Cafe Atlantico

(Originally published at joecsmolen.com 2/15/23)

Before the band, before the beer, I see lovers in Café Atlántico. You can tell they’re old-hand lovers who know how to hide from Portland’s rain. Some of the lovers even dress up – just for a toasted bagel, cream cheese, cappuccino sips and each other - in Atlántico’s shadowy, third-world ambiance.

Before Café Atlántico’s downbeat day, I was never a lover. I mean, there’re a lotta Mr. Nice Guys around. I’m not like them – not at all.

Café Atlántico. Get it off Portland’s south Park Blocks. Low-ceilinged, intimate, smelling sometimes the sulphury way fermenting wine wafts, other times like ripe bananas left in the sun; this day-job bistro tugs you off the sidewalk, down out of the rain, down three bodega steps to a never-feels-crowded, underground Santo Antao tropic island.

And the colors in the place! Once in a while, I hear a lover exclaim something like, “My gosh, hon’! Look at the colors!” Trimmed-out in thatch and driftwood, the furniture is painted beach-sand, the ceiling the pale aqua and grey-greens of a snorkleable reef, the walls the deep blue of off-shore dark ocean abyss.

Lazily listening to the Cape Verde, smoky, cabaret voice of Cesária Évora, Queen of La Morna, I watch underground couples melt and flow.  I don’t understand her West-African creolu much beyond “na despedida”, but I don’t need to. We’re all refugees – I and the couples - from the city’s breeding metal, glass and rain.

From where I’m sitting behind outlandish potted plants, sipping black coffee from a paper cup, I can see the blood stained terrazzo - Atlántico’s one downbeat. Was a big dude, he and his up-scale dog. Downbeat day, dripping rain, profaning our sanctuary, they stood plugging the front doorway. Pink-faced him, I guess a wannabe Rasta-man -  blonde, but dreads-roofed, his massive, brindle dog’s face same ominous color as the funnel of a tornado cloud. Dreads spotted me spotting him. I guess I let it show. Saw it in his face, no question - that he reveled he rankled.

On a previous Friday, through a beaded curtain, a giant, dark man in a white apron stepped out of Atlántico’s kitchen, and spoke politely up into Dreads’ face – about his dog Chopper.  What little I could hear told me we were to believe Chopper helped Dreads emotionally. Trying to smile, the man in the apron went away. Dreads didn’t.

But downbeat Friday, just when Cesária’s voice refrained with “Sodade, Sodade,”  just then, Dreads was back. He thudded before the expectant evening rush, before the beer, before the band, in the winding-down time of day when Atlántico is still a coffee oasis. In back, probably from the hospital up on twenty-third, sipping to a tinkling piano solo, a haggard couple in green surgical scrubs picked up their espressos, and edged their tender mutterings further back into Atlántico.

Dreads picked a table, leashing Chopper to a chair. Chopper hopped up onto somebody else’s chair, haunches on his leash chair. Both of them smacked at something unwashed Dreads’d just dumped out of his grubby back pack onto his table beside his cell phone. 

I didn’t see the instant it happened, but right away, Dreads got some push-pack. I saw him blink sarcastically at a manila-colored card he’d just been dealt. The dealer - a dark, daring girl of about ten years I knew to be the giant dark man’s daughter had already glided away. Dreads picked-up the card, read it; his face flushed. Uber-griped, he coolly flipped the card onto his table. Squirming on his chair, he grabbed-up his phone – pecked at it importantly. He tore a sip from his drink. With thumb and forefinger, he hauled at his nose. Then, he grabbed the manila card back up, twiddled it with his fingers, re-read it. When, Dreads’ face snapped my way, my adrenaline took a big surge. But if a little girl could stand up to Dreads, so bloody-well could I! I glared back at Dreads. Not breaking eye contact with me, he tore the manila card in half and tossed the pieces over his shoulder.

That’s when a slight, dark guy with Christmas-light beads dangling at the ends of his corn rows felt his way down the steps into Café Atlántico. In bright orange – I guess they’re called chinos – the man wore a pale green, zipper-front jacket. As if at home, a little gold-on-yellow guide dog harnessed in black led the blind man confidently to a table not a dozen feet from Dreads.

I never saw the man in chinos order anything. Behind his white-framed Ray Ban sunglasses, he just sat weaving rhythmically to Cesária, and smiling happily at something I couldn’t see.

A few minutes later, the same dark, daring girl served the man in Ray Bans a steaming plate of - looked like from where I sat - spaghetti. Chopper animated instantly. A jiggling drool of saliva started from his lower lip.

The Ray Bans sensed blindly in Dreads’ direction. He paused. Then the blind man picked up his fork. I saw him reconsider, set it back down. Slowly, he leaned forward to caress his cracker-jack, now agitated guide dog.

Cautiously, the blind man picked-up his fork once more. A scrap of Cesária’s lyrics I sorta understand got emphasized by a lilting, desert-island clarinet. An actual celebration of Cape Verde’s seldom rain.

But the little golden-yellow guide dog’s eyes hadn’t left Chopper – not even for a nano-second. I could actually see the little golden guy’s stand-up ears vibrate.  He growled, then squelched his voice into a hoarse whine.

Too fast, the blind man tried to set his fork back down. It missed his plate, tipped and fell and clanked loudly across the floor. Trying to reach quickly down to calm his dog, as he pivoted in his chair, his elbow swept his plate of spaghetti right off into space. Chopper’s leash chair launched.

Delicately, the little golden-yellow guide dog danced to his feet. It was over-with in seconds. White teeth flashed. With a primordial, lethal suddenness, right up close to Chopper’s nose, the dinky dog clamped-on. Terrified, trying to back away, Chopper’s toe nails ripped desperately at the hard mosaic. He yiped shrilly. He swung his tiny assailant and the leash chair in wide arcs. The little yellow wrecking ball knocked over two more chairs. As if he had got hit by a bus, Chopper screamed piteously. Chopper bled.  Finally, tearing a jagged rent in Chopper’s upper lip, the little canines ripped loose.

Dreads and Chopper evacuated.

Before long, her head up queen-high, the dark, daring little daughter reappeared from behind the beaded curtain. Bearing two-handed a fresh plate of spaghetti, she bent gracefully at the waist and set it before the blind man. In a single sweep, with her left, she picked-up the broken plate, hugging him with her right. Loud enough for me to hear her musical voice quite clearly, she addressed the little dog as “Cassius”. Back under his table, Cassius got a caress. Smiling, he rolled on his back for more. He got it.

As she mopped up the red spaghetti splatter, the little queen and blind Ray Bans exchanged animated pleasantries I longed to hear.

I never saw her vanish.

But so then I did something I thought was all in my past. I spotted Dreads’ back pack abandoned there on his table. I ditched my coffee. I jumped up and grabbed the back pack. I just took it. I just stole it. And I just had to know - so I snatched up the halves of the manila card from the floor, too, and shoved them in my hip pocket and I dodged out the front door.

Outside, with the stolen back pack, between a steel dumpster and a plastic porta-potti, I shirked off the sidewalk and away into my darkling streets. Revolted by the shockingly greasy back pack, wishing I had hand sanitizer on me, I hustled his filthy pack clear down past Union Station, way over to the Naito Parkway seawall. There, I hucked it over the rail into the river. I didn’t even watch it deep-six. I just turned my back and walked away and up Burnside.

Later, on Washington Street, I breathed the brake lights of the honking, downtown traffic jam and waited for the 23rd Avenue bus. That’s when I remembered the pieces of the manila card I stuffed in my left hip pocket.

I still have Dreads’ manila card. I taped it back together. It’s still framed on my bathroom wall right over the toilet tank.   

Mostly, I’ve written women off, but e-e-very once in a Friday night at Café Atlántico, I meet a lit-eye girl who actually, patiently seems to want to listen to me. And when her hand starts on my knee, I invite her. Holding hands, we walk to my apartment not far up off Vista. She can’t know it, but I never expect any girl to live up to the cappuccino lovers I see in Café Atlántico. She can’t know it, but alone with me, it’s gonna be a tough test for any girl – what she’s about to undergo.

Later yet, with my apartment door locked, after our breathing has calmed back down some and I tell her my alias for that day, and we’re alternately giggling and kissing and groping and crawling after her buttons that got ripped off, she asks to use the “potty”.

 When my bathroom door clicks shut, I grin privately. With my careful, hand-written addition of the phrase, “Madam! Yes you, Madam!”, my repaired manila card still demands from its frame over my toilet tank,

“The Management – Respectfully requests that you and your party leave the premises as quickly and quietly as possible.”  

Pretty much always turns out the same. I hear her flush and she explodes out griped as Dreads, and over the sucking toilet flush noise, she yells things like, “I suppose you think that’s funny?” or, “Of all the juvenile..!” and flies apart like the transmission of a dragster and yanks my apartment door back open and fumbles and spills all her lipsticks, nail polish, nail files, nail polish remover and make-up and candy bars and even, once – no lie – I’m pretty sure I saw a DIY Botox Kit! in the hallway outside my apartment door.

I always offer to help pick it all up, but I usually luck out and just get swung at and called something accurate and told off and don’t have to.

But it could happen. It’s the reason my paper-cup, to-go coffee at Café Atlántico never gets bitter any more. It’s always possible that the broad could burst out of my W.C. grinning, too - and splutter to know where I got “that stupid card,” and we’d end up laughing about Friday Night Fights at Café Atlántico.

Conceivably, she could keep listening to me and I could even get a chance to split an afternoon bagel and cappuccino with her at Café Atlántico some day. I could!

It’s always possible, too, I might end up putting her on my checking account. I might even get to see her smiling up at me through our front window while, with a can of purple paint, I hang off the side of our ginger-bread house up in Northwest.

Then, I’d be somebody. I’d be half of one of those lucky couples.

Next, she’d probably witch me into dadness.

Anything’s possible!