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The Roasting Company

Let’s face it, language does not make sense. It doesn’t have to. When you stop and think about their origins, the phrases we use all the time are utterly incomprehensible. Their obscure and convoluted etymologies are not apparent. It is quite possible that these histories are not even knowable, and it is not the slightest bit important that we know them in order to utter the phonemes they have resulted in. Language keeps trotting along. But sometimes it contracts severe case of philosophical doubt, and hysteria erupts. Let us consider, for instance, the following sign:

PLEASE, “BUS”
YOUR OWN TABLES
Thank You :)

Obviously I could just send this along to the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, and be done with it. And we could all have a good laugh. I sure did. In fact, transcribing this sign felt risky because I thought the employees of The Roasting Company, inside of which this sign is posted, would see that I was giggling at their sign, and would give a shit. This is absurd, of course. In any case, I think the sign is more than just amusingly stupid. It’s smart for the same reason it’s stupid.

Why put “bus” in quotes? It was done, it seems to me, to draw attention to the peculiarity of the word. “Bus” bears only a spare relation to its homonym: a bus transports people, and to bus a table is to transport dishes. Aside from both involving transport, they aren’t even the same part of speech. This is not at all uncommon in English. Homonyms don’t have to be related in any way, in fact, they generally aren’t. If one troubles oneself with such things, it is a bit confusing, even, that occasionally they are connected at all. But if one is confused, usually one just rolls with it. This sign is hung up on it. Bus your damn table, it says, and quit telling us about how odd the word “bus” is.

There are a number of other, less explicable decisions that went into the making of this sign. There is that one comma after “please,” which seems like it could be a misplaced genuflection to correct punctuation, despite the fact that elsewhere those rules are completely ignored. Perhaps it’s not attempting to be correct at all, but simply a verbal pause meant to emphasize the insistence of its plea. There is that change from ALL CAPS to Capitalization for “Thank You”. It’s as if “Thank You” is its title, and just happens to fall at the bottom.

In short, the sign is a mess of conventions. It has been here for a long time, and although its place within even advertising English is sketchy, it very much belongs here. This whole place exudes the same sense of rushed intentionality. Everything seems to have been put in place just until a more permanent fixture can be put in place. The ugly, hour-glass-shaped mugs feel like they could fall apart at any moment. The plastic water cooler is perhaps the most obvious example of slapdashery, resting as it does on a not entirely clean-looking towel, which is there not to prevent leaks but to absorb them.

There are two communities here, one of which I am not and have never been a part of, and other of which I was once, briefly. The former community is this cafe’s family, as some cafes develop. It consists of the regulars, the proprietor, and some of his employ. They chat; they ask each other how they are doing and how their children are doing. Some of them even have a predictable schedule of coming in, which when deviated from is commented upon. The family worries about its members.

The proprietor has baby pictures posted on the back of the espresso machine. At least, I think he owns the place. He certainly acts like it. Youthful though he is, he has this fatherly way of carrying himself. His manner is very grave, like you might wish a surgeon to have. When I order coffee from him it is as if I agreed to the excision of a tumor.

The latter community is high school students. Only a hop, skip, and a jump away, it’s their hang--well, some of them. If you come here during lunch, or, even better, during the off periods you get in your last year or two, you are cool. But you don’t come here alone, you come with an entourage of friends and/or your boyfriend/girlfriend. You come here to feel adult-like with coffee in paper cups or with little pots of tea. You spend money here because you have it.

I hardly remember being here in high school although I know I was. It is only by eavesdropping on the current batch that I can access my memories of that time. Okay, I do remember, waiting in line one time, being told that Ray Bradbury is a good guy. Or a standup dude, or something like that. But mostly my memories have been bussed away. I can come here, for a small fee, to be bussed back, for better or worse. It is in this way that if you’ve lived somewhere for a long time, its geography becomes an archive.

Although high school students rarely do in Ashland, I like to think of them as those that come on busses. After all, if they don’t come on a bus, they are either bussed here by their parents or they bus themselves. Even those that walk to school are bussing themselves, are they not?

In the ideal world that the sign proposes, baristas do not bus tables, but they end up being bussers anyway. So there are those who are bussed and those that bus. This distinction is not in the least bit helpful in distinguishing high school students from baristas, but let’s use it anyway. The bussed are urged to bus their tables. In theory only the bussed bus, while the bussers are in no way a part of any bussing or busses. In practice, however, the bussed are forgetful and do not always bus, and the bussers, true to their name, also bus. There is something a little irksome about this, hence the sign. The sign polices language and customers alike, yet in doing so it recreates the very aberration it seeks to quell.

Percolate

There was a greenhouse at the college I attended. In the dead of New England winter I used to sit there in its wicker chairs, soaking up the jungle air. From that warm perch I could look out across the snowy campus at the traffic navigating the icy highway. Percolate has lulled me into such nostalgia. It too is a perch, something very rare in Ashland. Once, before Percolate, it was even rarer. There are those few businesses in the Plaza with second or third-floor windows and patios. And there are the nine floors of The Mark Anthony, as I call it, trying to be cool by clinging to the name of the building rather than its most recent hotel, which sadly seems to be here to stay.

Anyway, this place makes me nostalgic not only because it reminds me of a greenhouse in winter, but because the landscape of Ashland has changed with the erection of this building. It is a monument to Ashland’s vanity and represents a culmination of cynicism about its tourists. It was built to put tourists in the shoes of Ashlanders as they gaze upon themselves. When this building was dreamed up, it crystalized a mostly unacknowledged facet of the city’s tourism: that it’s not about the Shakespeare festival, or the landscape, or Mount Ashland, or any of that; it is about aestheticism. From Percolate’s vantage we see the unity that sign regulations, self-conscious city planning, and the economy of storefronts has brought about. Here is not Ashland with a view, but Ashland as a view.

To locals, Percolate is charged with an air of unwholesomeness because many remember the saga of its inception, funding, and construction as it unfolded in the Daily Tidings and by hearsay. Tom and Lisa Beam were once the idyllic couple of Pasta Piatti and Sesame. It is the latter which ultimately birthed Percolate and killed their marriage. When Tom was charged with sexual harassment by one of the Sesame employees, the Beams had been discussing starting a new restaurant. Their key idea came of acknowledging that Sesame’s success was largely due to its view. They wanted not just to start a restaurant, but to solicit the City to foster building something entirely new that would house multiple businesses. Though the harassment charges went nowhere, the City, wanting to distance itself from the headlines, decided to instead fund a very similar proposal from another party. Oddly, this other proposal took the Beams’ idea of a view even further. There would not be a shop-studded five-floor building with generous windows. No, there would be a stubby Space Needle with a coffee shop and bar at the top made almost entirely of glass.

The heat is not as needful here as it is in Maine, but it is still welcome. And the cold outside is also welcome because it means there are not that many people here. In the summer it’s a bit like a theme park, everyone rushing about with cameras. But now, as the sun sets in that colorless way, I am in a welcoming gloom of leaves. The floor is studded with potted plants. In an inspired design, the view is not brutally displayed everywhere, but obscured by hanging vines and banana-like tropical plants. For all of its grim economy, it is rife with incongruities. Coffee and relaxation is a common enough combination, but here it becomes absurd. Myself and other locals come up to this glamorous class cage just to sit by themselves and work. We come to reflect, but also to get hyped up on coffee. We come as if we couldn’t care less where we were, yet the coffee costs $3 a cup.

Cafe Nomyen

In Doctor Who, everyone is always astonished to find that the Doctor’s spaceship, the TARDIS, is bigger inside than out. Cafe Nomyen is actually smaller on the inside. Before I had set foot inside I always tried to peer inside its large windows as I drove past. I imagined a vast, spacious array of tables full of people consuming its mysterious food and drink. The reality of its interior disappoints.

Cafe Nomyen is a business destined for failure. Why? Because it operates upon a conceit that, while a good idea in general, is rife with logistical problems in this town. The idea is to be a teenager hang-out that parents can approve of, while still being genuinely appealing to their children. It has low, comfortable, sofa-style seating. There are games such as Jenga, cards, and Chinese checkers in cute little shelves at the entrance. It’s not a coffee shop. They serve cold bubble tea with enormous, black tapioca pearls. Like the icy turquoise of its logo and the baby blue of the interior, bubble tea seems intended to cool on an oppressively hot summer day. And in summer its large patio could fill with the crowd I had imagined before.

The trouble is that not only is it winter, but even in summer whence would such a crowd flock? The college students are mostly gone in summer, and those few that stick around would rather drink coffee at Starbucks across the street. So really Cafe Nomyen has to derive almost its entire income from high schoolers looking for a place to meet away from their families. Ashland High School has never had an enormous student body, and it has been dwindling for at least the past decade. On top of this, the cafe is not located particularly close to the high school. Who, then, is this cafe for? It is as if it’s trying to promote itself to the universal register.

A group of three boys are playing Jenga. Every few minutes there is a loud clatter as one more piece is removed from the tower and it all comes down. Cafe Nomyen plays a similar game: how many pieces can be removed without collapsing the entire structure?

The Beanery

Sometimes one doesn’t want smiles, performances, or to perform. One wants to be treated gruffly. One wants grim surroundings and to drink one’s battery acid from a chunky mug in peace. At The Beanery, the butch man of coffee shops, one can pretend not to pretend. One can be blue.

(Don’t get me wrong. It’s lovely battery acid.)

Culturually, geographically, and perhaps grosstopically, Ashland has at least two poles, if not three or more. There is the downtown pole centered at the Plaza which organizes itself around the tourist’s gaze. On the other end of town and across the railroad tracks, a second pole rises up with the giant flagpole upon which the contentious giant American flag flaps. It is there that big box stores may be found, conveniently located next to the interstate onramp. The possible third pole, which would thus break the status of all three as poles, is the university.

At the convergence of the latter two poles is The Beanery. From out here at the corner of Ashland Street and Walker Avenue one can see signs indicating where to get onto the interstate. In the outside seating with the noise of the traffic is where people come to smoke. This is one of the many ways in which The Beanery forms an opposition to downtown Ashland. Here the alien and the past converge. Closer to the University and the I-5 onramp than it is to the glittering, self-consciously touristic plaza with its shops and restaurants that change hands and names so frequently I can’t keep track, this place is a bastion of, well, itself. Not only has it been here since as long as I have lived but it has not deigned to reinvent itself. Here one gets a waft of the 90s. The music often drifts in that direction, subject to the often nostalgic whims of its employees. Inside and out it is painted a deep but not dark blue taken from the branding of its parent company, Allann Brothers, that pervades the building’s very being. It is not a cheery sky blue or a sombre navy blue, but simply blue. Yes, I dimly remember that long ago the furniture may have been changed from dark wood to light wood with synthetic tabletops. And yes, suddenly there are now two comfy-looking leather chairs in the back. Does it matter? The exterior makes a minor concession to the present with a newish burnt umber paint job that tries to render the blue excitingly colorful, but it does not succeed. It remains somehow drearily solid. In contradiction to any color theory I can imagine, the perception of this particular blue is not changed by its surroundings. It cannot be framed. It is that philosophical vulgarity: something selfsame.

As I write, an employee sits outside wrapped in his coat and listens to music with his eyes closed, savoring the five minutes he has before he must work. It’s okay to let your pathos hang out here. There is not a sense that anybody is watching. One feels anonymous in the impassive grit of aged furniture, paint, and aspirations. Here is a strange island of urbanity. This is sometimes but not always welcoming. In summer overzealous air-conditioning vents blast from the ceiling straight at the tables below, threatening to turn their occupants the signature Allann Bros. color. When someone grinds their own coffee using the machine in the back, an infernal whirring noise fills the cluttered interior. Everyone tries their best to ignore it. This is not a manic utopia, but somewhere that the noisy silence between people is all too apparent.

Noble Coffee

I have to stop just inside the doors because this isn’t a coffee shop, it’s a party. The bodily warmth and noise drive me to the counter in a daze and I nervously fidget with my hat. The barista apologizes for how busy she is as if I too have already been enveloped in their whirling imperatives. Drinks must be made, coffee roasted, surfaces cleaned, smiles given, money tendered, and all must be done with glee. “Sorry about that” she breathes like she’s turning to attend a neglected friend. Where does one begin? It’s impossible to argue with her message that her labor is deeply inconveniencing, and that we are on familiar terms. It would be understandable if she were looking for human connection here. It is everywhere performed and nowhere to be found. Light and space invade from all angles through ample windows unhindered by any obstacle more substantial than a potted tropical plant. An inward-smiling techie has found the only corner of slight shadow where the couches are otherwise abandoned. Everything points toward the central barista corral in which they gracefully toil in black. There are two black curtains on either side, the only cover from the constant strafing of gazes around the room. It’s all public intimacy, pop music, and magic out here. What goes on behind the curtain?

It’s easy to imagine there is a terrible authority overseeing all this and subjecting its employees to its demands. If this is a coffee cult--and there is no doubt in my mind that it is--then surely it has a deranged leader. But there is no evidence of this; there is only the building’s scant secret. The truth, I fear, is far more insidious: not only are these baristas who spew unsolicited origins and roasts willing converts to the coffee cult, but if anything, the edifice itself is the locus of the cult’s power. The very interior space, filled with people and paraphernalia, reproduces itself ad nauseum. Literally the coffee is as heady and wonderful as it is nauseating. Their coffee, french pressed, not dripped, embodies the establishment that produces it. It gets you wired, it’s so good it makes you want to throw up, and you want more. Beneath its ethereal yet muddy perfection seethes a dire need for food and beverage that does not sock you in the brain or threaten to make your stomach bleed. The coffee, like the place, is a mania with limits and a nasty side. One can only be Noble or so long, and to be Noble one must be cruel.

However, within the cult nobility is nobility. Consider its namesake, the founder Jared Rennie's grandfather, Noble Dukes, pictured on Noble Coffee’s website standing in front of an airplane in 1937. He harkens from a bygone era when white men could earnestly find their adventurousness in the far corners of the world. It’s a spirit that can be witnessed in its last gasps in the pages of National Geographic and on television, taunting crocodiles and climbing Everest for the zillionth time. Rennie admired his grandfather’s virility but could not live it, exactly. So he started making coffee. He lived up to the dream of his grandfather by condensing every enchantment with an exotic world into a cup of coffee. It brims over with new discovery that can only be old. This old newness is fortified with political correctness. The coffee beans are fair trade (you will notice that this is an adjective, not a verb and that things are not fair traded), he visits their origin, he talks with the growers in Spanish, and he provides for them. They are taken care of so that you, discerning customer, may enjoy the very best coffee. To really drive this Noble-noble connection into the ground: Noble Coffee allows you, the customer, to be noble. Your dirty work is done.