I don’t know when the story starts, how long it was there, the name ATOMIC CAFE whispers the dreams of a bygone era that became loathed for its relationship to conformity and aggression. It was not the atomic age when I walked in the door – young and eager and knowing it was the place that cool people hung out at and of course, everyone who doesn’t conform in America seeks to be cool.
The first night there two of the Ramones are sitting in a booth nearby and the adrenaline of being that close to something that central to culture and consciousness – it was intoxicating. We told people we were there when Joey and Marky were there and nobody believed us, nobody. And I was like “Dude I have bullshitted you with a hundred fantastic exaggerations that you believed and now you won’t accept the simple fact of a coincidence in a known rock and roll hangout befuddles me.”
So you don’t have to believe me but believe this – part of me emerged that night. Part of a belief in myself was berthed from the sheer dumb luck of being two booths over in an already wild scene corralled into that brick and mortar square. I took that night with me wherever I went – part of me crawled out from the cocoon of a suburban kid who had been so sheltered that the idea of being someone or something never went past being an idea and suddenly I was as validated as I might ever feel just for having walked in a door and grabbed a table.
The menu was baby boom delight and I settled on the white bread chicken salad sandwich that night and I probably went there a hundred times and I don’t think I ever ordered anything else. Over the years I grew up there a little. The old Japanese chef got his heroin delivered at four PM on weekday afternoons and if you ordered by 3:30 you got your food and he went and shot up and was high and nobody got served until after five, so I paid for less than half of those meals. If you ordered and he shot up, though, good luck starving until someone else arrived. The food was straight form a multicultural suburban atomic era but the things I saw there pushed that Americana of my youth further in the rear view mirror than mere time ever could have.
We all blossom somewhere and I became me in Downtown Los Angeles and the corner of First and Alameda in a brick building on a parking lot that the Manley family of Pasadena had owned since the 1890s was one of the places where the light clicked on for me. A strung out chef filling my belly, the figures of the whole revolution hanging out two booths away, a wild cast of semi-regulars and a juke box, oh what a jukebox…
The jukebox was the greatest jukebox in history and if I made a list of my ten regrets in life in the top five would be not simply taking a picture of the display – assembling that on iTunes as a playlist would be all the music I would ever need. Do you have one? Look out get out of my way, let me see it.
They tore that building down on the last week of January, 2015, 125 years after they had cemented the bricks together there, all the oil sucked dry out of what became the parking lot leased by Manley Oil. Its all disappearing and the memories are all really starting to fade and so I have to write them down but it gets repetitive to say we went out drinking and it was fun and then we went out drinking and it was fun and then… so the memories themselves are just little bricks and the bricks can form a building and when that building gets torn down you write abut the building itself and the time a girl threw a drink in your face and stomped out and the time that Richard Duardo told you a story about eating there with Basquiat a year after the painter had died and the memory of that one guy everyone on the scene knew who, the guy who played saxophone well he just stood next to the jukebox and played along with each song that came up and he knew them all and it sounded great and everyone cheered him on and you left without paying for your drinks and when you felt guilty and went back to pay they didn’t even know and it was loud and so you ordered another drink and left without paying of r it either , all those memories and a thousand more just get cemented on top of each other and soon each memory is a just a fragment of a shelter you have built in your ind and now, well that shelter is all that is left, a memory. And so you write it down. Gimme shelter.