Tales From The Loon Town Cafe Read online

  Tales

  From

  The

  Loon

  Town

  Cafe

  A Novel

  Dennis Frahmann

  Tales from the Loon Town Cafe is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Dennis Frahmann:

  The Finnish Girl (available Fall, 2014)

  Version 3

  Copyright © 2013 Dennis Frahmann

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1482555077

  ISBN-13:9781482555073

  To Robert

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  Spring Into Summer

  5

  Fall Into Winter

  107

  Spring Forward Again

  315

  PROLOGUE

  Years later, I was jolted into reflecting on that curious time in my life, a fateful year in the ‘80s when I owned a cafe, when I mingled with scoundrels and saints, when I learned that even the smallest of towns has its secrets, its plots and its dreams.

  It took an earthquake, the Northridge quake of 1994, to jostle free those memories. The shaking woke me from a dream and the digital clock read: 4:31 am. A huge boom echoed throughout the house. Everything was in motion. Each nail in the old wooden frame building screeched as it was pushed and pulled by the rolling of the earth.

  I jumped to the floor, just as our big color television flew from the falling bookcase to land on the bedspread. Outside our bedroom windows, the Los Angeles basin spread before my little house perched in the Silver Lake hills. And the lightness of the city fell out. The glittering bowl of streetlights and neon signs rolled into darkness, with only the emergency lights from the Kaiser Permanente Hospital now glowing as a beacon.

  “Move away from the windows,” Stephen shouted to me. “It’s an earthquake.” And he pulled me to the side, as another shelf of books collapsed on top of me. And I fell into unconsciousness.

  I came to, slowly, groggily, with the worried face of Stephen bending over me. “Are you alright?” he asked. “I think this might have been the big one. Everything is a mess.” There was a yeasty, herbaceous smell of cabernet floating through the air. Stephen noticed my wrinkled nose. “The wine rack collapsed,” he said in explanation.

  I just wanted to escape outside before there was another tremor. We stood in the darkness of the cold January morning, as our neighbors began to emerge with flashlights, walking the perimeters of their houses, checking the exteriors for damage. Above us, the electric transformers still popped and crackled with a weird glow.

  Another aftershock hit, and the light poles swayed in front of me. I began to walk the neighborhood to calm myself and see what damage might exist. Up ahead a cheap apartment building from the ’50s listed dangerously above its carports. Walking toward me was the neighborhood hermit and packrat. He never spoke to me. As was our custom when we passed, he nodded solemnly. But today I wanted to reach out to this old man who always seemed so alone.

  “How are you doing?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes indeed, young man. Thank you for asking.”

  I reached Sunset Boulevard, a tawdry, tired section near downtown Los Angeles, totally unlike the tony reaches that curved through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. In an alcove of a thrift store huddled a neighborhood bag lady I saw every week. She wasn’t hard to miss, since she always wore antennae made of aluminum wrap.

  “Are they invading?” she shouted out to me in a surprisingly strong and clear voice. “Have they come at last?”

  “It was just an earthquake,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She only rocked back and forth in the narrow entryway. The shopping cart filled with her life sat next to her.

  “Come with me,” I said. “You need something to eat.” She seemed surprised and wary. “I won’t hurt you. Please come. We just had an earthquake.”

  She stood, wrapped her tattered blanket around her shoulders, and together we began to walk back up the hill toward our little house. Because she would not leave it behind, together we pushed her overflowing shopping cart over the cracked sidewalks.

  As we made our way, I waved and shouted greetings to all those who were in their front yards, all unwilling to go back inside while the earth still shook. We came up to the hermit, who had continued making his own slow inspection of the neighborhood.

  “Where you heading young man?” he asked.

  “I’m going to get this woman some breakfast,” I replied.

  “Mind if I walk with you?” and he did.

  The old woman tugged at my sleeve. “I was wondering if you would have any wild strawberry jam. Just hoping.”

  In our front yard, amidst the birds of paradise in full bloom and the beds of calla lilies not yet in flower, I saw Stephen standing over our gas-fired grill, a turner in his hand. I could smell the cured smoke of bacon and the crispy odor of frying eggs. The aroma of coffee, made cowboy style in a pot on the grill, intermingled with it all. In the yard with Stephen were our neighbors Josh and Daniel. A young woman from across the street had also joined them, as had the fat and ponderous Neighborhood Watch captain, who was always prone to stick his nose into every bit of business.

  “I have two more for breakfast,” I shouted out, feeling so overjoyed to see Stephen there in the new daylight, surrounded by friends and neighbors, undamaged by the quake.

  “No problem,” he replied. “There’s plenty.”

  And in the cold morning air, we sat together over coffee, with eggs and bacon, united as much by the joy of being alive as the fear of going inside. I looked around the small group and it suddenly seemed so familiar. “I was dreaming when the quake hit,” I said. “It was about my hometown in Wisconsin, a wondrous place where everybody cared, and everybody knew everything, about everyone, all the time. And it was like all of you were there.”

  Stephen laughed, “I know you got knocked out, but I didn’t know you’d wake up thinking you were in a Judy Garland movie.”

  “The dream was just so real,” I started to say, and then I stopped. I looked at everyone around me, their faces turned to me expectantly, even the wearied faces of the bag lady and the hermit. There was something in each of their eyes and smiles, a sense of life worth living that I had never seemed to notice before. I felt suddenly giddy with a newfound joy. I reached for the coffee pot.

  In the lifegiving breeze of the morning wind, I extended my hand. “More coffee anyone? This loon town cafe is open for business.” And for a moment, it was as though my original Loon Town Cafe was back in business, but without its scoundrels. For a moment, I was reliving a year and a dream that truly mattered.

  SPRING INTO SUMMER

  chapter one

  “Welcome to the Loon Town Cafe.”

  “Get me a beer,” snapped back the old woman, all decked out in a big black-and-white bird costume.

  What better way to start a chapter of my new life story than to serve an ice-cold Leinie’s to the town loon? I dug out a bottle of the local brew from the cooler. “So what’s with the garb, Claire?”

  The woman dolled up in a north woods loon outfit was accompanied by Bromley Bastique, the rotund, full-of-himself, self-proclaimed mayor of Thread, Wisconsin. As usual, he was quick to dismiss any question of mine as nonsense. “Wally, you should know the answer to that god darn question. Claire’s the town mascot for the Loon Fest. Always has been. Always will.”

  Bromley had quite the knack to exasperate me by lecturing on things I already knew. “Of course. It’s Lo
on Fest. I was just wondering why Claire is already in costume.” Did the town mayor really want his town mascot wandering the streets lugging an opened beer bottle? “Loon Fest is why I’ve been working like a dog to get this place ready for its grand opening. Everyone tells me it’s the best weekend for tourists. Miss this weekend and you miss the summer. That’s what you tell me.” And yet here I was, sitting in my otherwise empty cafe with the mayor and a woman dressed as a giant loon who had wandered in before I had a chance to turn the sign on the door from “closed” to “open.”

  “Quit your bellyaching,” said Claire. “It’s not like you get snapped at every morning before the sun comes up by those spindly little men.” Bromley took advantage of my confusion with Claire’s statement to go behind the bar and open his own bottle of Leinenkugel’s.

  “Hey, where’s my beer?” asked Claire. I slid the opened bottle down the bar. She picked it up, took a swig, then stopped and looked around. “You know, I like this place. I remember when Al Capone stopped here, back in ‘33, or was it ‘34. Over fifty years ago, but I can still remember the meanness on that man’s face. You remember, Bromley?”

  “You weren’t even a teenager then. Why would you remember?” Bromley asked with a dismissing tone. “Just a little kid, and Capone was here for ten minutes. It’s not like your supposed spacemen who stop by every morning to chew the fat.”

  “They have never chewed my fat, just collected it. And there’s nothing supposed about them.” Claire, peering through her thick glasses, turned her attention back to me. “Wally, I’ve been thinking ever since I heard that you were coming back, and I just can’t figure it out. I remember when you were just a kid. Kinda pudgy and short, as I recall. Never liked Thread either, if I remember right. Seems to me you wrote some kind of article in that school paper about how every single kid should leave this town and run off.”

  “And where would one run off to?” A newcomer had just walked through my restaurant door. Did no one pay attention to the “closed” sign? The town eccentric Mr. Packer was tall, over six feet, missing an arm, nearing eighty at least, and with a yellowish-white beard that reached to his waist. He wore a heavy knitted red stocking cap, even though the heat of this late June morning was already well into the eighties. “Is there possibly more to the universe than Thread?”

  “If anyone knew, it would be you, Mr. Packer. How are your collections?” I asked.

  “Passable. Passable. What fool thing have you gotten yourself into, Claire? You look like a giant loon.”

  “My God, Mr. Packer, that’s what she is. She’s our Claire de Loon. You know she walks in the Loon Fest parade every year.” Bromley stomped around the bar, his rather ample stomach preceding him as he turned the polished mahogany corner, and pulled out a second Leinie’s. Our Mayor was a quick drinker. I was just hoping he was planning to pay for them. He wasn’t only the town mayor, he had also been my realtor for this place, and maybe he thought his commission included a lifetime pass to my bar.

  “Is it the Loon Fest again? I had hoped to have gotten out of this danged town this year before it came up. All those summer people showing up. Bunch of fools.”

  “Well, Mr. Packer, it takes one to know one. What we would be without our fools? Take our young Wally Pearson here. Abandoning the bright lights of Manhattan to come back to our little Thread. Opening up a fine cafe . . . ”

  “Say, Wally, did you know that Al Capone once drank a beer here?” interrupted Mr. Packer.

  “Of course, he knows that,” said Claire. “We were just talking about it. I remember how mean he was. My first gangster.”

  “I bet he was,” muttered Bromley.

  “Such a nasty looking man. They were on their way to Timberton. He had some actress with him. Beautiful woman.”

  “Frances Farmer,” said Mr. Packer.

  “She was going to be in that movie they made about Timberton. What was it called again?”

  “Come and Get It,” said Mr. Packer.

  “Get what?” asked Bromley.

  “The movie. That was the name of the movie,” he replied.

  “I remember Frances Farmer. She was quite the looker,” Bromley said. “Do you remember her in King Kong? What a movie.”

  “You got it wrong. That was Jessica Lange in King Kong.” For some reason, I felt compelled to interject and correct Bromley.

  “Bromley’s right. It was Jessica Lange before she went crazy and had all that electroshock therapy. Just like they did to me,” said Claire. “I remember her in that movie. They made a movie of her life, too, you know. And someday they’re going to do the same for me. Jessica and I are so much alike. Beautiful women. Misunderstood.” She glared at Bromley.

  “You’re confusing Frances Farmer, an actress from the ‘30s, with Jessica Lange who played her in a movie,” said Mr. Packer, providing a perfectly reasonable fact that was completely ignored by both Claire and Bromley.

  I polished the bar counter as this conversation flowed, and questioned my sanity in coming back to Thread. I had known Bromley, Claire and Mr. Packer when growing up. Bromley had acted as mayor for years. Claire Moon, once the beloved town tramp, now just beloved, had slept with so many men for so few dollars that many wondered if she had lost a little bit of her mind each time she claimed to have lost her virginity. But that was so many years ago. And Mr. Packer had his own story, although who knew what that story was. Even the Mayor didn’t seem to know Mr. Packer’s first name, and Bromley never referred to anyone without using their first name.

  My little cafe was filled with warmth and I liked it. The late June sun streamed in through large plate glass windows facing onto the Square. White painted letters, Loon Town Cafe, cast short morning shadows across my square tables with their varnished birch tops. I had kept much of what had been the Thread Tavern. The great Art Deco mahogany bar was still in place. It looked a bit rough when I arrived, having been kicked by many a lumberjack over the years, but now stripped, restained and properly polyurethaned, it was ready for the eighties. The old vertical board wainscoting along the walls had also been stripped. Much to the horror of the local workman, I bleached the boards until they were nearly white. Manhattan had been dark enough. Coming home was meant to lighten my mood.

  “So what you going to serve here?” asked Claire. “Fish fries and beer. You gotta do that or nobody’s going to come. But what else?”

  I handed her a copy of my menu. “Take a look and try something. I’m not officially open yet, but my new cook’s already in back.”

  “Maybe later. I’m too excited. You don’t know what I have to go through to get this costume. Everyone knows that it’s always my job to be the town loon for the parade, but that school principal won’t let me borrow the team mascot costume. Like that mascot does the basketball team much good.”

  “Lost forty-five games in a row,” said Bromley.

  “But the game against Grosselier in February was lost on a technicality,” said Mr. Packer. “Only four players showed up for the Thread team.”

  “Anyway, you see,” continued Claire, “each year, I get this idea in my head that it would be great fun to walk in the parade as Claire de Loon. You know, my last name Moon really is Lune in French and that’s just the same as loon.”

  “A homophone,” said Mr. Packer.

  “Now don’t go calling Claire names,” titched Bromley.

  I went back to looking at my menu for the Loon Fest grand opening lunch. I needed to get my head around officially opening, and this disjointed conversation with three of the town’s oddballs wasn’t helping. “I think Miss Moon was talking about her plan,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly,” she said with a sharp look at Bromley and at Mr. Packer. “As I was saying, it seems a shame not to have a town mascot in our Loon Fest parade. And no one seems to care. But I do. I have to be Claire de Loon. It’s a cosmic thing.”

  “Like your visitors,” muttered Bromley.

  “And so, just like I’ve done for the past fiv
e years, I break into the Thread gymnasium, and go rummaging through that’s coach’s storage room. He saves everything.”

  “Coach Shapely is anal-retentive,” said Mr. Packer.

  “Listen to that man,” Bromley said in a near shout. “He can’t talk about anyone without calling them a dirty name.”

  “You’re the mayor,” I joked. “Banish him.”

  “So I rummage through this stuff. Basketball uniforms from forty, fifty years ago. Who’s going to use them again? He has all this stuff, all disorganized, all the better to hide the costume for Nanoonkoo so I won’t find it.”

  “Nanoonkoo?” I asked.

  “The mascot for the Screaming Loons. Don’t you remember your childhood, boy?” replied Mr. Packer.

  “And don’t loons call, not scream.” Bromley cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a deep, unearthly shriek that rose from low tones to high only to drop back down into muffled tones.

  “That’s not how a loon sounds. After all, I should know. I’m the town loon. Listen to me.” And with that Claire cupped her hands and began a more melodious and lonely sound. Bromley just continued even louder. Mr. Packer sighed as though he heard this once before and he too put his hands up to his mouth and emitted a sound so plaintive and echoing, wild and laughing, that both Claire and Bromley stopped their cries and just looked at him.

  “Knock, knock” a teenaged girl poked her head just part way through the door. I really needed to go turn the sign over to read “open” and make things official.

  Bromley turned toward me and whispered as though telling me a secret I didn’t already know. “Cynthia Trueheart. Red’s her father. A stingy son-of-a bitch, that Red. Don’t tell him I said so. He always gives me a lot of support at election time. But why shouldn’t he? He owns half the god darn town.”