Sweaty, grey and miniscule. It’s an unbeautiful jewel that glimmers to the psychedelic beats that tumble out of the speakers. It’s the baked ham and swiss centre for the drunk, stressed and hungry. Providence and Paris. It was a passionate rendez-vous in 1996 and boy, are we happy to have the crêperie. It’s what you want it to be. I’m going for lunch. I’m going for a hangover pick-me-up. I’m going for dessert. I’m going there to finish my problem set. I’m going for a date. Don’t tell my boyfriend.
***
And then, there’s Dave. Dave Public.
He huffs and he puffs. Blend, pour, chop, mix, sprinkle, ring ‘er up! Scoop, squeeze, scramble. Flip, sign, heat. Then it’s receipt, pen, change, lemon, egg, knife, carrot, cinnamon, feta, phone. 100% pineapple juice. He scuttles around in the L-shaped kitchen behind the smooth counter like “a young Santa Claus,” says Jess, a girl who works at the crêperie with short, black hair. The more I look at her, the more she reminds me of a grown up, fuller Jane Lane from the TV show “Daria.” Dave’s woolly beard clings onto his chin, follows him around like an obedient dog. He tells me, “It’s a shield of some sort,” and strokes it with his thumb and the side of his index finger. “I’ve had it for four or five years now and it doesn’t go away.” Jess, who is sprinkling some cheese onto a half made crêpe, peeks out of her jet-black mop to add, “And your girlfriend might leave you if you get it cut.”
***
“A Coke? Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry.” When I see Dave, hear him speak and interact with customers, I have this sudden desire to catch the next Amtrak to Penn Station, hail a cab to the Waverly Inn where the horn-rimmed and pocket-squared pack into after work, and convince caricaturist Robert Risko who, I assure you, will be there lapping up a cold gin and tonic, to draw a couple of sketches of this guy I know. His name is Dave. You’d love him. It’s quite difficult not to.
When I asked him who of the seven dwarfs he would be, Dave replied, “Grumpy with a smile on my face, or a kind of Grumpy-Doc fusion, Grumpy with a smirk. Or maybe Oscar the Grouch?” Jess was quick to retort, “You have cartoony eyebrows. You are a total muppet,” as if she were commenting on something as obvious as the weather.
I think Dave is the one who makes the crêperie the hangout so many students have come to love. According to the owner Leslie Albuquerque, who pronounces salt “saawwwt,” the crêperie has a “cult following”; college graduates come back for their crêpes, wraps and smoothies. Dave seems to maintain its popularity and keep the crêperie alive by spoon-feeding it ingredients, even when he doesn’t have shifts. He has a loyalty, an attachment to the crêperie, and has made it his second home. In an email, he wrote, “I’m actually off Wednesdays and Thursdays, though I usually stop by to drop off supplies and such, typically mid afternoonish.” He signs his emails “://dp” and they are always followed by “Sent from my iPod.”
***
He loves electronic music, “less techno, more left field. I’m very particular about all of it. I don’t like a lot of house-y music, but I like the ADD stuff, like the bastard child of music… but for spastic weirdos.” So imagine, this kind of music oozing out from the syrup bottle, dripping down with the squirming beats.
Today he is wearing a Nervous Gender T-shirt. At first, I didn’t know what that meant either. Nervous Gender is a band from L.A., “an openly gay punk band, actually.” The slight curve of Dave’s belly salutes me as he rattles on about Suffering Bastard, a grindcore band he has been in since 2006. “It’s hard-core punk metal taken to the extreme. We go crazy, but the songs are only thirty seconds to a minute long.” As soon as I get home that day, I go onto their Myspace page and find snippets of intense screaming and manic drumming. My favourite is their forty-nine second track “Fried Eggs,” although I have no idea what the lyrics are (if there are any). Suffering Bastard toured the Midwest, Chicago, St. Louis and the South. “It was the best… the people are kind down there, friendly. It’s a different sort of America.” Their music is a well thought-out tornado of gargling, growling, rumble rumble, topped with a tight, long streak of electric guitar. I was blown away. To me, it was the exploding I-can’t-take-it-anymore temper of a shaggy-haired boy venting all teenage anxiety on a set of drums, suffocating in a house he shares with his very nuclear family.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Isn’t this Dave that I am referring to? He tells me, that as a toddler he was “loud, germaphobic, paranoid, and nervous.” After a moment of consideration he says, “That’s actually pretty similar to now.” Jess pops in again and asks him, “Are you being facetious? You are quite the talker, you…” He has been playing the drums since he was nine, so it doesn’t surprise me that by eighth grade, he had long hair, wore flannel and band t-shirts. “I played a lot with my friends. We were teenage kids doing a lot of drugs.” Back then, he even owned a Nirvana towel. “It was a grunge thing,” he tells me. I look up to find a toothy smile of a boy plastered onto Dave’s face.
***
There are many things that make Dave loveable. If I told you that he smokes, perhaps you would be surprised. What if I told you that he smokes socially, never in the house, almost always in the car? I don’t know what you would get out of this, but I felt a smile invading the continent of my face when he told me that he smoked Camel Ultra Lights. Camel Ultra Lights! Remember, this is young Santa we’re speaking of, or Oskar the Grouch. Shaggy green hair, a bold uni-brow, and a voice that belongs to Michael Corleone in The Godfather. I imagined Dave puffing away at a harsh Marlboro Red, but then I had to remind myself, this is sweet, fidgety Dave who gives out free crêpes and smoothies to ex-crêperie staff (and twice, to me too).