The Light at Jimmy Lim's
No-one walks into Jimmy Lim’s all-night all-you-can-eat vegetarian Buddhist restaurant to fill in time. You have to want to be there in order to turn yourself off to the jaundiced light that it throws over the alley out front. I eat at Jimmy’s because he’s cheap, and not because I’m Buddhist, although I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of Buddha inspiration so that I could break up with my boyfriend Joel in a harm-nothing-on-this-earth manner.
I’m not always the most discreet of people. I say what I think and mean what I say, but sometimes, in the transference from head to mouth it comes out sounding like a verbal stab to the heart. For example, I want to tell Joel that he’s basically a nice person, but that every little thing he does annoys me: he doesn’t shower enough, he tries to get out of paying bills, he doesn’t make lists- just a few lists would make his life so much easier. Then, there are the big things: he spends most of his day in bed so there’s very little time where we can spend real and meaningful time together. That’s the most annoying. I’m not a sleeper-plain and simple.
So while I’m at Jimmy Lim’s I’m wondering what a good Buddhist would do in this situation, whether she would persevere with a relationship that’s going nowhere, although I imagine that a good Buddhist would end up being a nun, living in a snowy mountain cave while praying for good things to happen to all people everywhere. And I’m not looking forward to the breakup with Joel, I would prefer to just get to the point where after a month of not seeing each other we just come to an agreement that we’re not together. That would have worked except two days earlier when our mutual friend Bryony rang and said that Joel, who had just been at her place, told her that we were going really well as a couple, better than ever and that we were practically living together.
I get distracted. The tallest man I have ever seen in my life stoops to walk through the doorway into Jimmy’s Lim’s. He pauses, looks around the room and then takes a table in the corner diagonally opposite and across the room from where I usually sit. Immediately he looks out of place; not because he’s so tall, Jimmy Lim looks at least to be six foot four. It’s just that the tall man doesn’t look like he’s dirt poor, hungry or there on a handout. He doesn’t look like he had just been testing all the doorways to enlightenment and that he was ready to give this one a go. He doesn’t look like he’s going to pull a fat novel out of the pocket of his extremely tall man jacket, and sit and read for the next three hours at his well-lit corner table.
He looks shifty.
Shifty doesn’t bother me because I know that Jimmy Lim, while a practicing Buddhist, is also ex-SAS and could break him in a thousand different places without even the tall man knowing he was there. That’s why Jimmy Lim is a legend; not just because he has good food cheap, but because everyone knows that if he decided, he could do a contract on someone famous and not have to work again for at least another two years. Jimmy didn’t tell me this, and as far as I know he hasn’t told anyone, but Darren Sims, another regular of Jimmy’s looked it up on the internet. When I asked Darren what possessed him to put “Jimmy Lim” and “SAS” into the keywords on a search he said: “He’s a big man with a lot of grace. You don’t just stumble into that, it takes training.” Then Darren spoiled the whole effect by trying to look mysterious, like he’d had a father, uncle or lover who had once trained in assassin arts. But it was too late; Darren lived his life like a transparent pane of glass.
It takes my mind off Joel to wonder what the tall man is doing at Jimmy Lim’s. I notice that he hides behind his beard and folds into himself, tucking his huge shoulders around his body like wings. I glance over to Jimmy and see that he has noticed his new customer, and that he is frowning. Toast, tall man, I think to myself. You’re toast.
Jimmy Lim doesn’t get a chance to do anything about it. He doesn’t even cover the floor of his restaurant in three great strides because a loud bang close by rattles my heart in my chest, followed by a waterfall of smashing glass and then nothing makes sense because shapes are blurred and I’m on the ground hugging the floor and there’s yelling. It’s like someone has painted the picture in front of me without paying attention to the numbers, it kind of looks familiar, but then again, it doesn’t. It makes sense to stay on the floor.
When I look up the tall man is fury. He stands taller now that I’m on the floor and he steps over the mess to rip open a car door. There’s a car in the middle of Jimmy Lim’s I say to my brain. But all I get back is numbers painted the wrong colour. No really, there’s a car, look, and my eyes focus on the silver sedan that now sits in the middle of the room, with only the tailgate poking through the window to the alley outside. Ah, my brain says, now it makes sense, all that crashing and breaking and yelling was because somebody drove a car through the front window of Jimmy Lim’s.
My mouth goes rubbery and I’m ready to pass out, but I notice the tall man has reached into the driver’s side and has pulled out a man who dangles, stunned in the tall man’s grasp. The tall man winds up a massive roundhouse and hits the driver, once, then follows through with more punches that sound wet and flabby, like he’s belting a thick steak. Next thing Jimmy’s all over the tall man doing his ex-SAS helicopter-blade fast moves with a little bit of Buddhist mercy, which is lucky, because without that he would be dead.
The police arrive at the same time as the ambulance and they cart the tall man away, he’s all shaken up and wobbly like a sad stick figure cartoon. Maybe they’re a little hasty in taking him down to the station, but they eat at Jimmy Lim’s as well.
I leave and go around to Joel’s and catch him awake. I tell him the story about what happened at Jimmy Lim’s, how awesome it was, how I wasn’t hurt (only shaken) and how I’d never seen anything so real before. Then I tell Joel that we need to go our separate ways. He says that he’s glad that I wasn’t injured and that he could feel us drifting apart and that frankly, if he were being honest, there were things about me that really annoyed him. Like the way I labelled people as one thing or the other like: “tall,” “shifty” and “mean.”
I AM NOT JUDGEMENTAL I yell and then we fight. Not in the tall man and punched steak kind of way, not even in the Buddhist mercy kind of way, but in the way that brings everything up all together: two years of laughing at the wrong time, singing stupid songs in the shower, telling weak jokes with offensive overtones, sleeping too late, getting up too early, paying more attention to the dog, your mother, your sister, your ancient aunt; of nights at the pub, of ogling him or her or both of them, of spending money and then not enough. It all hits the air in wet phlumping splats of hatred until we’ve had enough.
Then we sit in silence. I’m not sure what he’s thinking, but I want to yell out to him: THEN WHY DID YOU GO AND TELL BRIONY THAT WE WERE PRACTICALLY MOVED IN TOGETHER, THAT WAS JUST STUPID TO SAY THAT WHEN WE BOTH DIDN’T MEAN IT.
But maybe, after a night at Jimmy Lim’s, of not eating meat and then seeing what can happen to a person when they’re angry or desperate enough to run a car through a window, I’ve had enough. Eventually Joel and I hug, like awkward strangers, and then he yawns and I leave.
