Fiction

It’s as if the entire room is on some sort of intellectual drug.  Walking through the door, I was overwhelmed by noise – light jazz in the background, coffee beans grinding behind the counter, and what seemed like 17 conversations between couples, each trying to out speak one another with their volume and use of words I only knew because I had recently helped my teenage neighbor with her SAT practice quizzes.  Moving through the crowd of people, you would think that you had entered some University discussion session, but in actuality, I had only walked into a small coffee house I visited several times each week, in a small town just a few miles from my own.

The couples were not traditional couple-couples as you may have imagined from my lack of description.  No, there was no love in the air here.  It was an odd mix of people, all who I had seen in this building before, but never all at once. It was as if the barista had called some kind of “regular customer meet & greet” and my invitation got lost in the mail.

The thing that stood out about this situation, however, was that several of the couples seemed to have been mismatched with their counterparts.  Where normally you would assume 20-somethings would flock together in conversation, and the older gentlemen, whom I assumed were either long widowed or had been bachelors forever, in their late 50’s and 60’s, would also be conversing among themselves, some sort of twilight-zone match up had been cast . It seemed that each “young buck” was sitting across from one “wise old soul.”

This contrast didn’t make much sense to me, but I realized after I placed my order for a double shot of espresso and cream (I needed something to take off the edge of this crazy set up) and made my way to a small corner table, that perhaps I was being a bit ageist. Why did it matter that each couplet of patrons was composed this way?

F-that.  I never claimed to be PC, and this was just plain weird.

Add to the pile of strangeness that the louder the older gentlemen who always seemed to travel with last week’s Sunday paper got when talking to the art student I had come to know as Shelley, the louder the high school basketball player across the room became in his discussion with the older black gentleman who was always talking about the book her wrote back in 1964.  (This time, it would seem that the basketball player wouldn’t let him get a word in, which I found enduring until I saw him spin a flipping basketball on his middle finger out of the corner of my eye.  mid-conversation.  Then I just saw it as cocky.)

As it seemed that everyone in the room was trying to out volume each other at any and all cost, I had a difficult time trying to follow any sort of conversation.  This was unusual for me, as I have been putting my eavesdropping skills to work since the tender age of four and was quite sure, up until this moment of course, that the CIA should consider hiring me on this self honed skill alone.  But this evening was different.  I was barely able to pull a phrase out of the air, let alone a full sentence or thought pattern.

The only way I could commit to anything being said, undoubtedly, was word by word.  I tried harder to deepen my listening, but still, one word at a time, from one conversation at time, was coming my way at an ever increasing speed and volume until I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Thankfully the waitress had dropped off my espresso just moments before my audio breakdown.  Sipping was not something I could commit to with this level of stimulation and confusion around me, and I responded the only way I found appropriate – slamming the double as if it was a tall shot of tequila on my 21st birthday.