The Reader

Unlike everyone else in the store, he’s sitting at the counter. Two binders, both red, spread out on either side of him, dozens of cluttered papers between them. He flips pages back and forth, eyeing over one sheet and returning to another. A ballpoint pen dances between his fingers. He’s in uniform, Air Force it appears, and he’s obviously studying for something. I can’t imagine he’d be looking over classified documents in a place as public as Starbucks, though from the amount of black on his papers he very well may be doing just that. 

The man is of some type of Asian descent, but he has no discernable foreign accent — if anything, he speaks with a heavy Brooklyn accent instead. I hear him probably three times while I’m there: Once to ask for his first cup of tea, once to ask for a Black Eye (dripped coffee with two shots of espresso, so it’s safe to say the man’ll be up for a few more hours), and a final time to say goodnight to the employees upon closing time. When the barista hands him his Black Eye, he pounds it back like a champion. The barista is impressed, something I gauge from the way her eyes open wide and her audible “Wow!”

His pen scribbles on several sheets of paper, sometimes dotting the same location while his eyes scan back and forth. His left knee bounces up and down like a sewing machine while he goes over this mass of information. Maybe he’s studying for a promotion, or maybe he’s just going over information that he’s taking home from work. 

He keeps to himself, sometimes moving papers away from other people if the store gets a little crowded. I can’t tell if that’s out of courtesy or out of privacy — perhaps it’s out of both. Perhaps it’s just one. My mind bounces; on one hand he could simply be studying for something, on the other hand…

On the other, he might be a super secret intelligence officer going over classified documents of a pending alien invasion. What if. That’s what I enjoy about people watching — it’s as much focusing on real details as it is about letting your mind wander. 

The Little Sh*t

He’s here more often than I am, and the people here like him less than the freebie skater boy. Sure he’s only a kid, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t sit right with the people around him.

His height is basically non-existent. He is, at best, four-foot-something. Shaved head, big teeth, and he’s always “dancing”. I’m sure to him it looks like he’s the next Justin Timberlake or Michael Jackson or some other smooth pop-star, but in his outward appearance he looks awkward and corny. Of course there’s nothing wrong with awkward and corny — I myself was an utterly terrible mixture of those two when I was his age. The difference, however, is that I wasn’t so outwardly and inexplicably rude to the people around me.

He comes in every night with a man that appears to be his grandfather — though it could be his dad, I won’t pretend to know. They don’t really talk to one another even when they leave the store and sit for a couple of hours at a table outside. The man he comes in with orders a tall coffee, as plain and bold and black as tar. He used to order the kid a cup of water but has since stopped that because they started charging for it. While the older man waits for his drink, the kid runs or walks or dances around the store as if it were his home. He bumps into people and doesn’t say “excuse me” or apologize, he’ll — no, look, one time he came up to me and stared at my laptop screen for a solid minute before looking at me and saying “‘Sup?”

‘Sup? ‘Sup? Who the hell does this shortstack think he is?

Like the freebie boy, this one has a reputation as well. Where the other kid asks for free stuff, this one is known for his rudeness and inability to stop doing things when people ask him to stop. He’s known for his sense of entitlement.

“Is he in school?” asks one of the baristas.
“No, I don’t think so,” starts another, “I asked him if he was and he told me he wasn’t allowed to go to school.”

They laugh in disbelief. Not allowed to go to school? That’s crazy talk.

“One time I caught him with his hand in the tip jar!” says an employee.
“Oh my god! What did you do?”
“I yelled at him! I told him to get his hand out of it and told him to leave before I called the cops!”
“That’s crazy. He’s so rude!”

They laugh again, this time in agreement. They discuss a time when he purposely knocked over a container of half & half and ran out before they could get to him. Why they even let him back inside is beyond me, why they haven’t talked to the man that brings the boy in is even further beyond me.

Behind me sits another man on a MacBook, and through the sounds of spitting espresso machines and laughing baristas I hear four simple words roll off his tongue…

What a little shit.

“The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.”

After a week of life and people watching, I’ve decided to expand this blog’s potential even slightly. As of tonight, along with daily people watching posts, I will be posting quotes that have to do with watching those around you.

Of course that’s not it — simply posting a quote wouldn’t get us anywhere, so we’re going to be expanding on these quotes in posts that are (hopefully, no promises) under 400 words. Brief pieces about what these quotes mean to us and how they can be implemented in everyone’s day-to-day struggle.

After searching long and hard, I’ve found the right quote to kick this feature off with, one by Michael Jackson: “The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.”

This whole people watching thing is as much a plan to help me become a better writer as it is to see things more clearly, to make an attempt at really seeing everything around me and taking it all in instead of simply noticing things and forgetting about it. It is by all means an education. I sit in places for minutes or hours and jot down what someone is wearing or what they’re saying not just for the purpose of blogging, but to become a better writer. These pieces are, if nothing else, individual character studies. Examinations of humanity. Some may call it eavesdropping, some may call it creeping — and I wouldn’t argue with them. I drop myself into intimate situations and construct the world around me out of words. What’s the weather like? What’s she wearing? What is his laugh like? What are they drinking?

I gain my education by watching and writing about people…about humanity, the masters of their world. In my week of doing this, I’ve discovered people watching to be as much of an art as it is a hobby, and as much of an education as it is an art. As such, Jackson’s quote is the perfect way to kick off my new daily quote feature.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, and as always I appreciate you reading.

The Ginger & His Mom

Thousands of little orange wires sprout from his scalp, where bulks of curls collapse onto one another. Freckles by the masses dot the kid’s face, which surround two murky green eyes. He’s young, though I’m not sure how young – ten, maybe, let’s go with ten years old. It seems like kids always look younger than they actually are, especially now that I’m in college.

He walks back and forth a lot, waiting for his mother – here with him – to get off the computer. “When are you going to be done?” he asks every few minutes, only to be met with rolling eyes and responses like “Soon” and “Be quiet.”

He’s wearing camouflage pants (the kind that zip off at the knees to turn into shorts) and a bright orange t-shirt – brighter than his hair – with light up shoes that flash red and blue with every step he takes, pacing and pacing some more. He leans in over his mother’s shoulder, staring at what she’s doing until she rubs her head into her shoulder as if to tell him to go away – leave her alone.

His hands touch everything; every surface of every table and door and trashcan, and then they touch his face. I shudder every time he does it.

Unlike her son, she is not a redhead. Her hair is wiry and sandy brown with streaks of grey riding through it. Early forties, probably, as I can see some wrinkles starting to line her face. She’s working on her laptop, an older silver Dell model – I don’t know what she’s working on, but I know it runs Windows XP. She has headphones plugged into her ears, but I’m not sure if she’s actually listening to anything because she can hear her son just fine.

I’m guessing she has them in so no one bothers her, a fact that doesn’t deter her son from constantly prodding her with questions like “When are we leaving?” and “What are you doing?”

She’s wearing a purple sweater – which is ridiculous given how warm it is outside – and green khaki pants with brown moccasins. With those shoes, I might add, she’s wearing bright pink socks. A clear, half-empty cup of iced coffee is sweating, leaving a nice sized puddle of water around itself.

Her son walks outside after another failed attempt to get her to go home, looks at me and asks, “What’s up?”

I nod and say “Not much.”

He’s resting against the window with his hands behind his back, pushing himself away from the window and falling back into it over and over again – something I too do when I’m bored and leaning. He sighs a deep, exaggerated sigh and kicks his toes against the concrete. Inside, I see his mom close her laptop and shovel it into a briefcase before standing up, stretching, and downing the remainder of her iced coffee.

Excited to finally be leaving, the ginger boy runs back inside and stands next to his mother while she checks her phone. It’s like she’s making him wait on purpose, just because he kept annoying her with questions. Eventually they begin to walk towards the door, before she changes direction and, instead, walks into the bathroom – the one place he cannot follow her.

In a final moment of despair and disbelief – an act of surrender – he throws his hands into the air and once more leans his back into the wall.