The Progressives

A Bernie Sanders meet-cute.

“Matty!” I called out into the cafe, one of those third-wavey places with stainless steel counters and tea pots that look like a dream a robot once had of something warm. I was the first customer; Matty hadn’t yet put on the wordless music he played from a station called ‘psychedelic soft metal for acid trips’––but soon it would be flooded by fully bearded men between the murky ages of twenty-eight and forty-five in black carhartts and work boots and chipped red-painted nails and computers with stickers of various environmental engineering firms.

It was quiet work, making coffee for these discerning pseudo-hipsters: no small talk and weighing beans and getting tonic water to a crisp sixty degrees. It was quiet work and focused work, and for that reason, I was on strict instructions to never come in when Matty was on shift, because I distracted him to the point where he got chatty, the water got too warm, and the beans atrophied into inadvertent blonde roasts and everything went into disarray––in other words chaos, which is what he called me with warmth and vigor as often as he ever said my real name.

Matty liked it because he had been obsessed with food since I knew him as the skinny, fast-talking boy in the dorm next to me. He had spent his teenager-hood at an Austrian boarding school when his mother’s pharmaceutical company had promoted her to executive of European wellness (viagra). Because of the continent’s laissez-faire attitude towards underage drinking, he’d been sufficiently wasted enough times that at eighteen, while the rest of the student body at our small college were becoming prodigious drunks, a sober Matty was selling gourmet grilled cheeses from his dorm room window. He was a benevolent king, providing sustenance long after the dining halls closed, granting wobbly nerds a free sandwich provided they could explain the central philosophy of whatever great thinker Matty had named that night’s culinary creation after. My favorite was the Beauvoir, whole wheat bread with apple butter, avocado, thick-cut honey turkey and a peppery handful of arugula, which Matty always saved one of for me. His gift sandwiches were a move that began as a type of bribery so I wouldn’t be pissed about the commotion or occasional hard knock on my window at an ungodly hour begging for Kant, Kant, Kant, which sounded, as might be imagined, like a totally different sort of request to an eighteen year old girl in her retainer and thin sleep-camisole. But how could I have ever been mad at Matty? Full of energy, but also kindness, he’d been the only Black student at his very uppity, very European school, and had an air of simply getting it, whenever something seemed to be bothering anyone. Once, when a girl had been leaving my room in the morning, he ran into us in the hallway and gave her a wide smile and a high-five––underneath his every interaction was a deep desire for no one to ever, ever feel shame. It was the most expansive kind of beauty; it was all over his face.

After we graduated, we put our suitcases in my clanging, yellow Volkswagen bug and drove one hour to the capital city of Vermont, so he could attend one of the country’s best culinary schools, which was housed on the lush green acres of a former Vanderbilt farm that had been turned into an easement; the money from the school’s delicious cheeses, ice creams, and beef (wholesomely provided by a clean herd of regal Brown Swiss cows) was given in full tuition scholarships for promising culinary students to learn from French teachers with hyper-local American agricultural products––what the brochure described as the best of all possible worlds.

Matty wanted to be a chef; I wanted to be his roommate. The city’s library had a position open for an events coordinator. A horde of well-fed retirees and the wiry, artistically-inclined chefs and waitstaff who served them were all trapped six hours on crooked, mountain highways from New York City. The isolation made the city a hub for great local food, nature, and not much else––meaning the events I put on like Fungi Cookbook Fest, Pride and Prejudice themed Forest Bathing, and BYOB (bring your own book) walks were well attended and celebrated in the full color weekly pages of the Montpelier Gazette. And in the summer, there were enough bougie cafes to employ all the restaurant people on break and caffeinate the summer people––the engineers, the remote H.R. workers, the chaco wearing Department of Defense workers (hey! they studied earth science in college, give them a break, it’s not their fault minerals made batteries and batteries made surveillance technology and surveillance technology made wars easy and they wore chacos for God sakes and still felt the Bern!).

The summer people: Matty and I both reviled and needed them, because they inflated the sexual economy enough that we could keep not sleeping with each other and simultaneously not step on each other’s toes within the small pool of stick and poke culinary students or year-round forest service workers (hot, but nearly mute unless in the thrilling presence of an identifiable mushroom.) They were here for the mountains, remote working and taking the same trails Matty and I did with hand rolled joints and culinary school left-overs, but faster, with little beeping watches telling them how many calories they burned––barely even looking at the view over the blue-green landscape before hustling back down to make time or a conference call.

And the summer people were officially here––last night was the culinary school’s end of the year bash and Matty had gotten spectacularly drunk on five star apple brandy. He came home so out of it that he crawled into bed with me. He had slept with his hands around my waist, and I heard the murmuring of his dreams. I woke up to him gone, but I needed to see him. So, I came to the sterile little coffee shop that was militant about everything, and that Matty loved, despite how much he also loved to wade in filthy creeks with me, and sleep outside in the navy blue hammock that stretched long and agile as a dark cat between the peeling columns on our porch.

His head was resting on the stainless steel counter between the two, dueling tip jars he re-labeled every morning (today, the left jar said fried eggs and the right jar said silence.) I leaned over and placed my cheek on the counter so that if he looked up, there I’d be. The coolness was a shock. I could smell the soft tendrils of cigarette smoke in his hair and the sticky, cinnamon scent of a lotion I’d been gifted by an elderly library patron that gave me a rash and that I’d promptly re-gifted to Matty. He smelled like him, in other words. Like many of my own days, too, sitting next to him and reading, or just sipping orange juice and watching his wrists as he turned the pages of Being and Time by Heidegger, thinking how stupidly glad I felt being in time with him.

I whispered, “Hey.” He snapped his head up so fast that he knocked over fried eggs, shattering the glass. He looked at the shards and then back at me and laughed so hard––a sound that ran warmly through the air like it was someone barefoot in summer shrieking down the middle of the street; it was happiness. He was wearing a bleachy pink shirt that said Respect the Locals, and had hundreds of screen printed worms all over it. I opened my mouth to ask him about last night when the door jangled open. A summer person walked in. Matty rolled his eyes and mouthed khakis to me.

“Wait up, though, yeah, Chaos?” he said, his eyebrows knitting together softly.

“Duh,” I said, “I’ll be over there hoping for a deeply free cappuccino with oat milk,” I said, stuffing a five dollar bill into the silence jar.

He smiled, “Coming right up.”

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I felt a long shadow over my body and could smell the khaki pants wearer’s cologne (birchwood) and underneath it, the unmistakable bubble-gum smell of a vape––the smell of the most disgusting, vulgar, capitalist cartwheels. I turned to look at him: tall, a striking and stirring freckle under his left eye, thick lashes, tall enough that I, five feet and eight inches tall and what my mother used to call corn-fed, looked quite dainty.

“Coming right up,” Matty said, giving me a long look before turning around to enter into a coffee math equation.

Pushing my sunglasses onto my head and tilting my head like I was getting ready to take a picture of the guy’s face, I said, “What if I’m into some freaky shit like…whole milk.”

The stranger crossed his arms and leaned back on his heels. “I can handle it. I’m a tough guy,” he said.

“Oh, lactose is nothing to you.”

“I laugh in the face of lactose.”

“You eat cheese fries with no tears?”

“None. Pizza too.”

“Wow, big man on campus.”

“Actually, college drop out,” he said.

“Really,” I asked, “‘cause those khakis are giving Yale, or at least Connecticut.” I heard Matty laugh at that one over the sound of the espresso grinder.

“I’m not even allowed to wear sneakers at my office,” he said, pointing to his mahogany colored loafers. I could see that his socks were mismatched––one navy with red lobsters and the other green and orange stripes.

“Let me guess, software engineer?”

“No, God no,” he said, pulling out a black water bottle and pressing it into my hands. He pointed to the only sticker on it, a campaign one brandished throughout our state by the birkenstock crowd (my people). It was of our grumpy, socialist senator crossing his arms angrily, big mittens on his hands.

“Wait, you work for Bernie?” I asked.

“The one and only. I saw him at the urinals once,” he said, already bobbing his head like he was anticipating my incredulity.

“That’s so fucking cool. Did you say anything?”

“No, but right when I started peeing, he thanked me for my service.” I gasped and hugged his water bottle tightly.

“Bernie is such a legend. I’m Jessa,” I said, sticking out my hand towards him, “proud progressive voter.” He took my hand and didn’t let go for two seconds too long.

“Owen. Proud progressive urinal user.”

“So, can you get me in with the big guy?” I asked, pointing up at the ceiling, with all its millennial exposed pipes––the industrial chic of it all.

“Oh…you mean God? The big guy in the sky? Mr. and on the seventh day I created light? Probably. Yeah, on second thought, definitely. Bernie-shmernie.”

“Cool, cool. I have some questions.”

“Me too,” he said, grabbing his phone (no case) from his pocket. “For example, your number.”

“What do I get?” I asked. He took his water bottle from me, peeled off the sticker, and pressed it gently onto the back of my hand.

“You get whatever you want. But start with this.”

Matty cleared his throat and Owen dropped my hand.

“Two oat capuccinos,” Matty said, sliding a blue, porcelain mug to me and a paper cup with the word Khakis on it towards Owen, “one to-go.”

“Thank you,” Owen said, not even looking Matty’s way, but checking his watch. “Gotta head. All our meetings are remote this month, but the senator’s still a stickler for timeliness.”

“Good. I have big feelings on the lake clean-up, in all seriousness, so let me know if that comes up; I’d love to hear about it,” I said.

Owen scoffed. “We have nothing to do with that. That’s local. Bernie's not a state senator. My meeting is actually about tariffs in Moldova.” He took a sip of his cappuccino, “But I’ll text you,” he said, before walking out to his very important video call. Matty followed him and locked the door.

“What are you doing,” I asked, “also, this cappuccino is amazing, what the fuck?”

“It’s all about patience,” he said, coming up to me and standing close enough that I could hear his heart beating. “Please, please do not sleep with khakis guy,” he said, his hands clasped in supplication. “I can not,” he said, “under any circumstance, hear a white-boy lecture through the wall.” He looked at me, really looked at me, like he’d been doing since we were nineteen years old, the hazel flecks in his otherwise universe-dark eyes flashing with the sun’s warm insistence through the windows. And for the first time in six years I did not look away––like I did the first time he handed me a sandwich on a real plate unlike the paper ones he gave everyone else; like I did when we stayed up late in the dorm’s study room, a pink-covered textbook on the Middle Ages between us; like I did when we went skinny dipping in the river between the Psychology and Engineering buildings; like I had when we were driving cross country in our graduation caps and listening to Marvin Gaye while rolling green hills passed us and the fake leather seats hummed with summer’s heat. For the first time since I’d known him, for the first time since I was sure he loved me, which was the moment we both opened our doors at the same time on the very first day of school and a jolt of soul-deep recognition flooded my giddy blood cells, I looked at him.

“Ask me nicely,” I said. It was a command and a question: how love always was. And that’s when slowly he put his hands––callused and burned and spectacularly maimed from sautee pants and cow milking and pressing pencils deep into his palms as an adolescent to keep from fighting the blond assholes who terrorized him in school––on my hips, and lowered onto his knees, his palms sliding down the yellow linen of my dress.

“Don’t sleep with him,” he said. “Don’t answer his calls. Don’t even think about him.”

“Why?” I asked. He tugged at the hem of my dress lightly and smiled.

“Because he’s a dick. And tonight you’re busy.”

“I am?”

“We’re having dinner. You and me.”

“You hadn’t told me,” I said.

“I’m telling you now. We’re having dinner,” he stood up and put his hands on the side of my face, his thumbs making little circles on my cheeks, “and we’re going to keep having dinner, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. Okay?” I nodded and he kissed me.

And so it was.