Cup Of Coffee With A Little Noir ParanoiaOne morning I felt a little of that noir paranoia even before I had my first cup of coffee. I was on my way back to L.A. from the Bay Area and I stopped in Orinda to pick up some coffee for the road. There's a nice little joint under the library there. After finagling my kids, purse, local zines and bag of pastries into the car, I started to drive away. A nice looking man on the sidewalk across the street shouted at me as I drove past. I wondered what he said. Did he just call me a bitch? Maybe I should've stopped and let him jaywalk in front of me. Then someone else shouted at me. I checked my rearview mirror to see what was up, but the person was already walking away. Starting to feel a wee bit paranoid, I turned a corner and stopped at a red light. As a car coming towards me passed on the other side of the road, I heard a woman's voice loud and clear, "Your coffee's on top!". Fully blushing, I stepped out of my car at the intersection to retrieve the lone cup of coffee sitting stoicly on the roof of my car. I couldn't help but wonder, what if a character in a film noir played by, say, Richard Widmark, or Humphrey Bogart, or Edmund O'Brien (pick one) was driving along with a cup of joe on his car roof? And what if he was racked with guilt about something, or embroiled up to his eyebrows in an agonizing bit of plot and he noticed people shouting at him, but he couldn't quite hear the words? Just imagine his face. How would the ensuing noir paranoia affect his next actions? (And how far could he get before that little cup of hot coffee took off?)
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