Halfway to the Starbucks in Groton, my friend and I decided to go to Bean & Leaf instead. Though not hugely concerned with the growth of multinational corporations myself, I occasionally enjoy a less cut-and-paste coffee experience. I just had forty minutes to kill before a College Voice meeting.
Believing Bean & Leaf would be an in-and-out affair was my first mistake.
Our conversation petered as we walked through the door, interrupted by the heavily-flyered wall straight ahead. Gallery Opening 31st Annual Show Ocean Avenue Bank Street New Location One Night Only! – the blur of New London culture. I stomped the slush off my boots, and, continuing inside, I heard a low voice and a drumbeat from the far end of the room. A look to my left confirmed my suspicion – it was an open-mic poetry reading.
“It’ll be over soon,” a girl said apologetically from behind the counter.
My face must have said it: Oh, God. Poetry.
“No, no worries,” I said, waving it away.
“Can I get you something to go?”
“Uhm, no, for here.” My second mistake. In that instant, I thought not taking my coffee far, far away from this poetry reading would make me seem less…something – less judgmental, less stuck-up, less ConnColl. “Could I just have a small Americano?”
I walked to the other end of the coffee bar, in the direction of the stage. The poetry reading had, perhaps accidentally, filled every table in the room. The audience was a mix of New Londoners, half of them looking either genuinely homeless or affectedly so, and the other half on their laptops, taking up as much surface area as possible on tables and countertops with notebooks, power adapters, and dirty plates from sandwiches bought to legitimate such gluttonous consumption of space. Worse than stumbling into a poetry reading is stumbling in with nowhere to sit.
From the stage, “I’d like to read part of my favorite book.” The man reading looked inexplicably like a cartoon of a sailor, or of a gondolier – one who’d long since retired, perhaps, but couldn’t bear to part with his striped shirt. He read a passage about a statue from a Russian novel. I’ve forgotten its title.
Our coffees arrived at the end of the bar, where we were busy trying to lean casually. I still had twenty minutes before my meeting, and I felt responsible for our now ten- to fifteen-minute commitment to stay while we drank our coffees. It was now clear: the potential callousness of leaving, drink in hand, paled in comparison to the callousness of staring expressionlessly at poet after poet.
The act changed, and the couple in front of the stage picked up their jackets and left. A scruffy man in a red plaid shirt walked up to the microphone.
This is an experience, I told myself. I looked at my friend and we walked quietly to the open seats in the front row.
The man in plaid carried two large, black, bound notebooks in which he’d been hurriedly scribbling for the duration of the previous reading.
“This is a poem about writing a love song when you don’t love nobody,” he began. What followed was a string of roughly twelve couplets ending in -ain and -ove. He delivered each line as though he were reading it for the first time – deliberately, with careful, syllabic enunciation. They came out like the words of a song, the tune to which he’d deemed superfluous.
From my new seat, I looked at the rest of the audience. A middle-aged couple in big glasses sat on one of the couches, nodding along; a boy rocked in his seat and waved his hand in the air as though conducting a piece of music, embodying all its mute crescendos. In one of the deep, U-shaped booths behind me sat five or six girls – messy buns in their hair, big scarves around their necks, headphones in their ears. Conn girls, I knew at a glance. “I Am a Tree” was next from the man in plaid.
“I am a tree / and I have wood.” An extended sexual metaphor. “And I have wood.” The smile on his face was perversely endearing, like that of the boy in the front row who can see up the teacher’s skirt.
One of the girls took off her headphones and leaned over to say something to another girl, who paused her iPod and looked up from her reading. We were all there, in New London, in Bean & Leaf, drinking organic coffee, but none of us were doing the same thing.
Local artists were reading to anyone listening; Conn girls were doing their homework and feeling like world-savers and organic types for braving the streets of NewLo, State and Bank. I found myself pleasantly surprised by the work of people I’d assumed were crazy, or homeless, or both. My third mistake, apparently.
From the stage, “Both alone / and both afraid / but either way / they both get laid.”
We have a sense that when we leave campus we’re doing something noble, that “experiencing” downtown is our noblesse oblige. In Bean & Leaf, with six friends and headphones, you might as well be in the basement of the library – or, for that matter, at Starbucks.
In New London, it seems we’re rarely quite where we are – being seen and not being. “We went to Bean & Leaf to study.” What did you see? What did you hear?
“I am a tree / and I have wood.” The man in plaid took a self-conscious bow. My friend and I lifted our coats off the backs of our chairs, returned our mugs, and walked out the door. I’m glad we stayed.
