Blue Moon Cafe

The worn cuff of a jacket once revealed to me the full measure of a man’s redundancy.  The jacket belonged to my father and the day I understood the difference between strong arms and a fault line becomes imbued with the smell of scrambled eggs on burnt toast, the salty taste of tomatoes and the weight of words I had not yet heard or learnt to speak.

On visiting days with my father he would take us to the Blue Moon Café on Kotze Street for scrambled eggs on toast.  The Blue Moon Cafe was my name for this nameless place because whenever we went there Jim Reeves sang Moon Riverin slow motion from the jukebox in the corner.  In addition to breakfast you could also buy razor blades, bread, milk, pet food and State and Cinema magazines with pictures of Glen Ford, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne on the cover.

On these days words clogged my throat like cotton wool from the feeling I got when I saw my father wear the same blue cable knit jumper someone had knitted for him.

“Never knit for a man,” my grandmother said, “it’s bad luck.”

When I looked at my father we both knew something about luck and loose sand at the bottom of a bottle.

Somehow the smell of Listerine, the blue cable knit sweater, the anxious comb of his hair all spelled the kind of loneliness no one could fill; the loneliness of one who knew that someone had once loved him. Loneliness became associated with the Blue Moon Café and a Saturday.  For years afterwards, Saturdays felt like the beginning of the end of the world. I was anxious to fill every second of the void with migraines and vomiting so that pain and recovery would prevent me from looking at my father in his sweater across a yellow formica table with the salty taste of tomatoes and things chewed down in my mouth.