There’s this one time I remember, right back when I was still in love with the beautiful, copper-haired Rachel, and when Kris was still alive, and not only alive, but laughing and making all of us feel like rock stars, when for a few short seconds the whole damn mess seemed to make sense. Some people might call it an epiphany, I suppose. To be clearer, which is to say, a little less mystic, I caught a glimpse of La Vida Loca from the outside, and when I say the crazy life, I’m referring of course to the name of the café, for that’s what it was called. It’s still there by all accounts, which isn’t really so strange. After all, I’m not that old.
To use the popular phrasing, I stood, for a little while at least, in someone else’s shoes. And nowadays, in the way that life seems to turn upon itself like a snake eating it’s tail, I am somebody else. Kris is dead. Rachel has long since forgotten her dream of ever being a rock star.
So clarity comes and goes when one is thinking about the past. I was seventeen at the time I made my intuitive leap forward, when I grasped, finally, what to everybody else seemed obvious. Seventeen years old and young also in experience, and somewhat gullible, and happy even though I had to scrub dishes for nine hours a day at the back of a crummy kitchen. Happiness, too, comes and goes. Especially when one is thinking about the past.
To get to the heart of things: I was in love with La Vida Loca, and everybody who ever worked there, and everybody who ever ate there, and every table and chair, and every fixture and every fitting. I lived in fear of the temperamental, inflammatory nature of the chefs, I laboured in awe of the charismatic and beautiful waiters. And I followed the lives of the patrons of the cafe in the same way that many people watch the popular soap-operas on television.
It was a good café, in the old style you might say. And I don’t mean in the local nature of things around here, like in the town where I grew up, the coffee sitting in a pot on the counter, going grey, the patrons sitting in vinyl covered booths, also ageing fast. No, not at all. It was a good café in what might be called the European tradition. Which is not strange when one considers the owner, old Mr Milojevic, a swarthy and terrifying man who supposedly, because of the war, had a dicky heart. I’m sure if someone tries hard enough, they could find out his story, how he emigrated when still a boy, how he left a poor, war-ravaged country behind to start a new life in peaceful, provincial little New Zealand, and how he ended up in the west of Auckland growing grapes and selling food to people who didn’t really know just how good it all was. Trouble is, he never did talk very much, except to admonish his waiters, which due to the quite terrible force with which he delivered his sermons and his much famed weak heart, happened only rarely.
It’s a wonder he was such a success. In the culturally barren land between the Waitemata harbour and the Waitakere ranges, where new housing subdivisions would spring up overnight, only to become the new slums the next day, and where playing space invaders was considered the pre-eminent local pastime, he was a rare touch of sophistication. Pearls before swine, as the saying goes.