Tucker Burton was pulling shots for me to upbeat pop and retro eighties.
There was no way Gardner Evans would be playing rap, either. Gardner was a serious jazz musician who regularly decried “gangstas” making millions on selling “crack music to little crackers whose idea of slumming was going to the fringes of their suburbs for a 7-Eleven Slurpee” (his words, not mine).
The rap fan couldn’t have been fine arts painter Dante Silva. His preferences ran to Moby, Philip Glass, New Age, ambient, and space music. And if Joy’s father had been pulling shots of espresso tonight (which he did on occasion, when he wasn’t traveling the globe brokering deals for the planet’s finest micro-lots), opera or classical would have been playing right now. Unless Matt was feeling manic, in which case he’d be blasting the sort of synthpop electronica he routinely partied to in European and Brazillian dance clubs.
Unfortunately, what greeted me as I entered the Blend was none of the above.
Rich man’s got his dope, homey
Yo, he need that hit!
All his bitches get a taste
’Cause he think he the shi—
“Okay,” I murmured. “This ends now.”
I crossed the floor to the espresso bar, which appeared to be abandoned of all human oversight. “Hello!? Hello?!” I slapped my hand on the marble counter. “Is anyone here!”
“Don’t start buggin’, lady! I’m coming!”
Esther, another of my part-time baristas, emerged from the back pantry area loaded down with paper cups, sip lids, heat sleeves, and coffee stirrers. “Oh, it’s just you, boss,” she said upon seeing me. Then she dumped the stock on the counter and began to sort it out.
An NYU comparative literature major, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather) had untamed dark hair, currently stuffed into a backward Yankee cap; a pleasantly plump figure, now swathed in our blue Village Blend apron; and large brown eyes that were constantly on the lookout for anything that might require her critical observation.
“I’m glad to see you restocking.” I folded my arms. “But why are you playing rap on our sound system? You know the rules.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Esther pushed up her black rectangular glasses, rolled her dark eyes, and in an oh-so-droll tone began to recite my playlist playbook. “No rap, hip-hop, heavy metal, or arena rock.” She took a theatrical breath. “No polkas, bagpipes, Broadway show tunes, military marches, or anything recorded by Ethel Merman. Oh, and…wasn’t there one more verboten type of music on your list?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Anything by Wagner. But that’s not my rule. It’s Madame’s.”
I personally enjoyed Wagner’s epic compositions. But if approaching Nazi tanks had forced me and my family to flee our beloved Parisian home with little more than the clothes on our backs, I probably would’ve banned Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer from being played in my coffeehouse, too.
“Look,” said Esther in the sort of can’t-you-be-reasonable tone I’d heard a thousand times from my daughter, “the CD’s only been playing about fifteen minutes. Nobody’s complained. There’s only one more song. Can’t we let it finish?”
I glanced around the room. It was almost midnight, and there were only three customers left in the place. An Asian man and East Indian woman were nursing lattes with heads bent together in a first-date-passionate conversation. They didn’t appear to be bothered by the music. Neither did the young white guy in a black leather blazer, lounging near the crackling fireplace, bopping his blond, spiky head to the beat of the rapper’s profane chant.
“Fine, Esther,” I said. “I’ll let it go this one time…but what the heck possessed you to put it on in the first place?” Like all of my baristas, Esther had a preferred playlist—one that seemed much more aligned with her feminist sensibilities. “What happened to your Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Siouxsie and the Banshees mix?”
Esther shrugged.
“What does that mean?” I pressed. “You like rap now?”
“My boyfriend’s into it. He brought the CD over special and everything, you know? The least I could do was play it for him.”
Hold the phone. “Boyfriend?” Ever since I’d known Esther, she’d dated here and there. But never before had she used that “antiquated, Leave It to Beaver term”—as she’d once deemed it.
“He’s right over there.”
Esther pointed across the room toward that wiry young blond man; he was still bobbing his head to the rap. Just then, he looked over at us. He stared for a moment, then winked at Esther and gave her a little wave.
Esther sweetly waved back. “Isn’t he cool?” she murmured out of the corner of her mouth.