Hailie Penn and the Café Loren
“It’s got something to do with not seeing everything inside us as worthless and embarassing.”
Thunderheads loomed like anvils suspended forebodingly over my hooded Self. Thick, wet snow flew right into my eyelashes, making me blink often. Sheets of slippery white powder blanketed the sidewalks, so you could say the footing was sort of treacherous. The familiar weight of my textbooks made me feel unstable, sort of like an airplane that’s too tail-heavy. One step at a time, I pressed my boots into selections of firmly packed snow on icy narrow sidewalks. The snow pressed back. Horns blared on every crosswalk I used, as various drivers lost control and panicked.
With said panic in the air, I nearly forgot that I hadn’t checked my Instagram feed in almost an hour. Don’t judge. I follow over a thousand people, so if I slack off, I could miss something.
That’s how I walked nose-first into a telephone pole. Strange, though: my throbbing nose didn’t feel like it hit anything made of the kind of painful splintery wood that telephone poles are typically made of. No, the surface of impact was rather smooth, if not cushioned.
ENTERTAIN US, the poster commanded: POET HAILIE PENN. TONIGHT, AT THE CAFÉ LOREN. The poster was tall and bold, so that it pulled my eye in its direction — the kind of advertisement that I couldn’t not read because the curiosity was overwhelming. Some people were illustrated, facing out of the poster towards me. They sat cross-legged on a floor in front of a stage. They wore each other’s arms around their shoulders. They wore scribbled little hearts on their little sleeves. They wore joyful little smiles. All of their heads turned towards a figure with his back to me, who was looking out over the audience, gesturing with one hand and brandishing some paper with the other. I read the rest of the print: BE INSPIRED AND MOVED BY PREMIER LOCAL POETS AND STORYTELLERS. CAFÉ LOREN.
“Why don’t you come?”
I turned. I looked. I hesitated. “Hi, Hailie.”
She sauntered the remaining distance between us, the wind lifting her red hair, which was like flame against the white backdrop, the uniform coldness of our world. These flames seemed barely contained by the matching red stocking hat which she wore against the escalating snowfall. Such outer features framed a face with a half-teardrop nose, defined eyebrows, and cheeks flushed against the cold.
After I said Hi, she was suddenly as serious as the grave. Enunciating each word, she threatened “You didn’t answer my question.” I was so confused that I just stared at her, and I’m sure my mouth was hanging open stupidly.
After an uncomfortable, shocked silence, I said that she had to be kidding and there was no way she was actually mad. I didn’t like how she was always teasing me like this, telling me to “chill out,” or whatever.
And yes, she was teasing after all. She released her scowl, which then widened into a grin that went all the way up to her eyes. “I swear you believed it for a second,” she laughed, flames bouncing off her shoulders. “But seriously, you should come to my poetry reading! I’m still going to convince you that our English class is fun.”
“If you keep up this enthusiasm,” I answered, “you just might convince me that English isn’t boring. That class, however — ”
She interrupted: “ — is boring, I know it. Look, they might seem to have us reading all the wrong stuff in school, but I swear that there’s good reading out there if you look for it.”
And I said “Yeah, but I’m lazy.”
“Funny,” she smirked. (Hailie smirks more often than she smiles, by the way. She does it with half of her mouth, just like the Mona Lisa.)
And as she challenged me with that smirk something changed. She targeted my eyes and locked them with her own. With pupils like ink blots or bullets she looked hard, like she was trying to peer straight through me. I don’t know what she saw, but she does this all the time, saying how “eyes don’t lie.”
She likes this band called the Believers, and she hangs a print of their album cover on the inside of her locker door. It’s a closeup of someone’s eye, and also right there is the album title, in huge print: Eyes Don’t Lie, and so every time she opens her locker door — which, by the way, is to the right of mine — that big eye on the album cover is staring at me. It makes me fidget.
For the first few seconds I was peering back. Her matching cerulean oceans offered something serious, genuinely sad, and vaguely disappointed. They reflected someone’s confusion, disillusionment, and crushing frustration.
And I was thinking, It’s a good thing all of this bad stuff isn’t real. I shivered. I looked away. I felt so much better.
“See you tonight, then?”
* * *
She asked me to. That’s why I braved the winter storm that night to walk the streets of downtown Manchester, aiming my feet at Café Loren. Based on the street lights being out, I thought it was pretty safe to assume that there was a power outage, but that doesn’t stop writers, right?
I walked right past its narrow stoop three times before noticing faded typeset on a weathered oaken board, swinging overhead. With a ye-olde-type font, the sign read simply, 13 Crusoe Street / THE CAFE LOREN. This decrepit, possibly just minimalist, signal of the Cafe’s existence hung above a similarly beaten door. Taped to this beaten door was a sheet of paper which said YES, WE REALLY ARE OPEN. I nearly removed the doorknob with the simple act of turning it and pushing in on the door.
I crossed the threshold. Inside it was a real wear-your-coat-indoors shithole, drafty and poorly lit. Those first few steps inside Café Loren generated a sensation in my feet, and a sound, which reminded me of the squeaky, warped, ancient hardwood floors of my great grandmother’s house. The subtle unevenness of the floor generated a subtle up-and-down, a pitching sensation, like walking in a moving boat. In other words the floor was old and creaky and really uneven.
I imagined that the drywall used to be white, but at the time it shared the hue of a brown paper napkin. And all over said drywall, graffiti. Some of it was truly artistic and other bits just crude or profane. The entire place gave off the impression of a building in construction, opened for business far too early. But it’s nakedness gave it a certain course charm, to me.
I explored the area near the counter, which was made of laminated plywood, obviously homemade like the coffee. Vivaldi’s Winter Concerto wafted tastefully from a quiet radio.
I immediately got the sense that this barista was an expert. Her name tag read “Hi, I’m Trenta.” (Actually.) Someone in front of me had this incredibly complex order, which totally could have come out of a humor piece in Teen Vogue: “Trenta, double shot, half-caff., pumpkin spice latte, with two shots and no foam at 195-degrees.” And Trenta obviously knew her shit because this beverage was delivered within minutes.
A worn grandfather clock told me I was quite early. Since I didn’t see Hailie inside yet, I kept looking around. It occurred to me that the variety of graffiti on the yellowed drywall indicated that there wasn’t any legislation in place regarding who can draw what where, and when they can do it, and why they should do this, and how they can do that.
The decorations, then, demonstrated a notable conviction in the visitors of this place that if we could only write the words that speak to us, speak them loudly, and write them really big in public places, other people will understand them too.
Even after having done this contemplative observing I felt out of place amongst the tattooed, bespectacled, skinny-jeans-wearing people seated at other tables. I mean, considering the storm they all walked through to listen to poetry, they had to be the members of the youth art community who were the most smart, interesting and enthused. In other words I wasn’t in their league and I had no business trying to meet them.
That thought was interrupted when I heard a breathy male voice say, “I’m pretty sure she stopped reading my breakup letter at page fourteen.” Suddenly, eavesdropping seemed like a much more promising activity. After all, this place was supposedly all about entertainment. So I dismissed the dubious morality of such behavior on the grounds that it was selfishly convenient. I seized the high table next to the speaker.
The voice belonged to a middle-aged guy with unruly brown hair, glasses, and shaggy stubble. He sported a blue bandanna over his forehead, and unlaced dress shoes on his feet. I saw the past in his eyes, though. These eyes were shadowed, weary, knowing, and sad, yet, bright and hopeful.
On the other side of the same table sat a spectacled woman who looked to be in her late twenties. She had a certain Contemporary Realist charm. Frizzy brown strands framed a lightly freckled face. Near her jawline on the left was this large birthmark that was oddly distracting and probably ruined her chances of achieving commercial symmetrical beauty.
But this man studied her like a cipher. He held her gaze as if she’d disappear if he blinked.
She listened to the man’s ramblings with a curiosity that seemed genuine and thoughtful. This baffled me, because he just seemed weird and inappropriately open to me. He continued, “I think life feels sort of lonely if you can’t interact with people in real ways through art. I know this is hackneyed by now and it doesn’t sound hip at all, but, um.”
When he paused, she smiled again, and when she did her dimples formed this flattering sort of diamond shape.
He continued, “There are so many different ways to stimulate ourselves today, and so, why do we feel so bored? It’s like instead of teaching us renewable ways to achieve true happiness, they all just want to sell us ways to feel okay, like alcohol, antidepressants, vacations, heroin, and television… especially television.”
The woman tilted her head in a thoughtful nod, and said “I see where you’re coming from. My Netflix account, for example. The instant the credits roll on a show, Before you can even think about getting up to do something else — ”
“Yes!” the man interrupted. “Before you can even think about getting up to do something else, it automatically counts down to the next episode.”
The woman picked up again. “And eventually the all night binge ends as fast as it begins. I am thrust cold-turkey back into my boring real life, I have to work in four hours, and spend a night of good sleep to accomplish nothing important. It is dreadful.” A minute passed in thoughtful silence. They did not shift in their seats or search the room awkwardly, but studied each other, shamelessly, blatantly, openly.
I wondered why. Why does anybody want to listen to a guy who is obviously a nerd and a dork? Who wants to share his innermost thoughts about why he’s probably going to throw out his television?
He was madman to me. Because as I filtered his actions through my own life and experience, I was embarrassed for him. That was because, from what I knew about myself, those smart, talented, artistic people… They were in every way Not Me, because they have a lot of shit to say and people sit to listen to it because it’s all really smart. Whereas I felt like everything inside me was worthless and embarrassing.
* * *
The houselights were still up and it was going to be a few more minutes before showtime. I laid my fingers on the simple black-painted plywood like a child touching an alligator. A thin audience of those literary people who couldn’t be stopped by a snowstorm were all beginning to gather in front, sitting at high tables. I observed that the one thing that the owner had invested a lot of money in at Cafe Loren was an electrical generator. No indeed, you can’t stop writers, I noted.
Now, if I was about to go onstage and I saw somebody in the audience that knew me, I know I would freak out. So after I’d satisfied my curiosity about the forbidding stage, I retreated to a table near the back.
I scrolled through Instagram and soon the house lights went down. Hailie took the stage.
* * *
She was really great, I thought, and it’s really cool, too, how she can talk like she’s speaking to you rather than just reading.
She did this original poem called, like, “Dobre” something, except near the end there were some lines that she forgot. And this is what happened. Instead of saying “line,” or something, and finishing the poem, she just froze, and turned as red as her hair. I was soooo embarrassed for her.
“It’s okay, do it freestyle!” somebody shouted. Then someone in the audience started making drum noises with their mouth, and (Later on somebody called it “beatboxing”, but) anyway this beatboxer just sounded like a whole bunch of spitting and fart-noises. I couldn’t believe that person would make such a fool of themselves in front of so many people. Being onstage is never worth the risk, never mind drawing attention to yourself when you’re just sitting in the audience.
By then Hailie’s face was flushed even more, and at this point I actually wanted to read her eyes, but I couldn’t because they were aimed at the floor of the stage.
Next, somebody said her name: “Come on, Hailie! You can do it!” And in a second everybody joined in: “Hailie, Hailie, Hailie!” Then someone started pounding the floor along with the beatboxer’s beat, chanting, “Hailie! Hailie! Hailie!” and suddenly everybody was out of their chairs, standing right in front of the stage, stomping and clapping and screaming her name.
I couldn’t stand, though. Just imagining the horror onstage I was suddenly blushing and sweating as much as Hailie seemed to be. And just then…
She was transfigured. She lifted her eyes from the floor, and stood up straighter. She held up a palm to the room. Excepting the beatboxer, Cafe Loren was silent.
Hailie widened her stance, cleared her throat, and rapped: “Yo, I’m in the Cafe Loren / with my best friend Ben — / ‘jamin, yeah, I’m jamming / jamming with Benjamin / who beatboxes so slick / yeah, and he knows this: / you gotta be embarrassed and take some risks / or you’ll never get to learn or try real shit.”
The room erupted in deafening shouts and applause. She didn’t do her Mona Lisa smirk this time. She grinned the type of grin that I knew she couldn’t pull down from her eyes, even if she tried to. She said Thank you, everyone! into the microphone, and stepped down from the stage. The small crowd gathered around her, embracing and congratulating her. I just had to join them.
I found myself accidentally uncomfortably second in line. In front of me was our shaggy cultural philosopher from earlier. Just then I was the one transfiguring, from an amazed person to a confused, vaguely despairing person. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like she was just really foolish to take the challenge, because it could have gone wrong in so many ways. If she messed up, you know, everybody in the room would have hated her.
Preoccupied, I watched their conversation develop just a few paces from me. The man appeared amicably, charmingly awkward, bouncing on his heels as he spoke and gesturing with both hands. Hailie was leaning on one hip with her arms crossed, nodding and smiling at whatever he was saying about her poem.
“David!” Hailie practically shouted in my face when she spotted me. “Thanks for being here,” she smiled, moving to hug me. I tensed up. I allowed her arms to sort of go around me and I sort of put an arm around her and then it was finally over.
“Great job with your poem,” I said. “It was cool.”
“It was ‘cool,’ huh?” the shaggy philosopher teased.
“Yeah, didn’t you think it was cool, too?” I responded.
“Yes, yes, of course. It was very cool. Hailie’s poems are always cool.”
Hailie jumped in: “David, meet Mr. Keating. He runs the place.”
My jaw dropped. He smiled apologetically. “Yes, I know, shocker. I’m really sorry about a few seconds ago. I didn’t mean to tease you just then. It’s just that your analysis of ‘Dobre Den’ was sort of shallow. I’m sorry.” That last sentence alone summed up his social habits. Always apologetic because he had this vague sense that he could be rather exhausting socially, which he was. Most exhausting was how he didn’t seem aware that he came off as patronizing, which made his apologies seem insincere or sarcastic.
In an odd turn of fate or something, the lights went out right then as he apologized. The shaggy philosopher turned and shouted with a sarcastic smile, “Generator failure!” Hailie, myself, and between five and ten others cheered with mock enthusiasm.
I couldn’t see anything at all. Then I heard something scrape on paper, and an orb of orange glow appeared under Mr. Keating’s face. He produced some candlesticks, lit them, and set them on the stage. “Now that we can see,” he said softly. “Everybody, come sit down here, and we’ll have some more performers.” There was lots of floor space to share among the small number of us. But some force, unknown or at least unspoken, knitted us together like fabric. It squeezed us together where we sat, cross-legged on a dusty floor, in a tight circle in the intimate darkness. This force was alien and unwelcome.
* * *
Fidgeting on the floor next to Hailie, at some point I whispered, “Luh, lets-go-outside.”
“Yeah, let’s,” she agreed.
I could feel the nervous tension inside me releasing all at once when we stepped outside. Since we had crossed the doorstep of the Café Loren just several hours ago, snow had buried the sidewalk. Icy powder rose taller than my boots, sneaking down inside my socks, shocking my senses. I felt awake. With a spirit like noon, I swung a leg backwards, and delivered a mighty kick. A drift flew into the air with a satisfying swish, and wafted back down soundlessly. I looked back at Hailie and wasn’t surprised to spot her brandishing a snowball — actually it looked to be made of pure ice, and would surely leave a mark. But she hid it behind her back for now, which revived a quiet anxiety in the back of my mind.
Peering up and down Crusoe Street, snow had done more than just cover the sidewalks. It had piled itself on rooftops and blown under porches. It had filled the backs of pickup trucks and buried small cars above their wheels. On the street level the white powder mixed with salt and chemicals, resulting in a sloppy slush which was the same color as the cumulonimbi from which it had fallen.
The only interruption to darkness was the glint of extinguished lampposts in the light from the moon, which was robed in clouds. The only interruption to stillness was the light snowfall, each flake landing upon my skin like a soft kiss. As Mr. Keating and his handful of employees closed up inside, the sounds of shouting, tables sliding across floors, and dishes being washed spoiled the silence.
It was one of those nights were it was late and cold, and maybe one of us had responsibilities in the morning, but neither of us moved to leave, because we couldn’t know whether the best moment of this night was just another moment away. So we waited. And while we were “there / just then / together / and nobody wanted it to end,” (That’s how Hailie would have rapped it.) neither of us said a word because we knew that would ruin it.
“Here they come,” Hailie finally whispered, and then I heard the door open behind us as Mr. Keating and the others came outside then. They added warmth to the frigid, inky night beyond the Cafe’s doorstep. The staff said their goodbyes and Mr. Keating thanked them for working on such a night, and they trudged away.
I expected Mr. Keating to say goodbye as well. But with a voice considerate of our silence, he mumbled a greeting instead: “Hello.”
We obliged, turning around and giving him our smiles.
The shaggy philosopher continued: “I just want to thank you both in particular for being here tonight despite the weather. It’s very meaningful to me, personally, to see that young people value art, and each other, so much that they’ll walk through a storm to hear their friends’ voices speak their own hearts.”
The snow began to fall faster.
“By hosting the Café Loren I hope to inspire the young people of this world to communicate. All the lasting happiness in life, as it turns out, is in: knowing one another, in order to love one another.” This submitted, he gave a little bow and disappeared into the swirling whiteness of small town wilderness.
I believe that somewhere deep inside our brutal lives, there is a beautiful truth that we’re missing. It’s got something to do with not seeing everything inside us as worthless and embarrassing.
After he went away I pulled up my hood and let myself fall backward into the powder. The impact sent a light puff into the air, which wafted down onto me gently. Hailie gave it a little leap, landing beside me with another puff.
Prominent within my newly vertical eyesight was the out-ness of our lamppost. The silence was absolute and the darkness nearly so. I lifted my eyes further. I watched the snow fall into us endlessly. A moment passed. Then a minute. I shivered. I fidgeted.
Once I’d watched the snowfall for long enough, I felt the sensation of zooming forward though the universe, every snowflake a mysterious distant galaxy. Contributing to my childish fantasy, the cloud cover was then such that all worlds were invisible besides our own Earth, which Hailie and I were riding through the stars.
With her whisper Hailie shattered the silence. “So why was my poem so cool?”
“You know, I liked it.” That’s what I said. I really wanted to ask her more about a few cryptic lines from the beginning. But just as all those weird thoughts about riding through the universe stayed in my head, I didn’t know how to say what I felt about “Dobre Den”.
“Yeah, but you have to say why.”
“Why?”
She chuckled at the unintended pun and laid a hand on my shoulder softly. “Jesus, David, you’re tense.”
“Of course I’m tense. You’re getting ready to pelt me with that wicked ball of ice.”
Hailie raised her hands. Hailie dropped her weapon. “No. That’s not why,” she challenged with her soft smile, dusting her hands off. “You’re terrified to let your guard down.”
If I was tense already, this doubled now. “What’s my guard?”
“It’s when you only speak in facts because emotion makes you uncomfortable. My therapist says it’s unbearable for people in the long term. It’s like being an island to everyone else, because no one understands how you feel. I’ll start. “Dobre Den” is written for my friend who killed himself last October.”
“Wow, okay. Yeah. I uh… I sensed that there some heavy topic involved.”
“It’s true,” she said. “I was at this party when I got a twelve-character text message from a mutual friend. It just ripped my whole damn world apart. I’m still afraid to really think about it too hard because I can just start crying out of nowhere if I do think too hard about the people, the remorse, the pain that I’m afraid to talk about.”
Hailie sniffled. “I do it every single day of my life just to function.”
Then she scooped a handful of snow and tossed it. Icy powder wafted down over us, the tiny flakes spinning in little tornados as they fell, stark and crystalline against the inky darkness of the night sky, no one like any other, each uniquely and endlessly fascinating. As it fell upon us, the snow that Hailie threw melted against the heart-fueled warmth of our skin. I used this to disarm all coldness.
I stopped shivering. I stopped fidgeting. I put my hood down. And then I started noticing how I was existing, just riding along through the universe with Hailie, and that was joyful. I sat up. Despite the thickening snowflakes I put my hood down, because I had to.
My next few words were whispered, because something was moving in me which had not yet moved: “But what if you never talk about it?”
Hailie sat up, too. Her red hat was covered in little flakes of coldness. She removed it and I watched with wonder as she shook it and it all fell away.
“Can I wear your hat? I asked stupidly.
She laughed and said Yes, of course haha. So I was wearing Hailie’s flaming red hat against the storm just then, and she answered my question. “I don’t know yet what will happen if I never talk about it. It’s only been a few months. It’s kind of stuff we have to talk about, I know that, but it just hurts so bad, so I think that’s why I’m so hesitant and guarded about it.”
“At least you know you have a guard.” Just then something was welling in my eyes, and welling in my mind was a fact. It was a sad and simple fact, and a cathartic fact: there had been nobody in the world that I’d have felt compelled to write a Dobre Den to, if they just up and died. But seated in the snow on a sidewalk in a snowstorm with Hailie, I felt that feeling for the first time. It was joyful.
But it was dreadful, because feeling this way for the first time… I couldn’t help it. I grieved for the moments I must have missed out on, in wasted years past.
Next, I spoke to nothing but the air, and to Hailie, but for the first time I wished the whole world was listening. When I said the words, I knew they were real because I watched the breathe that carried them: “What you said, Hailie, about being an island to everybody else? You can maroon yourself on that island, if you don’t let anybody see you.”