The Midwest was not the home of high style. The roadhouses had whole aisles devoted to beef jerky, some places you could assemble your own hot dog or taco, and although the pour-your-own coffee sections often had cappuccino machines, they had several spouts, labelled “Vanilla Capuccino”, “Caramel Capuccino” or “Chocolate Capuccino”. I began to suspect that they did not conceal an espresso machine inside!

Coffee was a continuing problem. At home, I can walk into Artoven in Manuka, ask for a “super-ginormous family size slender latte” and get exactly what I want. But they know me there.

In the USA, I had not only my accent cloaking my desires, but the varied interpretations of what the coffeefolk thought I’d said, filtered through whatever technology they had available. One “slender latte” from a McCafe in Iowa turned out to be filter coffee with some very dubious milk pumped in. I’m not entirely sure it was liquid milk.

Then there was the time I was served an iced coffee. Heavy on the milk, so I guess it was a latte of some sort.

Top marks for a “slender latte” went to an Oklahoma Starbucks, who produced a latte, possibly made with low-fat milk, topped with whipped cream and caramel syrup.

“Uh, you want Splenda in your latte?” asked one barista. Discoverylover cracked up and I repeated “slender, please!” as I sucked in my gut.

Discoverylover became my interpreter after a while, and my coffees became less random. And not quite as much fun.

I’ll talk about the food another time, but let’s just say that rural America was pretty rural.

We hit Kansas City late one night after a whole day of Midwest, and I was determined to find some style. Somewhere. Anywhere.

We’d booked into the Raphael, which was an indulgence on my part, but was a pretty classy joint, right across from the Plaza. We spotted a restaurant/bar opening off the lobby and went in for a nightcap after a day on the road.

It was really nice. Dim light, a piano player, bar staff in formal clothes. Instead of my usual beer, I ordered a martini, and sat there sipping it, basking in the glow.

The piano player was quite an entertainer. Believe it or not, he had a pet monkey, and he talked to it and it did tricks as part of the act. Sat on his shoulder, reached down and tinkled a few keys, waved to the audience.

The musician took a few requests and was rattling out some good tunes. “Piano Man!” someone asked, and he gave us a great version, rolling his eyes and voice in over-the-top Billy Joel.

The monkey hammed it up for a while and then went visiting, jumping up on tables, begging for pretzels and nuts. It came to us, squatted over my drink, and then to my astonishment and horror dangled its testicles into the glass.

“Get away out of it, yer filthy little bastard!” I snarled, and it scampered back to its master.

I followed, fuming, and the piano man looked up at me as his monkey sought refuge on his shoulder.

“Do you know your monkey dunked his nuts in my martini?”

“Uh no,” he replied, “but if you hum a few bars I’ll pick it up.”

It took all sorts. Harley helped Quint with his suitcase – “Full of bricks, is it?”, realigned his GPS so he could see it over the curve of the steering wheel, and u-turned the cab smoothly around, heading back up Monash Drive. Morning tea time, and the bakery at Campbell shops made the best coffee in the world.

Not to mention a superior rock cake. Their pies had won prizes too.

“Flat white, please. Hot. Big.” His hands sketched out a shape approximately the size of a beer keg. “And a stone-cold rock cake.”

The barista, an altogether too handsome young man, smiled politely behind his mirror-gleaming machine. He’d seen Harley’s comedy routine far too many times. He wished he had a dollar for every time he’d heard the same jokes.

Harley paid and took his coffee and cake outside. Cold in July, but he could keep an eye on the cab. One other hardy soul sat at a table, his chair angled to catch the sun, steam curling gently from a mug. Eighty years old, at a guess.

Harley glanced at him, sensing a kindred spirit. The signs were there for those who knew the code.

“Where’d yer do yer laggin’?”

The elderly gent looked up, a trail of blue tattooed tears faintly visible dropping from the corner of one eye.

“All over,” he replied. “You?”

“Goulburn, in the main.”

“Did me first laggin’ there. Evil place, that.”

“Not going back.” Harley stuck out his hand. “Harley Barnardo.”

“Sharkey, they call me.”

They shook. Harley set his coffee down on the table and turned to face the sun.

“It doesn’t get much better than this, eh?”

“I should be on the Gold Coast with the bikini birds,” Sharkey said. “Not stuck in this cold old hole.”

Harley raised his cup. “Let’s both bust out, hey?”

Sharkey shook his head. “They only let me out of Humane last month. Gotta stay in the Territory for a year. Gave me a room in that place.”

Harley glanced over at Erstwhile Garden Retirement Village, a grey slab with windows. “Looks like X-Block without the bars.”

They chatted on, a shared brotherhood of crime. Sharkey told of the old days in Goulburn, when as a teenager he had been assigned a cell with one of the last bushrangers, a man who had ridden with the Governor gang in his youth. The nation had been founded on other peoples’ convictions, unbroken chains of sentences and cant stretching back to the old lags on the First Fleet.

A woman within a sniff of thirty came out of the grocery, pushing a stroller with a couple of infants. Her arms were laden with plastic bags full of disposables, and the children were barely visible noses poking out of hooded garments, eyes gleaming in their caverns. Her own face was grim.

“Ever get married, Harley?”

“I run too fast,” Harley grinned, taking a bite of rock cake.

“Three times for me,” Sharkey sighed. “and me girl’s inside watching telly.”

“She should be making you coffee.”

“She only does instant. Instant everything. Microwave crap and boiling water. Not like the old days.”

“Never is nowadays.” Harley took another bit of rock cake, working his way around the cherry in the centre. “My Mum could make a rock cake so hard you’d be spitting out fillings for a week after.”

“Sounds like me first missus. Scones of Stone, I used to call ‘em.”

The door of Ounce Books opened and a woman emerged with an armload of books. One look at her and you could tell that a life of books, cats and chocolate was a comfortable one. She was smiling, and her t-shirt had a bust of Mark Twain on the front.

“Nice set of buns right there.”

“Nice all over,” Harley agreed. “She gives out free books. Can you credit that? Runs a bookshop and hands them out for nothing!”

“Oh yeah? I could do with a bit of that. Don’t mind a good murder, meself.”

“She fills up a shelf in the bakery. Up the back it is. Only catch is that you have to go on the internet and make a note or something.”

“Bloody computers and internet. It’s just another way of ripping off the little guy,” Sharkey said. “Me girl’s always chatting away to her mates. Twittering, she says.”

Harley took another mouthful of rock cake. The sultanas slipped under his teeth. As a kid, he’d pulled them out and set them aside, worried that a blowfly might have found its way into the mix. One Christmas, he’d spent ten minutes working on a pudding so full of dates and prunes and currants and cherries that all that he could get out of it were tiny shreds of duff. After that he hadn’t bothered.

Life was too short to worry about the little things. So what if a nut got into his cab? He’d be out again in a few minutes, and Harley could drive on in the sunshine. Canberra was a good place to be a cabbie. The roads were wide, the traffic flowed smoothly, the passengers were well-behaved.

And so what if they were putting up an ugly building at the end of the street? There’d be work coming out of it. Engineers and architects needing cab rides while it was going up, and public servants when it was in business. The more passengers in his taxi, the more money in his pocket.

He drained the last of his coffee. Life was good and the future was better. It would be spring soon. He popped the last fragments of rock cake into his mouth, feeling the preserved cherry slide under his teeth, sweet and delicious. That was the best part.

Sharkey was looking at him, smiling.

“Got to get back on the road, mate. Make a quid.” Harley said, putting his coffee mug down firmly. “Good to meet you!”

“Yeah, you too, cobber. Look, I might have something you can help me with.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay