The Bag King has a Beak

There is a man who I have seen in the coffee house a great many times. I find him there at night, but I suspect if I were to come during the day, he might be still be there. Most of the time he reads; he is reading when I get there, and still reading when I leave.

Today I saw this man leave, and this would have been a hell of an ordeal for most people. You see, he had a lot of bags. They were plastic bags, the kind that the student store uses mixed in with nondescript ones, and he must have had at least a dozen of them. I don't know what he had in them, they looked lumpy enough to be clothes, but who knows? He could have had cabbages, for all I knew. Whatever they were, he planned to carry them all home on his bike.

The man is dressed the same every time I see him. He wears a dirty brown tweed blazer, not quite a business suit but close, mismatched with a pair of blue Adidas sweat pants, of the style you see volleyball players walk to practice in. Shiny black boots poke out underneath, and as he walks I think I can see studs. He is tall and undeniably thin, but with naturally broad shoulders. All this you can see from the way his blazer stretches out on top, then fits inward at the waist. He has the frame and arms of a high school basketball player. White earphones are always dangling from his ears, and he always wears a scarf over his mouth, and a dark woolen cap over his dreadlocks. As I look, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out what looks like a white plastic headwrap, and stretches it on his head over his cap. Before, I wondered if he had a beak. Now I have the sudden thought that he might transform into an eagle before my eyes, spread his long arms wide and fly away.

He stands very straight over his bags; so straight that when he bends to pick up a handful of his bags it seems to take him an eternity. When he finally stoops, it looks like it's causing him just enough pain that he can suppress it. While he reaches down with one hand he holds the other behind his back, revealing a silver chain dangling from his wrist.

And so he stooped, grabbed, rose, and put each bag on alternating handlebars of his bicycle with the speed of a 50-story crane. After a couple of bags I worried he might not have room on the handlebars to rest his hands. Still he piled them on, and when he had only one bag left, he paused for a little longer, stooped in his stiff, ponderous way, retrieved it as an ape would scoop up an infant, and put it with the rest. Then he wheeled his bike around and stepped into the night.