Member Bio: Attila Bronsky
Attila Bronsky has been a member of the Markham Village Writers since 2005, writing fiction and currently working on his first novel.
Black Coffee and Flies on the Horizon
By Attila Bronsky
Part 1
Primo Klaxon awakens to the beeps and blue glow of his oversized alarm clock, feels his body under the covers, can’t remember what he did last night, and feels no changes in his life. No cosmic shift had occurred during the night, no realignment of the unaligned, no justification of an unjust world, no godsend revelation that might alter the course of his life. Nothing has changed the truth – he’s still a loser.
By his calculations, he’s fifty-two years from an eternal berth in a cold ground, if all goes smoothly past disease or unfortunate accident. He tries to keep himself fit, but knows he won’t pass the age of eighty because no male in his family has lived to be eighty-one and why should it be different for him? He wakes every morning with this deep emptiness, carrying a long face into his short life. What else was there? What burst of euphoria could catapult him into a different frame of mind and shake off this perpetual funk?
Time. He’s running out of it. He knows there are many things to accomplish yet he can’t think of one thing he wants to accomplish. He believes there must be a purpose, but he doesn’t know what it is. He has no purpose, that’s the problem, and every day staggers on and there’s another day lost. Only 18,900 days left and after tomorrow, only 18,899 and on and on and less and less. Time flies when you want to live forever. He consoles himself with the thought that his suffering job makes the days last longer. Sure, there are probably lots of people who feel like him, but who gives a shit about anyone else? In this universe, Primo struggles alone.
Switching off the alarm, he whispers, “Fuck!” throws off the bedcovers, plants bare feet onto a cold parquet floor and lifts himself into the weekly morning drudgery of getting ready for work. He’s an expert at keeping quiet lest he wake his old mother who, if roused, will surely appear as if from thin air to ask him if he’d like her to make breakfast. He doesn’t understand why his mother still asks this question since for the many years he’s been going to work, he has always responded with, “No, I’m all right, Ma. Go back to bed.” He doesn’t want breakfast or chitchat or pampering; he just wants to get dressed and get out, and grab a coffee on the way to the seat factory, where he’s the relief man and shop Steward. Or, as he often refers to himself, the walking Complaint Box.
As he stares into the bathroom mirror at the face that keeps changing, at the skin around his jaw that appears droopier than the morning before, he thinks he’s turning blunt. He’s losing the sharpness and tightness of youth. Are the folds over his eyes starting to droop? He squints and counts the creases around his eyes. There’s one more crease per eye than there was yesterday, or is there? How many did he count yesterday? He doesn’t remember. He has his father’s eyebrows. He sees them getting bushier and bushier and finally curling up at the ends like an owl’s horns. He looks at the brown mop on his head. Thank God he still has his hair, though his brush likes to collect batches of it every day. He stares at the big picture, the amalgam of all these failings. There he is – Primo Klaxon – going nowhere fast.
He’s always felt that somewhere inside there was an artist trapped in a straitjacket, fitted and buckled by mundane daily ritual and responsibility. At one time, he thought he was a writer. He likes the sound of words, like crux and gist and juxtaposition. He resolved to write a chapter a day. Sounds easy. You set a crisp blank page in front of you, get all relaxed and start writing. But after taking a week to rearrange two sentences – a total of twenty-one words including the title – and not knowing where to go from there, he decided he needed help. He purchased a book that would show him how to write a novel. There were so many of these books at the bookstore that he couldn’t decide which. So he closed his eyes and pulled one off the shelf. Being in possession of this book was like holding the answer to the riddle of life. Knowing this book was in the plastic bag lying on the passenger seat as he drove home infused him with a great enthusiasm. Nothing could stop him now. He settled on the couch and opened the book. Skipping the introduction, because he feels introductions are pointless, as are prologues, he began the book proper with the first sentence of the first chapter. It told him that a novel consists of 55,000 words or more. And there he stopped.
He thought of the twenty-one words he created over the past week, that he still isn’t one hundred percent happy with, and this gargantuan number that seemed to blink in his mind’s eye. How was he going to do it? He doesn’t have that many words in him. Then he thought maybe painting would be better. It looks easier. He’s already fucked up mentally and socially and you really don’t have to know how to draw. A few brush strokes here, a splash or a drip there and maybe one day, a well-connected critic might see his work and declare him a newfound genius. And people would look at his work and see things he’d never intended. And he could stand there, aloof, acting like what he does is no big deal while people tell him he’s great. But then he thought, how could he live an artist’s life? He could never see himself living downtown, looking like a shaggy derelict, riding a rusty old bicycle to the open-air market to buy a pear and a plum because that’s all an artist could afford. Then he thought, even for his own personal pleasure, he could have taken painting lessons at night school or on Saturdays, but he never did. He knows he’ll never do anything to advance his life, but he can complain about it. He says to the guy looking back at him, “Can you save me from myself?”
He sees it all going downhill after thirty. Like a magma flow down the side of a volcano, you can’t run fast enough from it and then it swallows you, and then you’re forty. Step back, your head still spinning from turning forty and you’re fifty, ten years away from being a senior citizen and most of your life is gone. Gone, and all you’ve got is memories. But what memories does he have? He wonders if he shouldn’t just choke his sorry life; end it all.
“What’s the point?” he says, then washes his face, brushes his teeth and prepares himself mentally for the day that will soon accost him once he flips the lock, pulls back the front door and steps out into uncertainty. As he dresses, he wonders what could go wrong today? He knows from experience that it’s never as bad as it turns out to be and at some point in the day, usually by mid afternoon, he’ll look back and think, ‘That wasn’t so bad’ and then he can look forward to a nice dinner and the placidity he feels after five p.m. When the night comes, there are no expectations. No live stresses. Just the memory of a day spent, home and the comfort of all that’s familiar. But now, he asks himself, if I’m so concerned of fleeting time, why the hell am I thinking of night when morning has just broken and why must I think negative so that something positive might happen? He answers himself with ‘that’s just the way I am.’ He was born that way and no lame little resolutions will ever change him, and when he’s eighty, he’ll die that way.
At six a.m., morning breaks cold and windy and instantly freezes his nose hairs once he’s out the door. He hops into his cold van and after a weak but insistent effort, the engine comes to life and as Primo rubs himself into the hard cold seat, he remembers that there’s a new donut shop in the neighborhood. He smiles because now he can get his favorite cup of coffee en route to work without going the long way. Coffee is not all the same. People who don’t drink coffee will tell you that coffee from this place is no different than coffee from that place. But in the morning, if coffee memory isn’t stimulated, you end up having a shitty day.
He approaches the corner and is doubly happy when he realizes his brand of gas station shares the same corner as his brand of coffee. What convenience! There’s a drive-through, but Primo won’t take it. Drive-throughs are for transients and lazy-asses. The servers are rushed and confused and Primo has suffered too many drive-through disappointments.
He’s fifth in line and this allows him time to absorb the atmosphere. He admires the innards of this coffee house; the neatness and cleanliness of freshly finished construction. When the line advances he becomes aware of the server, a lovely girl with auburn hair and brown visor cap. He takes an inventory of the beauty before him.
Small tits.
He lifts himself onto tiptoes and watches her move to the donut rack.
Nice ass.
When it’s his turn, their eyes lock, and in that instant, all Primo’s shortcomings and uncertainties are swept away… then she looks down at the counter.
“What would you like?” she asks. You, he thinks, but says, “Large black coffee please.”
She makes it. He drops exact change into her outstretched palm and as he walks away, he looks back. He’s just seen a goddess.
Within minutes he’s at the plant and as he backs into his reserved parking space, he realizes where he is but can’t remember getting there. It’s Primo’s habit to arrive forty-five minutes before his shift. He spends it quietly in a desolate cafeteria. He’s been doing this since his father got him a job here when he was seventeen, when everyone realized that Primo wasn’t going to college if he was even going to finish high school. Primo argued that what he was learning in school wasn’t interesting, and he could never absorb what wasn’t interesting, yet he was able to absorb everything in this place – every machine, every procedure. And that’s ironic and it makes Primo laugh a little when he realizes that the job he hates the most is the thing he does the best. Here in the cafeteria, Primo is at peace. He sees people arriving at work in the nick of time, donning their work face and then getting right at it. Primo is unable to get right at it. He needs to warm up. He likes to sip his coffee and read the paper but today, he forgot to get a paper. The donut girl has taken over his mind. He thinks about the donut girl all through his shift. She helps him deflect the slings and arrows of his insufferable workday. But there’s hope now. The vision of the donut girl has made him numb to the scourges of time.
Over dinner, his old mother recounts episodes from her youth. She does this a lot, laughs with herself as she remembers and Primo smiles at her, but he isn’t listening. He stares at the kitchen window and thinks about the donut girl. He looks at the clock and knows his morning is eleven and one half hours away. He goes to bed early, tries to bring on sleep amid the blue glow from the clock radio but he thinks about her still and sees her living in his fantasy… her milky skin with a hint of freckles, arriving atop a great white steed, slipping down from that equine back to bathe in a clear lake surrounded by swans. Of course, she’s naked. Of course, he’ll have his way with her. It’s his fantasy. It’s all good now because he doesn’t know her yet. He could go on like this, imagining what it would be like to touch her but eventually, he’ll want to touch for real. But for now fantasy is good. It’s safe. He doesn’t know if there might be a conflict in personalities. She could turn out to be a little bitch, a possessive, conniving little bitch full of attitude and complaint; a gnawing, grating little whiner who’s always telling you what shirt to wear and if you don’t do what she wants, she’ll pout and give you the cold shoulder for weeks. Primo had once had a girlfriend and now her face flashes before his eyes. He shudders. He’d wasted two years of his life trying to make her happy and, in the end, neither of them were happy. He was miserable trying to satisfy someone who couldn’t be satisfied. What if this donut girl was also insatiable? He realizes he’s fondling himself and decides to take it further; he masturbates and comes quickly, then falls asleep, now encouraged by a purpose.
Over the span of a couple of months, Primo is now part of the six-ten a.m. crowd. He sees the same faces every day: the big guy with the red beard, the woman who counts out exact change while she’s standing in line, then counts it two more times. There’s a guy who drives a dump truck and parks his vehicle diagonally across six parking spaces. There’s an old guy with paint-splattered pants and a dark blue jacket with the inscription, ‘Terry’s Interior Design.’ He sees them, they see him, and sometimes nods are exchanged. There’s only a five-minute window here. If you arrive outside that window, as has happened to Primo once or twice, it’s a different group, a different class. Strangers. But what these people have that he wishes he had, after weeks of patronage, is a great rapport with the girl of his dreams. She smiles at them, says good morning. They don’t even ask for their order. She knows what they want and prepares their orders automatically. Then she says, “Bye, bye. Have a nice day.” Primo wants the same treatment. He wants that familiar friendliness. He wants a relationship with his coffee server but it isn’t happening. Every time he steps up, she won’t look at him. He has to ask for his black coffee. It isn’t a difficult order, a black coffee. That’s the first one they learn at donut school, isn’t it?
It has often been said by people who know him that Primo is judgmental. He can be prejudiced by how someone looks, the sound of their voice, what they say, their actions, and this could be compounded with how Primo is feeling when he meets this adjudged person: Is Primo pissed off? Is he feeling happy? Is he in the mood to be helpful? All these emotions influence Primo’s first impressions, which would always prompt his father to say – probably quoting some mystic Indian guru, since Dad never had any original insights – “You can spot a fly on the horizon but can’t see the elephant in front of you.”
April 15th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I loved both stories! Your dialogue is spot on and you lift an everyday situation to a new level. I hope you submit on a regular basis ‘cos I can’t wait to read more of your work. Sincerely, Betty