Photo credit, Kevin Konnyu
Interviewer: We’re speaking today with the editor of Ulysses’ Friezes. This is part of a series of interviews with the writers of literary weblogs who were born shortly after World War II.
PM: Hi there Jack.
Int: I suppose it’s safe to say, finally, that you’re in a position to look back and evaluate your literary life. Any outstanding regrets?
PM: To put it in proper context, I should mention that I feel thirty-one, but I guess it’s not altogether foolish to review one’s life at the age of sixty-three. But regrets? No. To have been twenty-one in 1968, and to have gone to graduate school in 1969, I’m of the era of people who were role-oriented rather than goal-oriented, as McLuhan said, and we learned from Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday that regrets are strictly for rubes.
Int: Well then, if no regrets, how about bad mistakes?
PM: No, not really. It should be obvious that persons I have wronged would cite numerous examples that will contradict me. Cultural anthropologists realize that significant advances in the human psyche are made only after times of trial, in those latter years or decades of calm and repose. It’s then that people have the disposition and leisure to acculturate their feelings, conclusions, and creative expressions.
Int: I’m not sure I understand that.
PM: Well, you’re prejudiced in favor of comprehension.
Int: Is that why most people find your writing obscure and dense?
PM: Those descriptions’ll do. There is also rarefied, muddled, lotus-eating, ostentatious, and sick. I can write a sentence that’s as straight as a ramrod, but I’m really only feeling full of beans and truly part of the human comedy when I’m writing on a reckless wing. It’s kind of like driving drunk. It’s stupid, sure, but if you find yourself in a Porsche on the roads high over the lakes and vineyards of upstate New York on a sunny summer day, you’d have to be a real shitstick to drive safely.
Int: Okay, I get that. But what if you hit a deer, or God forbid, a child?
PM: Drunk drivers also miss children.
Int: I don’t get that.
PM: Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and I’ll go further than that and agree with myself that you’re kind of a sissy.
Int: You write a lot about sissies, and the lack of courage.
PM: It’s a topic that sustains me. Sort of like food.
Int: So, you have no regrets, and haven’t made any mistakes?
PM: I think I said that I haven’t, but the sorts of people you’d feel safer trusting could list lots of mistakes. I will give you this, though. For the past few years I’ve had a faint but unpleasant sense that I’ve forgotten to do something. Normally, at this point, women will say “I forgot to have children!” and men might say “I could have been a contender” but in my case, I am starting to develop a clearer sense that I might have failed to go a bridge too far in journalism, and I now think I could have written a biographical appreciation that might have flown on to the pages of The New Yorker, or even some lesser pub. I still work at, desultorily.
Int: What would that be?
PM: Well, I hate to say it, but I don’t think you’re really interested.
Int: Excuse me?
PM: You seem to be treading water, waiting for me to contradict myself so you can drill me. Which, by the way, wouldn’t be particularly hard to do.
Int: Hmm. I probably shouldn’t have let you come to that conclusion. Unprofessional of me. I guess I was annoyed by your calling me a sissy.
PM: Have you not been afraid of stuff in your life?
Int: Snakes, cancer, that sort of thing?
PM: No, more having yourself for deep company when you’re at the moment of your death.
Int: I don’t think about that very much, except in terms of leaving an inadequate level of security for the two kids I have in college now.
PM: I’ll take a wild guess here. I expect you’d be shit-pooping afraid to arrive in Sao Paolo after midnight and have to find a safe hotel, but wouldn’t give a thought to going up Omaha Beach in 1944.
Int: Hmm. Let me ask you about your journalism again.
PM: Shoot.
Int: What were you going to write about, but seem to have abandoned?
PM: It was a biographical appreciation.
Int: And?
PM: I’m not specifically reluctant to talk about it; the narrative is very interesting. But I would have to layer it quite profusely with a sort of remorse relating to my trepidation about doing the subject justice.
Int: Isn’t that a regret, per se?
PM: Let me leave that to you to decide. Where do your kids go to college?
Int: Colby, and the University of Rochester.
PM: You couldn’t find any more expensive schools?
Int: Even if it’s not exactly a regret, would you mind telling us about your biography?
PM: Biographical appreciation.
Int: Right.
PM: There are two parts to the preface: one addresses the fact that I never seem to really get going on this writing, and the other concerns the central figure, who seems to have done something almost impossible, something that opposes all my understanding about the process of aspiration. The former says something unflattering about me and my soul, and the latter renders a pigment of fantasy upon the narrative that I’d prefer it didn’t have. I’m not sure you’re going to care for my treatment.
Int: Okay. Who is the “central figure”?
PM: It is a person named John Englar. He is from Toronto, which explains more than I expect you would allow it to. I met him in 1987 in France, and we spent ten straight hours together. Then I never saw him again.
Int: How old were you in 1987? What were you doing in France?
PM: Englar would have been in his early twenties. I was forty. We met during the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle event, a randonnee, which is 750 miles. It is ridden within ninety hours, straight through three nights, in the rain, with no sleep, and in an exalted state of very considerable enervation. We rode together up and down the hills of Brittany. At one point we stopped at a café for some coffee. The young fellow working alone in the café was very bored, without necessarily being sullen. The lattes tasted – let me say this now - absolutely heavenly to me, but for Englar, his had been inadequately scalded. He carried his cup back to the fellow, who re-prepared it properly, exposing I would guess a bit of chagrin for having been caught trying to foist a second rate beverage on what he took to be a couple of undiscerning barbarians. Englar’s insouciance doing that had impressed me deeply, and made me feel a better man for having simply shared his company. You might say I admired him breathlessly. We sat a while at the table; he told me he was going to Ireland after Paris to study for three weeks at a prestigious confectionary college in Dublin. When we were riding again, he said he was going to open a coffee shop in Toronto. I think I said something along the lines of “oh, that’s nice,” and then he gently and generously corrected me “no, it’ll be a special coffee shop.” Then he described visions. Were you there when that little kid in Portugal saw the Virgin Mary? I was.
Int: So then he opened a coffee shop in Toronto?
PM: First, let me settle upon you my most withering look. There, now I feel better. No, nothing so trite as that. Open a coffee shop in Toronto is one of the things he did, but his chief accomplishment – unique in my experience – was to take each element of the vision he had articulated, and bring it to exhaustive fruition, making an impact on the zeitgeist, defining a culture of freethinkers, and resurrecting an aura the modern world assumed it had lost forever, from the days when Zelda Fitzgerald jumped into the fountain, and Dean Moriarty sped down the two-lanes, when Mark Rothko discovered balance, and when Shakespeare wrote the twentieth sonnet.
Int: I have to say, you’re making it pretty hard to believe. This is a young kid on a bike with an idea that’s not even particularly original.
PM: I understand that. It takes a bit of research. And I’ll provide your editor with some resources that will illustrate what I’m trying to describe. When the mosaic is taken as a whole, you’re looking, not only at a unique character, but standing in awe at the sheer impossibility of dreams that have been actualized. We’re not used to that. His vision of “special” contravenes just about every square inch of land upon which you stand.
Int: So he opened a coffee shop.
PM: Ufff. I’m going to go get a beer.
PM: Okay then. In part: He sponsors a bicycle racing team that has achieved notable success and some comical notoriety. Some years ago he created a figure 8 velodrome in Toronto and Vancouver that has as much legendary allure for cyclists as we might suppose Harry’s Bar in Venice has for nascent authors. He is by many people credited with inventing the Alleycat Scramble, which is an affair of lunacy now held in many of the major cities in the world. He has made a place where bike couriers’ half-mad culture is churchy. He has feared nothing, which doesn’t sound unusual except that he’s the only person I’ve ever met for whom that is true. He has fulfilled his destiny by assuming responsibility for every bit of his innate charisma. The only other person who has done that, Eddy Zieba, is also a cyclist, imagine that. But the reason an extensive biographical appreciation needs to be written – and I happen to lack the vigor to do so – has to do with his iteration of these details, and more, and his describing the ambiance that now exists, twenty years before they came into full existence. In precise detail. It is raining, and we’re riding between Loudeac and Carhaix. And he speaks the very words that will be written twenty years later by culture critics, restaurant reviewers, bicycle journalists, and Sunday newspaper feature writers. He describes a place that photographers will later document, in chilling, exquisite detail. Actually, it was more like this. We’re riding along together over the terrain that was the territory of those strange creatures, the Breton Celts.
Int: France.
PM: Look at this photograph. It’s a great photograph, yes?
Int: It’s nice.
PM: This young woman is reading the newspaper in a Toronto Coffee Shop. Jet Fuel Coffee on Parliament Street. She has found a place where she can have a coffee, read the paper, maybe smoke a cigarette, and be herself alone. You might even say, there are no boyfriends around to distort her. A photographer takes her picture from the street, through the glass window of the shop. Just a second before she realizes the photographer is a friend of hers, Kevin Konnyu by name, she lays a scornful look on whoever it was that was interrupting her; whoever it was who slashed a rip into her privacy.
Int: And?
PM: This is what John told me in the rain near Carhaix. Bike couriers will hang out there, the Apaches of Metro Toronto; it’s an art gallery; the music is immersive and vaguely anamnetic. Jack, listen to me now: he used these very words. Women can go there and read the paper in private. John says: “I would found an institution where any strong, independent woman could read the newspaper and drink her coffee and not be messed with.”
Int: He said “I would found an institution”? That’s fairly impressive, and I completely doubt it. Though don’t you think some people will conclude that maybe it’s your memory that has filled in the blanks, and makes you remember things that he didn’t actually say, based on the things you’ve read years afterward?
PM: I’m quite sure some people have hearts void of faith and minds lacking the ability to believe in intuition, or in the mystery of art.
Int: But it wasn’t an artwork, which allows those things, it was the factual occasion of two guys riding bikes. And, come to think of it, it wasn’t the vision of the Virgin Mary, either.
PM: You’re sure about that?
Int: My business has as its principle tenets, corroboration, the laws of physics, an examination of motive, and paraphrasability.
PM: No room for the mystic?
Int: But you’re not saying Englar was a mystic. You’re saying, basically, that he foretold the future.
PM: I am saying that John Englar foretold the future. Yes.
Int: Maybe he just had a dream and got lucky and it came pretty nearly true? Doesn’t that describe a hundred coffee shops in North America?
PM: Maybe you need to look a little more closely at the picture of the woman with the newspaper. Who do you suppose provided her with the cathedral of such an eminent place in which to be private? Private.
Int: I think you’re getting a pretty long way from the intention of this interview, which was, I thought I had understood, to ask you about your thoughts looking backward; to give you a chance to describe your regrets, or what you’ve learned.
PM: I am looking back. I see that I’ve been surrounded by weaklings and cowards and by profoundly insipid people. When I look for heroes, if that’s a word we can use, I see only five or six souls who have followed a flight path like the goddamned swallows of Capistrano, from vision through to achievement. Paul Campbell is one. Stacy Schiff. Jim Jarmusch. If Englar had foreseen himself as a theatrical impresario, we would now be experiencing the moral thrills that we have had to pretend we’re getting at Stratford, or the O’Neill Theatre, or the Old Vic. If he had wanted to make the perfect cupcake, people would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and fight wars for his cupcakes, the way the Dutch in 1637 went absolutely batshit for tulips. If he had...
Int: Okay, okay. But the fact remains, he opened a coffee shop, and the one he described in 1987 and the one he owns now in 2010 are not the same, provably, except in your recollection.
PM: Provably. Well, that’s not where the charismatic live, is it? Alice B. Toklas said that when she met Gertrude Stein for the very first time, a bell went off, signifying genius. Nobody else in the room heard that bell. So there was no bell, eh?
Int: All we know for sure is that Alice Toklas claimed there was a bell.
PM: And I am reporting to you that John was describing the coffee shop that was going to exist with all the verisimilitude of describing a coffee shop that might have existed back in 1955 in Greenwich Village. I have made the mistake of sharing with you my feelings of having missed something, which is as close as I was going to get for you to your “regrets” or “mistakes.” People tell me I’m getting older. I missed the opportunity to become a trans-ocean sailor, and I erred in failing to play squash racquets all my life. I missed the opportunity to watch John Englar cleave through the semi-bohemian culture of Toronto like a saint, and to write about him in a way that might give people a little more courage, and an increased tolerance for the sheer beauty of recklessness.
Int: Well, our time is at an end. Thank you for speaking with me today.
PM: Oh heck, I’ve got more time.
Int: Well I have another appointment, so I’ll be saying goodbye now.
PM: You don’t seem to have been able to suppress your skepticism about John Englar.
Int: My feelings don’t have any bearing on what you have to say.
PM: Yeah, that’s the idea, but you’re skepticism is kind of callous, isn’t it? Englar represents many of the things that seem to frighten you: liberty, transgressive daring, and good-nature.
Int: Oh whatever!
PM: Isn’t your job to elucidate information, not pass judgment?
Int: You’re dissatisfied with our conversation?
PM: I’m dissatisfied with your hidebound lack of imagination.
Int: Is the interview over?
PM: Fucking right it is.
NOTES:
Enjoy the work of photographer Kevin Konnyu
(it's amazing)
from various Toronto newspapers (attributis perdutis)
Founding owner John Englar (known to regulars as Johnny JetFuel) holds culinary, pastry and chocolatier papers but limits his wares to coffees, lemonade, and home-baked muffins and danishes. (The Cabbagetown landmark is patterned after the original Parisian coffee stands that sold only strong lemonade and even stronger coffee.) Order your drink hot or cold.
...
Check out the elegant vintage Italian coffee machine, the art exhibited on the walls and the jerseys of Englar's bicycle racing team, the first pro outfit in Canada . No surprise, then, that the regulars include a robust blend of bike messengers, along with writers (including Michael Ondaatje), artists and dancers who derive equal kicks from the company and the caffeine.
John Englar, the small, skinny, unshaven guy behind the bar, wouldn't want it any other way.Nor, it seems, would his motley mix of customers, who've been coming here to Parliament Street, just north of Carlton, for nearly a dozen years.
John Englar, the owner of Jetfuel, is an avid cyclist himself and has played an active part in the cycling community of Toronto.In 1986 he started the Alleycat Scramble streetracing series with a friend, which attracted qualifying cyclists from around the world.John also designed the world's only portable velodrome figure-8 racetrack where the Human Powered Rollercoaster and Alleycat races were held in Toronto and Vancouver.
John Englar, now owner of the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop in Cabbagetown but then an ex-courier living on the Toronto Islands, was seeking to enhance the local winter carnival.
He started by clearing a figure-eight track on one of the frozen coves, then challenged bike couriers to race there.Thirty showed up.
If you’re serious about your coffee, then it’s time you steered your attention toward the next bike courier you see, and follow him - over rough terrain, avoiding oncoming traffic, through bank lobbies - to his unofficial headquarters. It’s a given that you’ll wind up - perhaps not right away, but eventually - on Parliament Street, just south of Carlton.
Now, a coffee shop has to be superlative for us to suggest it's worth stalking a messenger over, but the now-classic Jet Fuel Coffee makes the recommendation easy, especially if you're not afraid of coffee with attitude.
"Do one thing and do it well" could be the mantra of Jet Fuel. The high-voltage experience begins right at the doorway, where clusters of smokers hang loose, lattes in hand, bantering at a feverish pitch. Step into the raw coffee shop and you’re greeted with a small, pumping art-gallery-ish space, offering simple, quality coffee, and not much more. You can get a Jet Fuel coffee (a latte), read the papers (there's plenty of room), and just chill. It's the brainchild of John Englar, whose aim is to pare things down and to have a little fun on top of it.
Jet Fuel wasn't born overnight. Jet Fuel started life in the late eighties as a sandwich truck, servicing the film industry. It was the film crews that named Johnny-Jet Fuel-Englar. Later, Englar’s first coffee bar location (that didn’t bear license plates) would be a 200 square-foot coffee bar within a bike store. The size of a postage stamp with two monstrous speakers on each wall. "It was like walking into a set of headphones!" says Englar.
When Jet Fuel opened in the current location in ë92, it was instantly a cool place to hang out, sanctioned by local couriers that made it their unofficial headquarters. But you didn't have to be a messenger to enjoy the nonconformist ambiance, good caffeine; at here, the emphasis was on slackerism and customers who knew each other’s regular time-slot.
There remains a strong connection between coffee and cycling: Years ago, Englar and his cycling friends (soon to become a cycling team) started what was basically a series of illegal rally-cat night races. An all-out no-rules series of races, that grew out of proportion to the extent that Dunhill Tobacco sponsored the races on a national level. Tracks were built for a figure-eight velodrome, and the entire track would be shipped to the next race destination.
Over the next six years, the Jet Fuel cycling team would develop, and become pro. In fact, this weekend, the team takes on the Wall Street Criterium; Jet Fuel was one of the eight teams of riders invited to race down Wall Street at break-neck speeds, taking hairpin turns "with a cobblestone curve". Taking place on a course laid out on New York City’s Wall Street, the weekend’s Criterium has Wall and Water transformed into a daylong festival of pro-racing attractions.
Jet Fuel (the racing team) is indeed headed for bigger competitive action. Team captain, Andrew Randall (the guy making your latte), was a previous national champion, taking the Jet Fuel team to the Pro Road Race in San Francisco - headquarters to Lance Armstrong’s team.
Closer to home, the plaudit-heaped Jet Fuel (the coffee shop) continues to be a standard on top-ten cafe lists. The messenger harmony doesn't trouble the friendly groups of coworkers that come to relax their highly-caffeinated selves. Music depends on who’s manning the shop. But even though it’s Jet Fuel - and not Un-leaded - you will not feel self-conscious here if Rancid isn't in your iPod shuffle. - D.E.
The cities of the world today are filled with two kinds of people, bike couriers and everyone else: Those who spend their lives trying to avoid danger and those who actively devote theirs to seeking it out. Those who pedal and those who drive. Or worse still, walk.
Couriers aren't alone in their dedication to living on the edge, but risking life and limb - theirs and ours - to deliver a parcel?
Maybe in the beginning they were a bunch of pedestrian-hating, car-eating psychos, but couriers have flourished in the pandemonium of postmodernity. Surfing the city and its traffic instead of waves, they are uniquely adapted to the discontinuity and chaos of the urban landscape..
So perhaps it isn't surprising that corporate culture has discovered courier culture; outlaws and bandits, each using the other for its own purposes..
In this case that means the Dunhill Alley-Cats Scramble, a winner-take-all bike race that will be run tomorrow and Saturday at 1401 Yonge St., on a figure-eight track designed and constructed especially for the occasion.
But the Scramble is more than just a race - it's the most visible and best financed celebration of courier culture ever held in Toronto. In addition to the main event, there will be a lineup of messenger bands - see Club Crawl column, below - and what organizers affectionately call ``the Mini-Nightmare Trade Show.'''
``Bikes, bands and beer,'' declares Alley-Cats founder and driving force, former courier and pastry chef, John Englar, 33. ``Plus, we have a cigarette sponsor. Can't get much worse than that. But really Dunhill's been f---ing great. They haven't bothered us at all.
``Of course, some people think we've sold out. We have. We're just trying to take this thing to the next level.''
In fact, Scrambles have been held in cities across Europe and North America for a decade. The difference is that most were illegal. But not this time. No racing through the streets, shooting the holes and running the lights. This time it'll be indoors, safely hidden from nervous middle-class eyes.. And stop signs..
From a messenger's point of view, this is a mixed blessing: ``Playing in traffic is what it's all about,''' Englar observes. ``Being a pro-floater. You don't follow any line of traffic. You shoot the diagonal.. That's the rush, going for the super-run. It can be very amusing and totally fun, or turn you into a complete mother------.'''
These days, however, Englar definitely seems to be having fun. Five years ago he opened the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament St., and the less aggressive existence suits him fine. Besides, his cafe is a gathering place for couriers, which means he can stay in touch with his buddies..
At the corner of Aberdeen Ave. and Parliament St., opposite John Englar's diehard Jet Fuel Coffee Shop, Starbucks is expected to open in March. It may anger Jet Fuel regulars who think cultivated rudeness is a vital part of the coffee experience, but it is a bit of stable ordinariness the street could use. Certainly Starbucks won't threaten Jet Fuel, the street's incumbent coffee shop king, with its art shows, occasional readings and backyard parties that are part of the its eclectic identity.
Now I've known owner John Englar since about 1992, when he first opened (across the street, south of Carlton, upstairs, with four stools and coffee for two bucks). I may not be precisely a regular, but I have been drifting in there on and off for more than 15 years; for the six years or so when I lived in Cabbagetown I was there a lot. And I would still say the service can range from "quizzical to withering" (as I wrote in a little Enroute magazine piece about it). So I don't know who qualifies for kid-glove treatment, and I don't really care.
I like the coffee in the tall glasses with the tall spoons kept in the glass Barbicide jar on the counter, and the art shows, and John's deadly sense of industrial design and all things stainless steel. I like the loose newspapers lying around. I love the lemonade. I enjoy being able to run into a certain sort of friend (dancers, cyclists, Islanders, Cabbagetowners, journalists, activists). I find it comforting that it obstinately stays the same, like my beloved Chalet Bar.B.Q. on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal that was so much part of our family life for 35 years that we held my brother's funeral there.
Nobody has to love Jet Fuel. If you don't, the east end has a wealth of great coffee shops to patronize instead. But I cherish the element of ritual and familiarity, and if the barista doesn't know who I am, well that's okay. I know where I am, and that's enough.
519 Parliament, at Winchester, 416-968-9982. John Englar’s long-running cycle-savvy java joint has a reputation for serving attitude alongside its joltin’ cups of joe. But who cares, when an expertly executed espresso goes for a buck? Bonus: since it sponsors a road racing team, it also sells Jet Fuel cycling jerseys.
John Englar of Jet Fuel Cafe on Parliament Street. He started with four chairs, selling $2 coffees. Now he has a whole bunch of chairs and sells $3 coffees.
PLUS: silent auction of original art by John Englar made out of the boards from the Human Powered Rollercoaster with treatment of misfit bike parts. John will deliver the art to your door the next day. Bring your chequebooks!
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