Sureshot Coffee and Pinball, Seattle | anecdotal reviews from cafe tableaux

visited by: j.h. trefry, September 29th, 2005

peripatetic in the city. sure it is romantic, sure it brings you to a space of scrutiny in which you can enjoy the stain of dirt left above the extinct neighbour’s roofline on a brick party wall for longer than you could at a stoplight, or at a busy bus stop, sure you can try to follow unsuspecting couples around the city at night trying to tail them, find out where they are going, sure you can stop completely at random to duck into a small boulangerie to break off a boule or batard, or a demi. the thing that all these activities, when combined with the final activity, possess, is a duration away from home base in which that bread, coupled most likely with an espresso beverage, give rise to a fearsome need for a public restroom.

in new york i sat on the southern edge of central park on a bench, eyeing a plastic bag, would anyone see me place it beneath the bench, hold it open, and… to avoid a scene such as this, the peripatetic consumption of the city becomes a dance, you and the cafe. it is vicious. you drink coffee, you lounge, you wander, you eat bread, and then you need to find another cafe, you arrive at another cafe, buy a coffee in order to use their bathroom, you lounge, etc. it is a fantastic way to see the city, it is a built-in pause, like the length of time the walking life affords your investigations of architectural minutiae, your bathroom visits are given a breadth and import that would never come with any other lifestyle. all this is to say, when we entered sureshot, a quintessential little hovel, dark, populated with the kind of furniture we love in a shop, all the drinks (white coffee?) we could ever desire, a counter with a streetside view through which to watch parades of daycare’d infants in various formats (pulled in carts, tied in sequence by the wrist to a long rope in a forced seattle death march), hand painted signs, hand painted signs that read “no public restroom.” what could this possibly mean! it does not say “restrooms for paying customers only”, it says “public”. we were the public, we needed to use the restroom, especially after more coffee consumption. i suppose we could have asked about the semantics of their sign, but we chose to read it for what it was and let the tirades fly at a more grand scale. what role does the public bathroom play in our courtship of the city. see above.