Neon Memories

Continued adventures of a young writer determined to make an ass of himself

In the spirit of something or other a couple of nights ago, I pulled down my copy of Matt Cohen’s story collection Cafe le Dog. I needed something to distract my mind from the delirium of day time book writing thoughts. Last night, I read the story “Life on This Planet,” about a would-be freelance writer in Toronto and his friend Brandt, a middle-European piano player and romantic. Brandt plays piano nights at a restaurant called the Neon Cellar Room, described in the story as “a cheap emigre restaurant on Bloor Street,” where he meets Claire Boisvert, the story’s love interest. Brandt will go around spouting inanities like “I never read books about love. Love must come en direct, from the heart.” I recognized the Neon Cellar Room instantly as the Blue Cellar Room, a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street, a Toronto institution for impoverished would-be writers, one of my mainstays (great goulash, I recommend it—or not, the place doesn’t exist any more) in years gone by.

The Toronto Star food critic Susan Sampson remembered it this way. Not quite as inviting as in my recollection.

At eateries like the Blue Cellar Room, impoverished students downed massive quantities of egg noodles with cottage cheese, bacon bits and drippings, at bargain basement prices. Carnivorous couples with cash could order a festive wooden platter and get change from a $20.

The tower of fried schnitzel, bacon, sausage, pork chop and chicken livers came with rice, potatoes and salad. The platter for one served two, of course.

I was living in an attic apartment on Westmoreland Avenue, running a hundred miles a week with the Toronto Olympic Club, and rewriting a truly terrible novel called Vukovitch. Decades later, I burned all the pages, drafts, and notes in the backyard at the farm, with my ancient mother warming herself at the flames and occasionally interjecting, “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” But at the time, I was stressed to the max with my sense of irrevocable failure. Yet, like a gambler on a losing streak, I insisted on doubling my bets (two years of my life went down the drain with that novel). A friend came for a visit. Abruptly, after two days, she departed; just being in the same room with me, she said, gave her stomach cramps. (No wonder I wasn’t getting any dates.)

I remember being bored (boredom is a powerful and underrated human motivator, responsible for all sorts of trouble in my experience). In those days, the Globe and Mail ran companions ads. One caught my attention. Not your run of the mill companion seeker, this woman wanted specifically to meet an “intelligent” man, someone, I thought, just like me. I wrote a response, then she wrote back, then we arranged a phone call (letters written on pieces of paper; real telephones connected by wires—many of you probably don’t remember such things). We agreed to meet for coffee to break the ice. Some time during the day so as not to imply an actual date. I suggested the Blue Cellar Room as safe and public. So next Saturday afternoon just after lunch, we met.

She was a compact, nervous blonde. Nothing suggested that I was at the edge of a vortex. As she began to reveal herself, I could only sit back in wonder. I quickly learned that her main source of income was a parttime job helping to edit a small Toronto singles magazine. She lived in a singles building. And her mother, who also happened to be single, lived in the apartment across the hall. The word “single” kept looping back with an obsessive regularity, as if it were a stigma that might be expunged by facing it with bravado, though in the end it seemed she had all but immured herself in a fortress of singledom. She did not seem to be able to talk about anything else. I kept peeking at my watch, plotting a courteous exit, when she happened to mention that her mother had come to our meetup.

“Where?” I asked, looking over the nearby tables with some alarm. Then, always (sometimes) the gentleman, “She should come and sit with us.”

“No, no. She’s outside. Waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“She didn’t want to intrude, but she wants to meet you.”

At that moment, it was I who felt like an intruder, a voyeur peering in at a private psycho-sexual melodrama. I felt secondhand embarrassment. I felt pity. I felt, yes, that being single myself a while longer might be a good plan, only I wouldn’t talk about it. Ever.

We went out. The sun outside the darkened restaurant was harsh and blinding. The sidewalk seemed crowded, but the young woman quickly located her mother, another compact, nervous blonde, slimmer, more compact and more nervous than her daughter. Only she was dressed more expressively. I recall a white summer dress cinched tight at her waist and a flamboyantly blue scarf around her throat. She was dragging a little two-wheeled mesh shopping cart at her heels. She had been patrolling in front of the restaurant door. Quick little strides. I shook her hand. We parted, the romantic possibilities of companions ads and the Blue Cellar Room sadly diminished.

I heard Matt Cohen himself read the title story of Cafe le Dog some years later, in 1983, when he stopped in Albany for a reading, courtesy of the New York State Writers Institute and the Canadian Consulate in New York. I was living in Saratoga Springs, drove down with Bob Miner, a great writer friend (check out his novel Mother’s Day). Only a dozen or so people showed up for the reading, but the Canadian Consulate in New York had contributed enough bottles of wine for 80. They were piled behind the reception drinks table like stacks of artillery shells. Bob, Matt, and I had a couple of glasses while the crowd thinned out, leaving us alone with the artillery shells.

We quickly agreed, Canadian patriots that we were (Matt and I, anyway), that we needed to drink as much of the Canadian Consulate’s wine as possible so as not to disappoint the staff in New York. Appearances needed to be kept up. At some point we adjourned to one of those ancient, smoky, mahogany paneled Albany bars where it seemed we might just camp out until spring. I remember spilling into the street much later, having some difficulty with my legs. Brilliant streetlamps, fresh snow falling in dense flakes, bracing air, projectile vomiting between parked cars. Three Musketeers. A great moment in Canadian literary history.