It's outdoor cafe season once again, except for the places that didn't survive the winterkill. It was toughest to lose Zines on Corydon, my neighbourhood cafe and a bit of home to me. A fine cup of coffee - make mine Americano, a cheap plate of nachos and newspapers free for reading. Don't we all need our own cafe?
Zines was an Info Cafe, a multi media caffeine scene. It had a lively mix of reputables and disreputables and a regular huddle of computer rats cruising the Internet or fighting the Galactic Wars. That was fine with me - I let my four year old play Dr. Seus on CD ROM - some fun without a gun. That gave me a crack at the nachos and a chat with various people from various places - all of them non virtual.
I could take my son to Zines and not feel hushed. Sure, a few people had more metal piercing more body parts than I cared to count. And when they played, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - it was no figure of speech. But people were open and friendly and that gave Zines my five star rating.
I've always had a hangout, a haunt. I've never measured out my life in coffee spoons but I can count the stages of my life by coffee shops.
Do you remember Oscar's? It was Old Time North End Cafe even in the 50's. A deli/grocery store with depression period booths, a rolling wooden floor and a creaking ceiling fan fuzzed with dust. My dad would lead me in by the hand and lean against a barrel of herring to smooze with Oscar - a big barrel of a man himself, who'd laugh out a welcome, cut me a greasy slice of Halava and rub my head. Later, stuffed into a booth, I'd watch Oscar greet others by name and by hand. Once I spotted him slip someone a folded five dollar bill with a whisper and a nod - you could call that a North End style hand shake.
How about the Deluxe Coffee Shop beside the old theatre on Main Street? My parents had a store nearby and would send me there for lunch - an eight year old flanked by city sewer workers and even worse - perfumed hairdressers. It was a Lunch Counter Coffee Shop loaded with ham-on-white, eggs-on-the-sunny side and big plates of local gossip. It fed me scandals, tough luck tales and wise cracks. Say, I could write a book about it. And I did - 30 years later.
Then Dad opened his own cafe, Bert's Corned Beef House further north on Main near Edmund Partridge Junior High. It was a 60's kind of Club House Cafe with a nonpaying membership of tough kids who came for pinball and juke box. Not a discerning crowd, to them a hot meal meant fries with gravy. A sophisticated drink was a mickey of lemon gin kept hidden in the men's toilet tank.
This inner circle had remarkable talents, especially with their hands. My job was to wash dishes and to watch them so they wouldn't skip out on the check or clean us out of candy bars. But quick hands can also be open hands and they always helped their own. Every so often some couple shocked everyone by making a sudden swerve into lawful wedlock. But it was no shock to see the grinning bride and groom still in tux and long lacey gown stop at Bert's for burgers between their wedding and reception. One time a clutch of pals was waiting with a stunning presentation of silverware. For one half hour, Bert's Corned Beef House looked like Ben Moss Jewelers (the unfortunate store where they'd lifted all the loot).
At night the motorcycle gang took over. These were older, more savy fellows who didn't allow foul language, vandalism or bare knuckled fist fights. Not in their hangout. Those activities were conducted elsewhere.
My parents still maintained the house rules, especially after one of "their boys" drove his Harley Davidson through the back door and out the front. I recall my mother dousing one surly fellow with a full pitcher of water, a real wake up call in the dead of winter. He later became her favourite, full of 'pleases' and 'thank yous' "He just needed a bit of attention," my mother said.
Though I worked at Bert's throughout my adolescence, it wasn't my territory. The North End Sal's was my first Hang Out Coffee Shop especially on Saturday nights. I'd kibbutz on car hoods, flirt with passing girls and consistently fail to find a party. By midnight, I'd join the crowd in the back lot to some trade wise cracks while others, less verbal, traded blows. It was puberty with a punch or punch line. I can't imagine anywhere else I'd rather have been.
Until university. And Coffee Houses - the Ting on Broadway, the Winged Ox on Stradbrook. They didn't serve coffee at all. They served Java. And revolution.
A favourite spot in 1970 was Tony's a Student/Worker Cafeteria at the University of Winnipeg. I could actually sit with a professor and talk. About the Establishment. The Military Industrial Complex. The Oedipus Complex. About Anything that was Complex and Started With a Captial Letter. I could actually impress someone by discussing Ideology, Philosophy, Psychology. Or so I thought.
Then came the Quest for Truth, Justice and the Great Cafes of the World. I and a million others hitched past Canadian truck stops, Yankee diners and Mexican cantinas then we backpacked through Europe as if it were an unchartered wildness. We discovered English pubs and French sidewalk cafes, Turkish kasbahs with coffee strong as gunpowder and Moroccan souks with mint tea in glasses that buzzed with honey bees. And what a buzz it was for my generation of bewildered wanderers - all of us travelling to Marakesh on American Express.
And what a crash to return to Junior's and MacDonalds and the crunch of styrofoam cups. Still, there was always some refuge like The Banyan Tree, Winnipeg's first Spiritually Aligned Macrobiotic Restaurant. I recall shattering its serenity when I went to complain about waiting half an hour for herbal tea. I found my waiter sitting cross legged in the kitchen, deep in meditation.
The Lox and Bagel on Sherbrook (AKA Impressions) was an 80's Counter Culture Coffee Counter with New Age talk and Old World tastes, chess boards and billboards packed with posters and petitions.
Lithium Lunch, a Depression Cafe was a late nighter in the dark heart of the Exchange District. It was crazy with artists and run by a rag tag co op of creative lunatics who knew how to prepare food and how to prepare us to enjoy it until they welcomed in so many street people that the landlord shut them down.
That's how it was and is - scenes shift - people move on - to places like Bar Italia, Cousins, Heaven, McNally's, Mondragon, The Fyxx and The Sunstone Cafe. But when I bring in my four year old by the hand, he'll look around, uncertain, maybe wishing for a MacDonalds where he'd get some junky toy. Who's going to laugh out a welcome, cut him a slice of Halvah and rub him on the head?