(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)
The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.
Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.
The man who speaks with her most often, a language poet who affects drip of silver, leather, and semi-precious stones, sells his self-typed, self-photocopied, self-stapled together collections from a table via a hand-lettered “Buy Great Poems” sign. He has had hearing aids surgically implanted in his skull, and their most frequent companion, once a forest fire fighter, now an astrologer, walks with the assistance of two poles which require that his latte be carried to the table by a barrista.
Soon a professor emeritus of comparative literature, who has out-lived two wives and is courting a third, arrives and sits along the back wall. He wears horn-rimmed glasses behind which he blinks constantly. He is joined by a stand-up bass player, also a widower, who performs with a trio at assisted living facilities and hospitals. Both he and the professor are kayakers and birders. The retired contractor who sits alongside them is a birder but not a kayaker. He and his wife take cruises, most recently to Norway and the Balkans. These three men show photos of their most recently observed birds to each other daily, like cats presenting recently slaughtered prey. The final member of this group, neither a kayaker or a birder but a former library clerk who lived for years in Thailand, has a white beard and plans to vote for Robert Kennedy, Jr.
For a while, this first wave of customers included three octogenarians named Harry, each of whom wore a Greek fisherman’s cap. One had been a labor reporter and one an abstract expressionist painter and one, whose occupation I never learned, was Austrian-accented. The reporter died of cancer and the abstract expressionist from injuries sustained in a fall while leaving a doctor’s office. The Austrian’s fate I don’t know.
…
The café is on the ground floor of a brick building in the Gourmet Ghetto. The building had been a laundry until its acquisition by a developer who converted it into a boutique hotel and felt a café would provide a desirable bohemian flair. It had bare brick walls, where local artists could show their works, and shelves, on which local authors could display theirs; but when the developer sold the hotel to a Paris-based syndicate, the new owner covered the bricks with red and gold, fleur-de-lis-patterned wallpaper and removed the bookshelves. Any unclaimed books were donated to Goodwill and the art replaced with framed travel posters celebrating France.
This did not cause a shift – or improvement – in clientele. The customers continued to come at the same times and sit in the same places. They continued to defiantly call the café Espresso Bongo, not Café Montmartre, as the syndicate had re-christened it. They continued their conversations about Covid or retirement portfolios or the period when Eldridge Cleaver hung at the café (“A nasty fellow”). They argued about meta-fiction and the value of a signed Don Larsen baseball card and the best way to prepare eggplant and complained about each other’s quirks once the subject of complaint had left for the day. Younger people, who prefer cafes in which they can sit, undisturbed, focused on their lap tops, go elsewhere.
…
By 9:30, most of these people have been replaced by others who prefer to sit outside. Many of this group are acoustic musicians of a vintage that still resents Bob Dylan’s going electric. The most accomplished among them plays guitar, sings, and owns a shop where he restores and buys and sells stringed instruments. He has lived in Madison and the Village and Tangiers, and has stories from each stage of his life, which he repeats more and more frequently, more and more loudly, and at greater and greater length. (He sold Dylan and Joan Baez guitar picks. He smoked hashish with Paul Bowles.) He has survived quadruple by-pass surgery and says Arhoolie is releasing a four-disc, boxed set of his entire unrecorded catalogue, but the royalty rate he reports (50% of the cover price) causes skeptical eyebrows to be raised among those knowledgeable about the music business.
Another guitar player makes his living buying, selling and swapping antiques – jewelry, art, furniture – at flea markets. He is thin, with wolfish grin, and still plays pick-up basketball. Once he played in the best game in the park but now he plays in games where the other players are teenagers, smaller than he – and often Tibetan. “The Slinger,” he was once called, but now it is “O.G.,” and he is a plaintiff in the Camp Lejeune class action because of bladder cancer.
A third guitar player grew up in Hawaii and came to Berkeley after touring in a company of “Hair.” He has not worked on-the-books since, but owns a house in Emeryville in a shoe repair shop whose conversion he did himself. He hosts every-other-week concerts ($20/person) and monthly pot-luck backyard jams. (Free, if you arrive with an instrument). He wears a battered cowboy hat and scuffed cowboy boots. Twice, surgery removed cancers from his cheek.
An (at most) five-foot-tall former figure skater, who lives in his truck, also cowboy hatted, also a guitar player, is usually not speaking to one or two of the other outside regulars. He travels a summer circuit of music festivals at which he sells mushrooms, Molly, X, and his jeans contain more holes than fabric. A roofer, who writes and records his own songs in his home studio, seems to have a brain mis-wired to compel him to join any conversation in progress, regardless of subject, and overwhelm it with his own experience, which have always been considerable. A non-musical woman who was a UC administrator and another who was a librarian are among those he overwhelms, as is a third woman who cleans houses and a fourth who acted in soaps in NYC. They are frequently joined by a meditation instructor, who has redirected his life to the writing of noir crime novels, and a Vietnam vet, who has devoted his to an inner journey and calls the café “Church.”
A musician, who once sailed around the world, died earlier this year of ovarian cancer. A potter had pre-deceased her with breast cancer. A stand-up story-teller of her life in Appalachia, has dementia, and a pediatrician with Parkinson’s no longer leaves her room.
…
The shift between the inside and outside groups is marked by the arrival of a 60-ish, twig-thin Indonesian woman with waist-length salt-and pepper hair and pink-tinted wire-rimmed glasses. She drives a BMW convertible, and, regardless of the weather, wears sandals, baggy, cord-tied slacks and layered tops in browns and greys, which accent her thinness. She sits at the outside table farthest from the others. She does not interact with any of the regulars but reads Buddhist commentary – Ninoslav Nanamoli, Sumanera Bodhesako – or, occasionally, P.G. Wodehouse. Area streetpeople are drawn to her like pigeons to bench sitters in the park. But instead of bread crumbs, she dispenses money, coffee, pastries. (Dogs race to her, yipping, from half a block away, because they know she has treats for them too.) When it rains, she may put a favored streetperson up in the hotel.
Some of the streetpeople become customers of Espresso Bongo. Raider Rip, who always dressed in silver-and-black, came every morning with a yogurt and banana he had bought at Safeway. He would have a coffee and read any sport section that had been left behind. He circulated among the other customers, one by one, day by day, asking to borrow money which he promised to replay the first of the month when his check arrived. After enough first-of-the-months had passed with no one being repaid, he disappeared. He returned several months later, borrowed more money, and disappeared again.
Nigel was a stove-bellied young man who wore a Cossack trooper’s hat that may have seen service during the Korean War. He could spend hours playing video games on his lap top. He had to sit near one of the cafes two electrical outlets in order to keep his many electric devices charged. He was extremely knowledgeable about such devices and eager to help people who were having troubles with theirs, but if the tables by the outlets were taken, he would ask the people at them to move and, if they did not, would vilify them. (“Old geezer!” was his preferred slur.) His parents, retired corporate attorneys, owned a home in Orinda, but Nigel kept his belongings in a storage locker and slept in the doorway of an abandoned Bank of America close to the cafe.
Another outdoor sleeper, Nsemgiyumva, had come from Rwanda in the 1970s to study at the university. He panhandled, drank wine, and urinated in the flower box in front of the post office. He spoke of returning to Rwanda, but it is unclear if he was Hutu or Tutsi or if he had any idea what had occurred there since he left. The magician used to see to it that Nsemgiyumva took his kidney medication, but not long after the magician failed to return from Mexico, he disappeared too.
There are others who’d made impressions before vanishing. One was an elderly man in a coolie’s straw hat who pushed a supermarket cart filled with newspapers he had collected from “free” boxes or recycle bins and tried to sell. One was a puffin-shaped man, who wore leiderhosen and a skull cap, multi-colored like a pousse café, who passed a basketball back and forth, from hand to hand, around his front and back, while he walked. Once he was chosen into a three-on-three game in the park, and when the ball was passed to him, passed it around his front and back and then threw it toward the nearest light post. Another liked to shoot by himself on one of the park’s four courts and if anyone joined him, screamed and cursed and flung their ball to the park’s far end. But if you ran into him, say, at the bar in Chez Panisse and tried to avoid eye-contact, he would smile and say, “Are you trying to pretend you don’t know me?”
…
Between the café and the abandoned bank is a stretch of sidewalk where a skeletal woman slept. She appeared from nowhere and stayed for weeks or months, wrapped in blankets, with lit candles in a circle around her. She seemed to exist on unfiltered Camels and grape popsicles. If someone gave her loose change, she threw it back. If they gave her a bill, she stuck a lit candle to it. For a few months, she was gone but, one morning, there she was again, lying on the same patch of sidewalk, returned to the place in the universe that was home.