the regulars had left paraphernalia out because one time somebody literally left a three-foot-tall bong set up next to one of the potted plants on the patio. I was like “oh shit, you were the DARE officer at my school, sorry for smoking” and she was like “don’t worry about it, I’ve been an alcoholic since my girlfriend left me.”
I went to a school TWENTY FOUR MILES away from this coffee shop. This was a SMALL shop. In a stupid, shitty suburb that nobody goes to. This wasn’t a coffee shop that had ever been on California’s Gold or made the news or been featured in a “Best Coffee Shops You’ve Never Heard Of” article. So I’m at my school TWENTY FOUR MILES away, in a totally different county, and I mention to one of my classmates that I work at this coffee shop and he just goes “Holy shit, so you know where to get good drugs?” And I was kind of offended but he wasn’t wrong and I had actually blown a guy in the back seat of the Good Drug Dealer’s car. (Unrelated to drugs, it was basically pity oral) (and not that the Good Drug Dealer was a good guy compared to the shouty meth dealer, just that he was the one who sold the Good Drugs)
There were twelve WLW who hung out there regularly and we all had the worst lesbian sheep problem and somehow the fact that none of us could get our shit together and fuck each other did NOTHING to prevent the kind of “I’ve slept with all your exes” drama that you expect out of insular queer scenes which culminated in a confrontation that ended like six friendships. Turns out Debbie had told the manager about my adventure with the body because Debbie thought I was cute and that worked out well for me because I thought Debbie was cute and we made out, like, twice but her girlfriend lived with her literally less than a hundred yards away and wasn’t open to a poly arrangement so instead me and Debbie were just cuddle buddies and we’d nap in the lounge in the back of the shop where everyone else either fucked or did unimaginable amounts of blow.
When the coffee shop finally shut down the owners just told everyone that it was closing for four days for earthquake renovations and when we all met up to hang out in front of the shop the next day (because we were all fucking losers and had literally nothing else going on) we found out that the owners had changed the locks and thrown all the shit we’d left inside (CDs, a couple backpacks, paintings, ashtrays, board games) into the dumpster along with the broken coffee machine and they’d shattered every single bottle of torani syrup in the place on top of the pile. The only Chumbawamba album I’ve ever owned came out of that dumpster covered in butterscotch because fuck it, I wanted a souvenir and I wasn’t about to take Sheryl Crow.
I miss that coffee shop like you’d miss a lover you left behind.
Everyone imagining this with the fast food reaction meme was imagining it in the wrong direction.
