Cafe Reggio

   Up the stairs and into the sun ricocheting off the melting snow on Christopher Street. Cross Sixth and head towards MacDougal and all at once I lose that Rizzo Ratso-"I'm waking here" mentality and begin to stroll like a drunken sailor. This is the effect the Village has on me. An apt analogy as I have actually been down here twice during fleet week, but that's a story for another platform. I pull off my long leather gloves and trail them in my hand like a new bride after the dance. It's warm for the first time in living memory which does not go too far past November, when the brain sinks into bundled up hibernation, hydrating itself only with cognac. I am going to Cafe Reggio for breakfast, a favorite Sunday excursion that I haven't taken, for some unaccountable reason, in over a year. Turn the corner at the park on MacDougal and two blocks down it sits, as it has sat since 1927. 

   I was a lucky dog to come across this place on one of my first trips to New York, but if I hadn't found it then, it would have been only a matter of time as it contains almost everything that drew me here to begin with. One of the most distinct memories I have still scuttling about in the curlicues of my gray matter is having my three year old nose pressed against the car window as we drove past the distant glowing mass of New York City in the middle of the night. My Dad was of the ilk, which many Dads of the time were, where you pile the kids in the car and drive like a bat out of hell until you're there. On this fateful trip back home to a place where kittens lolled on my lap as I sat in the quiet of the old tobacco shed breathing in a musty, earthly scent that would forever bind me to things that grow and die in the slant of the rain and sun, I sensed that there was something else, something quite different that I might just cotton to.  I gazed out upon this thing, too far away to even see the silhouettes of skyscrapers; until it was swallowed up by the dark and the hum of the radials replaced the buzzing in my head. Finally closing my adorably gaping little maw, I turned my head and looked at the mass of my sleeping siblings beside me and the rigid back of my fathers neck at the wheel and thought, "So long folks, I'm goin there." It pleases me to think, that even then on that ancient night, Cafe Reggio was filled with the ill begotten finger snapping youth of the day.  

 This morning there are no bongo's or berets but there is Canario Voltaire--poached eggs on a bed of yellow rice with Italian cheese and of course, cappuccino.  There is opera music and oil paintings so darkened by age and I suppose the grand old days of smoking inside, that you can only guess at the expressions of the subjects. There are marble topped cafe tables and heavily carved wooden benches lining the walls, and endless conversation. And as long as you're eating or drinking something, you can pretty much sit there forever. But this being the first day you can walk outside and not consider moving anywhere south of the equator, I decide to take a stroll in Washington Square Park.

   Not long after I enter the park I hear "Hey, Tall Girl!" and one of the chess players is beckoning me over. There was a time when every Black man on the streets of New York called me Slim. "Hey, Slim." "How ya doin, Slim?" Or sometimes just a polite nod of the head in passing and simply "Slim." Now it's most often "Hey, Red." but today it's "Hey, Tall Girl" and I don't mind the evolution. I walk over to him and he's interested in imparting his knowledge of Chess, which I would love to gain, but it don't come cheap in the Square and payday's around the corner and down the block on the calendar. I promise I will bring my daughter down to the square when she comes home as she has beaten my every game since she was ten and he grins at that. I sit on a bench for a while watching people go by carrying their children or their dogs, many of both specimens dressed in pink puffy coats. Eventually the tuberculin hacking of the guy across the way gets to me and it's time for Tall Girl to head back uptown. It's odd how insular we become in our own little neighborhoods when it's so easy to get out. So easy to shoot through a tunnel in the ground and find yourself in a place you promised you’d be, a million years ago.                          

An Irish Bar

In an Irish bar I observe the women coming, in hopeful hats and the women without such adornment come and handle their static ridden hair capturing the golden or auburn or manufactured color of the same in a 16 cent band. We watch, don’t we? And we intrinsically understand the power of Samson? And don’t we see that the touch of ones own strands is evocative in the primal and viral understanding that in lies some hidden power that you may or may not know if you could only grab a hank.

  And the men with their sweet archaic brogues which sugar coat their words with a sweet scent so that we pretend to misunderstand the boorishness or look shyly aside at their meaning.

 This is what it is to be alone. In this life having the promise of emerald isles on foreign tongues but not allowing a translation from brain to loin.

And I who bore one beautiful child who has flown the nest  am now as I was in the state of perfect aloneness inside this beer strewn space. Smelling the air as a wolf in a distant field and returning to my den satisfied that nothing here will constrict my existence. And meeting at the door this dog who keeps me honest and accountable to his bladder who beckons me home in time to escape some irretractable mistake so he can prance out into the winter chill and do as he must.

And won't we all, the women and the men, dance on the wings of the wind if not together than yet alone.

"It is good for you to make the espresso, yes?"

   Many years ago I worked for an Italian furniture importer down in Chelsea. Of course back then it wasn’t down in Chelsea as I lived on Avenue A and 4th above a hardware store and below a heroin junkie (which was a prerequisite for living in the East Village at that time.) This said Italian employer was named, surprisingly enough, Guido. I know what you’re thinking, but let’s not confuse this gentle man from Mi-laaa-no, with a previous Guido I knew in Chicago. I never actually met the Chicago Guido but his name was used like a baseball bat whenever the fine establishment I worked in would get behind in a liquor bill such as, “Maybe you should like for me to send Guido down to pick it up poi-sanally.” I would naturally grab the nearest intern and set them out front with an envelope for Guido instructing him to “give the nice man the envelope and under no circumstances show him back to the office.”

The Mi-laaa-no Guido would come to the New York office a few times a year and it was always a pleasure to have him as aside from the few business discussions I was involved in, I mostly got to dress up, ride around in limos and eat dinner at swanky restaurants with Guido and the showroom crew. Then one day during a meeting he looks at me and says “It is good for you to make the espresso, yes?” I stand up and nod “Oh yes.” And as I head toward the kitchen, my heels clacking across the showroom floor, I am thinking no doubt it would be very good for me to make the espresso but it will be a miracle if my picture of good and your picture of good coincide. I’d seen him drink espresso from a beautiful little demitasse cup many times, but I had no idea where it came from, the only thing I knew about espresso is that it came in a little cup and was enjoyed by either a man in a thin silk tie or a fez. I got my coffee like everyone else did, in a blue and white paper cup with Greek stuff written on it. (yes, these are now actually found in museum gift shops)

I go into the kitchen and I see this:

I puzzled for a moment but it seemed pretty clear cut. Espresso is made out of water and well, espresso. This thing only has one opening at the top, it’s clearly designed to make espresso so I threw a couple of spoonfuls of coffee and some water in the top, put it on the heat and waited for it to work it’s swarthy black magic. But wait…

 

   I was bothered by something here. Something about the grounds. Where do they go? Do they get sucked down the hole? What is that hole? Where does it go? What does it lead to? All these thoughts are going through my head in a sort of David Byrne type ditty while the curtain is being held for my reappearance with a perfect little cup of coffee. No, this is not right, this is not “good.” I dumped the contents out of the top and considered the object again. I grasp the top and the bottom and attempt to pull it apart with all my might. Aside from a nasty burn on my hand which comes from touching metal that seconds ago was engulfed in flames, I got nowhere. And then a light bulb went on over my head… sadly, not the cartoon kind. My office manager had sneaked in behind me flipped the kitchen light on and hissed “where the hell is the coffee?” She took the mystery object from me with an audible sigh (is there any other kind?)

  

   Friends, the damn thing screws apart. The water goes on the bottom, the coffee in the middle and the stuff burbles out on top.

   A delicious lesson learned as I am now, all these years later, wearing a fez and finding it very good to make the coffee. Yes!

Cave Man Time Machine

   All of us would agree either by a timid raise of the hand or a consensual nod of the head that a time machine is a pretty swell idea.  I'm not just talking about something that would allow you to undo the naughty text that you mistakenly sent to your boss last night after a few too many toddies- no, there's a valuable lesson in that faux pas which hopefully hits home. I'm talking back, way, way back to the cave man days.  First off, I am dying to ask them if they are as embarrassed as I guess they might be by that continuously replayed intro to 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the one where a group of grunting, squatting, not quite used to opposable thumb handling of a blunt object folks are hopping around the obelisk tossing a bone at it. Who want's to be seen the world over acting the fool in front of a shiny black rectangle which may or may not be sinister, depending on the soundtrack and the lighting. Though I suppose when visiting a culture of the past it would be more polite to ignore the obelisk fandango and make nice talk regarding the fancy artwork on the walls.

    My true reason for taking a trip to yonder years is a burning, nay let's say pungent, question regarding the domestication of animals. Specifically- dogs. What I want to know is --who specifically had the keen idea to bring a stinky little monster of a black pug into their spiffy New York apartment and allow it to wreck havoc upon the gleaming hardwood floors, various leather accoutrements and standard Ikea couch. Yes! I did, it was my idea I admit that, but it had to have started somewhere. I'm no genius and I certainly would not have come across some growling snapping animal and thought- wouldn't that look good on my bed? No, I did not come up with this idea. The first jaw bone of a dog was found in a cave 20,000 years ago. Maybe back then dogs did not stand on the edge of the pee pad to better direct the flow into the grout of the kitchen floor, maybe back then the communication between master and beast was clear as bell. Maybe enunciation has done us in in this instance.

   Perhaps if I grunted and threw a bone at my sinister little obelisk he would see the light of day on this whole housetraining thing.   Or maybe I should leave the origins question alone and simply take the time machine back to the moment before I brought Mr. Sparky home. Would I walk up to myself and say, "Step away from the dog. This will come to no good."? The answer is regrettably no. Even though I have actually seen him running with scissors, the stinky little bugger must be loaded into the cab. Domestication be hanged.