Raw Power

BY DAVID LEVINSON

Raw Power is a food café located on Vulcan Street, and which specialises in salads and other vegetarian dishes (such as falafel,tofu sandwiches, etc.). Each Saturday a friend and I would meet there for lunch, and did so for a total of about 4 months earlier this year.
Now while these lunches began as relatively innocuous affairs, consisting of not much more than polite conversation and maybe an occasional browsing of the newspaper (the entertainment section, mainly), one day something switched. When, exactly, it would be hard to say. What was engendered was more a gradual shift in feeling that, maybe due our mutual tendency to become uncertain around those who express affection towards us – in this case, said person being the café proprietor who had taken a great and obvious liking to both of us – on some subconscious level caused us to sabotage the blissful idyll we had discovered.
Our chosen accessory for what would eventual result in us no longer being welcome at the Raw Power food establishment became the bowl of mints they kept beside the cash register – well not the bowl itself, really, but what was inside it, i.e. the mints. So, while the second person was paying for their order, the first would move round the side of the counter and, in some pantomime of searching through magazines, grab as many as several handfuls of mints and place these in their pocket, before we would both convene at our usual table by the window. Then we would place the mints in a small mound on the window sill and cover it with a newspaper, while we politely waited for our orders.
Once the waiter was clearly out of sight, and counter person happily occupied, we would proceed to flick mints out of the window at passersby. Now, three times as a result of this we received verbal threats, but more often than not people would stop momentarily to try and ascertain the source of the threat, before awkwardly moving on. Sometimes when there was a surfeit of mints, we would flick as many as three as a time over the sill. Overall, I would argue that this was not a very productive but overall very pleasurable time in my life.
I can't recall anything being out of the ordinary the day our little pastime finally met its demise - only that there was a deep mixture of sadness and disappointment in the waiter's eyes when he informed us that people had been complaining about us. Since then, all my mint-throwing has been put to a halt but I can't promise that this will remain indefinite.



***