TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 2) WINGIN' IT

A Throwback Thursday Serial About Living in London in the '70s

That ‘70s Show (the real thing)

During my senior year (‘72-73) at The American School in London (ASL) it was my responsibility to deliver cheesecakes on Sundays. I'd load the van with cakes—which by this time included a chocolate fudge cake—and  weave my way through London (occasionally hungover from too much Double Diamond the night before), lightening my load at Torino, the Continental, Brookes, Richoux, The Village Inn, Hard Rock and the Playboy Club.  

Also: the Great American Success and American Haven, owned by Iranians and Indians, respectively.  Every ethnic group in the city was cashing in on London's trend to Eat American.

I had decided to take a year off. ASL's headmaster, Jack H, a tall, thin, quiet man partial to dressing in black leather on Saturday nights said it wasn't such a bad thing to take a year off, so long as the time was put to constructive use.  

Unfortunately, I had nothing constructive in mind. 

I had wanted to attend the American University in Beirut to be near my high school sweetheart, who’d moved to the Lebanese capital prior to my senior year at ASL. But the notion of living in Beirut fizzled when, visiting my girlfriend, I got caught in the start of what was to become a 16 year civil war in Lebanon.  The natives were shooting-to-kill before my eyes.  That was Easter, 1973, my second trip to Beirut—and my last.  The romance fizzled too: time and distance to blame.

The summer of '73 after high school graduation was a binge, mostly at Bruce S's townhouse—Party Central—where the parties started early and ended late, if at all. Tim Buckley’s Greetings from LA reverberated through three floors at all hours; Bruce's parents, an ocean away.  

My only responsibility was sitting in for Ivo the Driver on mornings he didn't appear at the bakehouse. An aspiring rock musician with reddish afro-style hair, goatee and shy demeanor, Ivo smoked a lot of hashish and played clubs most nights. Consequently, his morning no-shows were legend at the bakehouse. It was never better than 50-50 he would turn up by 8 a.m. on weekends to load the van. 

That's when I'd get the call.  

And so I'd say a little prayer before I hit the sack each night:  May God look after Ivo tonight and get him home at a reasonable hour.

We eventually discovered tequila at Party Central and, what began as a promising liaison with Tina M ended with me dry-heaving most of the night. I guess I awoke about 5 a.m. feeling like I'd run a marathon into a brick wall, my head imploding at the first glimpse of summer sunlight. 

Of course, I'd forgotten to say my Ivo prayer and at 8 o'clock—it was my job to phone the bakehouse if I wasn't home—I crawled out of bed, staggered to a phone and dialed. 

"Nope," said my Dad.  "Ivo's not here.  Better come down."

ARRGGHHHHHHH!!!

I pleaded, I moaned, my voice thick with bile—couldn’t somebody call Ivo?  (He had no phone.)  Couldn't someone drive to his place, splash cold water over his head, beat the shit out of him?  (No one knew where he lived.)

My Dad was unsympathetic. He probably knew I was hung over and his attitude was this:  fine, drink and get sick, but get your ass over here and deliver my cakes.

I was dizzy, half-blind.  I couldn't stand up straight.  But I dragged myself out into the morning and pointed the Austin minivan north, up through St. John's Wood to Finchley Road and the bakeshop.

My father took one look at me—I could hardly stand up straight, my complexion was pea-green, I was drained of all energy, had puked my insides out, was probably still intoxicated and had slept only about two hours—he took one look at me and said, "Better get loaded."

"Huh?"

"Load up the van.  You're running late."

I couldn't load.  I couldn't walk. 

I called my brother; he didn't yet have a driver's license yet but if I did the driving, I mumbled, he could carry the cakes. 

And that's how we spent the next six hours, with me slouched over the wheel trying to focus on the road and Michael carrying cakes in and out of three-dozen restaurants, tripping and kabbashing a dozen cakes at the Hard Rock.  

The only thing that kept me going that day was the grace of a car called the Jensen.

Every time I passed a Jensen, I got a notch better.  And I swore to Mike that one day when I had some money I'd buy a Jensen. 

And I think that was the year, or soon after, Jensen went belly-up.

At summer's end, I took a trip back to the past in search of a future: A cheap charter flight to LA, following the footsteps of my ASL pals who’d all returned from whence they came. 

The night before my departure, smoking weed with Michael, listening to Carole King's Fantasy LP, left me in doubt about this new direction, though after a joint or two it felt like an old direction.  And after a third joint, directions no longer mattered. 

There's an old adage, "If in doubt, don't."

But I did.  And LA seemed alien after four years abroad: big cars, wide streets, canned vibes and, compared to London, an homogenized culture lacking character.

Everything seemed so... so regulated. It seemed incongruous me that jaywalking was illegal; more so that everyone complied.  

If you think culture shock is just some over-used cliche, try living abroad sometime and see for yourself.

My older brother Jim and his wife picked me up at LAX and drove me to a coffee shop called The Copper Penny for a late night snack before rolling onto their home in Hermosa Beach. Jim and I took a midnight stroll along the beachfront, trying to get to know each other again.  He hadn't been part of the London equation; was attending college and stayed behind, got married, got a job...

We walked, we talked—and I got startled by a beggar with long matted hair and beard who snarled at me, "Got any change?" 

I jumped, moved on, the beggar said something snide and Jim answered him back.  

The experience left me spooked.  America seemed dangerous, threatening and I knew at that moment I would use the return portion of my ticket. 

My future wasn't in my past and it struck me that LA was no longer home; would never be home again.

Three weeks in LA left but a haze of fleeting memories... driving around my old neighborhood in Beverly Hills... buying second hand cowboy shirts… visiting my old elementary school... purging myself of whatever pull LA still had on my psyche.

Back in London, my dad landed me a job at The Widow Applebaum, a New York-style delicatessen on South Molten Street that had introduced hot pastrami on rye to London. 

I bussed tables, brewed coffee and took out the garbage.  It became a hangout for me as well as a workplace, until Michael Franks, one of two managers, decided off-duty staff would not be tolerated on the premises. 

So what had become a second-home suddenly became just a job even though I got promoted from busboy to counterman, slicing meat and zapping pastrami in the microwave behind the deli counter.  Then during rush hour I sliced a piece of my thumb clean off and I took a few days AWOL. 

On my return, they sacked me. I didn't really want the damn job but the humiliation was overwhelming. Life in the real world.  I paced the roads around Goodge Street brainstorming a plan.  Ron from Philadelphia, who worked behind the deli counter, had a one-way ticket to New York he wasn't planning to use, I could buy it cheap.

I didn't.  I bummed around London for a couple of months, hitting a pub called The Blenheim Arms with Dickie, visiting ASL, honing in on coeds and pulling stunts. Like once when Dickie streaked naked (all the rage back then) through the school and I drove the getaway car.  I almost left without him when a police car stopped behind me while I waited.  I kept my nerve, the police car pulled off and Dickie, hooded but otherwise unclothed, appeared in my rearview mirror seconds later.

Bruce and his brother Mark would appear periodically from roustabout work on oil rigs in the North Sea and when they'd arrive a river of booze would flow to make up for lost time (the rigs were dry), their pockets bulging with the big bucks they’d earned and everything would be on them for a week or two.

It was leading me nowhere.  I earned beer money from driving cake routes three or four times a week.  By this time, the cake business had expanded throughout London and we had three routes:  Knightsbridge, Piccadilly and Kingston.  I knew them all and would train new drivers or fill the void when they were sick.

My parents, meanwhile, needed more space for baking, finishing, packing and storage. 

My father struck a deal with Abe to take over One Dollar Bill, his run-down restaurant, intending to remove the wall between shops and create one large bakehouse. He got a verbal go-ahead from the landlord before paying eight grand for the keys.  The rent was twelve dollars a month, a pittance, and the lease had five years to run. 

Abe left everything behind: beat up tables and chairs, a battered old microwave (perhaps one of the first ever made), a decrepit oven, rusted utensils, crusted pots and pans—and two Israelis, who slept on the mezzanine.  

When it came time to putting the arrangement into writing, the landlord reneged, demanding that the rent be increased 20-fold as a condition for merging both shops. 

My father was outraged; he'd never give in, on principle alone.  He'd just use the new space as a separate unit.  It wasn't ideal, but, hey, space was space.

I had applied that autumn to Boston University and, oddly, to Cape Cod Community College as a fallback.  

All my young life I'd wanted to live in Massachusetts, for no other reason than it sounded right.  

Meantime, with the arrival of a new year (1974) my parents decided I should have a real job and I got drawn into the cake business by participating in lively morning banter about things that were going wrong, employees who were stealing and other petty injustices. 

This chatter would stir me into a fit of motivation, whether so designed or not.  Before I knew which end was up, I was the new Distribution Manager with a desk at the front of the shop and a list of duties that required arising at six o’clock each morning to portion and box cakes for their routes.  Later in the day I would tally the "dailies" (cash, checks, credit charges) and analyze orders for the following day to call production. 

Meanwhile, pitched legal battles were underway between my dad and the landlord who, thwarted in his call for a rent increase, began to demand that One Dollar Bill be run as a restaurant as the lease stipulated and not as an annex to a bakehouse.

Options were limited.  My parents could simply not afford a 20-fold rent increase, not after paying Abe key money and investing, yet again, in new cake rings and mixers and ovens.  They ran the business on daily cash flow.

I offered a solution, partly in jest.  "Let's open a tearoom." 

My parents must have been desperate because they didn't pooh-pooh this idea. 

"Sure," I continued, surprised not to have been shot down in flames.  "We can sell our cakes and serve coffee and tea in the front part of the place.  We can use the back half for finishing cakes."

The restaurant would be a “front” for a bakehouse and ostensibly conform to the requirements set down by the lease.  

After all, we already possessed tables and chairs, an old microwave and assorted kitchen appliances.

"Who will run it?"  I can't recall which parent asked this.

"Me," I answered.

They looked amused.

"What would you call it?" one of them asked.

I thought for a moment.  Something American... something offbeat... something amusing... something topical... Richard Nixon was still grasping onto the presidency and fending off talk of resignation, impeachment...  Hmm…

"Tricky Dick's."  

And (I kept this thought to myself): It would not be a docile afternoon tearoom.  No, Tricky Dick's would be a Greenwich Village-style late-night coffee house. 

I'd never been to Greenwich Village and I knew nothing about late-night coffee houses.

But what the hell.  I'd wing it, as usual.  Make it all up as I went along.