scottvalid
OF ALL MY many idiosyncratic peculiarities—most of which stem from the same singular source of guilty/ obsessive/ paranoic neurosis—the fact that I don’t enjoy spending time in public places looms large among them.
While congregating in community plazas may be fine for movers and shakers, captains of industry, hustlers and bustlers, and any other manner of active, well-adjusted types, such is not the modus operandi Fate had in store for me. Still, this distaste for public gatherings isn’t as wholesale as I often make it sound. Given the right combination of persons, place, and activity, I too can don a TGIF shirt and a ‘fanny-pack,’ while ‘ooo-ing’ and ‘ahh-ing’ with the best of them. It just so happens that these combinations tend to be few and far between.
Following this line of thought, cafes typically haven’t been among the places that join forces with persons and activities to bring me scuttling from my cave. This is paradoxical in a sense, as sitting around while drinking coffee is one of my favorite pastimes, yet it’s precisely because this activity is so second nature that I usually find little reason to do it outside my own living room. I know how to make a cup of coffee I enjoy drinking, I have access to the music I want to listen to, the art I appreciate hangs on my walls (or at least more of it would if I could ever get around to interior decorating), and the people I like to converse with are usually on hand at home, either in person or only a quick phone call or email away. Why disturb a system that works?
Sure, there’s something to be said for challenging one’s routine, yet at the same time I learned long ago that seeking out novelty for novelty’s sake rarely leads to anything satisfactory. On those few occasions when I have gone seeking a cafe in which to conduct a public life, either the environments have been inhospitable, the faces have been unfriendly, or the coffee served has been uninspiring, and while I can live with any one of these three shortcomings on their own, two or more together spell a quick retreat to the comfort of home, and time and again such a retreat has been the case.
I do know, however, that it doesn’t have to be this way. As a young child living in San Francisco, my parents used to take me to their own public haunt, the Cafe Trieste in SF’s North Beach district. It was a real neighborhood joint, full of friendly and familiar faces whom my parents recognized and were glad to see.
There was Bruno, the old man with the blind-guy shades and beret, Matteo, the stately mandolin player, always with a warm smile, Yolanda, the effusive Italian woman behind the espresso bar who once gave me a toy Fiat car she brought back from Italy, and plenty of other folks whose faces swirl together in a child’s-eye haze of morning fog and cigarette smoke.
Meanwhile, in addition to the people, character oozed from the cafe’s smoke-yellowed walls as well—the ‘Clark Kent’ style phone booth in the corner, the jukebox overflowing with Italian crooners, the Colombus-discovers-America fresco on the back wall, the black and white photos of Bill Cosby hanging askance, in between pictures of customers’ babies (yours truly included), and so on.
The years since have not been kind to the Trieste, just as they haven’t been kind to much of San Francisco, unless you happen to be a tourist or an IT/business-minded immigrant from the Midwest. Most of the folks I remember from the Trieste are dead or gone, the place seems a lot cleaner these days, there’s no smoking inside, and the phone booth has been removed (or, if it’s still there, it’s strictly ornamental), but the memories and the standard they established remain.
And so it was with great trepidation that I set out on the morning of Friday, April 9th, 2010 to pay my first visit to the Atlas Coffee Company in Santa Rosa, CA.
The Atlas Coffee Company is a cafe that was opened recently in my neighborhood by two local musicians, one of whom I’ve known for years and who’s played in some particularly notable bands, and the other whom I’d never met in an ‘official’ capacity, but who’s also left an indelible mark on Santa Rosa’s musical landscape.
Jesse Wickman (the proprietor of Atlas Studios, a stone’s throw away from the cafe) played in, among other projects, Santa Rosa’s own Nuisance (an amazing band on the 1990’s Lookout Records roster), Fifteen (probably no explanation needed for readers of this blog), Undertoad (a 1990’s Santa Rosa act that channeled Mike Patton’s brand of rock/metal/jazz improv freakoutness), and Edaline (Matt Carrillo, the force behind SR indie greats Kid Dynamo’s follow-up project).
Jamie Voss, whose musical history I’m not as familiar with, played drums for the country-tinged outfit Cropduster, one of SR’s proudest musical moments, and so while I’m probably short-changing him by not referencing his full credentials, let it be known that participation in Cropduster is, in my mind, money in the bank. A lot of money. Meanwhile, these days, Jamie plays bass for Santa Rosa’s mighty Spindles.
Both of these guys are guys I like, guys I’ve admired from a distance, guys I looked up to growing up, and so I really wanted to appreciate their new venture. The fact that two individuals like Jesse and Jamie were the ones opening this business already signaled something different from my history of cafe sampling in Santa Rosa. Generally speaking, most cafes I’ve frequented (and a few I’ve worked at) were owned by detached businesspeople, and so even at their most pleasant, those places felt cold and calculated, as if—had the owner decided to follow a different business model—the joint could just as easily have been a carpet store, a dried fruit distributor, or a Baptist church.
Jesse and Jamie have both worked at cafes, they’ve hung out at cafes, they’ve probably played music at cafes, and while, let’s face it, a business is a business and has to be run like one in order to survive, there is a certain synergy that happens when the ‘right’ people are plugged into the ‘right’ enterprise for the ‘right’ reasons. If anyone knows how to create a neighborhood space for people to enjoy some beverages and mingle with one another in an organic, creative way, it HAS to be these two guys. Add in the fact that Jesse is one of the most naturally entrepreneurial spirits I’ve ever met—he works incredibly hard and he knows how to make things work—and my hopes were through the roof.
So Friday the 9th rolled around, and with it came a lot of hectic energy in the Valid household. We were preparing for a trip to an amusement park in Anaheim, CA, and I had a long list of chores to get through so that we could leave on our vacation that afternoon, but even still I was hell bent on swinging by Atlas, and so by the time the clock struck 11am I was out the door and walking to the site of a former Greyhound bus station on Santa Rosa Ave. that now houses a purveyor of coffee, tea, and baked goods.
As I approached Atlas I felt swamped with the usual wave of nauseating social anxiety. Were my shoulders slumped? Did my smile look forced? Would I open my mouth to make pleasantries, only to find myself accidentally letting loose a torrent of offensive slurs instead? And then, opening the front door and walking in, it all melted away in a soothing wave of green and orange.
The first thing that hit me upon entering Atlas was its ethereal airiness. One hundred and eighty degrees removed from the smoky cloister of the Cafe Trieste, though equally effective in terms of character, light floods through the windows of the Atlas Coffee Company and joins with its vibrant interior wall colors (the aforementioned green and orange) making the place seem about three times as big as it actually is. Any apprehensions forgotten, I wanted to sink into a corner and lose myself in some jittery conversation while sloshing back a few cups of caffeine.
But, I cautioned myself, I’d been on this precipice before—entering what seems to be an enticing spot, only to realize that it’s barren of folks I know or have anything in common with. Yet just as this thought crossed my mind, I looked over to see my friends Amber and Dave—Amber seated at a table, Dave at the counter adjusting his beverage—and another fear was put to rest. I hadn’t seen Dave in person for close to ten years, and here we were, brought face to face by Atlas’ cheery, inexorable pull.
So the setting was good, the company great, and boom, two of my cafe ‘musts’ were checked off the list, a sufficient score to make Atlas Coffee Company a place enticing enough to get me out of my living room on a regular basis. But wait! Stepping up to the counter area, all the while admiring both the countertop crafted by Slim Hoffman and the coffee spill-over stand made by Klaus of Whiskeydrunk Cycles, I was greeted by Jesse, Jamie, and barista Erin. Given a choice of a lighter or darker roast (whose specifics elude me at the moment, I’m bad at those sorts of details), I went with the lighter of the two and sat down with Dave and Amber.
The three of us launched into some conversation, and as we did I raised my cup to my lips, tasting the best brewed cup of coffee I’ve had outside of my own home for as long as I can remember. Suddenly I found myself in a euphoric state. Time seemed to slow. The constant tension in my jaw that causes my molars to grind and crush together relaxed. Birds were singing. The sun was shining. And it was at that moment, setting the cup back down, watching Jesse and Jamie smiling earnestly and enthusiastically behind the counter as a steady trickle of familiar and friendly faces came through the front door, that I realized I was in the middle of one of those time travel or dream sequences in a movie when the characters are transported to an idealized 1950s setting, a proverbial ‘simpler time’ that never really existed, although right then and there on that Friday morning at the Atlas Coffee Company, simpler times did in fact exist, for real, for a moment, but also somehow forever.
It was like in the film Blue Velvet when David Lynch shows us a perfect, lush body of green grass only to unearth the disgusting insects swarming beneath, but in this case the green grass was all that mattered. Oh, I knew the insects were out there, somewhere, but for a blissful thirty minutes, I really didn’t care. I was drinking great coffee, brewed by great folks, talking with Dave and Amber and listening to The Misfits playing ambiently over the house speakers. Atlas Coffee Company was a resounding success, and as I skipped my way home after my visit, amped up on lovely dark nectar and wanting to help little old ladies across the street while whistling show tunes, I was already day dreaming about my next visit.
So kudos to Jesse and Jamie for creating a true neighborhood spot that serves a quality product and appears to be inclusive to a nice variety of folks. I look forward to spending more time at Atlas as the years go by, and, after going on excessively in true Valid Neurosis style, I’ll end things simply by stating that Atlas Coffee Company is a great place. I really enjoyed it.
- scott
April 13, 2010 at 3:24 pm
nicely written.