Where Memories Hum

Actwerks Café is gone now. It disappeared with the nineties, as did so many other things.

The space where it buzzed for a time on East Hampshire Street in Milwaukee now houses a Sicilian restaurant. The locals love it. But COVID-19 is devastating small gathering places, changing the way we interact with friends and strangers alike. They’ve had to reduce staff and add curbside pickup to stay in business. Now, its TripAdvisor listing includes “socially distanced tables” and “regular temperature checks for staff” along with the usual notes assuring vegetarian and gluten-free options.

Actwerks might not have survived COVID. Even without the challenge of a global pandemic, it existed only a few years, succumbing to what one local reporter saw as a struggle with “identity.” But I don’t buy that. To me the identity was multifaceted, multi-faced. The identity of that café was its patrons, the bevy of sprits that Barb, the owner, once referred to as “our Actwerks family.”

The identity was solid.

From 1993 through 1995, I spent practically every day in that bustling, local-art-bedecked space: writing; keeping a detailed journal; reading thousands of pages of American labor and social history; thinking deeply, sometimes superficially; meeting people or just being around them; eating chicken salad sandwiches on twelve-grain bread and drinking gallons of coffee.

It was a good place to work. I like the steady, incomprehensible hum of a roomful of voices. It’s an easy rhythm I can settle into and study for hours, which I did, day after day. But other times, Actwerks could be a haven for procrastination, a place where I might, if only for an hour or two, put off facing some ever-pressing grad school responsibility—something which, in my burning-out state at the time, I referred to as the “tyranny of ‘should.’” A journal entry from January 1995 shows that I’d planted myself there one afternoon because I was “sick of sitting around the apartment thinking about deciding to think about” an upcoming research paper topic. So instead I sat by the front window at Actwerks, “writing about thinking about deciding to think about” one.

Well, at least I was writing.

Most of us were connected in one way or another with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, not even half a block away. Being that close to campus, table space often came at a premium during lunchtime, so it was wise to claim your spot in the morning and stay until your classes met, which for me was typically later in the day.

They hosted live music sometimes, typically open mics, in a snug corner of the slightly elevated smoking area. It that corner was also a timeworn but pleasantly tuned upright piano; and once in a while, at mid-day, Peggy would get up and play from her repertoire. She was accomplished, classically trained. I suspect she might have been in a graduate program, like me. We were similar in age: early thirties. Peggy was a beautiful soul, positive in so many ways but also obviously anorexic, her cachectic features accentuated by the tight ponytail she always wore. She made no secret of her self-inflicted starvation either, and her nonchalance could be at once disarming and disturbing.

After one performance she came down to sit with a group of us admirers and quipped: “What a paradox: me playing to a lunch crowd.”

My favorite tune was her rendition of Chopin’s “Fantasy Impromptu.” Unlike so many other pianists—and possibly Chopin himself—Peggy deliberately slowed and evened out the tempo of the middle section, which for me rendered it more heartfelt, moving. Today, I can no longer hear a recording of that passage without thinking of her, and how she would have played it more to my liking, her thin, nimble fingers dancing atop the keys.

Barb, the café owner and de facto master of ceremonies, was still something of a hippie, embodying the Aquarian ethic of peace and good vibes. Through her we made the connections we otherwise would never have. One afternoon, Barb hosted a “psychic tea” at Actwerks. The tables in the smoking section were occupied that day by seers from all over Milwaukee. The rest of us waited below for our turn. I wound up getting a reading from Charon—pronounced like “Sharon.”

Before beginning, Charon lit a cigarette, and I recall being surprised that a clairvoyant would take up a habit that promised so bleak a future. But I cast aside my doubts and paid up, and the session did reveal some intriguing insights and forecasts, including the prediction that, for me, a critical romance was imminent. My future love was to be a “worldly” person, Charon prophesied, dark-haired and beautiful in an exotic way. She also would bear a distinguishing feature by which I would immediately recognize her: a slight abnormality around the left eye—perhaps a small, surgical scar—which she concealed by shadowing the spot with her long hair.

After twenty-five years, I must confess that no such meetup occurred. But for a while, I did find myself scrutinizing the left eye of every exotic brunette I saw. Belated apologies to anyone I may have creeped out.

Barb’s son, Jeff, worked behind the counter, and they were about as dissimilar as two generations of blood relatives could be. Twenty-eight years-old in 1994, Jeff was the anti-hippie, exuding an overabundance of Gen-X cynicism and disillusionment. His shaved head and tattoos enforced the image, and I remember spying at least one Swastika amid the colorful, off-putting displays on his flesh. Jeff’s persona wasn’t just for show, either. He backed it up with action when prompted, like the day when a stranger grabbed the tip jar and ran out of the place. We all gaped as Jeff chased after the guy, body-checked him into the side of a dumpster, and relieved the dazed, would-be crook of the loot.

I don’t know of anyone else at Actwerks who would have done that, least of all me.

Still, like most tough guys, he had a gentler side which I suspect he concealed from all but a few. For some reason he seemed to like me; he always scooped in extra pineapple whenever I ordered the fruit plate. A nice enough gesture, yes, but the odd thing is I’d never once asked him to do so. He just assumed I liked pineapple—probably in the same way that he did. Turns out he was right, and to this day I can still picture him passing my table with a knowing wink and an all-too-rare smile.

“Good stuff ain’t it?” he’d say.

It was for this reason (and many more equally subtle ones) that I was shaken, though not surprised, when I walked in one day in early March, 1994, to discover that Jeff had come home from the taverns the night before, drunk and despairing, and had hanged himself. Months later, Barb shared that the police had tried to reassure her that her son’s end probably came quickly because, of all things, Jeff clearly knew the proper way to tie a knot.

“Always the Boy Scout,” she remarked with a smile, her gaze falling not on me but rather through me, reflecting the memory of a child long ago finding a special kind of peace with his crafts.

***

So many more lives intersected with mine during that brief span of grad school, and so often at Actwerks. I recall the English girl who spent time there, who was probably in Milwaukee on a student visa. She’d become pregnant and was already showing by the time I met her. We talked about her pregnancy on one occasion, though I didn’t really know her well enough to discuss something so personal. But then again, Actwerks was that sort of place. At one point in the conversation, she made a memorable comment regarding the father, who was still in her life.

Shaking her head resolutely, she insisted: “I shall not marry him out of convenience,” which I still consider to be a fabulous line. With her crisp British delivery, it sounded like somebody on “Masterpiece Theatre” or a character from literature.

And speaking of literature, there was Jen, the poet. She worked behind the counter part-time, and otherwise studied English at the university. It was with her encouragement that I dusted off and revised some abandoned short stories from my undergraduate years, and even penned a number of new poems. Jen organized a writers’ group comprised of some of her fellow English majors and me, the elder outsider. Richard, a charismatic but pompous poet, was the star of the group—which in this case meant that he had actually been published. One night, after I shared some of my new poems, Richard savaged my work and even demanded to know whether I had actually read any poetry.

I left the meeting crushed. But he wasn’t far off the mark. The truth was that I knew nothing about poetics, but his scathing review prompted me to read and learn more about it.

Jen and I grew to be friends in those days. Still, ours was a transitory friendship typical of college life. It had a logical, inevitable endpoint. I was at least happy to have been around long enough to see her get some pieces published—not that I never expected it would happen for her. Even Richard could never accuse Jen of not knowing poetics. A few days before I finally moved away from Milwaukee in the summer of 1995, bound for Sault Ste. Marie and a temporary job as a project archivist, Jen and I met once more for coffee. She called me a “rememberer” then, which is probably as close as anyone has ever come to nailing with words the essence of who I am. And toward the end of our visit, she looked at me with a prescience that overshot her years and remarked: “I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

Now that is a poet: so much human understanding packed into one sentence. I’ll never forget it, or her.

Actwerks Café was the perfect setting, indeed the only setting, for all of these encounters. It is where the energy happened to be at that particular point in time. But don’t we all have spaces like this—physical locations from emotionally-charged times where, much later, so many of our memories still reverberate? It might be a fifth-grade homeroom, or the neighborhood in Paris where you lived during your semester abroad. Perhaps it’s an old converted school bus on route to a Rainbow Gathering, or a Navy aircraft carrier at sea. To be sure, some of us wind up with dozens of mnemonic hot spots. As I get older, I’m discovering more and more of my own. Over the course of time, the evocative powers of some of these diminish, while others come to the fore in ways that surprise and inform. This, I think, is inevitable.

But a quarter century and countless life experiences later, Actwerks Café still hums for me. There must be additional things to learn there, experiences to recapture as I warm within the memory of its confines—which to my mind’s eye now assumes the muted quality of a dreamscape more than it does a solid, physical feature. Maybe there is some lost conversation I need to play back, a point someone made that merits reiteration. Perhaps it’s time to reach out and reestablish bonds with one or more of the people I knew then. Especially now, when the existential disruption brought on by quarantine and enforced distancing reminds us daily of the cruciality, the healing necessity, of human contact—even if that contact is virtually achieved through Facebook or Zoom, which in the end is in no way the same.

***

After Jeff died, I’d stayed away from Actwerks for a time. I’ll be honest: I was a coward. I did not want to see Barb, to witness her grief. I had a child of my own, a son who came down from La Crosse to Milwaukee to stay with me every other weekend. I could not imagine losing him in any way, much less the manner in which Barb had lost Jeff. Somewhere deep within me, I knew that seeing her would put me closer to facing what that would be like.

So I stayed in my apartment, leaving only to attend class or my work-study job in the archives. Maybe I’d drive to a restaurant in the suburbs some nights, or just walk to one of the many small establishments near campus. But alone. Anonymous.

And for better than a month, I avoided Actwerks.

One day, while driving, I turned onto East Hampshire Avenue just to get a glimpse of the place. There, on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, stood Barb. My heart raced. I wanted to look away and keep driving, but she had seen me and waved. I stopped, shifted into park in the middle of the street, and got out.

“I’m so sorry,” I said as we embraced. “My god, I’m sorry.”

I felt her warmth, her weight of sadness. We cried together, participated together, and a new calm washed over me. I’d paid the price of readmission to the human family. A bargain, really.