The Customers at the Midnight Café Ken Anderson

The Customers at the Midnight Café by Ken Anderson

The Jaycee

He owns a hardware store, is stingy with his wages, whether clerk or trade. His eyes say that he’ll pay you ten, no more— his crystal eyes that come alive with lust. Like some small businessmen you’ve seen, he wears a wrinkled, light-green leisure suit.

Trick

The lumbering, gangly child —he’s thirty-five— who forces love in bed remarks the sign announcing a revival Friday night. The lonely youth will go with him for food or no good reason, just that rape somehow seems better than the unforeseen. He’s hard to hurt, and yet an unexpected kindness may, by accident, forgive without relent.

Luck

The minor hazards change our lives: the inauspicious ghost among the glass reflections of the counter customers, uncertain eyes in a sharp, decisive face. Sometimes your white knight coughs and pays his check, then vanishes into the night, someone who sat for minutes just in reach.

Bobby Darlington

Brown shoes, green socks, red pants, blue jacket, hair half brown and gray that’s thin and sprayed in place— our Bobby Darlington’s come to cruise. He turns to size us up, then lingers near the cigarette machine before one last, seductive wink goodbye.

Chevalier

No dignity distinguishes despair, O mon chevalier, who turns to stare, this face I’ve seen, but can’t remember where, another bar, another late café. O gallant, in your courting days with jonquils for a Southern belle, the cool winds and the yellow leaves portend the night you will not score and winter’s rude affront.

Wayne

His face crinkles when he kindly smiles, just in to check the place, a coke to go. A lonesome lover visited last week. Yet, married now, he met him at a friend’s where stories of the good old days recalled a lovers’ quarrel, a car chase, a flashing gun, the state asylum, prison cells. But when his wife inquires, he never tells.

Gary Wine

He doodles, smokes, and lays the cryptic napkin on the edge of the table, revealing symbols, numbers, circles, squares, and Gary Wine, his name, with his address. Like a tiny harbinger of a life that’s trapped, yet yearns for brilliant, merciful release, a moth conveys his message through the air. His mind’s on someone else who flew away.

The He-She

The he or she beside the entrance orders, waits, with a belt embossed with mystical designs. Ambiguous, austere Tiresias, explain the double snakes, tonight’s distress, the doleful prospect of your sunken eyes. What sex can solve life’s Sphinx-like riddle best? And why did Hera blind you, give you sight?

Information

Greg works and studies at the college, cruises in an old white Chevy late at night. He’s short and blond, a little overweight, flat broke, but young and out, not out, that is, not in. He knew about the horse show when I asked, in fact, owns horses, rides the trails at school, two years to go. A dirt road east of town descends through trees to a secret realm of sighs.

“The backfield’s where I want to play,” he says, then adds, “I let out a hustler once.”

Yet how can I sift the truth from his confession, especially when he has so little to lose.