I had recently moved to Boston, and my brother had come to visit me for the first time. We decided to take a day and hike to the summit of the highest peak in Massachuetts. He was four years younger, a senior in high school, and because my last four years had been in college, we hadn’t seen each other much. This was a good chance to be brothers for the first time in quite awhile.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been the best planner – so we found ourselves freezing cold on top of Mount Greylock in Northwestern Massachusetts, sunlight nearly gone, with only a flashlight to help us hike the four miles back to my Jeep.
I was worried at first by the cold, but luckily, as we hiked, we got deeper into the woods and the cold abated. That left only the dark to worry about. I could tell that my brother was a little afraid – perhaps of the cold, perhaps of the dark or the unfamiliar landscape of an East Coast forest at night. But as we descended into thicker forest – not our own personal Heart of Darkness, but reminiscent, to be sure – we managed to slip back into the old roles of Big Brother and Little Brother that I, for some reason, thought we’d left behind. He fended off fear of things that go bump in the night and I fended off fear of having gotten him into a situation I couldn’t get him out of in one piece. When I fell down, he laughed; when he fell, I dusted him off. It had been awhile, but I guess it’s true: “A brother’s love is… a brother’s love.”
Eventually, the trees thinned out and we walked out onto the farm where my Jeep was parked. It was warm.
_____________________________________
Caffeine and Conversation:
The Grand View from a Small Town in Northern New England
“You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.”
-Tom Waits, “Hold On”
I
There’s a lot of anxiety being passed around these days. Uneasiness, dissatisfaction, fear – people don’t trust the government, they don’t trust the banks, they don’t trust their employers, and it often feels like they don’t trust each other. As the effects of the failing economy express themselves in new and surprising ways, it becomes more and more clear that no one is immune to the country’s present ills. Its as if the rug of 21st century manifest destiny has been yanked right out from underneath our feet. Old people say it’s the death of values. Middle-aged people say it’s the death of American economic values. Young people say it’s the death of America.
I don’t know how to adequately describe what I feel, but I know how to describe what I see: I went to the bank a few weeks back. I was seated with my back to the waiting area, talking to a banker, when I heard a commotion behind me. There was a woman talking to the bank manager. Pleading, actually – not talking. She was trying to convince the manager to give her a loan, and he wasn’t having it. She pulled out an envelope and rifled through it, holding up receipts with abandon, saying, “See? See? I can pay! I’ve paid for these things! You can give me a loan and I’ll pay it!” The manager’s back was to me, but he was shaking his head… The woman picked up her baby out of the stroller next to her, pressed him against her chest, and said, “I can’t leave here. I can’t go back out there.”
* * *
I’ve only been living in Boston for about a month. It’s a pretty solitary existence. I work from my apartment and I live in my apartment, so I have to motivate myself to leave everyday. Sometimes I don’t. I moved out here knowing no one, and the people I’ve met are scattered around the city, so mostly we just meet up at bars or restaurants and chat nights to bed.
It’s put me in a position where I find myself spending a lot of time wondering what loneliness is all about. I thought I understood, given my circumstances, (though to be clear, I welcomed it – I had move somewhere with no social connections for a reason) but it didn’t take long – didn’t take much misguided economics, many bank encounters – to make any loneliness or isolation I felt seem petty and inconsequential.
See, I know what I’m not really alone or really isolated – hell, I know that I’m in better shape than probably 75% of the country. But my only basis for comparison lies in situations that I know. I know the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. I know family and friends and how the economy has hit them. I don’t know Boston, or New England; small towns or blue-collar jobs. I like to believe that I can understand their plight, at least intellectually – but at the same time, I know that that’s something that I want to believe.
And sometimes I come across things that I have to fully acknowledge that I don’t understand.
The Grand View Topless Coffee Shop is a coffee shop that recently opened up in Vassalboro, Maine. Vassalboro is a small town. I read about it online, and was instantly intrigued.
What is a topless coffee shop doing in a small town like Vassalboro? Do women even take their tops off in small towns? I hadn’t thought so when I was younger, that was for sure. But then, I guess a bad economy will make people do crazy things. I mentioned the shop to several friends, out of curiosity and humor. One well-endowed female friend quickly explained to me that any girl who gets her ya-ya’s out in public has low self esteem. This made me wonder if the shop was inspired by the same loneliness and isolation that everyone else seemed to be feeling, albeit perhaps in a different guise. Why else would a young lady take her shirt off in a small town, where everyone would know about it?
It just so happened that I would soon be picking up a 2005 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (a trade in for my snow-unready Honda Civic), and I had long planned for the inaugural trip to be to Maine. I realized that I needed to go see this titty café for myself. I didn’t know if I’d find any answers, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t a downside to a trip to a topless coffee shop in a state known for its natural beauty.
II
I picked up my Jeep at 6 pm on a Friday. I got up to Vassalboro – after a variety of pit stops and misadventures – at 4 am. My usual MO in this situation was to find a quiet street in a safe-looking neighborhood to park my car and fall asleep.
Vassalboro has quiet streets but no neighborhoods.
I was either parking on the minimal embankment of State Route 3 or I was parking in the driveway of a respectable Vassalboro citizen. I chose option C, which was to find a small, unpaved road along the shore of a frozen lake. It was quite a sight to see at sunrise… until I noticed the private property signs everywhere. I headed back into town to try and find the Grand View. It was harder to find then you’d think, considering that there are only a handful of commercial buildings in Vassalboro.
I noticed two things as I drove through “town:”
1. My concept of a small town was being challenged – Vassalboro was a stretch of Route 3 with houses a half-mile apart and a gas station or general store thrown in here and there for good measure. The Grand View used to be a hotel. I have no idea who came to stay.
2. The citizens of Vassalboro love antiques. Either that, or the booming tourism industry in Vassalboro is based around antique shops. Maybe people used to come, stay in the Grand View, and cruise the antique shops. I really can’t say.
Anyways, I eventually found the place. I was tired and disheveled and actually needed a cup of coffee. It had a curious façade – the windows were all blacked out, so that you couldn’t see the “merch” inside – but they were blacked out with posters advertising the New England Coffee poured on site. Not the typical window dressing for a nudie bar. Continuing the absurdist theme was the sign by the door: “18 and over only. No touching.” This was a coffee shop?
Even though it was 8:30 AM, I had the mindset that I was going into a strip club… and sure enough, there was a bouncer checking ID’s just inside the door. He didn’t check mine. I don’t know if it was the beard or the fact that I looked like I’d slept 3 hours in the back of a Jeep. Which I had.
I was the only customer. I sat down, and realized that I had no idea what I wanted. I wasn’t handed a menu, and this wasn’t a coffee house where you walked up to the counter and ordered from the menu posted on the wall. I had to squint at a menu on another table to see what they offered, and I think the bouncer thought I was ashamed to look my topless waitress in the eye because he told me, “Tell the lady what you want!”
I managed to fumble out some words about a regular coffee with cream and sugar, and then promptly checked my wallet to discover that I had no cash. The joint was cash only. I got up and told the bouncer and my waitress that I’d be right back.
That’s when I realized that I didn’t know if ATM’s existed in Vassalboro.
The bouncer let me know that there was, in fact, a local ATM, as well as where it was (in a general store two miles down the road). He told me to come back when I had cash, but clearly didn’t expect me to return.
I got in my Jeep and drove down the road. I wasn’t sure if I had driven two miles, but I was pretty sure that ANY store would be THE store, so I pulled over at the first place I saw. It was a gas station/general store. The ATM was down, but I could get cash back with my debit card – I just had to wait for the cashier to lend a hand to the local (ice?) fishermen, who were buying worms. God this was a small town.
Arriving back at the Grand View, I followed a family of eight adults through the door, and the bouncer told my waitress – with a mix of surprise and respect – “He came back!” I sat down to wait for my coffee and the cinnamon bun that I had been convinced to order, and finally got to observe the small town anomaly that I had come to see.
I’m still not really sure what I expected to find – but I’ll try to articulate what was on my mind. I grew up in a town of 25,000 people next door to a town of 125,000 people in the backyard of San Francisco. My dad has a lot of family in Oregon and Alaska and despite the fact that he grew up in Sacramento, his parents farmed their backyard and his whole family personified down-home small-town values. I was trained to hate the San Francisco Bay Area; I was trained to hate large groups of people, period. And what this meant, in practice, was that the “City” and the “Small Town” were more than dissimilar locales: in my mind, they were two very different ideas. The City was a place of possibility but of uncertainty, a place of promise at the cost of moral decay. The Small Town, on the other hand, was the embodiment of Puritan consistency, with a firm ceiling compensated for by the virtual guarantee of “living the good life.”
All this to say that a topless coffee shop in a small town was a damn curious thing. Unnatural. And so my hypothesis was this: in a time of such economic unrest and cultural anxiety, the city was exporting its undesirable qualities to the small town, because for once, life in the small town was as threatened and uncertain as life in the city.
It’s probably relevant to divulge that I cooked this theory up sitting in my lonely Cambridge apartment.
There was an idea in my mind about isolation and loneliness, and I thought that perhaps the physical isolation of the small town – which had always begat surfeit moral isolation – was for once being overpowered by the cultural loneliness that all of America was bearing together. I heard a woman in a bank saying, “I can’t leave here. I can’t go back out there,” and I heard it echoed by another woman saying “taking my top off in a coffee shop is a job, if nothing else.” In both statements lived the idea that, for maybe the first time as a superpower, we – as Americans, as individuals, as citizen patriots or citizen apathetics – were feeling incredibly alone. It was an idea predicated on the implicit notion that when the chips are down, you do what you gotta do – though maybe this time with a different oeuvre. Because, perhaps for the first time, it seemed like isolationism couldn’t be the answer.
My late-night California-via-Cambridge mind thought this was all wrapped up in a wooden building in the middle of nowhere on Maine State Route 3.
What I found was something entirely different.
* * *
By the time my coffee arrived, the Grand View was far more populated than when I had left to find the town ATM. The aforementioned family of eight was sitting at four tables in the center of the room. Their ages had to range from 25-65… it was some kind of bizarro Sunday Brunch. And that wasn’t it – the Grand View was full of small town clichés. There was the 20-something with wraparound sunglasses on his head. He was in the booth next to me. He actually knew one of the waitresses and I overheard them talking about a party later that night. They probably went to high school together. I think he had Twisted Sister in the CD player of his lifted truck (Ok, so I made that up, but I’ve probably got a 91% chance of being right). Then there was a booth with two middle-aged men, probably getting their morning Cup of Joe before fishing with the worm buyers. Another booth held an older man reading the day’s paper. It was everything I would have expected from a diner in a quiet little town – and I’ve been to a lot of those – except that the waitresses were topless.
There were three of them now. Mine was tall and lanky with small breasts and two pierced nipples. I thought she seemed a little hangdog until we started chatting and she turned out to be a lot of fun. Then there was a shorter brunette, with larger breasts, and one pierced nipple. She was the one that Twisted Sister knew. She looked like she probably knew how to find the hottest Vassalboro parties. The third waitress was the tallest and most well-endowed, but also the chubbiest. Neither of her nipples were pierced. It made me wonder if they scheduled the waitresses that way on purpose, to cater to all crowds.
They all seemed comfortable. I started a conversation with mine to prove that I wasn’t uncomfortable, and we ended up talking for a while. I told her how I was from Boston and came up to Maine to get away… and she told me how she and her friends went to down to Boston to get away. Fair enough.
When she went to help other customers, I took a look at the décor of the place. They had done a real bang-up job. Like I mentioned, the Grand View had previously been a hotel. From the looks of things, they had simply taken the lobby of the hotel and put in ugly, uncomfortable booth seating. There was a counter with coffee machines and a register, and a standard break-room refrigerator holding the day’s pastries. In the entry way of the place – behind the bouncer’s barstool – was a pen and ink drawing of Dave Letterman. Letterman! I couldn’t help but wonder if he had given consent to have his picture used to promote this endeavor. Near my booth was a pen and ink of a B-rock star, if I remember correctly, Jon Bon Jovi, and on another wall was, no joke, a pen and ink of the Three Stooges. All things considered, I had no idea what they were going for. I think the point was that they were really just selling one thing. Two, I guess.
At least, that’s how it felt.
However, as I looked from the décor to the “It’s a Wonderful Life” clichés sitting in the booths around me, I realized that my conception of what the Grand View was “selling” was flawed, thanks to my life as a City Kid. In a City, the place I sat in would only be selling breasts. We’ve all been to the strip club that wouldn’t pass as an acceptable bar if it didn’t have boobs on display.
This was the same thing, except that it wasn’t.
Despite all appearances, this was a coffee shop that was selling what all coffee shops sell: caffeine and conversation. And unlike most Big City coffee shops, there wasn’t a laptop in sight. If there was anything in front of a patron’s face besides a cup of coffee, a donut, or another person, it was a newspaper. The conversation was genuine. There was a family of eight sitting together. In a completely unexpected turn, it was comforting and familiar in the way that lunch at a normal Small Town diner would be.
I had finished my cinnamon bun (good) and was working on the coffee, trying to take everything in. I had no answers – but that wasn’t for lack of information. It was the most understated sensory overload I’d ever experienced. My problem was that I had driven up North with a preconceived idea of the answer I wanted to give, before I even had a proper question formulated. So now, I sat in the shop, staring at Larry, Moe, and Curly hanging on the wall, stealing glances at Party Girl’s rack, and thinking about how much I wasn’t a drip coffee guy… all the while wondering if, maybe, there wasn’t anything interesting to write about after all. I was wondering if perhaps what I had wasn’t a story about Big City disillusion in a Small Town, but rather about how the Big City and the Small Town remain as different as ever. Or at least about the ignorance of Big City people, like myself, towards Small Towns.
I was interrupted by my waitress: “So, are you an artsy person?”
I looked up at her, laughed in spite of myself, and then replied, “What makes you ask that?”
She really only had appearances to go on. I was wearing beat-up Nike shoes that had been – if ever hip at all – preppy-hip when clean and new. I had on a tight pair of designer Levi’s jeans and a flannel hooded sweater with expensive aviator sunglasses hanging on the collar. My San Francisco-made Chrome bike messenger bag was on the seat next to me. Of that motley collection of articles, I really expected a comment about my jeans being way too tight, or my flannel sweater, or the fact that the clasp on my bag was a seat belt buckle. These were the kinds of comments I normally got in the Northeast.
What she said was, “The shoes. Only artsy people wear shoes like that. And maybe the aviators… you just can’t pull those off…”
Maybe that is artsy, or hipster-ish, in Maine; maybe even in New England – but in Berkeley, my shoes and aviators would have been a dead giveaway that I wasn’t artsy. After all, they weren’t Chucks and rainbow colored Ray-Bans.
She went on about the glasses. “The other thing about aviators is that they get scratched within five days of you buying them. Last time I was in Boston with my girlfriends, I bought a good pair for $15 or so, and I dropped them the next day and they scratched. That’s how it always goes.”
I was fumbling with my own pair, and dropped them. They didn’t scratch, and that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that they were $200 aviators, as opposed to $15 aviators. I suppose that admitting the price would have been the most revealing and honest thing for me to say, but I kept it to myself, because her next move was to venture a guess that I was a musician.
I should have lied.
Instead, I told her that I was an aspiring writer; that I thought that maybe there was a story in a place like the Grand View. I asked her how she liked working there, and she said she loved it. I asked if they ever got trouble from locals who weren’t appreciative of the nature of the business venture, and she said a little, but that it wasn’t too bad. That was the extent of my investigative journalism.
It was quickly time for me to leave. I had read online that some of the waitresses allowed hugs as one exception to the “no touching” rule. When I read it, I assumed it was about customers who wanted to get cute, and the girls letting them indulge a little – I realized, however, that it was probably more about the fact that everyone in the damn place knew each other! In any case, I think I could have gotten a hug from my waitress, but decided just to pack up my things and leave. The other move on my way out would have been to give the bouncer a wink – I’d proved him wrong, after all – but considering that I looked artsy, was wearing tight jeans, and had originally seemed nervous about the topless woman serving me, I figured it was probably best to just climb in my Jeep and head off.
III
I got back into Boston in time to meet up with friends for St. Patty’s weekend festivities. They were waiting for me at an Irish pub, with a live, three-piece Irish band. I ordered Bangers and Mash, had a lot of Guinness, a car bomb, a Tom Collins (sounds Irish…?) – it was a good time. Everyone was drunk but there were no fights. I’d thought it was impossible to have that many drunk people in that little space without fights. Suffice to say, I was thankful to be in Boston for that particular weekend. And I’ll be honest, the Grand View wasn’t anywhere near the front of my mind.
Nevertheless, as the weekend came down and the Guinness wore off and I put my green shirt back in the back of my closet, I started thinking about the café again. I wondered if my waitress had come to Boston to get away for the weekend, to experience St. Patty’s in a Big City. I wondered what I would have done if I had bumped into her in the pub I was at, with her shirt on. It would have been strange, that’s for sure. I probably would have bought her a drink but I’m not sure that I would have had words for her, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have had words to explain to my good Christian friends where I knew her from.
That’s what dawned on me, though: what I had been experiencing throughout the trip was that most basic of human fascinations, the unkown. My waitress at the Grand View goes to Boston for the same reason that my California friends called me after March 17th to get the lowdown on St. Patty’s in Beantown, and for the same reason that I wanted to drive up to Maine even before I heard you could buy coffee and donuts and stare at tits in one convenient location. It was the same reason, even, that I moved to Boston in the first place. It’s hard to be fascinated with something you know intimately. And life without fascination is painfully regular.
When I was driving home through Maine and New Hampshire, I thought that I would be writing a piece about how Small Towns and Big Cities are as different as ever, or perhaps the same as always; about how a “topless coffee shop” in a Small Town was really just a “coffee shop with topless waitresses” – though in a Big City it would almost certainly be a “topless coffee shop.” The purpose of this piece, if I followed my original intentions, would be to use that conclusion to say that, in this time of great uncertainty, the two ideals were still no closer together than when they had been moving forward through time uninhibited. Crisis averted, at least for the easy distinctions I had made for so long.
In truth, if I had set out with a good question to answer, I had gone about answering it all wrong. And if I had set out with an answer and a desire to confirm that the question was valid, I only succeeded at confounding my own biased notions. Perhaps Vassalboro was suffering gravely from the economic downturn. Perhaps antique sales were way down and their one ATM would soon be shut down for lack of use. I really don’t know. But toplessness is not a proxy for economic desperation. I’m not sure if that’s what I thought going in, but I certainly would have entertained the idea. I know now that it’s not the case at the Grand View Topless Coffee shop, as clearly as I knew within five minutes of sitting down for coffee that I wasn’t going to be answering my original question.
So did I end up with either a question or an answer? That’s neither here nor there. On a personal level, the Small Town and the Big City remain exactly the same for me. If anything, the experience strengthened my preconceived notions of what Small Towns are – I was genuinely impressed with the candor of the patrons and the help at the Grand View. Well, except maybe for the bouncer.
But I think the final conclusion was this, neither question nor answer: People cannot separate themselves from their expectations, and these expectations are intrinsically tied to the circumstances that inform our view of the world – tied to what we know. In this sense, Small Town and Big City are certainly meaningful groupings of peoples or lifestyles. Nevertheless, the expectations I had for the Grand View based on its lack of clothing were in essence the same as the expectations my waitress had for me based on my clothing. This is precisely how the people of Small Towns and Big Cities are the same – in the way they construct their notions of the world outside the scope of their own understanding. But it’s not a matter of the Big City leaking into the Small Town, or vice-versa. It’s human nature. It’s an immutable consequence of our construction, whether we chose to cover it up or let it all hang out.
* * *
If you’re wondering why I chose to mention the scene at the bank, I can only hope that the image sticks with you as evidence that there is something that’s changing right now about the American condition – because there is still a connection between that condition and what I’ve been writing about. See, I’ve been back to my local bank several times, and I’ve wondered each and every time whether or not the desperate mother ever got her loan. I’ve wondered if she even left the bank. And if I expected my trip up to Maine to somehow assuage the concern and disconcert I felt at my encounter with a real manifestation of the economic unrest that’s taking hold of everyone, well, I was sadly disappointed.
In a different sense, however, I found something that should probably be as, if not more, demonstrative than what I had hoped to find. What I discovered is that people are still just people. Half-empty pessimism about unflattering Big City qualities leaking out to Small Towns has been replaced with half-full optimism rooted in the fact that this is still the same America. And as far as America is concerned – let’s just be honest and say that we’ve faced troubles before. We’ve faced depression and unrest and isolation and human ingenuity has pulled us through each and every time.
So it is that the certain link between the subject of my trip and economic unrest is that America is facing a new problem that will color the Big City, the Small Town, and the interplay between the two a different shade than ever before. They are categories that are truly defined by cultural context. That context right now is grave and challenging, but we are ingrained with a receipt-waving sense of resolve to find a solution, Small Town and Big City alike. It’s what people do. There are desperate women in banks everywhere. Worm buyers and artsy types may find solutions in different ways, but you can be damn sure they’ll both be working on it – and the solutions they arrive at will not be symptoms of population or loneliness or poverty, but rather will be indicative of the different ways of life that coexist in America. The economy is not contributing to a breakdown of the walls between the Big City and the Small Town; the economy is a catalyst for understanding why they are both distinct and valuable.
I’m not sure why it took breasts to make that clear, but I can’t complain.
