I've probably written about some of this stuff before.
I wrote another post about breakfast a while back. I write a lot about breakfast. Not only on this blog, but on the pages of other notebooks. Breakfast and Trains. I write a lot about breakfast and trains.
No trains around here lately. I’d love one, though. Sleek, low slung, high-speed carriage, high-backed red chairs with fold down armrests and scattered with high-nervous company. I would love to bunch up into a corner, sitting with my back towards to driver's seat and my head resting on the big window. My earphones plugged in, I’d pump up as much Ella as I could find and just stare, watching the outside go by as I held as still as possible. Hold my ground, whilst everything else rushes past and away.
Hasn't been that much Breakfast either. I’m eating. I’m having an early first bit of something, but not that breakfast 'thing'. That early morning salvation that is a dance of compassion, care and activity hasn't been around me for a while now. Until this morning. This morning was one of the greats. One I will remember for a while to come.
Sleep is still coming all disjointed. All broken up. Most of all, I find myself waking up in the dark, heavy with....I don't know - distraction? Yeah - distraction. That's it. That's all the weight I wanna give to it. Cole Porter said it much better than me. In 'Under My Skin', he writes of voices that come in the middle of the night. You can listen to the song, if you need to understand it a little better. I don't know. It's just distraction and that ain’t no kind of bedfellow, so I jolted up awake, still not full with sleep.
But all of this is neither here nor there. It's just to let you know that I was up earlier than the sun. I didn't just get up and go. I had time to stew and read and “use your mentality; wake up to reality”.
I’m living down in a different part of Hollywood. Different to earlier in the year. I miss that old place, but it stayed still as I rushed past. This part is grungier. It has nature strips, palm trees, Mexican gardeners and driveways, garages and walkways lit up with guiding lights. The old neighborhood didn't have any of those decorative flourishes and yet, still, this new area feels grungier.
Down here, they leave their garbage bins standing proud out on the street all week long, whilst walking past with dogs off the leash. It's all post-deco/Californian Bungle apartments, only two stories high and running back to concrete courtyards, full of rusted, twisted chairs and broken, canvas, picnic umbrellas lying dead on the ground. There's no clean lines, no straight edges, no firm boundaries and no clear definitions. The apartment blocks kinda feel like they're all leaning over on each other - like drunk sailors at the end of the night, waiting for their friend to make the first move back to base. If you look closely at the black, cast iron numbers, plated onto the walls telling you the street addresses, you'll notice they don't follow any sort of logical algorithm. It's like every place was built as an afterthought to what was already considered adequate. I know the feeling.
The people too. They're younger, busier and less insular than before. That's not necessarily 'grungy', except in this case it is.
Anyways, what I lost from up there in a 24-hour supermarket, I've gained in one the great dining destinations on the planet. You wont find it in no little red book (neither Mao's nor Michelin's), but that's their loss. And yours, if you ain't never been to Canter's.
Like I said above, most things in this post I’ve written about before. Canter's is a vibe - a feeling - more than it is a place. It's a large space – three shop spaces wide – with a fifties style dinning room, crowded cake stand, cholesterol dense take-out deli, breakfast counter and late night dive bar/band room. The different spaces flow together so perfectly, that it is hard to understand why there aren't more places where you can slope into a brown leather, curved booth in a dingy, dark, narrow bar, eating dense, wet, chocolate yeast cake, whilst your uncle washes his Rye on Kaiser down with cheap American beer, as midnight passes to the swing of a distorted, Gibson Flying V, playing through a Fender Bassman amp. Or is he having chicken soup with matzo balls and a salted margarita on the rocks? It could easily be both.
I must be that Canter's is just a bit more highly evolved than, well, pretty much everything.
I chose the grey cardigan from the wardrobe, Tex Perkins from the iPod and the No. 4 from the breakfast specials. All good choices. Breakfast as therapy is a very delicate thing. Conditions have to be entirely favourable. You gotta arrive ready and plan out the right flow. Create time with a few courses. The No.4 starts with oatmeal, followed by eggs. This is America, so I know they're gonna cook those eggs too dry for a country boy like me, but I’m not really there for the food. It needs to be at least 'good enough', but I’m not there for the food. I’m there for the one who serves it. It might be an owner or a waiter or a cashier or the busboy or even the chef. I’m there for the stranger, who is there for me.
This morning it was my waitress. She is in her late thirties and sports rectangle, thick rimmed glasses and blue and red tattoos on her upper left arm. Her dark, dyed hair is pulled back real tight, but her smile is more than gentle enough to soften that picture out. She is tall - taller than me - and she has the raised, rounded and robust shoulders that my mother had when we were younger. There's always some part of someone's body that tells me about the character of the person. This morning, her shoulders let me know that she had carried someone before and will carry someone else again. I know how that goes.
Around about the time my eggs arrived, she asked after My Blues. If I would've just ordered the one course, we may have never had the chance to get to that. I talked vague and self depreciating. I wasn't being defensive, just that there wasn't much to explain. She knew though. She knew and we only spoke for a few minutes. Whilst she was telling me her story, she leaned forward with her arms resting on her side of the counter and her glasses slipping down her nose. I asked a question and she stood back up, leaning against the coffee maker and paused, silently looking to her right and towards the kitchen and then back to me, whilst readjusting her lenses.
That pause - that time she took to consider her answer - made me realise how honest she was. I don't think her first instinct was a desire to answer accurately. She wanted to spit out some reflex, dismissive line that had surely become a defense mechanism she had run to a lot lately. But she held back. Held off. Caught her tongue, paused and considered that - just like her to me – I was a stranger to her. Strangers hold no judgments. Not yet. Once they do, they're no longer strangers. They're people that know you. Or think they know you.
So she paused and then answered. And that pause let me know she was being honest.
What came after that is neither here nor there. In the real world – the one outside the fantasy of these pages – it may matter, but not here. What matters here is Breakfast. What matters here, is that if you can find someone with the shoulders to carry again, the courage to pause for the truth and armed with a fully stocked bar out the back, you should get that person to make you breakfast. You need it. Trust me.
I've written it before and I'll write it again: It's only ever worth finding that which finds you.
