on to the caffè’s basement). She proffered her drained glass for a refill.
“I’ll put on some records,” Enzo said. “Good stuff, too. Not that crap kids listen to today.”
He rose, a little wobbly, and crossed to an ancient machine with an actual diamond needle. I checked my watch. Being the designated driver, I’d declined the Italian brandy—no big sacrifice since I was still drying out from last night’s green beer—and I was beginning to wonder when this visit was going to end.
As Madame and Enzo fox-trotted around stacks of clutter, I felt my jeans vibrating. Assuming a certain NYPD detective was the reason once more, I dug into my pocket with relish. (Watching these two old friends reflame their affections had me aching for my own man.) But it wasn’t Mike on the line. The cell call came from Dante Silva, one of my baristas.
“Hey, boss. Did you get it? The Blend’s old roaster?”
In fact, the vintage German Probat was standing right in front of me. It was about the girth of a small washing machine (only taller) and tarnished with age and neglect—nothing I couldn’t remedy with a lot of polish and elbow grease. (Seeing Glenn’s restoration job was sufficiently inspiring.)
Of course, I wasn’t enough of a mechanic to get the thing up and running again, but that was never my intention. I wanted the antique for display purposes.
“How did you know about the Probat?” I asked Dante, raising my voice over Tony Bennett’s dulcet crooning. “You didn’t have a shift today.”
“I called in to check my schedule and Tuck told me about it. And since I was here in Queens anyway, I thought I’d snap a few pics.”
“You’re in Queens now? Where?”
“Here. On the sidewalk out in front of Caffè Lucia,” he said. “Unless I’m at the wrong Caffè Lucia. The lights are off and the place looks closed.”
“We’re in the basement. I’ll be right up to let you in.”
Topside, I spotted Dante’s form hovering near the picture window, his trendy chin stubble a textural contrast to the clean geometry of his shaved head. A distressed leather jacket covered the self-designed tattoos on his ropy arms, and around his neck hung a digital camera, which he used for artistic studies, capturing the play of light on urban images from dawn till dusk.
He waved at me as I emerged from the back of the shop. The door’s old lock was gluey as Marshmallow Fluff, but I managed to throw the bolt. Then my young, talented barista breezed in, full of beer and good cheer.
“Is that knockwurst on your breath?”
“And sauerkraut. But mostly hops, boss. Lots of hops.”
“Where were you, anyway?”
Dante grinned, glassy-eyed. “I helped a buddy install his exhibit at the Socrates Sculpture Park; then I hung at the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden with a bunch of aspiring Jasper Johns.”
I almost laughed. Not so long ago someone as terminally hip as Dante Silva wouldn’t have been caught dead at an outer-borough beer hall. But that was before the Great Recession completely flipped New York’s social scene. These days, slick neon bars with velvet ropes were out. Keggers and kielbasa were in.
Then again, every few years I’d notice my collegiate coffeehouse customers celebrating some kind of music, clothing, food, or art form that had become so outdated and square it went all the way around the wheel to come up hip again: bowling, bacon, sliders, cupcakes, hip-hugger jeans, Tom Jones, Neil Diamond . . . I dreaded the day preground coffee in a can made a comeback.
“So where’s this roaster?” Dante asked.
“Let me lock this door and I’ll show you.”
“Whoa, boss,” Dante murmured.
He’d stopped in the middle of the room to stare at Enzo’s mural. I walked up to join him. “What do you think?”
“Freakin’ awesome.”
“That’s what I thought.”
In a phrase, looking at Enzo’s mural was like taking a visual journey through the movements of modern art. The narrative began with impressionism, moved to expressionism, fauvism, cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. Layered in among it all were touches of Iberian art, as well as Japonism and primitivism—all of which influenced twentieth-century artistic developments.
Paul Gauguin’s fascination with Polynesian culture and Oceanic art was represented, as well as Parisian fascination with African fetish sculptures. The postmodern movement was explored, with its blurring of high and low cultural lines; the vibrant pop images of spoof and irony were also here, along with the (often misunderstood) reframing of common objects by those visual poets who helped us see with new eyes our cans