9- Drunk or Passed Out?
This guy is surprisingly not annoying. He is at the café every night without exception (he hasn’t missed a single night in a year) and, well, he never moves. Ever. He just sits at a table in the back sleeping, his body slightly leaned forward and his head in his hands. Dunk or passed out? Your guess.
In almost a year working there, I have not seen him move once. He’s basically frozen in time, and I often thought he was simply dead. He arrives before I do, and he must leave after I leave, if he leaves at all, because I’ve never seen him move from his seat. It is in fact quite scary to go home at 3AM after a good writing session and see him in the exact same position at 8PM the same evening. As far as I’m concerned, he’s still in that same position right now as I type this.
Like inert elements, he never reacts to anything no matter what: the morons from the call center could yell (usually, because some boring ass soccer team somewhere on Earth scored a goal) loud enough to provoke World War 3 and he still wouldn’t react. I’m fairly certain you could holdup the place without waking him up. Old, thin and of average height, he’s well-dressed and groomed, wearing a neatly-pressed blue shirt, suit pants, a quality belt and high-grade leather shoes. As a quiet man who never annoys anyone in any manner, he’s definitely down the list of annoying hobos, only rarely slightly importuning me with his hushed snoring – which is more comforting than anything, really (because it tells you he’s still alive).
To be fair, there’s a surprisingly good explanation for his situation. In fact, I happen to know exactly what this man does for a living: while discussing with an employee one day, I discovered he is a bus driver for the city. In fact, he does the morning shift and, as the coffee shop is located pretty close to the terminus, he sleeps there until his shift starts (he has an alarm clock on his watch, apparently), opting to save on both rent and transit time. And you know what? I think it’s a pretty good idea. I mean, it’s not exactly a Nobel Prize idea, but it’s not far from it neither – if I could live with the fat I was risking my life every night and if I could handle living with some of the worst sleep known to man, I would even consider it.
Well past the age of retirement, Drunk or Passed out (his name came from the first time I saw him, at a time were my only two theories on him were “shit-faced drunk” or “passed out”) had a large part of his savings stolen in some scandal by some unscrupulous funds manager and now has to work for slightly longer than he had intended to. Opting to save money in every way he can to be able to retire earlier, he has decided to live at the café until he can afford his dream house “somewhere warm,” as an employee said, quoting him. On this, I cannot help but smile, imaging Mr. “Drunk or Passed out” the day he will finally be able to quit his shitty job for good and plant his feet firmly in the sand of a large beach somewhere in Florida, never to go to that crappy coffee shop ever again. On a side note, that’s my dream as well.
Alternative Theory: The Wind Fish
Trapped in an endless dream, he’s the Wind Fish from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. For years now, he has longed for a hero who would wake him up from his nightmare (a nightmare which consists of driving buses all day long for forty years for basically nothing). Will you be that hero?
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