I have been asking questions and am beginning to understand Coffee Kusuko. He has a chain of coffee houses as long as Smith’s chain of pharmacy-post-office-street-car-station-patent-medicine-confectionery-cigar-stand-and-soda-fountain establishments. Kusuko has made the black demi-tasse the special Springfield vice and there are no deeper addicts than those who fight him politically.
People feel quite sure his drink contains some more sinister ingredient from the Malay peninsula. And he it is who sees to it that all the business offices are equipped with coffee urns that whistle through the late afternoon:—the custom of mixing business and coffee having originated with his great great grandmother, a famous local stenographer, who in the end became lady mayor, through her stenographers’ guild. Politics and coffee are hereditary with Kusuko.
In the legitimate organization which ministers to this drinking habit, Kusuko has concealed his henchmen, who bring him all needed information and carry abroad all necessary orders. And they have a considerable opportunity to serve him. Drinking begins in the offices at 4.30 P. M. and in the more fastidious business groups with many forms, till it is near to resembling the Japanese tea-ceremony. Stenographers, some austere and some luxurious, mingle with women political leaders, such as Orator Carrie Moore, Portia, the Singing Aviator, and others. These help materially to make up the sum of grace and bedevilment of the business and political day. A little later people who are still restless and do not want to go home drift off toward the motion picture houses, or the drug stores or the coffee houses of Kusuko.
As to the coffee houses, I make my tours through many and find these places extraordinarily varied in design, though the same general average of a crowd is in most of them. There is a Chinese-looking place called: “The Opium Fish.” There is a place hung with copies of Velasques, Goya, Sorolla, and others, called: “The Spanish Gypsy.” This is a place quieter than most. Then there is a kind of a Jazz emporium with copper and brass decorations, called “The Whing Whang Tree.” There are two other places that specialize in chop suey, called: “The Mock Duck” and “The Fire Cracker King” and then I loaf in “The Pig and the Goose,” and “The Sword of the Skallawag,” etc. In these last two on slightly raised platforms the Malay storytellers sit cross-legged. They unroll the beautiful ensnaring legends of the Malay peninsula and the islands around it. These storytellers appear occasionally in some of the other coffee houses, also, along with negro singers, etc.
And now comes Kusuko’s last touch, where he has completely replaced the old political functions of the American saloon, as an acceptable harness for the social brigands. There is always some allusion in the coffee houses, some implication, that the next real thing to do will be dancing, later in the evening, in wonderful Yellow Dance Halls. These are also owned by Kusuko and are the very keystone of his system. I follow the drifting tide of jolly good fellows several evenings and it leads me inevitably to the halls before midnight.
They are never too near the coffee houses and soda fountains and never too far away. There is nothing on the surface to make one apprehensive in the halls, except some very daring social dancing. There is often a motion picture show for part of the evening just off the lounging hallway and place of promenade. The crowd is not much below the average of the regular Fifth and Monroe crowd of all kinds of people.
April 20:—I attend this evening, at the invitation of two prospective art students, a session of the Board of Education. They explain the session to me, while we sit in the gallery and look down upon the general tempestuousness.
Boone is not only the presiding officer but has the impression that he is the whole Board of Education. Despite this they are fond of him on the board, but row with him till the men cuss before the ladies in desperate efforts to hold him down, and keep him down, and prevent his bullying the whole assembly out of existence. He insults everybody mercilessly and wags his black beard at them till they quail and quake.
It is a joy, a sorrow, an amazement, and a wonder to me to see people who look so much like the old Prognosticator’s Club, fighting away, and when I meet them all at the end of the verbal war none of them see me except as a casual bystander.
April 21:—I have had a jolly evening at Tom Strong’s with my beloved Rabbi. Boone is our inevitable theme in the end. The Rabbi, as we drink the black coffee and eat the salt mackerel, confirms my tentative remark that Boone, as president of the Board of Education, enforces its edicts, though few of the decrees are those into which from the standpoint of strategy, or even conviction, he can put his private heart. But, the Rabbi points out, they are all clubs with which Boone can pound the Mayor’s majority in the city commission and he backs the board’s edicts, every one, in The Boone Ax, and ever so often forces something through the council.