Compelled By Melete IV

Bistro 44
01/02/06 - Kicked off the new year's sobriety effort by meeting Mick and Judi for mid-morning coffee and chit-chat at Bistro 44, a place I've come to thoroughly despise. It combines all the charm of a back-alley brothel in Amsterdam with the menu pricing of the toniest cafés of Nice. I mean, five bucks for a biscotti? A cookie? A dense, bitter, flavorless cookie?? A cookie that tastes stale fresh out of the oven??? I usually get two. And don't even ask how much the no-fat caramel latté I get with them costs.

We sat at a small table by the biggest little window in the place, near the front but not too close to the door. It's one of those old windows with stained glass on the bottom and clear on the top so that you can sit and sip without having to look at the hoi-polloi out on the side street, all held in place by enough lead to poison half the city. At night the unused tables are completely cleared. But the day manager, an angry, hulking showboat queen in his early thirties, decorates each table with a cheery vase and fake flower arrangement, strictly to express the irony-laced loathing he feels toward this place and by extension the world in general. It's completely appropriate and everyone who goes to the Bistro gets it immediately. Our vase this morning held enormous daffodils, so tall that they partly obscured Judi's face for much of our get-together. I was kind of grateful for that.

The clientel of the bistro are your typical no-job-out-of-college, still-living-at-home rich kids in their mid-twenties, slumming it on the West Side using daddy's platinum card. The sort of people who like a place that makes them feel dirty even as they maintain perfect hygiene. They dress themselves in a caricature of free-wheeling bohemia while shopping only at the best boutiques. (They sneer at the Gap and just the sight of a Walmart-style bigbox store gives them hives. Or it would, if they'd ever seen one.) Every now and then, when our own conversation dies down, I catch snippets from the other tables and I puke back into my latté bowl. They remind me of me at their age so much that I want to crawl into the bowl with the puke and drown.

Anyway, the Bis definitely has that dirty/clean thing going on. The bare 25 watt lightbulbs, the palid violet walls and shiny black trim, and the two-tone tile arrangement in dingy red and putrescent green combine in a way that would normally hide how dirty the place was. But at the Bis the opposite is true: the dank interior inconspicuously hides the owner's germ phobia-inspired cleaning binges. Only the occasional faint wiff of Dutch Boy gives it away.

Bistro 44 is the first of many small establishments in the same long row of old attached red brick masonry buildings. Except that the Bis' red bricks were painted black some time in the sixties and have stayed that way ever since. It's the same width front to back so that the washrooms, located behind the main seating area, are down a short hallway against the side of the building (which also leads to a mostly unused kitchen door marked "KEEP OUT"). The small black awning over the front door acts as an umbrella for the inevitable guantlet of smokers that other patrons have to pass through since the by-law started being enforced, a group usually lorded over by the day manager, who apparently gets to take a smoke break every ten minutes as part of the terms of his employment. A fresh coffee alway takes twice as long as it should because he's invariably outside when it's ordered, and he's the only one in the place who can properly run the antique espresso machine behind the counter.

In the back corner, opposite the hallway to the washrooms and kitchen, is a stage barely big enough to hold the microphone and music stand that sit on it. I've never seen it used and my personal opinion is that it's just for show, a half-hearted attempt to give the Bistro some real coffee house bona fides.

On the wall behind the counter, next to the espresso machine, is a yellowing reprint of a late 19th century French poster showing Balzac in a greasy apron standing outside of his own dingy little hole-in-the-wall in Paris, looking as proud as would any fellow whose name sounded like "ball sack". That and the Mapplethorpe photo hanging behind the toilet in the men's room are the only artwork in the place. I'm guessing the day manager, who slightly resembles Balzac, selected them both.

Mick and Judi have just gone through another rough patch in their relationship. They were subdued company and left me to make up most of the small talk, which I'm not really good at even under ideal circumstances. (Which these were not. Other friends of mine who know them secretly refer to them as "Punch and Judy", though if anyone gets tossed around it's usually Mick.) Judi was still nursing a New Year's Eve hangover. Must have been a real blow-out, to have her post-partydom depression last more than twenty-four hours. I didn't really ask for details. I already know more about their private lives than I'm comfortable with as it is. Suffice it to say that when Judi interrupted Mick shut up and stayed shut up.

Our visit lasted for just over an hour, and was punctuated by too many uncomfortable silences. I left earlier than I'd intended to and felt relieved for doing so. I've got to find a new crowd soon. Eric called from LA again, offering the same deal as last time but with a bigger retainer. Maybe I'll take him up on it.