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Unread 01-31-2006, 05:22 PM
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Default Did Hemingway Play The Bongo Drums?

Mark Snell
Riverhippie@sbcglobal.net




DID HEMINGWAY PLAY THE BONGO DRUMS?

Forty-five-year-old Gary Snyder gave up a very lucrative law practice in 1998 to open a coffee house. Most of his friends thought he either had an inoperable brain tumor or some kind of congenital dementia. But to Gary and his wife Sonia, his reasoning was simple. He had decided he spent entirely too much time worrying about whether or not the firm was satisfied with the number of billable hours he turned in every month; his conversational abilities, once fluid and easy, had become strained and, in general, were going to hell in the proverbial hand-basket; television and computer games were making verbal exchanges between him and Sonia an endangered species; there were too many robotic voices on the telephone making confusing, ambiguous, and time-consuming demands in the name of efficiency (which usually meant only reducing payroll) and were followed by maddening minutes on HOLD; the Information Superhighway had virtually eliminated the pleasant country drive—even in the country; and getting an e-mail address and being “on-line” had taken priority over learning the names of state capitals on his ten-year-old son’s TO DO list.

The perfect antidote was a coffee-house!

Coffee houses gave people places to SIT, TALK, and READ. Drinking coffee was almost secondary. No bands, no waiters pestering you with, “Hi, I’m Jay, and I’ll be your waiter this evening. What would you guys like to drink while you look over the menu?”—in fact—no menu, just a chalkboard, a coffee pot, and thou.

Money was no problem. Ten years of raking in obscene salaries at Anderson, Johnson, and Burbach had assured Gary and Sonia of at least a five-year cushion. So they bought the abandoned Shell station on Church Street not too far from the center of town, put in a couple of tables they had gotten at a garage sale, a chalkboard, a second-hand cappuccino machine, and a Georgia O’Keefe print. They framed one of Sonia’s “Sonnets for Love and Peace” (which she had written while in Graduate School in 1975 while coming down from a bad trip), and hired Melissa Wright, a teen-aged co-ed from the nearby university.

Café Myrna (Gary thought the name sounded good, and Sonia grudgingly agreed, even though she had dreams of their naming the joint venture after her) was not exactly an overnight success. But the Snyder’s financial cushion sustained the business, and, after about six months, black ink supplanted red on the Myrna’s P&L Statement—not very dark black, but black nonetheless.

One bright winter afternoon, Melissa was on duty at the espresso machine. Gary had decided to take a nap on the cot he had in the back room, and Sonia was enjoying her day off by volunteering at the Nature Center.

The customer, who entered the otherwise empty café and took a seat at a table near the window, had a shaggy gray beard and wore a beret and sandals (even though it was the middle of February). He carried a book under one arm.

“Coffee, please,” he announced after sitting down and taking off his scarf.

“What kind? . . . Sir?” Melissa remembered the politeness lecture that Gary gave her every couple of weeks. “Our special today is Ecuadorian Dark.”

The man appeared puzzled, “Look, sweetie, I just want a cup of coffee…. OK?”

She poured a cup of the Ecuadorian and brought it over to the table. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want that de-caf? Or how about some nutmeg or cinnamon?”

The Man remained calm but firm, “Coffee. Black. No sugar. Like, OK?”

She put the cup of plain Ecuadorian on the table and then retreated back behind the counter left by the Shell people. The Man opened the book and started reading.

After ten minutes, Melissa went back over to The Man’s table with a steaming pot. “Refill, sir?” she asked cautiously, not knowing what kind of response she was going to get.

“Sure. Why Not?” said The Man, holding his nearly-empty cup out to the young waitress.

She filled the cup and breathed a sigh of relief that he now seemed friendly. Encouraged by what she considered something of a personal victory, she decided she’d really be bold and try to start a conversation.

“Watcha’ reading?”

“Hemingway, just some early short stories. He wrote some pretty good stuff ‘fore he got obsessed with war and bullfighting. My favorite is ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place.’ I try to re-read it every winter. It makes me feel warm inside.” He smiled, took a sip of his newly-refilled coffee, and then asked Melissa, “Ever read it?”

“No,” admitted Melissa, sensing that she had gotten in way over her head. “I’ve been meaning to, though” she lied. She remembered Mrs. Pope, her high school English teacher, talking about somebody named Hemingway, Earl Hemingway or something like that.

“You’d be doing yourself a BIG favor girlie,” emphatically said The Man. “Say, while you’re over here, would you get me the bongo drums? Hemingway always makes me want to play the bongos.”

Now it was the waitress’s turn to be puzzled, “Bon…..gos? Drums? I’m sorry Sir. We don’t have a band here.”

The Man stared at her, smiling in understanding. “You don’t know what bongo drums are, do you girlie?”

“No,” she admitted again, and waited to be told.

“Christ, a coffee house with somebody who never heard of bongo drums!” The Man mumbled, his smile disappearing. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is that you never heard of Kerouac!!”

“Is that a European dark-roast,” she answered, hesitatingly, starting to believe he might get violent.

“Jesus H. Christ girlie, you don’t even know who Lenny Bruce was!” he yelled.

“No, should I?”

“Mort Sahl? The Hungry I?” The Man was relentless.

Now Melissa, almost choking back tears, could only shake her head.

“J.D. Salinger?”

This time Melissa smiled through her tears. She recognized one of the Man’s questions! “Wait just a minute. I know that one!” (Mrs. Pope’s class again.) “He wrote a book about a baseball player,” she said proudly. She put the coffee pot down on the next table and put her hand to her forehead, thinking, and then remembered, “I know. It’s called ‘The Catcher in the Cornfield’—right?”

The Man’s eyes got real wide. Then he screamed, “Are you sure this is a COFFEE HOUSE?” Then he got up from behind the table, walked briskly to the door and disappeared through it into the street.

Melissa, scared to death, screamed too.

The two screams jolted Gary from his nap. He rushed into the main room of the Myrna, and a real cacophony greeted him: Melissa crying hysterically, the screen door slamming, followed by a car’s horn, and then brakes screeching outside. He stopped in the Café for a moment to see that Melissa was physically all right, then, thinking that he’d been robbed, he ran outside onto the icy sidewalk.

The Man was lying in the street, and Sonia was huddled over him, seeing if there was anything she could do. Gary joined her and found The Man, though dazed and semi-conscious, had a strong pulse and no apparent broken bones. Sonia’s Volvo, front right fender freshly-dented, had stopped a few feet away from The Man.

“I couldn’t stop! He just ran out into the street like a crazy man!” she said while Gary came running over. “I think he might have come out of our coffee shop.”

“He’ll be all right” he assured her. Then he turned and shouted, “Melissa, call an ambulance.” But just then Sonia heard an approaching siren, burst into tears, and rushed to the comfort of Gary’s arms. The people at the tailor shop next door had called 911 as soon as they saw there had been an accident.

Gary comforted Sonia until the ambulance left with the injured Man, only then did she stop sobbing. He held her hand while the Police took her statement and quickly returned to their squad car.

The pair, still hand-in-hand, went back inside the Café Myrna. Gary was still confused about the events which led to the screams that had awakened him and why The Man rushed out. Melissa, now a little less shook up, explained to Gary and Sonia that The Man had come in with a book, ordered coffee, asked some questions that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and then ran out screaming. She was just as puzzled as Gary.

Gary remained perplexed, “Sonia, did he say anything to you before I got there?”

Sonia had also regained some of her composure, “He was just mumbling something I don’t understand. It sounded like, ‘Shit, man, what happened to the bongo drums.’ Does that mean anything to you?” She looked at Gary, hopeful of some sort of explanation.

Gary figured she must have heard the mumbles wrong. Why would a person who had just been hit by a car be worried about bongo drums?

“Hey,” Melissa chimed in, “One of the questions he asked me was about bongo drums. What ARE bongo drums, Gary?”

“They’re little drums they had in coffee houses back in the 50s. My dad used to talk about them when he was reminiscing about Graduate School. But I haven’t heard anybody mention them in years.”

Sonia just shrugged her shoulders.

Finally, Gary said, “Oh well, let’s forget it. You know what I always say—anything that happened before the Beatles and Vietnam couldn’t have been very important anyway.” Then he cheerily asked Sonia and Melissa, “How about some Ecuadorian cappuccinos?”

While the trio moved behind the counter, the Hemingway book lay unread, ignored, and forgotten on the table where The Man had sat. Melissa was relieved that Gary apparently wasn’t going to start lecturing her on bugs.

“What was he saying about beetles and what did they have to do with Vietnam anyway?” Melissa wondered while she sipped her cappuccino.

The book still sat at the table, a nice clean well-lighted place.

Last edited by KG_Soldier; 11-08-2006 at 10:19 AM..
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