The Complainers' Cafe

(Note: This collection is technically humorous, but this particular section contains a few unpleasant bits, which is why I have the entire collection classed in the "Biography" category, not in the straight "Humor" category.)

At the far end of the bakery, just before you got to the produce department, we had this folding table with a plastic, flannerl-backed tablecloth (which we changed with the season) and a few folding chairs set up, as a customer convienience. But mind you, I'm not sure how many people were able to use it. Most nights that I worked, it turned into the private property/hang out for three guys in their late sixties. We'll call them Larry, Moe and Joe (for obvious reasons).

Joe was a quiet, nondescript guy with greyish brown hair, usually wearing a polo shirt and corduroys, no matter the season or weather. Not much personality. Basically a yes-man to whatever stronger-minded person happened to be present.

Larry was the nice guy of the group, friendly, always a kind word for everyone, a grandfatherly sort, white hair under a brown and red plaid cabbie's cap.

Which brings us to Moe, the center guy of the trio, dour-looking old codger with a bulldog face and beady black eyes, Supposedly the guy was a millionaire in plastics who owned part of a local company, but he sure didn't loook like one. You know the image you get when someone says "redneck": the unshaven, scroungy-lookin' white guy in a flannel shirt over a beer-belly, over dingy blue jeans and workboots. That's what he looked like. Next to him, Archie Bunker looked like Gandhi.

They tended to drift in about seven-thirty at night, or at least Moe would show up, if not the other two as well, dirnk coffee, eat doughnuts straight from the case (I used to wonder how many of them they actually paid for, especially because there was a large sign reading "Please pay for your selections before eating them" on the case. Then *I* started getting in trouble for their thefts!). If all three of them had gathered, Moe would take this oppurtunity to get on his (metaphorical) soapbox and pontificate about eeeeverything imaginable. Joe would blandly agree with him. But Larry actually would make objections to the contrary. Lest you think this became an intelligent debate between rational adults, said discussions would tend to decay into Moe argueing his (perennially narrow) viewpoint, and woe betide Larry for thinking otherwise, which to hear Moe say it, made Larry a flamin' pinko liberal. On account of this, I tended to refer to this table as The Complainers' Cafe, which became a private joke between Stella and I, since she found them just as highly annoying and boring to have to overhear night after night after night.

Some of the most notable proclamations:

* Re: the horrors in Kosovo -- "There's no one gettin' killed over there/no genocide over there/no mass graves/Clinton sent troops over there to make himself look good." (Oh yeah? Like history, specifically something resembling the Holocaust, can't repeat itself? Was he over there? Man hasn't evolved very much in the past 2,000 years, so whether it's Nero killing Christians, the Turkish overlords of Armenia starving Armenians, Hitler killing Jews and Gypsies, or Milosevic killing Muslims, genocide happens! I bet this guy's parents said something eeriely similar after World War II when the photos from Auschwitz appeared.... I wanted to say that to his face, or something to that effect, backing up Larry's arguments to the contrary, but I didn't dare because the Emperor was a close family-friend of Moe's, and if it came out that I had DARED to question the awesome wisdom of the all-knowing Moe, I'd be out of a job quicker than you can say, "Lest we forget...")

*Re: The 2000 presidential election debacle -- When it looked like Gore was ahead: "Oh God, if Gore gets elected, there'll be a second Great Depression/we're all gonna be living in cardboard boxes if Gore gets in the White House!" When Bush got ahead: "Oh God, if Bush gets elected, there'll be a second Great Depression/we're all gonna be living in cardboard boxes if Bush gets in the White House!" (Do I hear an echo?? I'd like to see what Moe had in mind for an economic plan... and who did that leave him to vote for anyway, Ralph Nader?! [How much you wanna bet he voted for himself?] I'm not gonna say who *I* voted for, but Moe's blatherings were enough to make me hope the guy got in the White House and did a bang-up job running this country, just to spite Moe.)

*Re: Post 9/11 and the talk about another draft -- "Women should be drafted the next time there's a war: it'll toughen them up." (Sorry pal, I think entering the military should be a matter of personal decision. It's not that I'm unpatriotic, far from it: My sainted Irish grandfather Mick Maguire was in the second wave at the landing at Normandy on D-Day, 1944. Granted, if Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein sent their goons over here en masse, I'd be hiding in the bushes throwing bricks at them, but I've chosen not to put myself in that kind of situation. Someone has to stay home and keep the home fires burning so the returning troops can have something to come back to. For that matter, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, which can be most briefly described as a clinical version of the absent-minded professor behavior, with the addition of some kind of hightened sensory awareness which can cause people with this condition to overload very easily. In my case it's hearing, so putting Holly the hearing-enhanced in combat is gonna lead to instant shell-shock. If I entered the military at all, I'd be with the think tanks in the back room.)

*The discussions didn't always pertain to current events. Moe and his wife were seperated at one point and it sounded like they were filing for divorce. Moe came out with a thoroughly misogynistic statement if I ever heard one: "Women should pay men alimony instead of men paying women alimony." (Only applicable if the woman actually makes more money than the man does and if the man has custody of the kids. Which wasn't the case here because it sounded like his wife didn't work, and they had kids older than me who were married and had kids of their own. Needless to say, the two of them got back together and next thing you knew, Moe was gushing about how wonderful his wife was! Somehow she went from Elvira Gultch, the Wicked Witch of the West to Marilyn Monroe in less than two months...)

*Occasionally, Larry would gain the floor. I don't know how that happened, but it did once or twice. Needless to say, he didn't keep the floor for long. The most notable of these discussions occurred when Moe had bought twenty dollars in scratch tickets and lotto tickets (Don't ask me why he did this....). Larry started talking about what he'd do if he won the lottery, and his choices were admirable: he said he'd use some to sponsor a kid in a developing nation and he'd donate some to help a crisis center for teens close to where he lived, amongst other things. Moe added that he'd donate the money to pay off the national debt. Mind you, I can't help seeing a lot of merit in that statement. However, this is also the same guy who complained about how much the government had screwed him for (or words to that effect) when he filed his income taxes. And then he started off on another harangue about how badly this country has been run and how the whole government needs to be restructed, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. (God help us if he ever ran for public office! If he made it into Congress, he'd start fillibusters so long he'd shatter the record held by Strom Thurmond -- every week! And if he made it to the White House, can't you see him vetoing the First Amendment?!)

* * * * * * *

Needless to say, two years have passed since I left that Grocery Bag. There's been considerable employee turn-over, most of the assistant managers have been transferred to other stores; even the Emperor has moved on (wish it had happened while I was working there, or I might still be there...). I was in there very recently after seven-thirty at night and I stopped by the bakery on purpose, to see if anyone I knew was there. They'd got rid of the coffee bean dispensers, they had new products, they'd even changed the bread rack. But over at a folding table with a red-checkered plastic tablecloth, sitting on folding chairs and drinking coffee were Larry and Joe, listening to Moe blathering about something. Le Cafe de Complaine was still open for business.