Baldy himself manned the front grill, doing chef's and cashier's duties while joshing customers. Like my Dad, he was a World War I army vet, and Baldy maintained that his hairless dome was the result of his hair breaking off at its roots when fright stiffened it under a steel soupbowl helmet of the era. One morning a visiting salesman tried to peddle a patent salve, touted to grow hair, to Baldy himself. Another customer pointed at the front door handle and suggested, "Rub some on that; if it will grow hair on that brass knob, it might have a chance on Baldy's head."
Baldy's waitress was a local housewife, long wed. On another day, her husband came in and began berating her about some failing. Thinking a customer was abusing a waitress, a stranger tried to interfere on her behalf. Husband and wife turned their anger on the stranger to inform him it was none of his business.
Coffee break is an established democratic right, although somehow overlooked by the framers of our Constitution. After I grew up, I worked on the news desk of a small metropolitan daily. Across the street, facing the railroad depot, was a aged hotel, once a great commercial site, but in my day run down, since only a single, mostly empty, passenger train now arrived daily. Newspaper staffers took coffee breaks in the seedy hotel restaurant, "to keep our resistance to germs built up," as one editor put it. Our coffee companions were a mixed bag of lawyers, loan sharks, store clerks, printers, stenographers and the like. The hotel stocked a couple of prostitutes, who now and then swiveled through, wearing tight skirts. Usually at the counter alone, I eavesdropped and sneaked glances while sipping java and hovering over an open novel, probably a Simenon mystery. One morning a minor flap of some sort surprised the news editor, who phoned across the street to the restaurant to summon me. "Who is he?" asked the cashier; "How will I know him?" The editor snapped, "He's the silly looking S.O.B. reading Plato." With that clue, the cashier fingered me immediately.
Eatery performances are usually subtle, between-the-lines stuff. Not long after we wed, Shay and I saw Stanley Donen's film, Two for the Road. In a restaurant scene, Frederic Raphael's script has Albert Finney ask, "What sort of people eat together and don't talk?" Audrey Hepburn answers, "Married people." Years later in a restaurant, Shay paraphrased, "What sort of people eat comfortably in a restaurant without having to think of bright remarks all the time?" I answered, "Married people." I later penned this bit of verse:
Timewarp
"I'll have the roast-stuffed potato."
The waitress, a girl of April years,
Grins a tip-me smile, scribbles, goes.
My wife scans the crowd. I look
At her cheeks, her mouth, her hair;
Best of all I like her nose's shape.
"That couple is out on a first date."
She speaks low, nods her head left.
I sneak a peek, see a young man
In a bow tie, young woman in heels,
Both talking, laughing, no pauses,
Filling the air between them with wit
Like characters in a teevee comedy,
See ourselves some years before.
Not all coffee shops are good listening posts. Hangouts of the Beats and Hippies often mutated from the proper Mom's Eats atmosphere. For one thing, the smoke in a Purple Onion might not be from tobacco. Hearing some local Ginsberg read his "Howl" might be interesting, but when the juke box was replaced by a teen group twanging electrically amplified strings, the din precluded all conversation, witty or otherwise. Visiting a basement joint in Lubbock about 1962, I saw a young woman, her long hair straightened on an ironing board, standing rapt before a plugged-in combo. She carried an eight-month-old in her arms. Her child was howling his disapproval, but nobody could hear that little voice. I watched his tears stream down, his little mouth open and shut, his chest heave with screams, all unhearable by Mom and the rest of us in the din. Philosophers seek quieter oases.
In regular cafes, the drama can on rare occasions become violent--a fight, a husband gunning down his wife's paramour. Our church rector's son, in adolescent rebellion, wore hipster clothing and had a ring inserted into his nose. After a movie, he had the bad judgment to stop at a 24-hour eatery at two in the morning. The only other patrons were redneck rowdies. One of them seized the mild rebel's nose ring and led that lad around while the other rednecks haw hawed and the waitress cowered in a corner.
Libraries also provide surrounding drama. Joseph Epstein, that excellent ruminator, complains that libraries put him to sleep. I find plenty of mild action at my fringes: a child noisily flipping pages of The Cat in the Hat, a pretty woman flouncing past in a swirl of Nieman-Marcus skirts, an old man seeking a word in a German dictionary. I was cogitating once in a university library when a young man and woman emerged from the book stacks to announce their engagement to two other strangers, their friends, at the far end of the long table where I sat. He had popped her the question somewhere between the ancient and modern literature sections. She had said yes. The two friends rose to offer congratulations. All were unknowns to me, but I stepped around to add my best wishes. The newly plighted eventually danced off, less artfully but more deliriously than Fred and Ginger, accompanied by the Music of the Spheres.
Bars are good theater. A German Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, once designed a theater in which there was no place for an audience. I suppose a play's cast and crew becomes its own audience, a situation that Pirandello seems to have captured in Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello and Schwitters may have had bistros in the backs of their minds.
A pal tells me he was having a drink in a little bar when a fortyish man finished his drink, rose, paid the cashier, and before leaving, inserted his change into a juke box. As the country-western song began plunking, the waitress with a gold front tooth watched him go out the door before commenting, "I'll be damned; the tight S.O.B. bounced for a little music." Cary Grant would not take Kate Hepburn to that sort of bar. Another friend, who has written heart-rending accounts for women's confession magazines, told me she would hang out in bars, sipping a shirley temple and encouraging haggard B-girls to tell of their tragic romances. Proverbially, bartenders were lending a sympathetic ear long before Freud decided that listening was therapy and started charging for it.
Not only do I listen, but I also like to write in coffee shops, in libraries, even in bars. The table makes an excellent desk. Scribbling, I am quite alone, although fellow humans are all around, chatting, arguing, laughing, enacting unrelated scripts. A sort of zoo, filled with primates. A living Louvre gallery. My attitude may be influenced by the number of years I tapped out copy on an Underwood in print shops and newspaper offices, places filled with mechanical clanking and talk, even running and shouting, in the era before computer hush descended. Stimulated, I write.
Of the three possibilities, I prefer coffee shops, so my table-desk can have coffee on it. In his 1829 book, Richelieu, G.P.R. James say that "government is often decided over a cup of coffee," and in the rightly named Age of Enlightenment, the scheming Tallyrand remarked he liked his coffee as black as sin, as hot as hell, as sweet as love. I can do without the sugar. David Mamet has published an essay entitled "Writing in Restaurants" in a collection of the same name. He fills his space talking of the drama he has seen in eateries, such as the end of love affairs. He doesn't mention his drinking coffee, and unlike me, he doesn't seem to actually sit and scribble there.
I realized the compositional possibilities of public places when I was a young college undergrad sipping java in Buck's cafe. I would occasionally see a thirtyish woman, a model thin brunette, sitting alone in a booth, and she was always writing a letter. To her mother or sister? To her husband? Her lover? She took no notice of a pimply faced youth bent over his French grammar, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She showed me it could be done. Soon my pal Rudy and I began to hang out in various coffee joints to write a short story for the pulps, which we naively considered an easy market. The resulting tale of the South Seas--we knew nothing of the South Seas--was called "The Little Savage." We were mature enough to recognize it for what it was and toss it in the trash.
Years later, laboring in public relations, I used to escape my office, with its jangling phone and frequent visitors, to walk a city block and across a busy street to a quiet little barbecue place. No longer with a newspaper column to vent my opinion in, I felt a need to say something, and over coffee I began more seriously trying my hand at fiction in a ballpoint scribble on a spiral notebook. My first two published stories, printed in literary magazines Sou'wester and Pawn Review, were the result. The latter inspired a literary agent to phone from New York to see if I had written a novel, but nothing came of it because I was by then working on a major nonfiction project.
Yet along with prose scribbling, I also observed and listened to my fellow coffee drinkers. I took time out from fiction writing to write a sonnet:
In the coffee shop
Old Roxie comes along to take my dime,
Plus penny tax, and ring the whole thing up,
Remarking that it's warmish for this time
Of April. I pour coffee in my cup
And wander off to settle in a booth
Where I will try to think a thought or two.
The cup is squat and smooth and white as truth;
The coffee is a black and bitter brew.
Behind me in another booth I hear
Two women talking loudly of divorces,
Of straying spouses filled with lies and beer,
Of swapping husbands much like swapping horses.
They're down on men and see no way to right us;
I sip my drink and think of Heraclitus.
