Gigantic.16
Angel from Mars
Cafe Mars was on a deserted stretch of Western Avenue, surrounded by empty lots and vacant maritime buildings. There was a viaduct then, it separated the desolate neighborhood from the rest of downtown Seattle, but people found their way to the Mars anyway.
The Mars had an arc-welding-meets-vintage aesthetic. Eye-catching color scheme. Mismatched tables and chairs from the 50s, retro lamps, salt-and-pepper shakers collected lovingly over time. Today, all cafes look alike. The Mars looked like nothing else, then or now.
Owners Cyril and Philippe were from France, so was the simple menu. Croque monsieur, niçoise salad, potato casserole with béchamel sauce. The kitchen, barely concealed behind the espresso machine, was brilliantly streamlined. A lone cook paired with a single waiter could run the whole show most nights, along with a dishwasher who came to the rescue mid-shift.
The Mars was not only my favorite cafe, it remains one of the favorite jobs of my life, in part because, even though Cyril and Philippe owned the place, it felt like it belonged to all of us.
We slacked at times, other times hustled like our lives depended on it. I could manage every single table in the place if it came down to it. We smoked, drank, drugged. A work family, but we hung out after hours, on days off sometimes, too.
Greg was probably the first person I met working there, he was on his way out when I was starting. Greg could always be counted on to get a poker game going at one of the tables when things were slow.
Another cook, Stan, lived right upstairs so didn’t have to travel far. He was a guitarist, we played together sometimes, but he could shred beyond my comprehension. I think he might’ve played with the Melvins at one point.
Jennifer was an easygoing cook who headed up to Alaska to bake bread for the summer before doubling back to Evergreen College in Olympia. I headed to Alaska for a look-see while she was up there, another story.
I seemed to work most with Eric, who never claimed to be psychic, but he certainly was. He had a sense about people, and on more than one occasion warned me about trouble I didn’t see coming.
His psychic powers could also be amusing. One slow Sunday, out of the blue, he announced:
“There are berries over there.”
He bolted across Western Avenue like a young buck, disappeared into the bramble behind the shuttered longshoreman’s union building. Five minutes later, his t-shirt rolled up to form a bowl, he returned with a quart of mystery berries.
We ate them all. Delicious. Got back to prepping. Shortly, with customers arriving, we exchanged a knowing glance, inexplicably high as kites, straining to stay in the game.
“What kind of berries were those, Eric?”
“Maybe they sprayed them with something…”
We made it through the shift.
Another night, Eric, me, and a well-read dishwasher named Joseph all experienced precisely two-and-a-half hours time loss, no explanation. Whitley Strieber was popular at the time. The same thoughts of alien abduction crossed all our minds, but we didn’t want to go there.
Most of our customers were clued into Mars being its own planet. A mix of regulars we knew by name, devotees who made it periodically, and first-timers soon enough enchanted. A decade before internet domination, people ate, and actually talked to each other.
At the restaurant where I worked back in NYC, my boss expected me to get rid of street people, sometimes physically. At the Mars, they were part of the family.
There was one guy named Dave in particular. He’d wander in when things were slow. Scraggly hair, beard, crazy talk, crazy eyes, a generally sweet disposition. We had a proper sound system, music was always playing. If something came on that Dave liked, he’d get up and dance.
Another regular was Angel. He wasn’t homeless per se, but slept in the woods outside of town, then came in during the day with his guitar to play on the street and make a little money. Some days the weather turned inclement. Eric and I knew that Angel needed every penny, so we kept his teacup filled, made him a little toast, and he was welcome as long as he felt like staying.
I hadn’t given up being a street musician myself, but now that I had a waiting gig I liked, playing on the street had become more sporadic. Angel was different, for him it really was his main gig. It was his life.
One afternoon I was walking through Pike Place Market, which was touristy but you could get good fresh food. On one of the designated spots for street musicians, there was Angel, doing his thing.
I stopped to watch. Soulful voice, expert guitar licks. He was really going for it. It made me proud to see how good he really was.
When he looked up and saw me standing there, he finished the song and called me over.
“Hey man!”
I didn’t want to take up too much of his time. Pike Place Market was very strict and regulated. You had to register in advance, you got your spot, your one-hour slot, and that was it for the day.
“I really dig those guitar lines,” I told him.
“Ah, it’s just the pentatonic scale,” he said.
“Penta what?”
“The pentatonic scale, it’s easy, I’ll show you.”
“Angel, I don’t want to cut into your time…”
“Nah man, for you, don’t worry about it.”
Angling the guitar so I could see, he put his index finger on a random fret, then showed me how, by alternating the index finger with your ring finger or pinky, you could play this whole blues scale with only two notes per string.
“Here, try it,” he said, and right there on his hard-won spot in Pike Place Market, he strapped his guitar over my shoulders and watched patiently until I did it myself.
“You got it,” he said.
Unhurried, he took his guitar from me and went back to playing his set, with however many minutes he had left. I watched a while longer, then went my way, transformed.
There’s something democratic today about how anyone, anytime, can go on YouTube, type pentatonic scale, and watch some influencer five states away show you how to do it. I’ve picked up a few things on the internet myself, I get it.
But old school transmission cannot be replaced. Knee-to-knee with someone who knows way more than you do, who years before sat learning the same thing from someone else.
I built on what I learned that day, experimented, figured out other patterns, made it my own. But the core of my understanding of blues scales remains what was transmitted that day on the street in Seattle, by a guy who sacrificed a precious chunk of much-needed income, because it was important to him to show it to me.
I met Angel at the Mars. And he lived up to his name.
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