The Unexpected Coffee Date

Dear Blog,
I know it's been far too long, yet again, since I've posted. As of yesterday I am finally and completely settled into my apartment. Joe and I went to Ikea this weekend (my very first ikea experience) where I bought a desk and a dresser so I no longer have to live out of plastic bins and go over bank statements sitting on the floor. Success! I'm like a real person again! A real live grown up...sigh. Well, I've got frames on the walls and everything in it's proper place, so despite the (most likely indiscernible) dollop of sarcastic excitement in my last statement let me say that I truly am thrilled to finally have a dresser and desk. With these, the rest of my room finally came into an organized, completed state which gives me comfort and peace of mind. And now, ever in line with doing the darndest, let me share with you my morning's adventure:

When I sat down on the 89 bus at 7:30 this morning, I didn’t realize I would be the recipient of dramatic, unfolding life stories from the man to my right. He was older, with soft, loose skin and short, spiky white hair. He held two walking canes, one in each hand and wore tinted aviator style glasses. Shifting as the sun blinded him he knocked my arm with his elbow. We made eye contact as he apologized and I smiled politely back. Before I knew it we were in conversation. At first I was reluctant to speak to him. Knowing how many crazy people ride the bus and talk to themselves, I was cautious of how much I said to him and how much attention I afforded to his sudden fountain of speech. But it had begun. The floodgates were open once I’d smiled at him and agreed on the overcrowding of the bus. As he rambled I soon lost hope of reading my novel, but quickly realized my time was being much more valuably consumed. He didn’t speak with the nonsense, laughing or angry stilted jargon of the insane. He was polite and asked if I was okay when a man standing over me continued to bump into my head. He was anybody’s grandfather; he was any lonely old man. We started talking about the commute and then of coffee and his dislike of Dunkin Donuts- quite uncharacteristic for a Boston dweller. He asked suddenly if I was taking the train and told me to avoid the red line because of impending delays. “Grab the Metro paper on the way out” he demanded. “It tells you all about it.” The bus pulled into the station and as I stood, letting several others pass to wait for him he said, “Go ahead sweetheart.” “Alright” I replied, “I hope you have a good day,” “I hope yours is better” he retorted.

For some reason I was compelled to oblige the old man. I took a newspaper from the stand and pushed forward into the crowd, buzzing through the ticket gate and taking the escalator to the orange line platform below. I laughed inwardly to myself. I’ve always treasured the spontaneous, beautiful little moments in life when someone unexpectedly changes your day.  There are so few unanticipated glimmers like these. To my surprise, a few minutes after arriving at the platform edge my new friend popped up at my side. He saw my empty hands and asked, “Did you get the paper?” Happy not to disappoint I pulled it from my purse. He pointed to the headline about delays on the red line, and we commenced to talk about the trains. He added that he was a welder in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and worked on the tunnel under Harvard square, welding the iron beams beneath the church. Soon we’d boarded the train where he refused to sit and insisted that I did. He told me he was seventy-six, and knew he looked good. He confessed he was handsome, conceited, sarcastic and hot tempered. Yet, as I’d come to see, he had a big soft heart.

He loved movies. When I asked him what his plan was for the day, he responded that the general agenda was to go home and watch movies all day. Come to think of it, I forgot to ask where he was traveling from to begin with.  Anyway, he told me that he loved, “The Parent Trap,” and said, “Lindsay, she may be an addict, but I’m not pure!” He laughed with his hands on his large belly. “I’ve tasted the marijuana,” he chuckled, “and I liked it!” He asked if I’d tried it as well, I’m guessing to make out if there was any crudeness he could relate to in my character. “I went to college” was all I replied with. We returned to the subject of movies. He told me to buy, “Casablanca” and “To Catch a Thief” and when he mentioned that Grace Kelly starred in it, he held his hands out and rolled his eyes as if no lady could be so scrumptious. “They’re making a Whitey Bulger movie now with Matt Damon.” he added, “I don’t remember who’s playing Whitey, but guess who’s playing his girlfriend?” He smiled playfully, “Lindsay Lohan?” I asked, “No, too young.” He said, “Joan Rivers.” He let this sink in and I cringed. He shook his head, “You couldn’t pay me to do her.” I gasped and laughed at his audacity. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

As the train lurched forward he asked me if I’d ever been to the North End of Boston. I told him about my first date there and how we’d gone to Bacco’s. “No, no” he shook his head, “try the pizza at Pizzeria Regina, and then the pastries at Lyndell’s.” The train pulled up to the Chinatown stop. “And try the pork buns here! Boy I’d love to take you around.” It was obvious he was a man of Boston, though when I mentioned my favorite pizza being the deep dish of my hometown, he told me he once lived in Chicago while in the air force, before O’Hare was what it is today.  He also lived in Florida as well, for a moment.  “Too hot” we said in unison. He said he missed “His snow and foliage.” 

We hopped off the train at Massachusetts Ave. where he made a proud show of climbing the stairs. “Walk first or walk last!” he said as he strutted ahead of me with both canes in one hand, gripping the rail with the other. As we walked down the street he told me of his early days, when he was hanging with gangsters. He related how a buddy of his, a cop named Scott Tarantino, once “dropped a dime on him,” tipping off the FBI so they could pick him up and investigate what he knew about his gangster friends. He never told them anything and his record was clean, so they always let him go. Despite the official record looking pristine, he sold coke to cooing secretaries and good friends. He rambled on. Though he’d accompanied me to my stop where I usually grab a coffee and bagel and b-line for work at the Museum of Fine Arts, it was clear our conversation was far from over. “You getting a coffee?” he asked as we reached the street corner. “Yea! Expresso Royale?” I suggested. We made our way over to the small side street café which I love for its quiet, comfortable atmosphere and patches of painted wooden tables. It was only my second time there. My friend grudgingly allowed me to hold the door for him and he snapped at me when, as we entered, he thought I was reaching for my wallet. “You are NOT paying for coffee here,” he said and opened up his wallet to display a 100 dollar bill among a twenty, a ten, a five and several ones. Thumbing the one hundred at me unabashedly he admitted, “It’s been in there for months. I love staring at my bank account.” “You’re good at holding onto your money,” I smiled, “Yes” he replied, “I am.” The cashier made change from the five dollar bill he’d handed her and as she went to return the small handful of coins he groused, “I don’t want that” making her smile out of the kind gesture so poorly disguised by his gruff exterior.

I took our two steaming coffees in hand and prepared them while John (as I’d learned was his name) directed how much cream he wanted and what kind of sweetener. They had no Sweet-n-Low, so he tempered a complaint and settled on a Splenda. We sat at small round table, brown with pink flowers, which he fought his way to, precariously inching through a maze of chairs. For seventy-six, he was tough; I could tell he was still strong and willful and bitter over the idea of asking for help. Here was a man that embodied (or clung to) as best he could, the strength and independence of his youth. He told me about his family, of how he was a twin and his nieces and cousins were triplets and twins themselves. Johnny was the youngest of seven, though one brother, the other half of a twin-set among the flock had died at birth. John unzipped a small brown leather bag tied to his cane and dug around for something. All I could think of were drugs. Perhaps not coke this time, but prescriptions I pondered as I watched his careful hands searching. Instead, he removed a white envelope, folded and worn open at the corners. He took out a small stack of photographs and showed them to me one by one.

The first photograph was a laminated, very old black and white image of an elegant woman with thick dark brows nearly touching in the center. She had beautiful, bright almond shaped eyes and a quaint, slightly smiling mouth that reminded me-no joke- of the Mona Lisa. Her hair was brassy and pulled back revealing a thin silver chained necklace glinting on her chest and her delicate shoulders were draped in a fur coat. “She’s lovely” I told him, looking at the gentle, smiling yet stoic image wrought from antiquity. From the directness of her gaze I could see where John got his strength. “Everyone says that when they see this picture” he noted, tapping the top with an age marked finger, “Her name was Grace.” I looked up at him recognized the strong resemblance in his features. I told him this and he replied, “People say that too.” He smiled. John told me that his mother was from Sicily. When his father, from the Apulia area met her, he had eyes for no other woman. “She came right up under his chin,” he described. “When they married she wore the long veil and had a long-sleeved white gown on. She looked so lovely. I have that picture somewhere, at one of my sister’s. I’ve been trying to get it back. If I find you again, Emily, I will make sure I have those pictures on me.”

 The next photo he laid out was incredibly fuzzy so that it was hard to make out the faces, but they were three figures standing in a fenced, sunny yard. In the center there was a tall man in a sharp dark suit with a teal turtle neck on. “Is that you?” I asked. “I always dressed well,” he said gazing down at the photograph. “Now all of my nice clothes are stashed away. Stashed! Like I was a thief or something! Ha!” A straight dark figure, he was flanked on either side by two women about a head shorter. One had cropped brown hair and had a tan leather bag slung low over her hip, the other woman had her brown hair in a beautifully voluminous do, iconic of the seventies. He told me that these women were his nieces and that the woman with the lovely coifed hair, Diane, had started her own hair salon as did most of the women in his family. With a chip he said that many of them weren’t speaking to him at the moment, and I glimpsed the depth of his isolation and understood his need to open up to a stranger. “I tell them black is black and white is white and they tell me that I’m wrong” he bristled. “If they hold a grudge, they’ll hold it till they day they die and I’ll still be here, saying I told you so while they’re up there, or,” and he wagged a finger towards the ground, “Wherever they end up.” 

Later John would tell me again how he is quick to anger, though pretty good at holding his temper. I could tell he’d been holding it against certain people in his life for a long time, building up pressure and creating something like a hard callous or a brooding mass somewhere within him. “Why don’t you let it go?” I asked, “Let it go? Let my temper go?” He asked, the pitch of his voice rising a little as if no one could know what they had coming if his anger were unleashed. “No” I said quietly, “Make peace with it, let it go.” I offered. He sat up straight and tensed, “I’m not interested in making peace.” He smoothed his coat. “I know who I am. I know what I am. I know what I’m made of. I don’t put up with people who make me angry, who push my buttons. You push me I’ll push right back. I’ll push you off the bus, out of the plane, and wave to you as you fall” he said darkly with a sardonic little laugh, his hard, biting Boston exterior shining in the morning light. As if to lessen this foreboding image of himself--though no, on second thought this is not a self-conscious man-- John said, “I never carry a weapon.” He halted a moment. “I’d never carry a gun, it’s too loud!” Suddenly he was jumping into frightening territory, “A guy could come right up to you with a knife and get you in the back. But you know the best thing is an ice pick, it’s long and thin and you just…” I stopped him there, covered my ears and wouldn’t let him continue. “You’ve had to make it through some tough times” I conjectured, since he so casually discussed such gruesome street life. “Naw.” He said. “It is the way it is.”

I lowered my hands and he pulled out another black and white picture of a young boy with thick, dark wavy hair, looking up solemnly at the camera while holding two smaller children on his knee. “Tell me who you think that is” he said, and I knew immediately from the prominent, round shape of his nose that it was him. He was around 12 years old and undeniably handsome. He had little Diane, in a tiny pale coat and black hat sitting on his left knee. “She was my favorite” he smiled, “I’d always get mad at her, but she was my favorite.” Lost in nostalgia he described Diane’s mother and how she took care of him, how she bought him everything he wanted back when he was an adored child of the twenties. If I ever see John again, I’ll ask him what had happened to his parents.

Finally, as I drained the last of my coffee (into which he’d comically deposited a handful of wooden stirs at the coffee bar), he moved forward in time and told me about his Marilyn. He’d interjected something of “his girl” here and there through the course of our morning conversation, but now he etched her out. She was Italian, about four foot eleven and seven-eighths and her head, he said, fit just under his chin when standing. “She was something.” She was his everything. “I was desperate to have her.” He paused a moment, letting the silence form an image before him. A shadow suddenly crossed his face. “She slept with a friend.” I told him I was sorry but he shook off my apology, saying it meant nothing now, though I sensed it meant a great deal. He dove back into his past- At first, his sister, who coincidentally was dating Marilyn’s brother (and would go on to marry him), told Johnny to stay away, adding she was a virgin. “Yea okay” he said and I could see how he relished the memory in his mind’s eye of the woman he lost nearly fifty years ago. He told me how right away, when he started to court her, she asked if he had rubbers and how he had to walk four blocks to the store since she’d caught him by surprise. At this point in the conversation I was blushing, which he graciously pointed out. But because we’d talked on so many other points so far I’d accepted that old men think of and enjoy conversing on all manner of topics. As they say (or perhaps, as I would say for him)- He may be old, but he aint dead. He continued… “By the time I was back and had turned to put my coat on the chair, she was undressing.” With a gesture of the hands he described how her clothes fell away from her so easily. Before he’d undone a stitch, he said, she was lying naked on the bed. “Naïve, eh? She was good.”

But the future was not to be so pleasant… One day she’d betray him with a friend. Amazingly, I presume, his love was strong and yet she would drift further from him still and meet a Polish guy on a cruise, and marry him. “What’s an Italian girl doing marrying a Polish guy?” He asked, “But she did. She married him.” Johnny reminded me of how desperately he had wanted her and how he would have protected her, had children with her. “More than anything I wanted a daughter” he said. “After she married the Polish guy it wasn’t long before she was all stitched up. No children. Serves her right” he said, though I could sense the faintest question mark at the end of that statement. With the spite that comes from a bitter past his glossy eyes hardened and he said, “I did that to her.” I think he meant it was karma. His eyes were brimming. I could feel his yearning for another life that slipped through his fingers. “I would have been a good father” he said. His love, though wronged by his Marilyn, still burned in him and I could see that it would until the day he died.  As our conversation slowed I looked at my watch and realized that it was time to head to work. 8:45, on the dot. “I’m headed over that way” he said, and I thought, what are a few minutes late to work for an experience like this? I cleared the table and offered to toss his cup for him, which after a moment’s hesitation he allowed. I threw it in the trash, still full.

We turned the corner to Huntington street and he waved to three successive friends, older gentlemen like him, smiling at his young company. “What a perfect day” I commented, feeling the sun on my face as the cold air whipped gently at our hair. “It’s days like this” John said, “that I like to go down to the water. I grab a cup of coffee, sit on the bench and at about a quarter-of-seven I watch the sun come up. There’s nothing like it.” For the next block we made small talk until we arrived across from the YMCA at Northeastern. “Here’s where I live” he pointed his cane in the direction of the YMCA. I had no time to ask where he meant. We shook hands and he looked down, almost bashfully and said, “I hope I find you again Emily. How will I find you again?” Since I didn’t truly know him, I could only comfortably leave our strange friendship up to fate. “I take the bus each morning, around the same time. If it’s meant to be I’ll see you again.” We shook hands. Just then, another friend of his walked past and said hello, so Johnny turned to answer.  I started off towards the Museum and looked back once. He turned and caught my eye, waved, gave a sweet half-smile and turned back to his friend. I made my way to work, smiling inwardly. Despite the bittersweet stories that had been laid out before me, I knew we’d both go forward with a bright spot on our day.

Thanks for reading,

Love Emily <3

P.S. Here is the photo that made me laugh so hard I cried yesterday (hysterics due in part to lack of sleep) plus two favorite pics of Joe, friends and I from a recent night out! -->