TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE 12) TD'S GROWS UP

A Throwback Thursday Serial About Living in London in the 1970s

Come late August (1976), a lot of things were in the air. 

I felt enthused, optimistic; my soul stirred with electricity. 

There'd be no school for me this autumn, but I felt its excitement anyway, vicariously, through new friends of friends, gearing up for the American School in London (ASL), a younger crowd, jailbait like Wendy W, cute as pie, I wanted to eat her up. 

Mike would be going back to the City Poly for a second year, and Clive, too, had cut school plans, part time at least, realizing he'd have to move on from Tricky Dick’s. 

Clive still came in, helped me manage, but he had long since given up the fight, and in any case we had grown to like one another. 

My parents had been shopping over a year for larger premises.  They were already producing more cakes and pies than they ever dreamed possible from a shop.  

An old factory north of King's Cross, down a deadend industrial road called Vale Royal, seemed a good deal, if a gamble.  It was a terrible mess, but it was large and inexpensive compared to other sites.  The cost of the move busted the budget, and my father went into it with an all or nothing attitude.  

Such a move would be traumatic for Tricky Dick's. 

For a start, its size would double, and who knew how that might affect its intimacy?  

On top of that, we needed new tables and chairs.  We needed a lot of things, like proper heating, but we only had room in the budget for basics, and heat was a luxury. 

Mike knew of a school that was selling an allotment of desks and chairs for cheap, and we took a whole basement full. 

After that, we were in the red again. 

It never occured to us to borrow money from a bank, and a good thing since there wasn't a bank around that would have loaned us ten bucks.  One visit, face-to- face with Bronco, would have sent any loan officer scurrying.

We were on our own.  Not even a cake shop next door anymore, so we couldn't help ourselves to cakes and pies. 

No more utility or rent or property tax subsidies.  We had the whole place, but we had to make it pay.

My parents moved to King's Cross in one day, September 16, 1976, and we did the same at Tricky Dick's.  We simply threw back the partitions, rebuilt the counter, painted the new areas—and we were open for business the same night. 

We had about 20 people helping out, mostly ASL kids volunteering their time, and we pasted the place together.  Clive directed the operation and did a swell job.  It wasn't perfect by seven o’clock, but there wasn't a perfectionist among us, and it was good enough to switch on the lights and flip the open sign.

Little Frankie was the first regular to arrive, and his reaction summed up everyone else’s response that night.  He walked in, did a dramatic double-take, his eyes jumping from their sockets, turned around, walked out to pinch himself, then walked in again. 

Our place looked almost exactly the same, but more than twice the depth.  It was freaky, even for us, and we'd been there all day.

It was a kind of a rebirth, or a maturing.  We'd begun as a baby coffee shop and had grown into a restaurant—and never with a plan or timeframe; all spontaneous evolution.  

I reveled in a London autumn for the first time in three years.  Mike had school, but he handled the figures and accounting. We still didn't have a cash register, we never would, just a simple cashbox and lots of Bic pens for adding figures. Clive stuck around to help with sheer presence. 

Bruce S, tired of roustabout work despite the big bucks, became the chef de cuisine at a meager pittance, beer money.  We young adult Americans all lived at home with our parents, all so cozy.  And none of us even talked about getting our own places.  That was for the real world.  Tricky Dick's was not of the real world, nor we, by extension.

Waitresses came and went in quick succession, and I forever interviewed, keeping a roster of names and phone numbers, calling them 15 minutes before opening, pleading with them to come in for a few hours, throwing in a "bonus," if necessary. 

We had a staff roster, a chart I prepared at the beginning of each week, but when you don't have cash to throw around, people don't work like clockwork.  The best we could do was minimum wage and a burger, and an offer to get high after closing (that was the "bonus").  Jolie was a staple, Colleen D, another, but there were so many, it's hard now to remember who and when.

Around this time, a magazine named Verdict phoned me.  They were owned by Penthouse, which had passed them my draft on Bilderberg.  They wanted to publish my story and pay me a hundred pounds (about $160).  I raised them 50 percent and we had a deal.

The staff at Verdict reshaped the piece and dropped my name from the byline, mentioning me in passing as a reporter who had researched Bilderberg. 

I protested.

The assistant editor, Derek Prigent, had promised to include a "box" that would credit me for the story. 

I was still young, naive, unaccustomed to the ways of British magazine editors.  It was a total con.  No box, no credit.  Nothing. 

But like a drunk who gets kicked in the head by a bottle of whiskey then gets up for another drink, the experience made me hungry for another fix of ink.