The Time I Tried to Work in a Café
The Catastrophe Café.
That was the café I worked in for a few months.
The broken sign bore the tagline:
“Embrace your mistakes.”
The owner was called Jane
and was as accident prone as they come.
You never saw her without
some sort of cast, sling or plaster
showing off her latest mishap.
The walls were decorated
with photographs of disasters,
all the chairs and tables wobbled,
every mug, cup and plate was cracked,
every menu gave you paper cuts.
The kitchen looked like
some sort of bomb site,
a constant mess of dirty dishes,
well-past-the-sell-by-date food
always spilling out of left open fridges.
She’d keep wild animals in the office.
They frequently disordered and destroyed everything,
and she would dance around in the debris
laughing with arms swinging.
I once asked her,
“How on Earth do you put up with this?”
“I adore chaos.
I want chaos to be mine.
I want to take it into my arms,
kiss its lips,
make it blush,
make it squirm and twitch,
I want to make chaos my bitch.
I don’t see why I should be afraid of it.”
The café became a trendy hangout
as Jane’s carefree attitude
was seen as being “Against the system,”
which was totally missing the point, of course,
but we were happy for the business.
I once heard her utter the words,
“Oh fuck.”
I hadn’t thought this was something
she was capable of thinking,
but there they were, those words,
temporarily tattooing a worried look on her
as an error with an order
(something that happened frequently)
resulted in a customer falling
into anaphylactic shock.
That’s when it got too much for me
and a couple of days later
I handed in my resignation.
She responded with frustration:
“You’ll look back on this experience
one day and see what I’ve done for you.
I detest everyone’s quest for perfection.
People need to celebrate things going wrong,
it’s those moments that make us who we are.
Instead we let ourselves be terrified,
never realising that perfection is boring.
I’ve seen perfection. It’s hollow and so fragile
you become too scared to even move.
That is not a life. Life isn’t museum pieces,
it’s organic and complex and sometimes a little dirty.”
“I’m not asking for perfection,
I just don’t think I can handle this!”
“Of course you can’t! I can’t! No-one can!
That’s the truth of it! That’s why we do it!”
(I still haven’t been able to work out
what she meant by those final lines.
Was she crying for help
or trying to make me realise
I can’t control what happens in life?)
Paul Askew lives in Oxford, where he regularly performs his poetry. He curates the written content of Ferment, a lit/art zine, and was recently appointed the title of “Sex Symbol of the Oxford Poetry Scene.” By himself, admittedly, but hey, no-one’s challenged him yet.