A Meet at the Java & Jive Part One

So I am in a constant casting mode for my movie “PARTY!!”. In this movie I use a technique which I like to call “fuck the establishing shot” where I do everything in close up and extreme close up. In this particular talkie I have shot everybody separately and had them react in different directions and give little monologues. In Post I plan to cut them together and put music in the background as if they are at a party together.

Today I was meeting a girl to play the part of clubbing bitch who sits on the phone in the kitchen and talks shit about everyone at the party to someone on the other end. I recently saw this girl Gretchen in my friend Philippe’s movie, and for a movie that was a minute long with no dialogue she covered a lot ground emotionally. I was sufficiently impressed and after much schedule wrangling I met her for coffee at the local palmetto “Indie Coffee Shop”.

I had been there before; I went to see some local bands play there one night. They were nothing to scream about, but the imported greek beer was good. And this morning saw me returning to this place during its normal business hours, and now that the furniture has been returned to its normal places, they were actually serving coffee, and I wasn’t knee deep in jail bait scenester girls and they date rapist beau’s I was free to take in the morning sunshine and sit in a comfy armchair in peace. They have a large selection of the usual shit you can do to coffee, so I scan for something I haven’t tried before. Then my gaze trips over something on the board: “Greek Coffee, lots of caffeine very dark very heavy”. And it only has one size, which was merely labeled “one size”. So I ask for one, and the girl behind the counter, who has been smiling at me the entire time but I figure it was just pants, that’s 90% of the reasons why women would do such a thing at me nowadays. Continuing to smile she says “are you sure, it is quite heavy”, and me attempting to sound smooth say yeah “I like my coffee how I like my women, very dark, bitter, and heavy”. She gave me a weird look, but I didn’t flinch. I don’t really get embarrassed by what comes out of my mouth anymore, I used to, but not anymore. Things just escape it, I cannot stop them all, and my method of damage control is to just act like that’s what I meant to say it and float on.

I mean so what if one day I said Schindler’s list was a little “Jew-centric”, when I really meant to say that Spielberg’s “opus” is overrated and that he buried virtuoso performances in a bunch heavy handed over stylized holocaust portrayals. But of course it came out “Jew-centric”. Thus is life, thus is me.

So she went to make the coffee, and this race conscious chubby chaser went and plopped in one of the big comfy armchairs in the corner. Looking around I realized what was missing from my first visit. Some of the pictures had been taken down, as well as some fake plants. Or were they real? I didn’t care to much to confirm. I was sitting on what was the main stage, where this band I had to hear, Palmetto’s most important apparently, played an 8 song set. But after song 2 I wondered over to Checkers down the road, are the fries still good I haven’t had them in a while.

I look over to the bookshelf that was a bassist when we first met and perused the selection. Dissecting Calvinism, Salinger, Faulkner, the mae… I grabbed Salinger. The Girl behind the counter was currently lighting a campfire under a golden goblet and putting in a heaping scoop of what looked like peat, “Five minutes”. I smiled back and took off my hoodie and opened “Franny and Zooey” and immediately closed it because I remembered that once was enough. So I got up and walked over to the girl and chatted her up.

She explained some rather earth shattering physics to me. If she looks directly at the goblet, it won’t boil at all and if she looks to far away it will boil over guaranteed. So she just picks a point in between and stares at it. I followed her gaze to where an open book was propped up against a cooler. “I noticed you were looking thru some of the books…” she said.

“Yeah, what a pile of pretentious garbage. I mean I like Salinger and what Faulkner I have read I liked… but it just feels like that rack screams “Hey look I am an intellectual bookshelf! Listen to my stories about going to Venice!”

She smiled and without looking up said, “I donated all those books.”

FUCK. “Oh, umm getting them off your chest, heh heh.” I bit my tongue, I just wanted my coffee not an argument.

“Yeah, they were my old boyfriend’s”

“Oh, serves him right for leaving them huh?”

“He died last year.” This time her voice was monotone. I managed to talk her to monotone. There was still silence as the coffee slowly percolated in the goblet. I needed to get out of this so I thought fast.

“Hey look at that” I pointed at the far wall behind me. She looked up from her mark and the coffee shot boiling over the top. In no time I had my coffee and was sitting in an armchair in the corner, this time facing away from the counter.

It was then…