Midnight Oil

Middle of the night leisure descended upon the few customers left inside of Perked Cup. Fender, the night barista, watched three stoners play Mortal Kombat on a big box TV with a bulging screen, a relic of the late 90s. There were nine of them earlier in the evening, but the numbers dwindled as the cloudless Friday night molted into Saturday. The quiet action sounds emitting from the old game washed over the remaining young men, now silent with concentration as two of them traded spinning kicks and hi-yahs on the screen. They had set up the TV in one of the joint’s front bay windows, balancing it tediously on the alcove’s black bar top..

At their backs, the long, single room of Perked Cup held a handful of other late-night customers; the homeless guy that Fender never had the heart to send away, an exhausted, stone-faced bartender who didn’t want to go home to his dysfunctional relationship quiet yet, and a highway drifter covered in silver ball-ended piercings from brow to chin. The usual set.

Perked Cup was one of the only 24-hour coffee shops in Cleveland, remodeled out of an old Irish pub and transformed into something that couldn't really be described as a café. Rather, it was a coffee joint (just coffee– no espresso) for nocturnal creatives on either side of the hill, druggies, transients, and second-shifters looking to sit in solitude after work. During the day, it was decently populated, but in the witching hours, Perked Cup fell into a steady slowness.

Music was always playing, but always on a low volume that folded gently into the background. The coffee was solidly adequate, offering customers an unspoken promise that it would never be great and betray them by rising above three dollars a cup. With startlingly green walls decorated like a punk music venue and graffiti lovingly scrawled on almost every surface, Fender fit right in. As the night barista for over six years, he memorized the faces of regulars and gradually chipped away at their life stories. The regulars tended to be downtrodden, especially the ones who lived nearby the shop. Perked Cup was in an undesirable pocket of the West Side, shoved into a blighted strip mall in a blue-collar neighborhood that hugged the deep gash of the Cuyahoga Valley’s deciduous sprawl. The neighborhood was always rough; at least it had been in the years that Fender had worked there. Fender watched shapeless forms lope up and down the block at all hours, often collapsing by the storefront, if not trying to enter and beg customers for change.

Inside, Fender mixed coffees with a myriad of flavored syrups that were too chemically designed to expire, topped them up with milk, and doled them out in nondescript Styrofoam cups. There were no shrieking machines or frothers, just a choir of colorful pump-top bottles and a chunky mid-century fridge with a groaning door. Dairy-free options was the most recent change, granted to a couple born-again vegans who wouldn’t stop begging. With full control of the stereo system, Fender often chose to bless the patrons with the Deftones discography or, if he was feeling it, some ska. Fender reveled in the peace that the night shift brought in, and he often used the dead hours to scrupulously clean the galley, often getting so deep into the zone that the odd customer would stand idle for five minutes, watching him furiously clean a coffee pot.

It was quiet out tonight, only a few cars sliding past and a handful of folks staggering home on the choppy sidewalk, their breath making abstract shapes in the air. Fender’s shift, which began at eleven, was wrapping up, and the once-sticky bar top squeaked from cleaning spray. At 3:50, someone entered through the back door and lingered by the row of worn out pinball machines.  In the mirrors that lined the wall opposite the main bar, Fender saw a small teenage girl round the corner and approach him.

Fender recognized her. She smiled at him politely and pulled the hood of her hoodie off her straw blonde head. He could see that her face was made up, but that mascara had smudged on the lower rims of her eyes. Her lips were dry, and she ran her tongue over her bottom lip before opening her mouth to speak. Her cheeks were flushed raspberry red from the cold. Fender felt a near-paternal grip of concern, noticing that the only thing she had to keep her warm in the early March chill was the worn hoodie.

“Rooibos is caffeine free, right?” She asked, eyes traveling to the industrial sized mason jars half-filled with tealeaves.

“Yep,” Fender said. “Did you have too much today already?”

She looked a bit confused at this. Fender pointed to the analog clock that hung from the wall behind her. She turned, paused for a moment, and he saw her shoulders rise and fall in a sheepish shrug.

“I don’t drink caffeine,” she said, turning back around.

“Sixteen ounce?” Fender asked, scooping the leaves into a teabag.

“Please,” she said, and took a seat at the bar.

The hoodie she was wearing, two sizes too big and faded black, displayed the name of a high school located ten miles away, an affluent suburb. Her posture was upright, her shoulders drawn back with confidence Fender did not often see in the teens that would convene here, usually hogging the pinball machines all night and not buying anything. She stole glances at the other patrons, who took no notice of her.

As Fender poured hot water into a doubled up cup, he remembered the last time he saw her. It was at around the same, strange hour. The last time, maybe two weeks ago, she seemed perfectly comfortable ordering a cup of hot tea at nearly four in the morning, drank it in silence, checked her phone a few times, and left before 4:30. Fender had been a bit blazed that night, and was more concerned about the organization of the milk cartons than the precarious teenager that night. Now, sober, he was intrigued by – and slightly concerned about– this preppy young girl, her face open and glowing like the last ember in a tamped down fire pit.

The girl was absorbed in the Mortal Kombat game that was starting to wrap up. “Is that their own TV?” she asked.

“Yep,” Fender said. “They bring it themselves and play for hours every Friday.”

“Huh,” she said, her dry lips pressed into a curious purse. Fender placed the Styrofoam cup in front of her, and she dutifully produced two crumpled dollar bills and a quarter. She blew through the small mouthpiece of the lid and tapped the screen of her phone, bringing it to life. From his side of the bar, Fender could see that her phone’s lock screen was a photo of charcoal sketches. He glanced around the shop, noticing that the homeless guy was starting to nod off in the corner, his gray beard dipping into his torn puffer vest. Fender frowned and shook his head. It’s better than when he was watching porn on a stolen laptop with no headphones.

The girl finished her tea by 4:10. She was drumming her chipped nails against the countertop, and Fender could hear the rhythmic thump thump of her combat boots swinging against the bar. She sighed audibly and began picking at her empty cup, digging her nails into the fleshy, white foam.

“Waiting for something?” Fender asked, turning his back to her and pouring a cup of coffee for himself. With an hour before his shift ended, he needed one last caffeine hit to carry him out.

“Sort of,” she said. She glanced up at him and folded her hands together on the bar. “It’s nice that this place is open twenty four-seven.”

Fender nodded, the corners of his lips tilting down. “Glad we can be open for ya,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “What are you waiting —”

She spoke at the same time. “Do you always work the night shift?”

 Fender gave a curt nod, a bit annoyed with her interruption.

“When do you sleep?” She asked, eyebrows raised. For four in the morning, she seemed wide-awake.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Fender said, a small laugh playing in his voice. “Aren’t high schoolers supposed to get twelve hours of sleep a night?”

“How do you know I’m in high school?” She asked, her tone suddenly barbed with defensiveness. She sat up taller on the bar stool, and Fender noticed a delicate, yellow-gold pendant settle between the drawstrings of her hoodie. A zigzag of hammered metal took the shape of what Fender assumed to be Arabic text.

Fender jutted his pierced bottom lip towards her chest. “Greenlake High School Track and Field,” he read aloud. “You run?”

Her raised guard broke with a smile as she placed a hand on the peeling green and white text that ran across the sweatshirt. “Ohh, no. This is my boyfriend’s hoodie,” she said. “He used to run track.”

Fender stifled a smile. She put stress on “used to,” like her high school love was a retired Olympian or a legendary racehorse. Her phone began to vibrate, and posture straightened.

“That’s him. Bye!” She swung herself out of the stool and hopped to the ground. She turned to wave at Fender once, and then dashed out of the shop. As Fender watched her depart, he glimpsed the last name Abuhamdeh printed in squared white letters across her narrow shoulders.