All day breakfast, coffee and the moving feast of Brunswick Street made Alimentari the perfect place to sit and watch the world go by . . . I’m pretty sure I saw Elvis wander passed there one day . . . Alimentari, ‘the deli’, was home to an eclectic mix of staff and patrons . . . parliamentary speech writers, Big Issue sellers, haute couture designers and dish pigs were indistinguishable from one another. Age, sex and occupation dissolved into – lattes, short blacks & macchiatos . . . Conversation started with a smile and a “Hi” and some surprising friendships grew out of those chance encounters. In my ideal world my CV would simply say . . . ‘Hi ’. . . ‘Hello’ . . . ‘How do you do’. . . No, not a lot of job prospects but the fringe benefits would work a treat for me.

Across the road from my possie at the deli, is the Black Cat cabaret / bar / coffee lounge, depending which manifestation of its existence it happened to be at the time . . . and outside the Black Cat, there’s . . . a sort of jungle. Not your deepest darkest variety, it’s just an unexpected tangle of feral greenery . . . Next to the jungle there’s a seat . . . caste iron sides, well weathered red-gum slats, obligatory splinter or two . . . and tucked into the right hand corner of the seat . . . was Andy.

My walk to the deli, took me passed the Black Cat, passed the jungle, passed the seat . . . and most days . . . passed Andy . . . In contrast to the nodding ‘hi’ I’d exchange with the locals, the only acknowledgment I subconsciously gave Andy, was the smidgin my pace quickened . . . Unlike most of the street dwellers I came across Andy never asked for money. In fact, I can’t recall ever seeing him initiate any interaction with anyone, just as I rarely if ever saw him change his position on his seat . . . or his grip on the brown paper bag he nursed so protectively . . . His focus was invariably on that point somewhere in the distance that we can all lose ourselves in on occasion . . . well I don’t know about you but I sure can . . . and do.

In a way, Andy was just another Brunswick St fixture . . . ignored by most, ridiculed by some and abused by a few economic rationalists and suburban tourists. The half dozen strides it took to walk passed Andy never failed to engage the play button on the docudrama of the life that had insinuated itself on me . . . A dishevelled existence . . . ingrained with the dirt and grime of his tenuous grip on the day . . . every crease and pore tattooed onto his being . . . the torn black finger nails muddied with nicotine stains. His three day old beard might have been trendy under different circumstance, but in Andy’s case, the ginger grey stubble only served to mask a fresh bruise or graze from . . . who knows what, stumble or altercation. His clothes were predominantly army disposal green. Standard issue grunge wear, a little more bedraggled than your average skater boy and way more layered. Whatever the weather, no matter how many shirts and jumpers he had on, Andy always looked cold. His hands and more often than not, bare feet, had that translucent, pasty bluey tinge of circulation struggling to circulate . . .

The innocent promise of my morning coffee now came with the bitter after-taste of that life . . .

It’s such a cliché, but every day that I walked passed Andy, I could feel the unease growing in my chest. What’s with that . . . that almost imperceptible tap on the shoulder thing . . . the niggling thought that lingers at the edge of awareness . . . half whispered word . . .
Who was I kidding?

“Life wasn’t meant to be easy” . . . “Shit happens” . . . “Life’s a bitch and then you die” . . .

Yeah, it can be hard on occasion . . . there’s always going to be some crap to clean up. Life’s a messy business . . . and yes, everyone dies . . . It’s all a bit like watching “Titanic” . . . we know the boat sinks before the movie starts but that doesn’t diminish the journeying it takes to get to the end of the story . . . So what’s the deal here? Every second street corner of every Fitzroy on the planet has an Andy . . . Feeling sorry for himself . . . Thinking the world owes him a living . . . or . . . Simply making a choice . . . Damn it Andy! Watching the world go by is meant to be a spectator sport . . . What position am I supposed to be playing here . . . What the hell are the rules . . . Why me . . . Why now . . . I had a good thing going at the deli’ . . . real food . . . great company . . . the occasional glass of red . . . Throw in a beach and does it get any better than this?

I closed my book, finished my coffee and left the familiar confines of the deli . . . crossed the road and walked passed Andy . . . passed his seat . . . passed the jungle . . . and passed the Black Cat. And then, I stopped . . . I stopped consciously deciding to walk on by, pretending to be oblivious to the reality I was desperately trying to ignore. I stopped subconsciously telling myself there was nothing I could do . . .

What was it Voltaire said?

“Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.”

I stopped scrolling through my list of excuses, turned around and walked the few steps back to Andy’s seat and sat down . . . Brilliant. Now what? There was no magic wand to make it all better . . . the words of our Indian exchange student came echoing through the ether . . . “I have no clue what it is you are doing . . .” Thanks Kanishk . . . I clearly had “no clue” what it was I was doing . . . not quite lost, but definitely wandering without my stroller straps.

A couple of the locals smiled a quizzical “Hi” at me . . . and that was it . . . minus the beach . . . it really didn’t get any better than this . . . As Louis Armstrong so eloquently put it . . .

“people going by
saying’ . . . how do you do
they’re really saying’
I . . . love . . . you”

So . . . I did the only thing my CV said I could do . . . and said “Hi”. . . & with the barest hint of a nod, the man at the other end of the seat . . . said, “Andy” . . . The simplest of realities had seamlessly unfolded . . . Andy could never again, be some guy on a seat in Brunswick Street . . .

Introductions over, I stumbled my way through an assortment of disconnected thoughts given voice & when Andy glanced across at me . . . we both knew I was mindlessly yaffling on . . . but when he turned back, to what I assumed would be his silent gaze . . . I got Andy’s story . . . There was no chronology to the uninvited snippets of work and family . . . accidents and homelessness. The only threads connecting the chapters of Andy’s life were the soft lilt of his accent and the constant reference to “the dear divorced wife”. It was a simple story . . . simply told . . . once upon a time, married, working, enjoying a drink with family and friends . . . there was mention of a daughter, an accident at work . . . drinking, losing his job . . . drinking . . . It was a story that . . . there . . . but for the grace of god . . .

When he passed the brown paper bag across to me . . . my faltering acceptance was more a reflex response than any real reluctance to share in the ritual I’d silently been invited to partake in. But how could I not ‘break bread’ with this man . . . He’d loved and laughed, just like me . . . He’d worked . . . and bled, just like me . . . He breathed in and out, just like me . . . and . . . he had a name . . . just like me.

Whenever I saw Andy after that, I’d say “Hi” and occasionally sit and listen to another dulcet toned instalment of “the dear divorced wife”. We didn’t share any more tipples, of what had turned out to be, a not so bad, McWilliam’s dry sherry . . . which, I have on good authority, is “a top buy when it’s on special”.

I walked with him once, back to his room at the boarding house in Gertrude Street. A few months after I’d first heard Andy’s story I came across him apologising to the air for something or other. The familiar ebb and flow of his voice had flattened into a mumbled slur that hid all but the words, “sorry” and “you’re in”. When I lent over to try to make out what it was he was saying . . . there could be no doubting, that he really was . . . very sorry . . . about the urine . . .

Over the next year or so Andy’s vigil outside the Black Cat became more spasmodic. He didn’t always acknowledge my “g’day”. . . He didn’t have to . . . Andy had given me something that paled any transgression . . . and even a little urine, into insignificance . . . That first sip of his story was all the ‘how do you do’ I needed to placate my walk, to and from the deli . . .

And then . . . Andy wasn’t there.

It’s been a couple of years now since I last saw Andy. When I tried to track him down, I was told he’d been in and out of St Vincent’s. His room at the boarding house had been let to another ‘Andy’ . . . minus the melodic brogue. No one on the street knew what had become of him & sadly, most had no clue who I was talking about, or why I was asking.

The picture that most often comes to mind whenever I think of Andy these days, is a series of black and white stills . . . every frame is a cameo of his story, with just a hint of the original hand painted life I’d sat with remaining now . . . aqua-marine eyes . . . forever on the verge of tearing up . . . but never quite brimming over . . . And . . . there it is again . . . just as his gaze catches mine . . . a momentary flash of memory . . . of what once was . . .

I doubt that I’ll ever know the truth of what became of Andy, other than assuming the inevitable . . .

A broken heart ‘ll do that . . . every time . . .