Part of a work in progress- a series of essays by the same title (Tales from behind the counter)
Café Cornwall
Café Cornwall was one of those adorable places that people passionately patronize despite the fact that it was managed with all the grace and organization of a sinking ship.
I worked at Café Cornwall for six months. The “home department” on my paycheck read “Barista 005”, but my duties included carving the rind off a 200-pound block of comté, substituting decaf espresso for the Italian Roast when we ran out of beans (they won’t taste the difference), and fetching the top-heavy Barista 002 from the neighbors’ bed before her witless husband and son showed up for chocolate chip cookies and Sunkist.
The café was comprised of three levels: a light-filled main floor with antique, mismatched tables, a sandwich bar, gelato bar, coffee bar and a regular bar where you could choose between seven different kinds of monk-fondled beer or an unopened jug of Cachaça.
The second level- the kitchen- was haphazardly divided between the delicate members of the pastry department and “the cook”; a slovenly Oaxacan with his cavernous belly button permanently on display. There was a problem with the gas stovetop so the burners were always ignited, offering up their flames to the God of the culinary arts 24 hours a day. Paco, the Oaxacan, took advantage of this fire hazard to add a host of “hand-roasted” items to his menu. It is a good thing that the second-home owners and tourists that made up our clientele were desperate for adventure because if anyone had actually inquired about this enigmatic method of food preparation, they would have taken off at a nuclear-powered clip for the nearest toilet. Really, who doesn’t like their poblanos held over an open gas flame until their wax-coated skin catches on fire and collapses in upon itself in a final symbol of defeat? Personally, I won’t come within five feet of a chicken wing that hasn’t been “caramelized” with maple syrup and a pair of multitasking chopsticks (indispensable for holding the peppers above the burner and for fishing “important bits” out of the drain). That’s why I so admired Pacos’ hands-on approach to cooking, along with his grubby, creviced hands.
Underneath the kitchen, the basement was a fear-inducing purgatory of storage and scattered scraps of ham rind spewed out by a mammoth meat slicer in the corner. The basement was also divided into 5 sections: bread-making, gelato-making, saran-wrap finding, the walk-in, and a disorganized collection of dog bones and potato chips that was the sole responsibility of our wino manager, a tremendous devotee of all things canine and/or coated in sour cream and dill.
We went through three different managers while I worked at Café Cornwall. The first was a lesbian, the second looked like a lesbian, and the third was a gay man who claimed that lesbians made him break out in hives.
The first manager’s name was Maureen. She was built like a linebacker and had a voice so virile, she could have single-handedly powered a locomotive train across the country by uttering the word “Go”!
Maureen had the irritating habit of coming up indecently close behind you and whispering the admonishment du jour with her chin hovering over your shoulder. Instead of calling you into the office and laying it all out at once, she executed her administrative tailgating sporadically throughout the day, leaving you to wonder whether you were ever really safe. In the restroom, fetching a pack of Parliaments from your car, bleaching a tea stain out of a mug- if your back was turned, it was a matter of seconds until Maureen saddled up behind you with her husky, pervy baritone, “Um, there isn’t enough chipotle in the chipotle mayo.” “Um, it’d be really nice if you could wear those sanitary gloves there.” “Um, you’re putting too much turkey in between the bread, there”. We all thought she was secretly a Canadian, but she claimed to come from the Catskills.
Maureen elevated laziness to an entirely new realm. She worked at the café for nearly six months and she literally didn’t accomplish anything other than hiring “Crazy Dan”, a garrulous hippy who droned on endlessly about “shrooms” and wizards.
Crazy Dan tried to hit on me his first day on the job. Or at least I thought he did until I heard him speak to customers. He wove unrelated questions into his speech with reckless abandon. In a matter of seconds, he could move from “mayo or mustard?” to “do you like men with chest hair?” In retrospect, his first day inquisitiveness, (“what’s a scone?” “How do you feel about not having a pet”?) could be chalked up to a severely damaged limbic system, and not to his attraction to Barista 005.
Maureen was inordinately fond of puzzles but she wasn’t very careful with them. When the owner caught her putting the finishing touches on a 1,000 piece puzzle in the office, she was dispatched with little fanfare to a fondue restaurant on the top of a “family-friendly” ski area (Elevation, 1,700 feet) and replaced with a fearsome tyrant named Dottie. Dottie had spiky hair and unflattering blue jeans and terrible posture, but she wasn’t a lesbian, she was a divorcee on a mission. With revenge in her heart and a cross on her back, she transferred all the bad energy she’d built up over “Bill” and unleashed it on to us. Her first victims were the walls and the floors and the unsightly bits and pieces of the fifty-year old café. With Clorox in hand Skoal in the mouth, she huffed and she puffed and she expounded all sorts of obscenities in relation to a man who, in addition to a long list of other offenses, once destroyed her asparagus bed because the eddy currents in his metal detector suggested he’d found gold.
When she wasn’t fuming over “that bastard”, Dotty bullied the muted pastry assistants whom she blamed for overly sticky sticky buns and scones that didn’t crumble the way they did in England. (She went once with the Girl Scouts in 1982, she was Troop Leader and it was a very respectable café so don’t test her, she knew).
Dottie was a raging alcoholic who nevertheless, tried hard to keep her darker urges under wrap at the cafe. The poor woman was so anxious, so irritable, so emotionally unstable, we all would have been much better off if she’d stayed drunk on the job. She once chastised me in front of an entire line of people for “putting the wrong GODAMN FUCKING coffee filters in the wrong GODMAN FUCKING place” which was kind of her, really, because one of the customers was so concerned for my well being, he left me a 40% tip.
Dottie’s unchecked rage got the better of her during an altercation with Barista 002. Upon discovering that the weight-lifting, curse-spewing, marriage-busting harlot had sliced the comté on 1.80 instead of 1.10, she grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently too and fro in plain view of the pastry girls and the big Ouxacan. Dottie was out that very same day, and for a reason that I try not to think about, she left with all the knives.
Dottie was replaced by another alcoholic named Patton whose only vice was constantly picking the crumbs off the blueberry crumb cake and talking with his mouth full. (and drinking three bottles of petit Syrah every evening, but he was very nice). Patton couldn’t make a latte to save his one hundred and forty pound life, the register “threw him for a loop”, and he pursed his lips and got really bitchy when children under sixteen came into eat. He called people “McFatty” within earshot and he cut the skim milk with Half and Half. He refused to eat anything “nasty”, so the walk-in was filled with Ziploc bags of half eaten melons and prosciutto slices with gigantic warnings, “Do not Touch! Pattons’!”
Patton would go home after work and cook and get sauced (he actually owned one of those ceramic blue and white plaques that read, I love cooking with wine! Sometimes I even put it in the food!) and once he had four or five glasses in the gullet, he would pick up his flip phone and start calling the staff to bitch about whoever he didn’t like that day. At that time, I lived in a Podunk town where people actually got up with the sun and chipmunks outnumbered humans, so Patton woke an awful lot of people up with his evening phonecalls. In his world, baristas went home and lounged on settees and ate stuffed figs and placed little stickers labeled “Entertain!” between the pages of magazines like Domino. I liked that world. I liked stuffed figs. I liked hating Domino. But most people I knew went to bed at eight thirty and they didn’t appreciate being woken up at ten to talk about Cindy McCain’s dye job.
But you have to love gay men. I mean, you have to. They’re filled with such silliness, you can’t help but smile. And I certainly liked Patton more than some of our regular customers. There’s something about regulars that I find really fascinating. With every café I’ve ever worked at, it’s always been the same thing. You have two types of regulars- the kind that comes in all sheepish and embarrassed, tripping all over themselves about your fantastic breakfast sandwich, eager to tip and pleased as pie that your establishment exists. With this type of customer, you are able to utter colloquial niceties like “your regular”? without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. And then, there’s The Second Type of Regular. The guy that manages to act personally offended by the price of your coffee on a daily basis, who sneers with his first sip, who acts like it’s a fucking tragedy that he has to keep coming, and yet he’s there every morning, muttering and frowning and carrying on like he wouldn’t know a tip jar if it hit him in the head.
We had a guy like that at Café Cornwall that I nicknamed “Honeybags”. Although we didn’t open for business until 7am, through rain, sleet and snow, Honeybags was there at a quarter-to. With his gigantic truck idling just in front of the restaurant, he would watch my trajectory from my car to the café with the attention of a predator. Honeybags allowed me all of thirty five seconds to punch in, and then, with my jacket and scarf and sometimes, (I swear), my mittens still on, he’d order a triple latte before I’d turned on all the lights. Three shots of espresso and the open sign was still leaning against the door of the walk-in. To make matters worse, this irritant of a homosapiens demanded honey with his beverage. He didn’t like the pace at which the honey came out of the saucer we used for that purpose, so we had to keep a private stash for him under the espresso machine in a little Tupperware. With the dark and fearsome winter morning as a backdrop, he’d stand there while I pulled shot after shot, half asleep and freezing and quite often, hungover, and that was just the beginning of our song and dance. Once the latté was ready, I had to fetch him a soup spoon (not a teaspoon or a tablespoon, it had to be a soup spoon), which he would plunge into his little bowl of honey to create infantile swirls on top of the foamed milk. Then he would carry the spoon to our sink with the self-satisfied air of someone who had just endured a strenuous bout of community service and strategically avoid the register until I reminded him to pay. He would then display all the gesticulations and facial expressions of The Second Type of Regular before handing me exact change and returning to his monster truck without leaving me a tip.
Honeybags embraced parsimony with the zeal and fervor of a man inspired. Even after I’d reminded him time and time again that we weren’t actually open until seven, even after he watched me struggle my way through the zombie-like trance of the very, very sleepy, even when I handed him back his seventy-five cents with my fist strategically placed over the tip bar, still he didn’t tip. One time, he paid me with a five and went to the bathroom before I handed him his change. I left the dollar next to the tip jar, instead of in it, because I simply couldn’t believe that the time had come. I moved towards the back counter to watch the scene unfold, and sure enough, after he had pissed in our toilet and used too many towels, he sauntered back towards the register and retrieved his dollar with the happy look of a man who had almost forgotten an umbrella.
We had another regular who was a total pill and insisted on ordering half sandwich and soup platters, although we listed no such option. She was in that questionable over-60 bracket within which it is impossible to make any informed guesses as to her actual age. She constantly looked as if she’d just gotten back from a particularly strenuous pheasant hunt and although she, too, was incredibly ornery and tightfisted, the rumor in the galley was that she was filthy, stinking rich.
This regular had the exact same name as an illustrious and incredibly beautiful movie star. Illustrious and beautiful, this customer was not, so it was always a bit bewildering to deal with her. I’d find myself staring at the merchant’s copy of her credit card receipt and wonder about her parents. Bette Davis. Really?
We had our fair share of customers with specific food obsessions. There was “Bacon Guy”, an affable fellow who came in twice a day to eat two separate plates of bacon, and a teacher who considered our mocha lattés a more affordable alternative to colonics. There was “Cool Guy”, an alleged tennis pro with a cream colored Alpha Romeo 2600 Touring Spider and a penchant for raspberry jelly on rye, and “The Grumps”, two older men who had whittled down their reasons for living to sticky buns and The New York Times. They formed a rather awkward, albeit touching friendship and even took to sharing paper when it went up 25 cents.
There was “The Photographer”, a rather creepy white man with dreadlocks who once asked me if the pastry department could bake him some pot brownies (he generously offered to bring his own pot), and “The Artist”, a hyperactive fellow with a million dollar mind. There was a little old lady so taken by our caramelized ginger scones, she actually shed a tear one day when we didn’t have them. There were the “Chipotle Boys”, a burly group of contractors who validated the maxim that you can’t judge a book by its cover. These virile fellows drank porter with their lunch, but they ordered like a bunch of anorexic ballerinas. This on one side, that on the other, one piece of lettuce, one piece of ham, they unfolded their sandwiches to inspect the avocado slices and they took a remarkable pleasure in sending things back.
There were the decaf drinkers and the optimistic chaps who drank iced coffee throughout the winter, there were the Dunkin Donuts converts (“Light and sweet”), the transplants from Starbucks (“A Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”), and those that frequented Cumberland Farms (“You got any pecan flavored coffee?”).
And then came the recession. It was a telling time to be working in a small café in the middle of nowhere. Some people increased their purchases at breakfast and stopped coming in for lunch, others brought their own mugs for a 10% discount, others read the paper over coffee and then, when they thought I had my back turned, they discretely put it back. Some people tipped less, but a lot of people didn’t. The notable thing about working behind the counter in small town America is the way that people view you as a human thermometer. When they ask you how you’re doing, they really want to know. When they ask what you think of the color that Mrs. Jenkins decided to paint her house, they are hoping that you will answer them with the voice of the whole town. When they put their faith in your opinion and ask with moistened eyes, between the Turkey Reuben and The Cuban, what would you choose? they are really asking what you think of them. You bid them good morning, you bid them goodbye, you serve them on their good days and their bad ones, you know about their proclivity for extra mayonnaise. So you, what do you think lies ahead in their respective futures? A savory mixture of thousand island dressing and the familiar taste of turkey, or the risky combination of seared pork and coddled muenster? Will they choose love, or will they choose passion? Oh- but how they fear the potential ripples of ridicule when they the screen door shuts behind them and the little bells ring out. No matter how often they grimace and they gripe, no matter how often they send a dish back, overtip or undertip, smile or scowl, the faces on the other side of the counter just want to be liked. As for those of us behind the scenes in our sullied aprons, our affections shift as capriciously as our daily specials. We, too, are eager for a change.
