I walked into Xhedos within 15 minutes of finishing my coffee at Java Hutt just up the street. I had actually parked in front of Xhedos but Hutt was the place I had referenced on the web from Portman’s Renaissance Center back by the river in Detroit before heading out on the highway to Ferndale. Also, from the outside, I was not quite sure Xhedos was a coffee establishment, it seemed more clearly to be a thrift store cum poetry slam venue, but there was some sort of tightrolled filthy sophistication about it that made me walk by a few more times like a square.

What I could never ascertain in my two visits to Xhedos was whether they were going out of business or had just been saved from going out of business. There seemed to be fliers strewn around indicating a predicament related to making their lease payment and perhaps hosting some sort of benefit show, the barista who was there both days was talking about some sort of extended road trip with her boyfriend, and some sort of cloudy noon lugubrious light fell on my styrofoam cup. I like to think that since I visited two days in a row that I could have visited on a third and I will safely assume that they have surmounted their financial woes.

Unlike Java Hutt, whose color scheme and matching furniture seemed to indicate a late arrival or a rejiggering once the Ferndale strip beachhead had been established, Xhedos had the sort of tone one would find in a crossroads shop in a smaller heartland town in which they were bordering on outcast, like the lunchroom table in highschool with the fat RPG kids and the Wax Trax kids who could not be pigeonholed or were just too socially inept to translate their potentially riveting interests into conversational fodder with the kids who drove their own cars to school and wore ironed tee shirts. That is too John Hughes. Xhedos smelled more like a place where kids who looked like bike messengers would hang out in Salina. It was haphazard but conscious of its stamped tin ceiling. It was unwashed but coiffed. The mugs were chipped. It was delightful and perhaps reassuring after walking off of the processed rebellion of 9 Mile Road.

On my first visit I waded into an oppressive post rock drone dirge that effectively washed the palatable second tier 80s kitsch of Gary Numan off of my cringing shoulders but, I think in the end it was the presence of the thrift shop half of the place that was the most evocative and communicative. It smelled like a thrift store and had the poor natural light struggling through dusty plate glass of your local church thrift store, not the megathrift with shirts arranged on linear store racks by color, but the kind of ancient downtown church satellite that sells teevees made of yellowed white plastic, boardgames in boxes held together by electrical tape clotted with fur and dust, magazines and Sunset books, plaid armchairs, polyester business attire, and wingtips with brittle laces. The light reflecting off of this half was yellow. It reminded me of the time I had spent in these places in middle school trying to determine how to individuate myself. The important thing, regardless of how, was that I had made the conscious decision, and it is always conscious, no matter how innate the down and dirty rebellion might appear, to look at things differently and to make of myself something different, and probably to someday end up in a place like Xhedos without feeling too conspicuous or disdainful.

Although I try my damnedest to creep the coffeeshops local to my home, it often ends up feeling like a sad chore that fits into the rote rolling through roads and places that disappear because I have seen them thousands of times, and I do not like to do that to special places like coffeeshops. Or perhaps I just like being in my house. I still drink coffee, but I do it on my terms and I can do it in a chair that I like to read in or in front of my machine or desk. On the road I have no choice. Moreover, the little voyages to find these new shops act as conducting bodies in a lengthier consumption of the locale. This is similar to my reflections on bookshops in my hometown, at which I rarely bat an eyelash unless I am parlaying a Corrin 7″ into a used Proust. The distant coffeeshop supports a romance beyond these utilitarian workaday conceits. Thus, I nestled two trips to Cafe Verde into a visit to Detroit.

I had come to Ann Arbor from Detroit for 3 reasons, to peep independent coffee shops, to buy books in a college town, and to visit my old friend Perry. I had been thwarted in my first 3 attacks on the city. My first stop, which I was very excited about, was a drive up coffeeshop on Washtenaw near the edge of town called Bear Claw. I have been interested in writing about a drive-up shop. It was not until I had pulled forward from getting my beverage that I saw the list of other locations which numbered in excess of 20. This disqualified the shop retroactively from my scrutiny. I then visited 2 bookshops, one of which only had new books and the other of which had moved, though it was not of interest to me anyhow upon finding it fortuitously next door to Cafe Verde.

Having ticked off the quality coffeeshop now on my list I was in a positive mood, the gloom outside notwithstanding. I found myself gregarious to a limited extent in Cafe Verde. I asked a single question on top of my order. I felt, thoroughly warmed by the co-op hippy openness of the shop, that I could be given some solid guidance for my quest for the decent bookshop. I was directed around some corners and down some blocks to Dawn Treader, and feared by the name a shop full of dreamcatchers and books about Shamanism. To my satisfaction I walked out with a stack of nothing of the sort, bought a baguette from a hardware store, and went off to visit my friend.

Distance, through time or space or both, has little impact on emotions, and can in fact exacerbate the little feelings or memories into fully formed epiphanies in hindsight. Visiting my old friend turned Ann Arbor into somewhere else, somewhere familiar. Revisiting Cafe Verde and the short stops I made, I find somewhere that has the character of a shop in my hometown. The faces and quality of light in my memory are more of Atlanta and my haunting environs than the places that actually are here because I encountered them in a free state of mind yet with a level of familiar comfort having some tether to the city that held me in at an emotional mooring more than a utilitarian.

I wondered which came first, the self-consciously selected alternative soundtrack or the edgy, quirky little shops on Ferndale’s downtown strip. Certainly my guess is that American Pop (I imagine it probably takes several years for caramel corn to turn black when it is left sitting out) and Record Collector (home of the 20% discount if you are buying Albert Ayler (or maybe everybody gets it) were there first, a beachhead of funkiness, before Ferndale made the conscious effort to cultivate the sidewalk scene with nice benches, numerous intrablock crosswalks, and of course, the speakers on the lightposts that force you to use ‘Rock n Roll Highschool’ or ‘Blue Monday’ as your soundtrack for trying to feed the meter before going into Java Hutt.

For sure, the type of a coffee shop has its place in a little strip such as this, see Aurora in L5P in Atlanta, or Jo’s SoCo in Austin, but I felt in Java Hutt a certain level of sophistication that I associated with a confident entry into an established neighborhood who yearned for its presence, not the cautious impermanence of perhaps Satellite in West Philadelphia. It felt very safe. There seemed to be a white male proprietor who was moving around testing his business plan, checking stock, making sure the two young ladies were wearing their black outfits, etc. He kept a tight ship. He asked a gentleman seated next to the door reading a bible if he minded the door being open for ventilation. He did not and the fresh air drew all the way through the space and out the back door, carrying a Cure song from this millenium with it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Java Hutt capitalizing on its role as coffee dispensary to the preened hipness of this suburban enclave. In fact, I welcomed it openly after spending the morning trying to find Black Gold on Griswold on foot in downtown Detroit and ending up riding the people mover back to my car from ‘Time Square’ out of desperation. As the Hertz bus driver had perhaps rightfully assumed, I would ‘enjoy visiting Ferndale.’ So I cannot throw stones at the freshness of JHutt. I could say I wished it had a layer of grit or a sense of isolation, a personality. But if I had wanted that I probably would have pushed myself to have a drink at Donut Cutters on Woodward instead, or I would have just leaned against a wall on Cass downtown all day looking for trouble.

At least this was a forum, a blank canvas if you will, on which an entertaining little dialogue unfolded. It was only happenstance that I had been driven from my table deeper in the shop by ‘Robert’ in the Bears cap whose machismo and sportiness belied the delicate intellectual front that many shops such as this wear so tremulously. Arriving at my new seat by the door, my table coincidentally seconded my sentiments about Robert (see photo below) and I began to eavesdrop on a young couple making their way to a seat parallel to mine.

Male: So I had to jump out of the shower, run up the stairs naked, and answer the phone, you know, because people are always complaining about me not answering the phone.
Female: I dont have that problem, Im always wearing clothes, not even in the shower, Im never naked.

This statement was unclear in its intent to me. Did she want to cut him off from pursuing a potentially ribald conversational topic, or was she trying to tantalize his imagination by saying the word naked about herself? It could have gone either way.

Male: That is too bad, Ill bet being naked would suit you.
Female: Soooo, its nice to see you.
Male (continuing the creepy tone): It is greaaaaaat to see you.

At this point the female noticed my attentiveness to the awkward exchange and shared with me a knowing glance similar to the one Thos., Vidal, and I received from the young exchange student who, upon being invited back to an oily Frenchman’s apartment, was ‘reassured’ with his insistence that it was ‘ok’ because he would invite some more guys over too. Feeling confident that this woman would be ok with the creepy imp at her table I decided not to attempt to follow them as we did in Paris, but to wrap up my 15 minute exhaustive survey of Java Hutt and strut down 9 Mile to ‘William, It Was Really Nothing.’