So I was walking across the street downtown, and this horn blasted my ears out. I turned to see a bus coming right at me. I froze for a second, looked at the grill that was about to connect with my head, and then some guy stepped off the sidewalk, pushed me forward, and both of us fell out into the street as the bus roared past. He picked me up and half carried me to the other side of the street.

“Did you see that?” he said.

“Man,” I said. I was still a little shocked. I had no idea what had happened. The bus had come out of nowhere.

“That bus came out of nowhere,” he said to me. I wiped my forehead, checked my sleeves and legs– they were swiped with grime from where I hit the ground. I dusted them off. “You should sue,” the guy said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Man,” I repeated. There was a bench nearby, and I went over and had a sit.

“Listen,” the guy said to me, “I don’t have anywhere to be or nothin’. Do you maybe want to get a cup of coffee?”

I looked him over. He wasn’t dressed too bad, white t-shirt and a pair of jeans. He had on a drivers’ cap, and it made a plaid yellow ring around his head. Maybe it’s because I was a little dazed from just having narrowly avoided being hit by a bus, but he seemed okay enough to me. Did I have anywhere to go? I thought there was a class I needed to be at, but things seemed foggy at this precise moment. The guy looked okay, I guess. There was a weird sense about him, though, like he was too good or something. You know those guys in the Abercrombie and Fitch ads that are always hanging out with skinny girls and looking off ponderously into the distance while wearing the latest fashions? Imagine if you saw one of those guys happily serving bums at the soup kitchen. That’s what this guy seemed like.

“Sure, I guess,” I said. “Where at?”

There was a little cafe a few blocks over, La Maison Du Ciel. I’d never been in there– it was a little high class for me, I think. Sure, I spent a fair amount of time in coffeeshops and bookstores, but not cafes where they had more than one fork. This place had three forks, but they were only open for lunch. I probably would have picked someplace else, but like I said, I was dazed.

The guy got us in, though I think the waiter figured he had better things to do before the lunch rush. We got sat at a table against the wall.

“What are you getting?” the guy asked. “I wonder if they still have eggs. I love eggs.”

“I thought we were having coffee, man,” I frowned and rubbed my head. It hurt a little bit. Or maybe it didn’t. I decided it would have hurt a lot more if I’d been hit by the bus, so I decided to be nicer to the guy. “I’m having coffee. You can get whatever you want.”

“It’s no problem,” the guy said. Man, nothing brought him down. The waiter came back over, and I just ordered a coffee. The guy asked if they had espresso, and then ordered a mocha. “With lots of whipped cream,” he told the waiter, whose nose turned up as I watched. “I love whipped cream.”

“So,” I said, as the waiter took our menus away. “What’s your deal, anyway? Why am I here getting coffee with– ” I stopped. I hadn’t really thought about it yet. “– a guy who just saved my life?”

“It’s no big deal,” the guy said, sipping water. “I do it all the time. Not the coffee, the life-saving, I mean. I’m your guardian angel.”

In a clearer state of mind, this is probably the point that I would have realized I was having coffee with a complete stranger. This is probably when I would have realized that I had almost died thanks to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, that instead of sitting in a cafe with a somewhat pretentious atmosphere having coffee with a dude who pushed me out of the way, I should be somewhere yelling angrily into a phone about how I should, at the very least, never have to pay for bus fare again. If I had been in a clearer state of mind, this is what I would have been doing.

I was, however, not in a very clear state of mind. “Oh,” is what I said.

“Wow,” is what I said next.

“Yeah,” the guy said. “Cool, right?”

“Oh,” I said again. My vocabulary had lost a few million words momentarily.

I sipped some water, regained a little portion of my personal dictionary. “You’re my guardian angel,” I told the guy.

“Pretty much,” he said. “I’ve done some fill-in shifts for other angels every once in a while, but mostly it’s been you all along.”

(to be continued)