that was a good excuse for it, and maybe not, but it made Heathen wonder what else he made up, since he could swap identities so apparently easily. Maybe he wasn’t even the Dangler Dag from before, and was just some new guy, pretending.
The next customers came in, and he engaged in more happy chatter about life in NZ, lying the whole time, and plink, plink, plink, more coins landed in the tip jar. By the end of the day, when they divvied up the week’s worth, Heathen half-expected Dag to demand a greater share for being the reason most of the money was in there, and she would have been hard-pressed to argue it. He didn’t, once again, the too-perfect employee.
• • •
The Hero was not always a Hero. The Hero underwent a transformation, both physically and metaphysically. The Hero was once just like you, only more so. The Hero became what he had not been before. But the Hero knows whereof you speak. And speak you may. The Hero has provided a forum. Click here to discuss amongst yourselves. And watch this space.
• • •
In addition to the daily featured coffee blend on the chalkboard, Dag kept trying out his own “specials of the day,” or, as Heathen thought of it, trying to be the special of the day. One day’s amusement: “Do you have a favourite cup?” Heathen watched Dag wave his hand with a flourish over the array of absolutely identical white china cups with the coffee-ringed logos. He’d been doing it all day, asking everybody he served the same question. The reactions he got were mixed. Some people just smiled or chuckled lamely and said nothing. Quite a few looked at him like he was slow-witted and really meant it. There were mumbles of “Any one will do.” A couple of people asked, seemingly seriously, “Is it extra?” Heathen had told him to give his lame question a rest already. Twice. Dag ignored her.
Finally, on his fiftieth go round, late afternoon, someone bit. The woman, a regular business type from the admin office at the convention centre, was there with some coworkers. She looked startled for a moment, then laughed and played along, like she was picking a goldfish at the pet store. “I’ll take that one. No,” as his hand hovered over the tray, “no, not that one…just to the left. Yeah, that one.”
“Not the one I’d pick,” Dag said, feigning skepticism, “but I don’t know, give it a try.” The woman was still smiling a minute later when she sat down with her latte and her friends. Dag bopped around to the next order, clearly thrilled finally to be indulged. Heathen rolled her eyes at them. He looked pretty smug, but the upside at least was, now that someone had played along, he stopped asking everybody else.
Twenty minutes later, he bussed the table as the woman and her co-workers stood up to put their coats on. “I’ll keep this one aside for you,” he said in a conspiratorial stage whisper, with a glance at Heathen.
When he was back at the counter and the woman was gone, Heathen said, “Oh, my god, are you for real?”
“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. I’m making this up as I go along. Anyway, you heard the lady. It’s her favourite.”
He racked cups into the dishwasher, framing the one with a couple of spoons to keep it apart from the rest of the cuppular masses. Heathen was sure he did it just to irritate her.
Later on, as she unloaded, he whisked it out from under her hands. “I’ll take that.”
She sussed what he was up to immediately and stood there with her hands on her hips. Dag looked around behind the cash area. There was a high shelf in the display area just left of the main cash with a bunch of travel mugs for sale on it. Dag rearranged the mugs to make space. Then he put the cup up there just so, placing it exaggeratedly, like an heirloom, then standing back to appraise it.
“Are you angling for employee of the month, or just Mr. Chicken Soup for the Coffee Drinker’s Soul?”
“Hey, Heathen,” he turned on her, and his voice got suddenly much sharper than she’d ever heard it. “Thanks for dropping in from your other career, but right now, I’ve only got this one thing to do. And I will not be continually crapped on just for amusing myself in a menial job, okay?”
That took Heathen so much by surprise that she actually found herself going out of her way to be nicer to him for the rest of the shift. “Nicer” meaning that she didn’t deliberately hassle him about anything, or hang back and give him all the crap tasks, like cleaning the bathroom, or slide out for more than one cigarette break an hour. And “rest of the shift” being only about another two hours, anyway. Because Heathen liked to think she was a reasonable, considerate person after all, and not one simply motivated by the pointed reference to her skiing, sitting there like a veiled threat not to swap or take shifts for her in the future. No, it certainly wasn’t that.
Four
Two days later, in the middle of the morning rush, Dag, on cash, nudged Heathen, who was plating pastries. He indicated a woman in the lineup. “I’ll bet she doesn’t remember me,” he said. “This’ll be fun.” On her turn, he took her order, then said, “Wait a sec. I’ve got your favourite cup set aside.” Both Heathen and the woman goggled as he made a show of leaving the cash to retrieve it from the high shelf before passing it on to Mohammed at the bar.
By the time Mohammed handed it over, full, the customer was grinning like a kid, taking her special cup, with her coworkers looking on in amazement.
Within a week, Heathen was once again utterly irritated and reluctantly impressed at the same time. The whole damn group was eating out of his hand, and now he had a shelf of five identical “favourite” BlackArts cups put aside for the lot of them. The travel mugs were pushed to the dusty back recesses of the shelf. Dag, for his part, insisted to Heathen and the customers that he knew which of the clone cups “belonged” to each of the women and never, ever mixed them up. He too, seemed pretty impressed with what had escalated out of one day’s idle amusement.
Heathen, who was out for a few days training and competing, heard the rest from other baristas who were on with him the rest of the week. The woman, now introduced as Bonita, had some fun with him, too. At the start of the next work week, she showed up in line again. “That’s not my favourite cup,” she said when Dag passed over her latte. It was “no, no, no,” as Dag hastily cycled through the five special cups. “This is my favourite,” she said and pulled a yellow stoneware mug out of her purse.
“Right on!” Dag said, poured her latte into it and added an extra dollop of foam for putting one over on him.
So there was one yellow mug on the shelf along with the identical white BlackArts cups. Heathen didn’t have a shift until the end of the week, by which time the rest of the bunch had brought their own mugs in, and there was this shelf, now, of people’s own favourite mugs to use when they came to BlackArts, and the women were chorusing, “Hi, Dag!” at the first sight of him.
“Jesus, Dag,” Heathen said without a trace of irony and with more than a hint of awe, the first time she saw it, “you’ve become a god to them.”
• • •
