The Flying Turk - Part 2
Ulak arrived at the train station five minutes early. He left the Avon bags in his car and bought a ticket to San Francisco. He made the exchange. He boarded the train. He counted the money. He looked for the girl.
"Wait, wait, Ulak!" I stared at him across the table in our favorite diner. We called our meeting Lunch, but the sun set into the auto parts store as we ate all day breakfast and the jukebox played Elton John and Johnny Cash. "You have to tell me what it was like! You can't just say one, two, three, the end. Come on, Ulak, I need the whole story. What clerk was on duty? Was it the snaggletooth bitch? Why did you buy a ticket to San Francisco instead of someplace like Orange County? Wasn't that expensive? Did you see any other people waiting for the train that looked funny or different? Did the police stake out the station? I need to know all of these things."
Ulak dropped his buttered rye toast on his plate. He glanced out the window to the spartan motorcycle coffee house across the street, to the dingy garbage-strewn auto parts store, to the hint of a right wing beach in the distance. "Birdie. You asked me to follow that woman, and that's what I did. I'm telling you what happened. I didn't look at anything. You shouldn't say 'bitch,' it's not a nice word. Really Birdie. You know better. You're a mother."
He picked up his toast and resumed eating. The nerve! The nerve of this man! To have such opportunity! Argh! Crazy Turkish old world conservative man! I took a few bites of potatoes and considered my options, considered all the wild options I could imagine, Turkish torture, or maybe hypnosis, or a new age relaxation tape, or the promise to treat his mother to lunch after suffering through the salon. Damn rational Point A to Point B man. Good thing he can't hear my thoughts, I sneered to myself, because he's a fucking old-fashioned know it all. That's right! A know it all. Blah.
"I don't know why they won't take my coffee here. This is terrible." Ulak grimaced into his cup but kept drinking. His coffee sales business serviced many of the dives skirting the coast, but not here, not in our favorite greasy funny hangout with the nun eating ceasar salad in the corner booth and three marines with shaved mohawk heads sharing dirty jokes and a mound of freedom fries. "They need a good espresso machine here, and shade-grown dark roast, the organic kind. This is unacceptable."
Ulak continued rambling about dark coffees he knew and loved, about equipment for brewing coffee, the roasters he visited in Florida, the plantations in Chiapas where Mayans still work family farms under swelting sun and poverty and the big pockets of distributers like Starbucks. He spat out the word Starbucks, told me how they pretend to have a conscience but refuse to move to all fair trade coffee, how they pay a pittance for beans, how they over roast and call it gourmet. He didn't mention the train station or my breasty customer. He described the young Catholic priest running a Mayan cooperative, his tall stature, the way he wore old clothes and worked the fields and fed the children and had a common law wife and two baby girls of his own, and I realized, oh it hit me, that he fell into the irrational and emotional and whirlpool of color and texture when it came to coffee, when it came to his parents and brother, the things inside his locked-up not-quite-Turish-anymore-not-quite-American heart. It must be hard to live with old parents, I thought, to live the old ways without deodorant, to speak a language steeped in incense male tradition, to meet with a divorced mother Avon lady with an Egyptian tattoo and low cut blouses and a men's utility kilt stuffed with samples and cards and smelling like musk and gardenias.
"So, Ulak. Let's go get some good coffee at that little place by the train station. We can sit and watch the trains go by and you can tell me the rest of the story, ok? I'll buy the coffee, they have that good dark Dutch roast." I hoped my scheme would work, a trip for coffee, a chat on the bench, The Bench, the one where the policeman threatened to arrest me, the bench Ulak must have used before he exchanged Avon bags of hand cream for cash. Maybe it would jog his memory, maybe the coffee would open those neural pathways, let the scene spill into his steaming cup.
To Be Continued....
7:20:26 AM 
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