Run For The Shadows In These Golden Years

The Corner of Downer and Webster -- A Personal History

Ca. 1984 - Ca. 1987: Brewster's Cafe. As a teenager with nothing to do, I'd go to Brewster's most weekend nights to teach myself how to love coffee. I brought along notebooks to write short stories, most them a weird kind of wish fulfillment exercise concerning high school popularity and an imaginary rock band. I smoked cigarettes and chewed wintergreen gum, and the combined flavors of mint and coffee still bring me immediately back to a table by the window. I read Salinger and Hesse and Anne Tyler and John Irving. The owners were largely absent and the waitstaff was tolerant of teenagers who'd sit for hours on a $1.00 bottomless pot of coffee. Increasingly it became a place to be, with cars of cool kids coming in from Tosa East and Whitefish Bay. By the end of its run, you were expected to show up drunk. Once Trevor and I split a giant bottle of Gallo wine, drinking al fresco in the Downer Woods, then walked down to Brewster's. I sat next to Adam on the park bench out front and vomited my very soul. Dave gave me a ride home, but I got bedspins and more vomitting led me to be found out by my father, who got the whole story out of me as I gasped over the toilet bowl. At Sunday breakfast, Dad poured me a glass of red wine, which I didn't touch again until I toured France in 1995.

Ca. 1988 - 1994: Webster's Bookstore and Cafe. Webster's had long been next door, and they expanded to the corner. I got a job as a dishwasher in about 1990, and that still may rank as my favorite job ever. I couldn't stand the feel of the rubber gloves, so I washed dishes with bare hands. The harsh chemicals in the detergent would turn my hands brown, and then the skin would flake off, leaving me with stinging pink hands for a couple of days, a monthly cycle that I somehow didn't mind at all. I played C90 cassettes of Elvis Costello's Get Happy, the first two Ramones records, and The Clash on the rustic boom box in the dish room, and now and then the waitstaff would have to tell me to sing along a little quieter. One of the waitresses banned "Lose This Skin" off Sandinista, a song which featured the reedy voice of Tymon Dogg. I was promoted to the kitchen, but I couldn't take the pressure of timing everything just so, and asked to be put back in the dish room. I would borrow new hardcover fiction from the bookstore, and returned most of it. One night I locked myself in overnight to study for a Psych Statistics exam, but the illegally-employed third shift breadbakers showed up with sheaves of marijuana and things did not work out well for me. I passed Psych Stats on the curve, with a C-. Plagued by bad management, the store relocated to Prospect and Kennilworth, where it died a quick death. (I was a bookseller at that location, but it came to be that the owners were buying packaged bestsellers from Sam's Club and reselling them from our store. Their credit was just that bad.) I left for Boston and graduate school in the nick of time. Still, nothing beat the feeling of ending a night shift at the sink, then beating feet to meet friends at North Avenue bars, drinking cold beer in a smoky bar while dish suds dried on my shirt and the hard shell of my hands cracked apart. When I got breaks, I'd walk up the street for more coffee at the Cafe Demi in the back of the Coffee Trader, but that's a post for another day.

1997-2009: Schwartz's Bookstore and Starbucks. Having a Starbucks on that corner is sort of like the moment in Grosse Point Blank where John Cusack discovers that his childhood home has become a convenience store, but Schwartz's was the perfect fit. I browsed there on visits home from graduate school, and this was a link to my history that was sorely needed at the time. (Years before, when Schwartz's was preparing to open in Shorewood, I applied for a job there. The hiring manager handed me an orange Crayola marker and asked me to sell him the pen, and I lost out on the job. Never been one for the hard sell.) I love that bookstore enough to be able to envision the shelf location of a particular book I want to find, barring those times when they swap the location of the Schwartz 100 with the Social Criticism shelves, or reverse the orientation of the fiction shelves. In those times when I would imagine the cover of a book I haven't written yet, I imagined it on those shelves. It's a hard loss to look in the eye.

Godspeed to your eternal reward, HWS.