Two Cappuccinos with Wings

I’m a bum magnet. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, homeless people stick to me like white on rice and make sure I know just how long it’s been since they had a decent meal.

Though it’s not much of a super power, I’ve come to appreciate being followed down the street and harassed outside restaurants because it reminds me that my life doesn’t suck.
I have shoes on my feet, I’m not sleeping in a prophylactic strewn park and I have the N$13,50 to buy the cappuccino I almost spill on the National Art Gallery floor. The man who comes up to me at the wooden coffee kiosk under the clock tower on Independence Avenue doesn’t have any of that.
He’s sleeping in Zoo Park, his skin looks like it broke up with soap and water in the late 80s and, he’s so hunched over under the weight of it all, he kind of resembles a black Quasimodo.
Though he’s as wretched as they come and his natural musk sort of singes the nose hairs, the truth is, I like him.
He’s direct, he’s well spoken and he asks me to buy him a cappuccino with so much conviction and puffing on a cigarette that, for a moment, I feel like I’m being asked on a date for the first time in my life which makes me giggle like a fatuous school girl.
As my delirium, which involves him transforming into a handsome creative type right there on the sidewalk, subsides and I remember that homeless people ask people for dimes, not out for dinner, I quickly become enamoured with the idea of buying him my most favourite beverage in the world. After tequila... And vodka... And chai lattes.
Finding it fascinating that he hasn’t asked me for money and instead boasts the primordial pre-coffee look in his eye that I know so well, I decide to spare the world his imminent transformation into the Incredible Hulk and buy him a cappuccino.
more eagerly than is appropriate, I signal for the barista to make my order two cappuccinos with wings and she looks at my head intently... No doubt trying to locate the bump left over from when I was dropped as an infant.
The somewhat filthy look she gives the pair of us, though risky given we haven’t had our first cup of Joe, is fairly warranted though if not incredibly polite. I suppose she’s looking at us and wondering whether the people behind us will be scared off by our general not giving a damn, looking odd and talking at the top of our voices.
I’m there wearing leopard print ankle boots and the kind of blue dress Ndeitunga would outlaw, given phenomenal cosmic power, and my homeless hombre is smoking something home rolled while smelling faintly of urine and generally slumming up the place.
Predictably, for a woman currently balking at such comingling of the classes, my asking him where he lives sends her eyebrows scurrying towards her hairline and I reckon she thinks I’m going to invite him to be a member of Park Orgies R Us.
When I ask him what shoe size he wears, her reaction is not much different but is coupled with a frantic hiss of foam as she hastens our order in a bid to move us along.
Pretty soon my coffee is all done and a look at my watch relative to when the National Art Gallery closes on a Saturday makes me bid the man farewell before promising to take a look around for a size seven shoe to see him through the winter.
I tell him when I do we can have cappuccinos and go look at some art at the gallery and he shrugs noncommittally and thanks me as I spontaneously push N$20 into his hands before hitting the road.
Later that evening and after the gallery, I take a walk to the Engen Service Station in Klein Windhoek and as I’m strolling home with a couple of bran muffins, I hear someone calling out. It’s the man who guards Luigi and the Fish and he’s holding out a plastic bag.
Inside is the plastic cup I gave him when I brought him some clothes and a coffee one icy night about two weeks ago.
He thanks me and limps away and, though I have this huge lump in my throat thinking about how he must have carried that cup around for a fortnight, I also take the opportunity to burst out laughing thinking: What is it with me, the homeless and hot beverages?

(Don’t forget to do your donating this winter season. It’s colder than
a scorned shoulder and the destitute could do with your clothes... And a coffee.)
Tweet me on marth__vader or mail martha@namibian.com.na

---