THE ORIGINAL CAFFÉ MIDÍ 845 East Fern Avenue, Fresno, CA. 1964-1970

The local Intelligentsia scene

Held claim to the place.

The Existentialists too, readers of Camus, 

Or Sartre’s "authentic" way of being.

Counterculture followers,

Politicos and philosophers attempting

To advance their personal theories

Of the great proletarian revolution

On Fresno, California.

Bohemians,

Homegrown outlaws, and literary figures

Blown in like a dry wind in summer.

At the Caffé Midi,

Fresno’s answer to a Jewish coffeehouse,

Really a beatnik espresso joint

In a perpetual fog of cigarette smoke,

On the corner of Fern and Maroa,

In the Tower District.

With food from the broiler

Espresso and Viennese coffees,

The french burger made with secret sauce

(secretly, a stolen recipe).

A brick storefront establishment,

With a French name: Caffé Midí,

For midday coffee, opened at 11 AM.

Women dressed in black turtlenecks,

Pedal pushers, leather sandals

Or sleeveless sweatshirts,

Leotards, or gingham dresses.

A refuge for the iconoclastic,

Incendiary, and bombastically volatile,

Or gracefully volatile, and surreal.

The courageous, and audacious.

Protest driven, the uprooted,

And the voluntary outcasts.

In the dark corner, social fugitives,

Mavericks, vagabonds,

Mad scientists, near sighted academics,

Gypsies, theatre types, artists,

Deviants, the unshaven radicals of Fresno.

The outsiders, who drank titanic quantities

Of the world’s most consumed psychoactive drug:

Black coffee, no cream or sugar, congregated here.

Erotic excitement saturated the air.

A spiritual home in the time of Nixon,

A remote island of cordiality

In a shoreless sea of loneliness.

A corner storefront business of 20 tables,

80 black bent-wood café chairs,

Ash trays and folded paper napkins.

Sun Ra sounds on the stereo—

Turning up the conversations

At a table of two—four—-or six.

A meeting place of free spirits,

Young girls in cutoff jeans,

Clever, adventurous and open

To new experiences on a Friday night.

European and socialist newspapers

In a rack by the front door.

A unisex lavatory, with a chalkboard

To keep epithets off the walls.

The fuming espresso machine,

Chrome and brass, hissing

And spitting, turning milk to foam,

Poured, floating on the top

Of a china cup of steaming black fluid.

A long bench by the door

For awaiting an available table,

The west wall was the “art gallery,”

Where artists could hang their works.

Weekend evenings were colorful

And festive, every seat filled.

Meetings of affairs of the heart,

Others playing pinocle or cribbage,

Drinking coffee in cups and saucers,

Many nursing one cup for hours.

There was desire, romance, rendezvous,

Infidelities, sleeping around,

Foiled love and attempted suicides

(always with pills, but never enough).

All, over the din of jazz music:

Coltrane, or Monk on the turntable,

There were spirited conversations for all

The attractive young women to overhear.

Like that really hip and cool girl

With long, straight brown hair,

Thickly adorned false eyelashes,

Glued on her eyelids,

Purple lipstick and laughing.

She blows the mound of white foam

Across the dark liquid

To the edge of the cup to cool.

Holding it in her cupped hands

Like a sacrament, she sips gently

Drinking in her fortification.

By Stephen Barile

From: United States