Coffeehouse Blues

Coffeehouse atmosphere ain’t what it used to be.

Why, I’ve frequented coffeehouses from Greenwich Village to San Francisco in my day…

Years ago, in the mid-70s when I lived in Manhattan, I did lounge about coffeehouses in the Village, particularly the chess coffeehouses. I was more interested in chess than coffee at that time, and between hanging out in Washington Park, and losing a few bucks against the street chessmasters playing on cardboard boxes along The Avenue of the Americas, I eventually had my fill of the chess hustlers. Chess hustlers are like pool hustlers, but worse.

I don’t recall the coffee establishments in Greenwich at that time sporting much of a variety of coffee drinks — the raspberry white chocolate lattés and mocha frappachino grandes with a twist we have today were sorely missing. Espresso was as fancy as it got.

It wasn’t until I arrived in San Francisco in the late 70s that I frequented a real coffeehouse and discovered lattés near the intersection of Noe and Market Streets.

I was down and out for about a year in San Francisco, living in a rooming house run by an elderly Chinese woman in the same area near Market Street. At one point I resorted to selling framed foil prints (perhaps you know the kind – a common one was an antique map of the world) door to door at doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. I was assigned a difficult territory by the perpetrator of this business, and then forced to buy the stock I sold. I may have even had to rent a huge portfolio briefcase to lug them around in. I managed to break even, just before I quit.

With the few bucks I’d saved from my sojourn in New York City I struggled for a while to write before that desperate time.  When I was massively stuck, as I so often was, I gravitated to the coffeehouse down the street.

Walk in the door and almost always I would be greeted by that hubhub, that buzz, that cacophony of crockery and human voices, laughter and exclamations that typifies the sound of the human animal gathered convivially together. Everybody being wired on coffee raised the frequency of course.

There were paintings by local artists on the wall. People read, argued, laughed uproarishly. One bearded fellow, I observed, sat down and pored over arcane tomes on the game of go, the black and white stones diagrammed on every page. Eventually, one day I saw him bring in a small go board and stones and he played through games all by himself. Soon, he and another fellow played, cups of coffee in hand, in a quiet corner.

For some reason, although not a great go player myself, I invited myself to play a game with him, and although I lost fairly badly, there was a moment or two, in front of a small audience that sprang up, that I had him going, and that was enough for me.

Now when I go into a coffeehouse in Vancouver these days, there might be a voice or two, but usually it is somebody on a cellphone. At almost every table, or the long shelf against the window where people sit, each space is occupied by a solitary person and a laptop. Morning or evening, it’s not much different, almost no place to sit as everyone interacts with their computer together, rarely looking at or even noticing their neighbour.

One local coffee shop has increased their hours to around the clock, to better accommodate the influx of lonely people with their machines.

I often felt this myself, especially when I was a student on my own. In those years, go someplace where there’s people and read my book, study my text, write my essay — it was a good break from my room. But I could always count on at least the sight of other people making up for my lack of sociability or friends.

It reminds me of that science fiction story “The Machine Stops” written by E.M. Forster way back in 1909. A rebellious son wants to visit his mother in person rather than communicating with her through machines like everybody else. But his mother, grossly fat and confined to a chair by inactivity, and surrounded by technological and communication marvels satisfying every physical and emotional need, prefers not to come into actual contact with her son. It is a sad story and a cautionary one.

These days, rather than go to the coffeehouse for a semblance of human contact, I’d probably just stay home and surf the Web. Except, I still like lattés.

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