Let Them Eat Cake

School trip to France. Hooray! I took French for just that reason. Surely speaking French meant someday going where French was spoken. I got hired at Rennebohm Rexall Drug Store’s Coffee Shop and started saving up.

I was assigned to wait tables at the state capitol location where I just knew I’d inevitably meet a young, change the world man, wearing a 3-piece suit, without a shirt. After France, we’d move to Manhattan. He’d work at the UN. I’d be a trophy husband until I was cast on a soap opera.

Ronald Reagan ruined that.

Downtown Madison was overrun with mentally ill people displaced when institutional budgets were slashed.

My coffee shop was essentially a soup kitchen funded by Catholic Charities.

The regulars were terrific people, with struggles. They were, in their own ways, generous. Grateful for each other’s company and appreciative when treated with respect.

Cheers meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  

My boss was Nurse Ratched. Peg. Nearly as bitter as our coffee. Hair like dryer lint, her lips were thin and tense. As though the pale outline of pink had been left on her mouth by Liquid Paper and blood.

A cautionary tale. A lesson in who not to let yourself become.

Peg hated me - the way someone stuck hates someone who is not.

To be fair I hated her too, as only an angry, repressed 16-year-old can hate.

Peg made my life hell – undoubtedly with good intention. She was just getting me, the gay kid, ready for the eternal damnation she was sure awaited me.

So, I just concentrated on my regulars.

Elaine who tearfully called me Danny because I looked like her dead son.

Ted, the chain smoker. Haughty. Fabulous. An addict. Ascots from Goodwill.

Bambi.

She was my favorite. Hyper feminine. Cascading curls. A babydoll voice. When asking her what she’d like for lunch, Bambi would say, “$10,000 to get my man out of jail.”

Peg did her best to diminish me in front of these sweet people. She’d demand I redo something menial for a third or fourth time – wipe a pie cabinet, clean a grease trap, relinquish my dreams. Whatever.

I wondered if I was just being sensitive, but then I’d notice the counter full of mentally ill people looking at her with a what-the-hell subtext.

I’d visualize my beret, dream of France, and carry on.

Finding new ways to make me miserable became her hobby.

On the upside, I did learn how to hold a grudge.

One day I was refilling coffee and chatting up the regulars when I was called to the basement. Peg was standing by the rack of nicotine gold and tobacco brown polyester uniforms.

“Greg, a shirt is missing. Did you steal it?”

“What? Why would I steal anything that reminds me of this place?”

“You really hate working here don’t you?”

“No.” Pause. “I hate working with you.”

She scoffed. “I don’t think you were made for Rennebohm’s.”

I took a deep breath of mildew. I stared at the cobwebs and boxes of saccharin.

I thought about France.

“You’re wrong Peg. Rennebohm’s wasn’t made for me. I quit.”

On my last day, Bambi baked a cake. It was lopsided, but beautiful. It was dry, but delicious. In the center of the cake was a tiny Eiffel Tower. Bambi smiled and said, “You’ll get there someday. I know it.”

Peg refused her slice, and chided Bambi for bringing cake to the restaurant.

Peg missed it all. Sad.

My new, less lucrative job was near Rennebohm’s. I was scooping ice cream by the University, where I was sure to meet a med student wearing skin-tight mesh scrubs. We’d fall in love and move to LA. He’d be the doctor to the stars. I’d be a trophy husband until I was cast on a soap opera.

One day while walking to work, police cars and sirens sprang from nowhere, blocking the street and forcing pedestrians behind barricades.

Word quickly spread through the crowd that a woman had just robbed a bank.

Reportedly she had asked for exactly $10,000.00 … to get her man out of jail.

Bambi.

I heard she was found incompetent to stand trial.

I don’t know what happened to her after that. Nowhere in my imagination does she get a happy ending.

Life has only gotten harder for people like my sweet friends.

Now, forty-five years later, when I pass a homeless person with kind eyes, I sometimes find myself wondering if they ever baked someone a cake.