Coffee House

I suppose these cafe guys liked an idenity completely removed from who they really were trapped one might say in home and work life. They could be someone else at the cafe and say things they couldn't at home. The coffee house was like a prostitute.

One day a kid a teenager came in with a knife dangling from his left hand and stood in line at the counter the whole time dangled there. It was a woman said to me and the men agreed, we should call the cops. I said no I know that guy. He threw a rock threw my front window and I chased him down. My son had a visitor and they were making faces and calling this kid names so that was how these sorts of problems in the alley where he lived Lundy's Lane were solved. It was a narrow side-slide pane and not the big picture next. So that was fortunate.

I met Ray at the cafe. He and his partner Dave owned apartment buildings with some other partners. With rent control when they bought a building, the rents were pegged to the purchase price of the previous sale. So when tenants voluntarily moved Ray and Dave would renovate and adjust the rent up to pay for the then higher mortgage payments. I became their plaster painter guy for about seven years. So my work-hall plan worked fairly well.

Ray was middle class and educated on the short and rotund side, light colored hair balding, broad face and glasses. He was the financial side - book and records, paper work, taxes and such of the partnership while Dave was the carpenter. Ray brought the materials to the job while Dave executed the work. New kitchen, more closet space, improved bathroom is mostly what they did. I was the plaster paint guy.

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