Counter Jockey: Coffee Tea and Company

Coffee, Tea and Company was inside the Sacramento Natural Foods Company but was an independent business leasing the space. I applied for a job, got an interview and was hired. The interview was conducted by a mousy little gay man whose relationship to the business was never really clear to me. I told him that I would need a week off in January. Christine would be arriving back from Europe then and in my hopelessly stubborn mind I was determined to win her back. He said this wouldn't be a problem and I started work immediately.
I had to be at work by 6 am to get the place set up and ready to start selling coffee to the employees of the Cal Trans building accross the street by 6:30. I seemed to thrive on this kind of schedule. And the Natural Foods Co-op was an environment that was obsessed with health, spiritual, mental and physical. I loved the environment and I loved my co-workers. We would listen to music while we worked and we were only busy in the morning for an hour or so, and durring lunch for another hour and a half. The rest of the time we restocked, cleaned and goofed around.
The boss woman was a raging alcoholic who was almost never there. She'd come by occasionally, drunk as a skunk and take money from the register. Later she'd notice money missing and I'd remind her that she took it. She wouldn't remember but she'd have to take my word for it. The state workers from Cal-Trans got to know us folks serving them coffee and they were generous tippers.
I started to feel better and then I recieved a call from Paris. Christine officially dumped me. I'd been writing her every couple of days, mailing the letters to her dad's place in Philly. She'd been unfaithfull before even making it out of this country but in Europe she was really discovering herself and she needed to shake the guilt so she did the write thing and made it official, we were no longer an item.
My depression kicked into high gear but with a new flavor. I was hanging out with Bryna a-lot and I remember explaining to her that I understood the celebratory nature of blues music. I was sad but the sadness was clear and focused now and there was something nostalgic and sweet about it. I enjoyed some aspect of the sorrow. I enjoyed feeling so completely how much I loved this person. It's hard to explain how real the sadness was, while being romantic and life affirming at the same time.
I started to write poetry again. Something I hadn't done in years. The fall weather was inspiring me along with the mellow drama that was my life. I wasn't eating much, living mostly off of stale bagels and orange juice from work, and penuts from the corner liquor store at home.
I took a second job doing fund raising over the phone for an environmental group Friends of The River and I was exceedingly good at it. I was starting to regain my self esteem.
Almost immediately after Christine had left with Sean I got a call from Sean's best friend Dan.
"Are you going crazy?" he asked.
"Yeah, I am." I didn't know Dan to well but he seemed like a nice kid. He wore a trench coat and he had long curly red hair.
"Let's get out of town." he offered.
No one made offers like this and I accepted gladly. Dan picked me up a few days later in a V.W. Bus and we went to Santa Cruz for a couple of days. Dan and I became close friends with many road trips, plenty of drinking and Dan introduced me to some of the greatest books I'd ever read. Charles Bukowski, Goerges Bataille, Henry Miller. Reading this romantic and adventerous tales made our road trips that much more fun. We ate acid on the beach, slept in the bus, drank gallons of wine and made up our own religion. My jobs supported this without becoming a part of my identity. I wrote more and more and began keeping a journal.
Eventually my roommate Chris moved out, wanting to have a place of his own for the first time in his life and Dan took his room.
I got Dan a job at Coffee, Tea and Company as well. I had no repsect for the owner and so it was easy for me to rationalize taking money from the till. Stealing felt romantic and passionate. It fit the adventurous spirit that my new literary finds had awoken.
I stole enough to buy two bikes, one for me and one for Christine.
I was stolen from too. Three young girls came in and one of them ordered a mocha. I turned around to work the espresso machine, but something didn't seem write. I turned back in time to see the girls running out the door with my tip jar. I hopped the counter and took after them but I didn't even come close to catching them. I could say carma, but losing less than ten bucks to three little girls hardly seems to balance out steeling several hundred dollars from an alcoholic business woman.
I made enough between my two jobs to take on a car payment and my dad helped me get a small loan. I bought my neighbor's Volkswagon camper bus. With Dan's help I began doing my own mechanical work, something I never thought I'd do. I doubt my father had ever changed his own oil and such things were just not in my blood. Yet there I was, doing my own timing, changing my CVJ boots, adjusting my valves. My self esteem was through the roof.
I was sure that Christine couldn't help but fall in love with this new me. At work we had a great time. We would make the customers wait so we could do the sacred scone dance, and the customers loved it. They got a kick out of how much we were enjoying ourselves.
We rarely saw anyone who could be considered a boss so we just got creative. We put up a sign offering a free shot with any quadruple shot espresso drink as a joke. A local eccentric musician named Norm took us up on the offer. He had two quadruple plus one mochas in a row. I took down the sign and was relieved to see he survived.
I rode my bike to work every morning still and it was freezing. January was just around the corner and Christine would be back. I put in my request for the week off, and I was denied! I reminded the little bald man who had interviewed me, and who seemed to pop and manage things for the owner once or twice every couple of months, of the deal we made. He said he could not give me the time off. I told him I would take the week off, and if he and the owner appreciated what a good employee they had in me they'd keep me on. If not, I had another job and I'd be fine.
He asked me to work on the day that Christine would return home to be followed by seven days off and I agreed.
I worked that morning, and got out of there by ten a.m. I bought a big bunch of sun flowers for Christine. She came to the house and there were hugs, tears and many, many stories. By the next morning we were kissing in my bus. Our relationship would remain ambiguous but as easily as she'd fallen out of love with me, she fell back in. She'd come home to find me a much different person than she'd left. I was happier, more confident, and passionate about writing in a way I'd never quite managed to be about painting. Writing to me meant living in a manner worth writing about and she fit in with that lifestyle perfectly. She began to join Dan and I on our road trips as did my dear friend and sometimes lover Bryna.

Dan was fired from Coffee, Tea and Company after a Co-op employee told the owner that she'd overheard Dan speaking negatively about the owner. The owner came in a few days later and asked me to tell her who was stealing money from her. I told her that I didn't make much money but somehow I had purchased two very nice bikes and a bus while working for her. She looked at me and she knew what I was saying. I felt better about the stealing having confessed it. I had tried to see workplace epsionage as a political tool, but stealing from a coffee shop just didn't seem like an effective means to bring about social change and I needed to move on. I needed to rid myself of one of the few threats to my self esteem I had left. I told her that I didn't think she was a very good person and that I wouldn't be working for her any longer, then I took my bike and left.

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