At the cafes where I hang out there’s a fellow whom I will call Dunfrey. He’s a lean, sleepy Jamaican in his 40s and most often he’s wearing one of those massive Jiffypop hats made of wool. I see him at one table, blinking into the distance, and then at another table, blinking there. He’s one of the most boring people I’ve ever met. A friend does this imitation of him: “Yeah, man, I wake up this morning. I was hungry! I make some toast, put in food my stomach. It’s nice, I like that. Now I am okay. I am going to see my friend outside Scotia Bank. We talk. Then I go my place, some lunch, eat corn flakes. I pour milk on the corn flakes, eat a muffin. It’s good.” And so on. He’s a nice man, but if he weren’t nice it wouldn’t make much difference.

What aggravates me is that cute young women are always walking up to his table, various shapes and sizes, and they’re lookers. Their eyes brighten when they see him; they hang around a bit and giggle and chat. He becomes distinctly more animated with them there, but his conversation still isn’t much. Yet the girls don’t seem to mind.

Last Saturday I had enough. I was sitting at the next table when a small blond girl from British Columbia stopped by. “Dunfrey!” she said and they fell into conversation, and then her friend stopped by and the three of them chatted away. The friend was the same pretty girl I posted about here. 

The girls took off and Dunfrey went back to blinking, or gathering his energy for a blink. He really is the most somnolent creature.

“Dunfrey,” I said. “What’s your secret?”

He stared at me and now the blink came. He seemed a bit rattled.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You know. Whenever I see you, you’ve got pretty girls talking to you. What’s your secret?”

“But you don’t know?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

He looked this way, the other way. He leaned in close and lowered his voice. He sounded rather sad.

“I sell them pot,” he said.