Jobless

A coffee shop is a shit place to be unemployed.

It’s 9:45 in the morning on a Tuesday. Another hotter-than-fuck day packed full of barely breathable swamp water air, loitering, and day drinking is already underway. Some of the bills were paid. Some were not. Some wouldn’t be getting paid this month.

That’s just the way of things.

At least you’ve got beer money.

The sting and the shame melt away in the mid-morning heat and you couldn’t give a single shit about what anyone else thinks about it anyways because you don’t see the dullness and black clouds swirling behind the eyes of these pressed shirt motherfuckers driving their Toyota Camry to work late because they get paid to make the big bucks and no one’s gonna speak up to them when they roll in fine-as-you-please 45 minutes after they were supposed to be there. Forget getting to work on time, it’s Chest Day. What’s that life even like? Hell if I’ll ever know.

I go to the counter at the coffee shop and get another iced coffee because unrelenting heat is no excuse for caffeine deficiency. Besides, the world might just try to finish me off if I get any meaner. I return to my seat and check the job ads for the 3 millionth time today and discover what I already knew when I got out of bed this morning aching for a paycheck and peace of mind: there are no jobs.

I could go back to working in a restaurant—but then what do you do about all that debt? Four to six years in school, tens of thousands of dollars in debt…and then go back to making cigarette and beer money? That’s not going to end well.

Someone left behind a travel magazine and so out of an overwhelming sense of “Nothing better to do” I pick it up and thumb through the pages. Well, I thumb through the pages that aren’t stuck together.

Pictures of small, quaint European villages. White sand beaches. Beautiful women and men dressed in such a fashion so as to imply ownership of a yacht; whether or not a yacht is, or ever was, in their possession.

I start thinking about how I used to want to live overseas. What it’d be like to be a part of some small ex-pat community in St. Nowhere. To wake up and smoke a cigarillo with my morning espresso. To read a true to life, honest to God newspaper (and wear a Panama hat). To know the locals and have the locals know you. But that requires seed money. Start-up funds. A lack of a certain predisposition to panic attacks stemming from the vague unknown and mildly uncertain. Commitment.

That was a doomed venture from the start. And so, here I am. In the same town I’ve always lived in. Out of work for the second time in as many years. Only this time I didn’t act surprised when word came down that my job was being eliminated. Oh. Damn. That sucks. The best I could muster. No one here seems to get it anyways. Why make a big scene?

I put the magazine down and watch the condensation from my glass pool around its base, making a small pond on the counter top. 10:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. A contingency of business types stroll in for their morning coffee break and for a chance to scan the room and scowl in disapproval of the tattooed bohemian types occupying all of the patio and also the dark corners of the space. Feels good to have someone to look down on, I guess. That’s a luxury. A fringe benefit of the well-employed.

It’s 11am and today is over. No work and that hollowed out and used up feeling in your chest that you can’t quite name but you might as well call defeat anyways because if that isn’t what it is, that’s where it’s headed. It’s hotter than ever and the humidity saps your energy like someone leaning on you. I check my phone for the 100th time this morning. Nothing. No calls in over a week. Everything dried up. Makes sense in this heat, I guess.

Did you know unemployment hurts? First you get tense and you can’t stop clenching your jaw. Eventually that wears off and you just kind of ache for a while. After a while you get restless—which is a really shitty symptom being that you haven’t the means to take your broke and worthless ass anywhere other than a goddamned coffee shop. And that exposes the state that you’re truly in: escapism.

You have coffee at home and, if you’re lucky, air conditioning. But instead of staying home you venture out to a fucking coffee shop of all places. When the last thing you feel like is being surrounded by other people, you go to a coffee shop and sit alone in a crowd and in some cruel and ironic plot twist a sense of quiet and calm sweep over you. But the anger and frustration remain. You’re a grim sonofabitch with an iced coffee and you’ll be damned if you’ll tolerate anyone’s shit.

Your mind wanders and the clink of dishes from the back of the house and the soft drone of multiple conversations acts like one of those white noise machines and you find yourself just zoning out. Staring at, perhaps through, the sidewalk, parking lot, tree line… whatever doesn’t wither under your gaze. You think of ways to get out of this city that don’t involve selling everything you’ve ever owned and trading it for a plane ticket.

The suits are getting up to leave. 11:20am. I’ve never had a job where I could take an hour-long coffee break mid-morning and not get my head chewed off by my boss. What’s that life even like?

They don’t know you exist. You put on your Panama hat, take a drag on your cigarillo, and open up the newspaper. Who knows, maybe you’ll read something inspiring. Or at the very least, maybe someone else just went out of business so you’ll have someone to drink with.