5:01pm | Author’s note: The other day a group of friends were recalling Long Beach coffeehouse regulars. This is an ode to one of mine.
I don’t know why people called him “Captain.” I never asked. They would use the term affectionately: “Hey, Captain, how’re you doing tonight?”
He was a skinny old man, his face raging a losing battle with time and gravity. He was at the coffeehouse just about every night, no matter the day or hour.
I had the impression he was homeless, though I couldn’t say for sure. I only ever saw him in one outfit: jeans and a wool-lined denim jacket, a navy blue pullover underneath. But he never stank.
His hair was never-changing, a sun-worn blond, stringy and shoulder-length.
With him always was an acoustic guitar in a soft case. Sometimes he would be outside playing it (always the same hand position, up and down the fretboard), sometimes it was leaning nearby or stowed for him behind the counter.
Now and again I’d spot him downtown, hiking the sidewalk to or from an indeterminate place, guitar slung across his back, travel bag in hand.
He was passive and well-mannered, but obviously not “all there.” He talked to himself, in whispers and quiet outbursts: “The wisdom of 40-year-olds. I’ve never seen such remarkability.”
Probably I never chanced to see him arrive. But he left only at closing time. That I saw.
He always bought a drink (or was given one — I never actually saw him pay), and he would sit for hours, doing nothing, staring into space or gazing unobtrusively here and there, filling the empty minutes, empty hours, filling them by the second.
He had a chess opponent for a while, but it was a rare occasion that the Captain enjoyed companionship across his little round tabletop (a barista on a break, an indigent in a cameo role and never seen again).
Once I heard him speaking nonstop for an hour, tirelessly employing a single rhetorical device: “The navy is my friend, but the army is not my friend. Nuclear power is my friend, but the internal combustion engine is not my friend. Marijuana is my friend, but alcohol is not my friend.” (I wondered more about the listener then, who sat and took it all in, never once interrupting, never once looking bored or confused.)
He never seemed morose or even lonely (whatever the truth may have been).
He would sleep in spurts, having mastered the art of upright unconsciousness. I would watch him sleeping as closing time approached and pray the employees would be busy with a last-minute rush, giving the Captain just five more minutes in a world other than this, a dream world, a life beyond that which he inhabited when spit back out into the nighttime air that hovered just above the desolate, impassive streets that he must have known with a shuddering intimacy.
“Captain,” they called him. I’ll never know why.