Thank You for the Coffee

Frank held the thermometer into the glass display unit and craned his head to see the reading on the screen, his biro poised on the paperwork to his right.
“What are you doing?” came Gerard’s voice from above him. Frank startled, and narrowly escaped smacking his head.
“Give me a minute would you? I’m doing the temperature check. Don’t want the cake to curdle.”
“Is that even possible?”
“According to my boss.” He lifted his head out of the counter, and drew his eyebrows together. “Hey, I know it’s a Monday, but what’s the date?”

Gerard sighed, and told Frank in a pained voice, as if reciting lines from a play he’d been studying solidly for 6 months.
“44 days; Monday 5th April 1999.”
“Got it” he said gratefully, scribbling down 3°C next to the date Gerard had detailed. “44 days until what?”

Gerard groaned again, passing his student card over to Frank before he asked for it.
“Until my final portfolio is due.”
“Ah, you in last year?” Frank asked as he ran the red scanning laser over the back.
“Yep. Not long to go now.”
“What then?” Frank asked, chatting easily as he poured Gerard’s coffee as always.
“Who the hell knows. Dark Horse have a position coming up, I was considering selling out and applying to draw Spiderman for them.”

Frank pulled a face as he rung up the usual price and scooped out the change. Gerard held the coffee in his hand as he waited for him to come around the other side and clean up the booth. Frank figured he may as well do that every night from now on. He knew that the booths were the most popular in places like this, but realistically it was the only table on which Gerard could spread out his supplies. He wasn’t about to let a journalism student come and take up the whole booth with just a tiny little notebook while they sip delicately on their espresso. It would just be plain rude.
“Nah, I understand, you’ve gotta make a living. I’m sure you draw Spiderman just fine. It’s not like you’ll be the one penning his whining little monologues, right?”
“No” Gerard laughed “just drawing the outlines.”
“That’s alright then.”

Frank had piled the booth up a little too much today apparently, so he carried one tray through to the kitchen and dipped his cloth into the sink again before he returned.
“You’re not a student, then?” Gerard hedged. “I mean it’d be pretty hard with these working hours.”
Frank’s chest hollowed slightly, as he wiped more vigorously at the table.
“Nah. Used to be. A while back. Dropped out halfway through first year.”
“Oh.” Gerard sounded a little sheepish as he said it, flicking a stray crumb onto the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, I’m not. Or at least, I wasn’t at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”

Frank shot Gerard a smile in reassurance. He didn’t mind talking about it. He just sort of hadn’t in a long time, that’s all. Gerard looked curious, but reluctant to ask, so Frank figured he’d save him the misery. Shooting a glance towards the counter, seeing that Beth was bored enough to have picked up her book, he figured they were quiet enough for him to take a bit of time. He sat down at the booth, urging Gerard to do the same.

“See, I’m a bit of a cliché.” Frank began as Gerard looked at him interestedly over the rim of his coffee cup. “You may have guessed that my life’s ambition has not been to feed the caffeine addiction of helpless art students. I’m one of those terrible people who come to New York looking for their big break. I dropped out, quit my job back home and upped sticks to NY. Not that I moved particularly far. I only lived in Jersey before.”
“Me too” Gerard grinned. Frank was happy to discover he was talking to another Jersey kid. There was something about home and the people who lived there that just made him feel instantly more relaxed.

“Well anyway. Yeah, I used to study at Rutgers. English Lit, nothing special really. My Mom wanted me to get a degree, didn’t matter what in, and I mean, it’s a good idea; it’s a good thing to have. But my heart was never in it. She knew that, but expected I’d stick it out long enough to graduate. So did I, really.” He smoothed down his hair, huffing out a breath before he continued. This was the only part that hurt. “I was always in bands. Always, since I was like 11. Playing guitar and being in bands was my thing, you know? My escape from big bad reality. They usually fell apart relatively quickly; no one was ever quite as into it as I was. But when I hit my late teens, I started another one up with some close friends, and this time it actually stuck. We were together for ages.” The past tense made him wince. “We made our own songs – good ones – played a bunch of shows and stuff. Eventually a local label picked us up, and we recorded our first record while we were still in high school. It went down really well, for an indie label, and within 6 months or so we were getting calls from the big labels, you know, the fucking big ones.”

Gerard had rested his chin in his hand and was nodding along attentively to Frank’s words. Frank hadn’t meant to ramble quite this much, but it had been so long since he’d told someone that he found it really difficult to stop. He wet his lips quickly before continuing.
“And this was our chance, our chance to really do what we loved. So we leapt. We waited for a label to give us the right offer and we jumped ship, got out of our other contract and piled together all our money to move states. I dropped out pretty much as soon as we signed on the dotted line. I didn’t think I needed it anymore.”
“It didn’t work out” Gerard surmised, his tone sad.

“No” Frank murmured. “They signed us too quick. We were relatively big in Jersey, but the buzz hadn’t quite crossed the pond yet. No one here knew who we were, and even our supporters in Jersey didn’t usually make the trip to see our shows. They promised us another recording slot, and that all went to shit. We were making next to nothing, they weren’t putting out our old record on their label yet, and our shows were pitiful. We were sucking money from the label rather than putting more back in, so they dropped us after about a year. Everything was so shit that we’d started fighting, our drummer had been threatening to leave for months, and we were having”- Frank raised both hands to make quotation marks in the air – “- ‘creative differences’. We split. They gave us no choice. We ended up in a worse position financially than when we started out, and we all had to go slinking back home, dreams crushed.” He shrugged, trying to make the memories hurt less. “I commute now. I work whenever I can, trying to save up the money to start again.”

Gerard finished his coffee and added his mug to the tray left on the table.
“You still want to try?” he asked.
Frank jerked a shoulder again. Did he? He wasn’t even sure anymore. Nothing would ever stop him loving music, but he couldn’t see himself being in a band again, not really. He missed playing the shows, but he didn’t miss the politics of it all. It hurt to remember how the label casually tossed them aside after they’d burnt all bridges with their indie. There was no way back from that, not for Pencey Prep.
“I dunno. I love music. I still write songs, and play my guitar and stuff. I made up with a couple of guys from the band and we jam every once in a while, but it’s not the same. It’ll never be the same. We’d never be able to take that chance again.”

“That’s really sad” Gerard said. His eyebrows tightened slightly, as if Frank had just told him the most tragic tale that had ever been penned. It only served to make Frank burst into laughter.
“And you’re more fucking soft than I am” he smiled, standing to take the tray. “Just keep coming in and buying my coffee, okay? Think of it as a charitable donation.”
“As if you could keep me away” Gerard smiled.
Frank lifted the tray and Gerard flopped his sketchbook onto the empty space it left behind.