When I walk in to introduce myself, neither one of them seems particularly impressed. The boy is super tall and skinny, with these tiny cutoff jean shorts revealing his long, sinewy, shaved legs. He’s wearing some kind of off-orange-colored boat shoes with no socks, and his tight, tight self-consciously vintage T-shirt has a picture of a sailboat silk-screened on the front. His head is shaved, and his neck and arms are covered in intricate, expensive tattoos. He has a pair of square, nerdy-chic glasses on that I’d be willing to bet aren’t really prescription. His name is Rafi.
The girl is a lot more plain-looking, with short black hair and a narrow face. She’s wearing sensible clothes—jeans, a V-neck shirt, and hiking boots. Her name is Elaina. I guess she’s the one who’s gonna be training me.
“Look,” I tell her, as she starts taking me on a little tour around the workings of the shop. “I’ve definitely been in your position before, you know, having to break in the new guy, so I just wanted to say that you really don’t have to worry about me. I’ll figure it out as we go along, so you don’t need to stress at all.”
She turns back, but without really looking at me. She’s got her eyes on the ground and her neck bent forward, so it’s like she’s talking out of her forehead.
“Oh, sure, yeah right, you’ll figure it out on your own. I bet you took this job thinking it was gonna be real easy, didn’t you? Well, I’ll tell you right now, it ain’t. We work nonstop for eight hours a day or longer. We’re on our feet, moving all the time. If you’re looking for a job where you can just slack off, you’ve come to the wrong place, man. We work hard here. Most new people don’t even make it through the first week. I mean, have you ever even worked at a coffee shop like this before?”
She stares me down with her forehead, jamming her hands into her pockets and hunching over a little more. I can’t quite make out her accent—Southern, for sure, but a whole lot different from Sue Ellen’s. It’s almost as if this Elaina girl has some sort of combination between a Southern drawl and a Midwestern twang. At least, her forehead does.
“Sorry, no, I didn’t mean it like that at all.” I stutter like an idiot, trying my best to keep smiling. Hell, I mean, I should know by now that any powerless person who’s finally been given a temporary position of authority is gonna take herself way too seriously. The only thing I can do is try ’n’ make her feel important—you know, necessary—like I fear and respect her. Of course, I know I can do it. I’ve been telling people what they wanna hear since I was four years old. It’s as instinctive and automatic as breathing. I can eat shit and suck cock like the best of them.
“Yeah, well,” her forehead demands. “What did you mean, then?”
I follow her lead, burying my hands in my own pockets.
“All I was trying to say,” I tell her, “is that I wanna make this as easy for you as possible. I’ve worked at a couple coffee shops before, and I just remember how annoying it is to have a new person tagging along behind you. So just let me know if I get in your way. But for now, I mean, you tell me what to do and I’ll do it, no problem.”
Her face lifts up into the light slightly, and for the first time I can see that her eyes are green and striking against her tan skin and cropped dark hair.
“Okay, good,” she says, her hand reaching up to play absently with the inch-long bar piercing the upper cartilage of her left ear. “Then enough of this touring crap. We gotta get sandwiches prepped for the lunch rush. Let’s go.”
I follow her behind the counter into the cramped, sweating, noxious kitchen area. She pulls out twenty-five baguettes from the industrial-sized, two-door stainless steel refrigerator. I’m told to split each baguette lengthwise. We go on from there.
The hours pass so goddamn slow.
Rafi and Elaina won’t let me make the coffee drinks or do the final preparations on any of the food items, so I’m stuck cleaning every last inch of the kitchen—something that looks like it hasn’t been done in, like, five years. Already I’ve come across more dead roaches and rat shit than I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean, I actually catch myself gagging—and this from a kid who’s eaten out of trash cans to survive.
The rest of the place is pretty nice, though—open and light, with tall ceilings and concrete floors. It looks like it might’ve been converted from an old barn or something. There’s bad but pleasant student artwork hung on the walls, and a stage is set up in the corner for open-mike nights and live music on the weekends. The shop advertises fair-trade coffee and organic produce. It even has vegan pastries and desserts.
The customers are mostly college kids—hipsters with tapered jeans and their track bikes all locked up outside. There’s also a middle-age contingency—women with long graying hair and dumpy, sack clothing, men with ponytails and Birkenstocks who look like they might’ve landed in Charleston by mistake on their way to Berkeley or San Francisco—like Columbus finding the Bahamas instead of a route to Asia.
Of course, every now and then a real-life Southerner walks in, uncomfortably staring at the menu. There was even one paunchy, clean-cut, doughy-looking man with a wealthy, refined Southern accent who slapped the hell out of his little boy ’cause the kid was messing around in line. When I asked Elaina if we could refuse to serve the man, she just made some sort of distorted face and pointed me back toward the kitchen to keep
