Lem's Jacket

The coffee shop menu was engaged in clever pretense as the barista worked the machinery of the espresso bar. It was printed permanently upon a solid plank crafted to resemble a wooden blackboard. From a distance it seemed written in cheery, varicolored chalk but any closer inspection would reveal a faint manufactured gloss covering the carefully relaxed handwriting. Jack was standing third in line, third of five. The detail about the menu was not the sort that Jack would miss entirely, but it wasn't the kind of information that he'd mull over.

Nobody else in the shop seemed to notice that the menu was faking it either, so it was getting by okay (the menu). It's tough work being something you aren't and the menu was doing a pretty good job. But back to Jack-- Jack was in this coffee shop today because of Julia. Julia was a short young woman of indeterminate age (certainly young, however, appearing between seventeen and twenty-one). Almost short enough to be scrawny, but pretty enough to qualify neatly as cute. Julia was the kind of girl who... Julia was a kind of girl.

So here was Jack in his light gray sweater and uncreased slacks. Jack was here because of Julia. He wasn't really the coffee shop kind of guy (perhaps why he didn't notice the ersatz menu) but here he was, for a girl he didn’t quite know. Jack made it to the front of the line where he found a wide assortment of mints and small retail items. He ignored them despite their pleasing plexiglas arrangement and ordered something with an espresso dropped into steamed milk. The details of his order are not important. It would be more important if he had ordered, say, a plain hot chocolate or something cold with whipped cream wearing chocolate shavings or even tea, but no: espresso it was and coins clinked merrily while the barista made twisting motions.

Jack took his drink to a corner table where he could sit and look pensive but before a proper air of seriousness could be effected, Julia walked into the coffee shop. Jack and Julia. Julia and Jack. The names rolled around together inside Jack's mind and it pleased him.

“Hi!” piped Julia, dashing quickly to the corner table. If she had been carrying papers, they would have been in danger of being dropped. “Sorry I'm late.”

She put her purse down and Jack gave her a not-quite wry smile.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Oh, I'm great, good,” she said, settling down a bit, “work's terrible of course, but I'm fine anyway.”

Julia had entered without stopping to stand in line-- I suppose that Jack had a drink ready for her. He was a responsible fellow in that sort of way. Julia took a brave sip of the drink that Jack had purchased in preparation for her arrival.

“Ooh, this is good,” she said, flashing a smile and a look. “How are you?”

“Well, I'm doing alright, I suppose,” said Jack. “As well as you can say you're doing.”

“Did you end up going to that museum?”

“Yes-- I went last week, on Thursday right after I got off work.”

“Any good? How was the exhibit?”

“I liked the museum, and the exhibition was fine, but...” here Jack leaned back slightly and made a sucking noise through his teeth as if preparing a package of incisive thought, “I had the impression that the artist was riding just a bit too much on the drafts of his predecessors, you know?”

“Oh yeah?” Julia looked genuinely sympathetic. “That's too bad.”

“Don't get me wrong, the he was interesting... just no pioneer.” While Jack spoke, Julia's purse emitted a rhythmic buzz that groaned harmoniously with the table underneath. Julia reached delicately and retrieved a small black telephone. Flipping it open and punching buttons with practiced movements, she furrowed her brow and looked up.

“Oh-- I hope you don't mind, my friend's coming,” she said with deliberate casualness. She peered out the window (for Lem, probably, which was the name of this friend) while a constipated spasm crossed Jack's face. This event brought a temporary halt to the rather plodding conversation.

Who was Lem? Lem was nobody in particular, but so was Jack. Jack didn't know this. Julia tapped the edge of her cup with her index finger and spoke a few more gathered phrases while Jack listened and imagined who Lem might be. Lem? Was that short for something? Lemmy maybe. Isn't Lemmy short for something? What then? Lem... Lem... Lemen... Lawrence, Lee, Larry; there was no doubt about it, Lem was an odd name.

Lem wasn't an odd guy though, at least not in the way you'd think. Something in the way he talked, unattached to his words...

The coffee shop door moved dutifully and a bundle of wind and sound entered the stillness of the foyer. Lem appeared upon the threshold, half blue jeans, bag in hand. A creamy canvas-looking jacket adorned his shoulders, radiating gently. The jacket was thin and somewhat vinyl looking; bulky yet fitting. Jack and Julia focused on it simultaneously as Lem scanned the room. He noted Julia, jumped into line, ordered, and maneuvered to the table.

“Have you noticed,” suggested Lem while he lowered himself into a chair, “that the menu here is in fake chalk?”

“It's shameful,” he continued without waiting for a reply. “No one should pretend to be something they aren't.” Lem oscillated his head to look meaningfully at both Jack and Julia as Jack leaned back in his chair.

“They do what they can to cultivate the whole hip and nonconformist attitude,” said Jack, crossing his arms and giving a bit of a smile.

“Yes,” announced Lem with a grin, “We all must do what we can.”

"That's a nice jacket,” offered Julia, wrenching the conversation from the subject of the coffee shop menu. “Where'd you get it?”

“Oh, here and there, here and there...” lilted Lem, his eyes glancing about from here to there and back.

“That is a nice jacket,” remarked Jack. “It has a discreet charm.” From here the conversation stepped along and there was some degree of oration thereafter from Jack; Lem studied the patterned tabletop while Jill listened intently. Both Lem and Jill gave insights as the ideas passed along, and it was all extremely dull and somewhat overwrought as conversations among near-strangers tend to be in coffee shops.

Fortunately, such conversations inevitably end, so Julia took a deliberate look at her watch.

“Oh, I gotta go,” she said busily, and did so promptly. Lem and Jack rose like weeds pulled from soft earth.

“Well,” said Jack, extending his arm, “good to meet you, Lem.”

“Yeah, yeah!” spurted Lem heartily, seizing Jack's hand with matching enthusiasm. Lem slipped off into the late afternoon and Jack stayed behind to clear the table of paper scraps.

“Lem,” he thought, “who is this Lem?” Jack was probably taking everything too seriously, but he didn't know this. He wandered back over the previous events pieced together archaeological evidence of Julia's relationship to Lem while compacting paper napkins into a cup.

“Lem,” he thought, “that Lem with his jacket. That fucking jacket.” Snapping the garbage into the waste basket by the exit, he jerked open the door and moved into the cool river of wind outside. “If I'm not careful, he might get the jump on me.”


Jack walked down the street, deliberating at a reasonable pace, making turns and walking straight ahead as necessary. His attention to his orientation waned and he found himself on an unfamiliar street surrounded by gray and unpainted buildings. A bumpy road in dire need of repaving flowed between the sidewalks. The street was quiet save for the voices of pigeons and a sort of background whooshing noise. The wind had calmed and the air seemed pregnant.

Jack whistled tunelessly, moving over the porous sidewalk. The ordeal had finished and his spirit felt easier. Counting the cracks along the sidewalk, he observed the green and yellow colonies of life amid the concrete martian landscape. The whooshing drew very near and as the sound reached Jack's ears he noticed a cream colored light floating across the street several yards ahead.

The space between the cream light, the whooshing, and Jack constricted abruptly and a purple sports car rushed past Jack towards Lem crossing the street in company of his cream-colored jacket. Lem was looking at a shop across the street downstream and his mechanical assailant plowed into him, sending him tumbling over the car and into the air. Jack stopped short, watching this singular spectacle which made very little noise, no more than a bump and a prominent whooshing. The car sped off as if it had failed to notice its victim, and Lem hung lazily in the air an instant before tumbling into the asphalt river.

The whooshing sound was receding now and Jack walked over to where Lem lay alongside a rack of bicycles which had jangled in collective protest at Lem's trajectory. Lem was unconscious but seemed unhurt. He had landed in such a way that seemed as if he had decided upon an impromptu nap. One arm hung with camaraderie upon a yellow bicycle that had shifted to one side in involuntary disgust. Lem's jacket was still somehow spotless, sitting smug in its luminescence.

“The jacket!” thought Jack, his mind a crisp silver. “The jacket...”

Without hesitation Jack reached over for the cream collar and pulled. The jacket slid off like a broken dumpling skin, leaving Lem a lonely lump of meat. Jack donned the stolen raiment, savoring the clutch of fabric around his shoulders. It fit perfectly.

The sound of distant motors and city life leaked back into the empty street, and Jack turned and continued without another glance at his serendipitously vanquished opponent. “All's fair in love and jackets,” thought Jack with reassurance. As he strode along, a complex feeling of effluence seeped through his being and he found himself feeling positively giddy. The colors and sounds of the city reconvened and Jack found his giddiness fading to the effects of a strong cup of coffee.

At this point the narrative focus blurs and swims, skipping ahead to a flower shop which was less of a shop and more of a stand where Jack stood radiant among bursts of priced and planned colors. The flower girl, whose appreciation for eye-catching displays had been dulled from long hours of labor, regarded Jack's jacket with dull-eyed acceptance.

“What do you recommend?” asked Jack with confident vigor, pelting the flower girl with a weighted look.

“Well,” the flower girl gave haltingly, biting her lip, “well, I mean... recommend for what?” She brushed her fingertips meaninglessly across a bundle of blooms. “There are lots... of flowers."

“Which one would you want?” asked Jack in a brusque tone that promised his addressee that her answer would be unimportant.

“Oh, um,” offered the flower girl while she pointed vaguely to her left, or Jack's right. “These are very nice,” she said, her index finger moving obligingly. It was nearly five-o-clock and what little enthusiasm the flower girl had for her work had been doled into the insistent hands of her previous customers. Jack made noises of consideration while the flower girl focused her inattention on an invisible geometry approximately 11 centimeters to Jack's right and her own left. Through months of careful experimentation, the flower girl had discovered that a requisite level of soft focus on this entity of neither mind nor reality often provided speedy resolutions to the chronic problem of indecisive customers. While Jack inspected the finer details of two of the more dignified arrangements, the flower girl (whose name tag read “RACH”) maintained her vigil. Soon enough, a tussled gray area emerged from around the street corner behind the pan-dimensional geometry. The gray area organized itself into Lem, limping and furious.

“Hey!” shouted Lem, seeing the flower girl first, then Jack. “Hey!”

“That's a pretty nice jacket , by the way,” said the flower girl as she waved amicably at Lem. Jack whipped around and spotted Lem breaking into a run from across the street. The flower girl settled into a snake-like reverie, eyes at nothing and face blank while a bustling gray area followed a bobbing cream noisily into the distance where the sun sat sinking into a hot tub horizon.

CC A.C. Marlowe, 2008