LETTERS FROM HOME: RETURN TO THOSE DARK CAFE DAYS: WHY NOT?

Jan. 4, 2001

Dear Pat,

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68 and he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe.

In 1971, those words of Joni Mitchell's drew a map of a place I knew I didn't want to go. It wasn't just that picture of soured romanticism. There was more.

In Arcata, I knew people who almost matched Richard's description. Some hung out at the Jambalaya or the Alibi on the square. Morey tended bar down the street at the Red Pepper and almost fit the description. He was a poet whose deep commitment to alcohol eased some pain few were allowed to see. Smiles bemused barrel-chested Morey.

At the Jambalaya poetry nights, he sounded like an American Richard Burton, his baritone deep, his diction precise. His poems were spare, unblinking meditations drummed from a bruised heart by a fine intellect. They were never boring.

Steve Miller, another poet, wrote about a pain only too evident. In Vietnam, his job was to descend into Viet Cong tunnels to see who might be there. Lots of guys who drew that assignment didn't live to remember it.

Steve's poems escorted the rest of us with him into Hell. Listening was difficult, but we owed him. Cynics don't show you their wounds.

Walking home from the square drunk one night, Morey stepped in front of a car. The last time I was back in Arcata, Steve wasn't around either.

You know how the song ends. "Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator. And he drinks at home now most nights with the house lights way up bright."

That was the more frightening vision in the song, the domesticated romantic who had forsaken his ideals.

Can marriage and jobs and bills and mortgages do that to people?

We have the dishwasher and the coffee percolator, and strong drink doesn't hold any interest anymore. But the ideals do, the romanticism does.

I miss the thrill of not knowing whom I might see and talk to that night, the folk singers and old bluesmen traveling through town on the way to San Francisco and roiling up the smoky air, poets and storytellers and the makers of magical elixirs.

In Cape Girardeau, buffets are much more popular than dark cafes. But sometimes I have the feeling we are on the verge of a renaissance, in the midst of creating a new city beloved by artists and musicians and dancers and writers. And why not?

Perhaps there is a time for hanging out and a time for hanging in there.

Love, Sam