The café is crowded, which gives me a chance to slink in undetected and loiter at the back to observe Justin. He is doling out muffins, coffee and bons mots with charismatic zeal to jonesing office-workers who offer little in the way of intercourse.
Certainly, less than I did.
I exit the office bursting with self-esteem and skip out onto Swanston Street with an impromptu soft-shoe shuffle of which Gregory Hines would have been proud. It’s a beautiful day, the finest in nearly a decade, for today I am bound for a café at which I intend to purchase a cup of coffee.
Full strength coffee.
‘The thing is,’ says Oscar, draining his coffee, ‘is that the British one pound coin is very thick, and around the edge it has something written in Latin.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Or Welsh.’ He orders another latte. ‘One of those two. Which is the one with lots of ‘w’s?’
Outside the window, through the girlie grey steam, the autumn weeds are waving in a distinctly springish wind. I think I could almost qualify as a perpetual motion machine, infinitely running a distracted loop between the untended garden and the untended computer, if it weren’t for the midpoint between the two, which is the television and which is being tended just fine.
I stopped doing creative things three months ago. What happened?
“Well, the more coffee I drink the more impulsive I become and the more coffee I order,” explained Oscar, “so by late morning I tend to feel connected to the here and now, the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a quasar at the edge of the known universe I’ve decided to call Ian.”
“I’ll get the bill,” I said.
I’m afraid this is going to be an unpleasant story, for it begins with the following words: I am sprinting desperately up Lygon Street at three minutes to five shaking a jar of my own urine.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Thanks but I don’t really like tea.’
It is Fitzroy, 2003 and the sales assistant at Tea Intersection shrugs.
‘Have you considered the possibility that you might be in the wrong place?’ she suggests.
‘All the time,’ I say. It was supposed to be flippant, but she checks the panic button.
The maitre d’ is hovering over my shoulder. An original Picasso is hovering over his.
‘I’m terribly sorry sir,’ he says in an accent so fluid I can’t tell if it is French or Hispanic, ‘but there’s a problem.’
I begin to sweat under my cravat. It is Las Vegas, October 2005, and I am about to reap the whirlwind.
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