It was Saturday, after all, so Mark figured that he might as well go. He dressed, packed his dilapidated leather briefcase and took the short route through the park. There was little worth looking at anyway on a gray October morning.
In less than ten minutes Mark was wiping his shoes on Impresario Coffee’s welcome mat. The café was uncharacteristically empty for a Saturday morning: besides himself, there was only an elderly couple who had taken the high-top table positioned under the casement window in the east wall — his favorite spot — and a middle-aged man in a camo jacket, the sole occupant of the massive, ancient round oak table in the center of the café.
No one was manning the bar when Mark walked up to it, but the jazz record (maybe Count Bassie, he guessed) signaled that Callie was working that morning. She stepped out of the back room about a minute later.
“Good morning, Calliope,” said Mark with a straight face.
Callie rolled her eyes and turned towards the espresso machine. “Mark,” she said.
None of the usual Saturday morning crew had needed to ask for Mark’s order in a long time: a drip brew coffee with a shot of espresso. Officially, Impresario called this a “Red Eye,” but Callie, a true artisan impatient with those who would merely use espresso rather than savor it, had dubbed it “the War Crime.”
“Where are all the college kids today?” asked Mark.
“Sleeping one off, probably,” said Callie, carefully tamping down the grounds in the espresso machine’s portafilter. “Homecoming, et cetera.”
Callie, maybe a year or two removed from being a “college kid” herself, was now earning her MSW — she aimed to work with homeless single mothers. She was basically a communist. She apparently had a new tattoo every week. She and Mark should have made natural enemies, but it hadn’t worked out between them.
“Anyway,” she continued, “if you haven’t spent all your millions on those dweeby vests by now, maybe you could pitch in and help us buy a halfway-decent espresso machine.”
Mark suppressed a smirk. With hardly any conscious thought he had donned the blue button-down shirt, slacks and Patagonia vest combo that he wore almost every day, even on the weekends — the infamous “Midtown Uniform” that had made its way to the Midwest. Callie frequently mocked him (“oh look, it’s the Peaky Blinders guy”), but in reality Mark just didn’t like to think about clothes any more than necessary.
“Truth is,” said Mark, careful to maintain a flat tone, “that, regrettably, I’ve got to cut back on dweeby vests anyway. The markets didn’t like the strong jobs data this week. Looks like the Fed won’t cut rates as quickly as everyone hoped.”
“Wow. You stockbroker types would think that other people having jobs is a bad thing.” Callie turned her head in Mark’s direction, checking to make sure she was still in bounds.
He nodded solemnly. He would have thrown out a jab about how low unemployment rates were bad for her line of work as well, but he doubted that he could land it just then.
Callie sensed, perhaps, that her sparring partner was not up to his usual form. Without further comment, she poured the espresso shot into the waiting mug of ordinary coffee, then set it on a saucer along with a linen napkin and a miniature mixing spoon. She slid it across the bar to Mark, who handed over a ten-dollar bill and turned away from the bar before she could calculate the change. This was, in fact, his usual method of tipping.
“Sure you can afford that? I mean, with all those horrible working people out there crashing the stock market and everything?” asked Callie, her delivery perhaps a shade less ironic than before.
“Of course,” said Mark, without looking back. “I’ll just sell my extra Porsche. ”
Impressario’s south wall was bisected by a black walnut bar counter. Above it, a series of vertical windows looked out across the street to a row of narrow two-story Victorian houses. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, these were red brick constructions dating back to the end of the 19th century. Beneath the counter stood several square-top stools, each topped by a small cushion that usually made sitting on them tolerable for at least an hour. Mark took the far left stool, the one closest to the corner, and set down his drink.
As he unlatched the briefcase, however, his phone started buzzing in his pocket. His mom was calling again. He studied the green “accept” button until it disappeared, then put the phone and his elbows on the counter, closed his eyes, and began massaging his temples. He would have to at least text back at some point, of course, before she called out the …
“Hey, man,” said a raspy, male voice directly behind him. Mark’s eyes popped open as he felt a jolt of adrenaline coursing through his system, but he set his hands down and turned around on the stool with as much deliberation as he could manage. It was the man in the camo jacket. Close up, he smelled like three packs a day and appeared to be unshaven for about a week. He was average height and, Mark now realized, notably thin. He was wearing a Chiefs jersey underneath the camo and had a couple of indiscernible tattoos on his left hand.
Mark mentally braced himself. It was a running joke amongst his friends and coworkers that he had “Please ask me for money” stamped across his forehead. The Uniform itself was apparently not the culprit, since his colleagues didn’t seem to have the same problem. Nor were these interactions restricted to the streets — it was not at all unknown for him to be approached in cafés, diners, churches, big box stores, and, on one occasion, while with his dad at a James Taylor concert.
“Hello,” said Mark, trying for a perfectly neutral tone.
“Hey, sorry, I’m sure you’re busy,” said the man, who seemed genuinely apologetic. “But I just wanted to ask … I overheard you’re in the stocks business?”
Mark blinked in mild surprise. The man wasn’t leading with the typical story of needing bus fare to go East for a job or child or sick family member.
“Yes, sir, that’s right,” he replied.
In reality, though, he hadn’t exactly been in stocks for a long time. For the last five years, he had been trading interest rate swaps. Once, however, he had explained his work to Callie, who, while grasping the concept, advised him to just tell people that he was a stockbroker: “I mean, when the revolution comes, you’re still going up against the wall. So you might as well make it sound like you do something cool. Everyone’s seen Wolf of Wall Street.” Mark had not, as a matter of fact, but nonetheless he had followed her advice ever since.
“Neat,” said the man, briefly breaking eye contact. But then he looked up again. “I’ve got a buddy who does that. I mean, sort of. He’s way into that crypto stuff.”
Mark just then remembered to smile. “Then he’s a lot smarter than I am.”
“Yeah, he’s something alright,” the man said, ending with a sharp, nervous chuckle. He scratched his cheek and started up again, “He’s got all of those graphic cards or whatever in his basement. I don’t really get all the crypto stuff myself, but I guess it’s …”
The man trailed off. Unconsciously, Mark resumed work on his right temple, then set his hand back down. He most certainly did not want to discuss financial markets — but, he suspected, neither did his new acquaintance. Maybe this was a circuitous sort of panhandling, but if so, it was oddly unpolished. Maybe he was just starting his career. Or maybe the man just needed to talk. Children and the aged are the most frequent, but by no means the only, initiators of agenda-less chats with complete strangers.
Either way, however, he hoped to disentangle himself quickly, perhaps with a vague appeal to the work that he needed to get done.
“Right,” said Mark. “Like I tell people, invest in things you can understand and then never look at your portfolio.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s good. I like that,” said the man, nodding vigorously.
By this point Mark had realized that his planned excuse was moderately dishonest. In some cases that would be fine, he thought, but not in this case. Not with a man who, panhandler or not, seemed lost.
Even so, for the sake of clarity it was time to force the panhandling issue. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your line of work?”
The man chuckled ruefully, like someone caught in the middle of a minor misdeed. “Yeah,” he began, “yeah, I was, uh … I was just across the river for almost fourteen years. The Rockton plant, you know.”
Mark found himself studying the grain of the bar counter.
“Steel?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer. He didn’t look up.
“Yeah,” said the man, forcing a smile. “Yeah, it’s, you know… they laid off a bunch of us ten months ago. Said they’d call us back when things got better.”
At that moment the man’s good humor broke. His voice suddenly became sharper, quieter. “But they’re never going to. I mean, not if … look, we can’t compete with Chinese steel, man. It’s because they don’t have to pay their people anything. You know what I mean.”
Mark could feel the man looking right at him, searching for something.
“Look,” the man pleaded, “I don’t have problems with anyone. But they can ram all this cheap steel … you know, down all of our throats. We just don’t stand a chance anymore. We’re going belly up. Not just steel. America. All of it.”
“Creative destruction,” murmured Mark.
The man looked puzzled. “Creative…” He broke off and shook his head. “Look, I’m … I’m sorry. I’m bumming you out for no reason.”
“No,” said Mark, finally looking up. “No. Not in the least.”
“But lemme tell you something. It’s all gonna be okay,” declared the man. He had switched modes again — this time from mumbling apology to fervent proclamation — with such speed and intensity that Mark felt slightly whiplashed.
“Because God’s always got a plan. He’s gonna work it all out.”
“Really,” Mark said flatly, with no trace (he hoped) of either assent or irony.
The man eyed him carefully. “He always has before.”
There was a pause. Mark wondered if the man was now waiting for him to speak his mind, which would have certainly been a first for this sort of encounter.
But as Mark tried to decide whether or not to do this, the man evidently lost patience. “Not that you would know anything about it,” he muttered. Then he turned and left.
Mark only now realized that, for whatever reason, it had not occurred to him to ask the man’s name.
After another minute or so, Mark took his first sip of the drink cooling beside him on the counter. It was mostly coffee — espresso is denser and tends to sink to the bottom, and he had forgotten to stir. Callie would have rebuked his lack of care for her handiwork. He took another sip.
***
Mark called his mom while walking up the stairs to his second-floor apartment. She answered on the first ring.
“Hey, mom,” he said.
“Sweetie,” she said, with the urgency of a mother finally contacting her child after some kind of natural disaster. “Are you okay?”
Mark opened the door to his living quarters (“the barracks,” so named by one of the few friends who had ever seen them). There was a glass table in the middle of the living room, an upholstered sofa, a lamp, a venerably dilapidated turntable, and a tiny bookcase containing a complete collection of Proust, untranslated. There was no TV, and a single painting (a minimalist desert landscape a favorite uncle had painted just prior to his death) adorned the far wall from the door.
“Yeah, mom. Geez.”
Relief palpable from four hundred miles away. “Ok, ok, you just haven’t …”
“Sorry, mom. I’ve been … well, not really busy, per se.”
Mark sat down on the sofa. She waited.
“It’s nothing. Pearson … oh, how to put it … Pearson ‘walked back’ their earlier statement about not making cuts to the derivatives desk this year. Unfortunate developments and so on.”
“Oh, sweetie …”
“Wednesday. Humorless security guard, the whole drill. It’s weird, I thought they normally do this on Fridays so people have a weekend to cool off, right? So they don’t come back the next day and shoot the place up.”
“Mark, please …”
“Mom, it’s fine. I wasn’t even … I’m fine. Really, I am. Already got the resume updated and all that. Even my Linkedin profile. You’d be proud of me. Besides,” he said, bouncing off the sofa and opening the window blinds, “I’m thinking about a career change anyways. Maybe go back to school.”
“Mark … wait, are you serious? What would you do?”
Just outside, a female cardinal landed on an upper branch of the old maple in the courtyard. She blinked inquisitively, hopping about on the branch.
Something old and calcified in Mark suddenly gave way.
“Mark? Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. Then, with the faintest possible smile, “At least I’m going to be.”
