There is a nice phenomenon in some cities, it may be in all cities except Atlanta, but particularly I am thinking of Portland, OR and Seattle, WA, where small intersections deep within residential districts swell slightly with a commercial hub. In the pleasant iterations I have encountered they both contained coffeeshops and ideosyncratic eating establishments as well as convenience grocery shopping, and in the Portland variation, an old movie theater that was at the time showing Night of the Living Dead, which we had trekked there to peep. Perhaps these spots are not very far from the thouroughfares and transportation networks, but as we were on bus and foot, our discoveries of them came after passing through what seemed like continuous residential fabrics.

Zoka, although our second choice after the untimely (or so we thought as we had only the chance to eat 2 donuts) closing of Mighty O Donuts right across the intersection, was a cavernous affair. This weekday morning found the entire cafe space, which was enormous, with a large raised laptop concourse, completely packed. There was not a seat in the house. It was a weekday morning, rather close to lunchtime, but not close enough for these people to all be on break. Our excuse was that we were on vacation. What were these people’s excuses? These were the people I loved to hate in Los Angeles, do not see very often in Atlanta, and usually see when I am able to be out and about during the day when I am on vacation. I always wonder what these folks are doing; everyone seems to have a laptop, so they must be ‘working’, but on what foolishness? Regardless of the lack of seats, these were not the sort of folks I wanted to fraternize with so we took a spot on the sidewalk where some stay at home dads were bro’ing down and showing off their kids that they were toting around in vintage Radio Flyer wagons.

Perhaps this is the price one pays for residential insertion. The flaunting of the idly comfortable, the luxurious days in overcast breezes, and I, only a mere 96 hours from being chained back to my desk, of not seeing the outside of my house in the sunlight. Despite the animosity, I was on vacation and was able to treat this, as I do all of my displaced experiences, as a chance to construct impressions of people and places without the burden of responsibility or routine. So as a detached observer I was still overwhelmed by the crowd but appreciated the way that Zoka took such an enormous space and kept it in scale with the little intersection and with the ideals and aesthetics of a small coffeeshop.

I don’t know in retrospect whether it was the domestic setting, so soothing to us, we practically sat in someone’s front yard, beneath a stand of bamboo, or whether it was because we had just tortured our stomachs with donuts and lattes, or whether out of recognition of the submission to a sort of crowd I loathe in which I had to counter my impulses and assume the posture of an idle afternooner, we eschewed our own coffee project and drank tea.

I am completely aware that one of the policies of Cafe Tableaux is to not review establishments whose sole focus is to serve food. I am also aware that many of these policies are potentially dooming the site to failure, although not that rule in particular, so I am using an executive privilege to register kudos to a well-deserving establishment that merits being recognized in all forums that could even tangetially apply to it. In fact, there is a provision in the posting guidelines which stipulates that you may review a food based establishment if said food can only be consumed whilst drinking coffee. I am also aware of the historical relationship between coffee and donuts which is probably documented in one of the coffee tomes that Thos. continually reads. However, this relationship for me has now become thoroughly personal, for someone who stopped eating lardy donuts about 4 years before I began drinking coffee, I must declare that there would be no higher purpose for coffee to serve than to accompany these delectable glazed doughy gems!

Each morning in Seattle we would venture to a different coffeeshop to write, draw, and eavesdrop. Most shops we went to were in the vicinity of our lodgings so that we could branch out from our home base for the day with a jolt and a full bladder. Mighty O however was an excursion of its own and we were rewarded heartily with 2 donuts apiece and a strong latte. Vegan donuts I have had in the past were always plastic wrapped bricks that I either bought out of desperation from a local health food store or was duped into buying through tricky photography and inaccurate descriptions from vegan essentials. But these were light, made on the spot, with a smell and foamy texture that brought me back to Saturday mornings when my father would take me with him to buy donuts for our family from the Mister Donut with the orange folded plate roof located somewhere that I cannot remember now. The ingredients were very respectable; the raspberry glaze contained tiny seeds left in through the process of stewing down and candying them into a paste. In retrospect 2 donuts was both not enough and way too much. They were large, I believe Southern Oracle might have even quartered hers with a knife, and although light, they sat in your stomach as anything delicious is wont to do, especially when agitated by the tempest of a foamy espresso drink.

But, we were not going to be coming back, at least not as soon as I would want another donut, so the 2 were far too few in what I envisioned to be a 4 donut a week lifestyle for myself were I to live in one of the apartments across the street or tiny homes down toward Green Lake. Even in the face of these musings they were closing earlier than we had expected and we would not have the opportunity to consume more if we could stand it. It was a fantastic treat while it lasted and we were forced to move our productive endeavours to the standing-room-only Zoka across the street where we found a table outside from which we could see Mighty O.

The coffeeshop has a different function for the tourist, the d?river, and any transient functionary than it does for the local, or the inhabitant of the city the shop is in. It is less receptacle and more passage. In the home environment, the coffeeshop is a wall, or chamber, against which the imbiber is bounced, from their home to their home. Even with intermediate stops, the shop maintains a fixed relationship to the home, unless the transient is intentionally fragmenting his route in order to alienate hisself from the familiar distances and sequences that tie him to his home. Lost in an unfamiliar city, we have no need to willfully corrupt our sequence, for submission to this loss is itself the presage to surprise and disorientation.

If we decide, after watching the sun drop across the fishnet ceiling of the public library downtown, that we need a chocolate and some fresh air, then we discover it. What lies beyond this node of the voyage, and what sequence will be necessary to satisfy the resulting whim, is of no consequence. So we construct a plan to travel by bus back across the Aurora Bridge and walk back through the neighbourhoods to the Fremont Cafe, which we had passed the day before during a failed attempt to watch Goonies in a parking lot teeming with rabble. Suddenly, we were snapped back into space, the fluidity of unfamiliar roads, dingbats, and cats fell away, and there was a point, the cafe, that we could surround ourselves with. Not knowing where you are in relation to your home somehow has the effect of making a Xocolatl chocolate bar seem like a comestible wrap-around porch, upon which the sun, falling in some direction, lets its final rays ignite the foil wrapper with a shade of gold that vapourizes the French tourists in pointy boots who keep shouting ‘allo!’ at each other, the ‘spiritual’ girl, who, on a lark, wandered herself downtown, ending up in a place where people had tattoos, and, feeling a communing with their ‘otherness’, went home to paint (it felt so good!), into the dusk, leaving us to watch the sky turn grainy.

In the darkness we claimed a new space that trailed us, a shell, detached from the facades we traced, which deposited us at busstop after busstop whose service had terminated for the night. This was a space that clung tight to us, true alienation, a scuttling introversion in which we encountered disappointments and monsters.

We had been doomed to find ourselves in Fremont Cafe that night. Shortly before we had passed the cafe, the previous evening, we had seen our deaths, in symmetry about the dawn, prophesied in the figure of a genderless creature in a broadbrimmed straw hat on the street corner opposite us. As a van carrying two llamas drove between us, the creature pointed, tracing in the air the direction of the van, until it disappeared, presumably in a representation of our ‘disappearance’ the following night, at the hand of this creature.

As we walked close against a stone wall, illuminated in the next streetlamp, was the creature. It stepped toward us with a parodical gait, raising its feet high above the ground with each step, mocking our fear, until we had passed it and were ourselves standing in the streetlamp. Why had the buses into this hell gone out of service? Why had we not confirmed our route on paper that morning? Where was our home, in which direction from this residential labyrinth? Looking over my shoulder, the androgenous golem raised both of its palms against the stone, then hopped, with both feet, onto the low coping at the base of the wall where it clung maniacally. Its steely eyes froze us as it crouched. We had chosen this fate, in our desire to find pleasure in loss, in the augury of our last experiences of stasis in the warm embrace of the cafe; we dutifully submitted to the open ending the creature provided the evening.

cafe allegro is downstairs from the pensione, college inn, right across the street from gould hall, the university of washington college of architecture, which i had gone to visit in the spring of 1998 to investigate their graduate program. the inn is housed on the second through fourth floors of the tudor style building. the cafe is housed on the first. i had completely overlooked it in 1998, my interests not having been fully cultivated, it was of course not until i arrived at graduate school elsewhere that i began my descent into the sober liquor, at first drinking cowboy coffee at my desk and, after being chastised by my parents, venturing into more mature forms of coffee consumption. but here, in my adult life, visiting the area, and having slept 3 out of the preceding 36 hours, cafe allegro lept out like a mirage, a monumental mug rising from everstretching fog banks like mount rainier.

without thinking at all of the actual time of day, our spirits, or our thirst, we entered quickly and claimed a table. sitting, staring through the plate glass at gould hall initiated a slipping through time that went beyond a reshuffling of memories and into a physical movement of my body through reconstructed settings and mindsets each sitting concurrently framed around my body as i lounged in the cafe. it was 1998, gould hall, interview, wandering the city aimlessly, ghengis khan chinese food, the freestanding terra cotta facade, the bookstore going out of business, it was 2pm, atlanta, saturday afternoon, i was sitting down to lunch, cats swirling about my feet, work on monday, wide streets, houses set back from wide streets, it was 11am, the university district, the barrista is lively and cracks wise when i ask for a glass of water, he feigns anger and irritation to gain our trust, to insure that he is ‘down’ with us. this is always an awkward situation. you appreciate the approach, you have used it before on creatures such as coworkers, but in this state of mind you wonder whether it is as you saw it. this is the first person you have spoken with in seattle, surely he wouldnt be so surly. it wasnt until days later, at pizza pi, that you realize what a complete asshole the proprietor of a small business in the city could be. but this gentle looking stocky man is merely being playful and the fresh repoire carries on through your stay in the cafe. the two of you discuss being playful yourselves and joining in the fun by flipping over the table when you are approached again. you have always wanted to flip a table over. you put away the remains of your lunch, the falling table might injure the cats, or spill coffee on your interviewer, then you take to the streets of seattle in search of vegetarian pho.

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.