THE WHOLE DONUT (Holyoke) A handwritten sign on the door says “CASH ONLY.” Taped to the counter, another sign says “CASH ONLY,” and on the cash register, there is a helpful and informative sign announcing “CASH ONLY.” A group of loud young-people-I-immediately-dislike barge through the door, all wearing green. High school? College? I can’t even tell anymore. I could give a shit. The boys speak with exaggerated New England accents, really hamming it the fuck up, in my eastern Mass opinion. “Kenwe youse yaw bathrum?” “Dooya godda buya doh-nut?” One of the guys waits with a girl by the counter while their friends pee and poop without buying doh-nuts. “We met last night,” the girl says to him. “Do you remember my name?” He does not. Haddaya like them apples. I order a small black coffee and a jelly stick. Well, the little sign in the glass case says they’re called Jellystix, but I’m not sure if that’s singular or plural. I get jelly all over my notebook, which is okay, because it’s a cheap thing from Staples. “Hi, Colleeeeeeeen!” a man coos at the counter woman as he pushes through the door. In one breath, he says “You wallpapered. I got laid off. Fuckin’ assholes.” Colleeeeeeen says nothing. There’s no music playing, so aside from the refrigerator case, all I can hear is my notebook grinding sugar granules into the tabletop. Outside, there are cops milling around at intersections, and I begin to notice more people wearing more green clothes. Irish pride shit. I realize I’ve accidentally stumbled into a road race, The Holyoke St. Patrick’s 5K. Engine 5 pulls into the Whole Donut lot as crowds form along the street, waiting to watch other people run past, which is a thing people do, I guess. The one goddamned day I drive into goddamned Holyoke for a goddamned donut and coffee, and I’ve placed myself directly on a goddamned race course. Ugh. My car’s going to get blocked in this parking lot and I’ll be trapped in a shamrock-infested hellscape for hours. Fuck this. I scrawl a number on my shirt with the remains of my Jellystix and sprint out the door. The crowd cheers me as I pass. “CASH ONLY!” they chant. “CASH ONLY!” I run, arms spread, flipping off both sides of the street at the same time. It only makes them cheer more. I run and I run, to a place where the weekend leprechauns can’t catch me, to a place where I can be free.

Freedom Cafe (Amherst)

I slowly run the gauntlet of North Pleasant Street, rolling through the heart of the UMASS Amherst campus on a rainy and gray Wednesday afternoon. Terrible visibility, five hundred crosswalks, and two thousand drenched twenty-somethings who don’t look up when they cross and walk on the five hundred crosswalks.

I park in the squishy driveway of The Freedom Cafe, a student activist-run cafe on the far edge of campus. Their Facebook page describes their fundraising efforts to fight slavery & human trafficking. What their Facebook page *doesn’t* describe is the cafe itself, which is not a cafe. It’s a walk-up counter. I jog in out of the rain, dripping wet, muddy shoes, laptop bag and to-do list in tow. No place to sit. I find myself somewhere on the spectrum between bummed out and annoyed. But the workers are nice, earnest volunteer kids, so I don’t want to be all WHADDAYA MEAN NO GODDAMNED TABLES AND CHAIRS. No one wants to hear me break down the meaning of the word “cafe” and all that it implies to the consumer. No one. So I order a cup of pour-over to-go, because honestly it seems too awkward to just turn around and leave. I listen to the slavery spiel (sex trafficking in India), and I’m encouraged to donate what I want in exchange for the coffee, by putting money in a jar and taking whatever change I want. I really hate that sort of transaction, so I just throw in a five. The pour-over is meticulously pored over. The pouring takes a supernaturally long time. I mean, wow. One stilted conversation later, I’m drinking a $5 cup of coffee in my Ford Focus, three towns away from home, wet, and still in possession of work that needs doing. The coffee, it turns out, is really good. I sit and listen to the rain hitting the car roof. It’s a sound I love, a sound that almost makes the trip worth it, aside from the fact that I could have made a coffee in my kitchen in half the time and then sat in my car in my driveway. I start the engine. I guess I need to go get a cup of coffee somewhere?

ADAMS DONUT (Greenfield) I want to drive to Greenfield and get some donuts. In my driveway, my car’s hatchback hits me on the head. The metal latch part - BAM - right on the base of my skull. Knocks my hat clear off and I almost fall over. The last time I drove to Greenfield I also hit my head on my hatchback door. I blame either the car or Greenfield, as long as I don’t have to accept any personal responsibility in the matter.

I drive up 91 and make it to Adams Donuts while they still have donuts. This is a momentous occasion for me. It’s about a half hour drive for me, and I have historically arrived too late in the morning, when they’ve sold out of donuts for the day. I order a jelly stick and a sugar thing and a coffee. They are all damn fine. I don’t think it’s the head injury talking. The circular counter is full of old townies and I don’t want to intrude upon that, so I sit in the corner and eavesdrop, as is my wont. Old dudes complain about dry waffles, bemoan the death of the newspaper industry, and retell jokes they heard on the radio. There is a conversation about grade school—nuns hitting kids with rulers, bus drivers throwing kids off buses and actually fighting them on the side of the road. You know, the good old days. In a politeness showdown, two older ladies disagree about who should get into line first. One guy insists that Adams Donuts should be the setting of a sitcom. “Someone should call Seinfeld!” he says. “There’d be tour buses coming by all the time, like Cheers!” He is really excited about this idea. Where did my donuts go? Whoops. They got et. I order two more: apple cider and jelly. I’m really glad I didn’t put any sugar in my coffee, because I am inserting plenty into my mouth hole via fried dough. The jelly donut is the freshest donut I’ve had in a long time. I think maybe this coffee isn’t so great after all, the more I drink it and the cooler it gets. But it’s all right. It is donut lube, nothing more. It has a job to do and it does it. Can you say the same?



SHELBURNE FALLS COFFEE ROASTERS (Easthampton) Headachy and under-caffeinated, I slouch into Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters after working outside on a New England afternoon that defines the word “blustery.” It’s the sort of cold where you hit your finger with a hammer, but don’t realize how bad it is until you get inside and warm up. So anyway, my finger hurts. I’m fiddling with installing updates on my temperamental laptop, an HP that is showing its age. I know all you Mac people are scoffing at me. I know, I know. Your magic-machines do everything right all the time and never fail and poop liquid gold into your mouths. I get it. We get it. Everyone gets it.

I order a bagel sandwich, and I like it just fine. The coffee is just fine, too. This place, in general, is just fine. It inspires me to go elsewhere when possible, but I never really mind it if I end up here. The back room, which I didn’t realize existed for many years, is a pleasantly dark sitting area. Crappy second hand furniture on a wildly uneven floor. Up front is sunny, lacking many table options. I write while progress bars fill in. I realize two things about the name of this place: 1. I usually forget to include the word “Falls” when I say the name, and 2. I apparently have no idea how to spell “Shelburne.” I keep leaning towards “Shelbourne” (as in “Identity”) while my computer wants to auto-correct it to “Burnisher.” A woman in too-high high heels waits for her coffee order. She seems 22% unsure of her balance, and sounds like a small colt as she clops across the interlocking wood-esque floor panels. A singer/songwriter guy plays on the stereo, and I wish I knew who he was so I could avoid him for the rest of my life. It sounds like he picked up a guitar for the first time ever in the recording studio, and the producer captured his inaugural attempt at forming chords. A man walks in and can’t figure out where to stand to order. He asks if the coffee is just coffee-flavored. He makes a loud joke complaining about how everything is pumpkin-flavored, like we’re all audience members for his talk show monologue. Looks like we’ve got a real Leno here. I’m very pleased this place doesn’t smell like the SFCR location on King Street in Northampton, which reeks of vanilla to such a degree that I can’t physically enter the room. Or at least it did the last time I attempted to cross the threshold, which might’ve been a decade ago. I don’t like the smell of vanilla. I don’t like candy stores or candle stores, either. If I ever commit suicide, I’ll probably do it at the Yankee Candle hellscape up in South Deerfield, which I imagine smells like all three things in overwhelming quantity. I’ll impale myself on a miniature New England village display or some shit.

SYLVESTER’S (Northampton) Sunday morning mob scene in the foyer. I excuse-me my way through the waiting crowd and make my way to the cafe side of the building. I order a coffee and a slice of maple apple upside down cake, because I read all of those words on a little card in the glass case, and combined, those words sound goddamned delicious. Sylvester’s is the former home of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker. Not the most earth-shattering thing to be known for, but here’s a restaurant named after him. They sell t-shirts with his face on ‘em, too. A designer added cartoon aviator sunglasses to an old etching of Sylvester. Isn’t that an odd thing to do to a dead man? I sit at one of the three comfy chairs arranged around a tiny little table. A couple sit with me while they wait for an adult-sized table. The wife is going away on a trip, and they’re discussing how the husband will eat. He suggests picking up a George Foreman Grill so he can make chicken. I’m assuming these people live in an American house with a functional kitchen filled with appliances and pans and so on, but apparently this grown human male thinks he needs to purchase an additional kitchen device, a device endorsed by a man who used to punch things for a living, to make things more convenient. “Mark, party of two?” the PA announces. There they go. If they don’t get that Foreman grill, she’ll come back from her trip and find Mark’s body in the garage, dead and bloated from trying to drink motor oil. If only he’d had a way to easily cook chicken! Godspeed, Mark. A little boy spins around in one of the chairs, being loud and bouncy and generally little-boyish. His mother hovers nearby, talking with someone, admonishing her son every twenty-three seconds or so. She points at me and says to him “Do you see this man? He’s reading. Could you be quieter, please?” I love being cast as an Angry Adult in someone else’s bullshit discipline lesson. The hell? She seems to really enjoy squashing the joy out of her boy. Ten straight minutes of

“Sit nicely.”

“Off the floor.”

“No spinning in the chair.”

“You’re getting up and down an awful lot.”

“Watch the table.”

He’s crying now. She seems very concerned about the room full of adults judging her as a mother, and not very concerned about how her boy is feeling. She seems like a real fucking asshole. I sit back in the stupid chair, in the stupid room full of stupid people, because now I’m in a bad mood, so everything is terrible. I pull out my sketchbook and start working on the logo for the restaurant that will someday be named after me. I draw my smiling corpse, wearing a noose and crouched on a surfboard. Two-For-One Tuesdays at Pappalardo’s Hang Ten Pizza Palace, coming in 2125. RADICAL!!!

MANHAN CAFE/BLISS

A trio of ladies play backgammon in the front window of Manhan Cafe. It’s early afternoon, the day after an ice storm. My glasses fog up when I walk into the place, but there’s no menu board to read and no one else to bump into, so I stand there wiping my lenses on my t-shirt while the owner guy watches silently from behind the register. I keep my earflap hat on because my hair is dirty and messed up. I ask the man if there are any bagels, since the counter display is empty. There are bagels, secret bagels, hidden behind the counter in a Tupperware container. I order a plain bagel and a coffee. According to a sign taped to the table I sit at, it is reserved for three people or more. Should that be ‘Three or more people’? Either way, I sit there. I’ve been casually trying to visit Manhan Cafe for three or four months now. Every time I walk by, they’re either closed, about to close, or in the progress of closing. After my first sip of coffee, I decide to never get coffee here again. I’ll come back and try the sandwiches, maybe. Maybe?

It’s pretty quiet, except for the white noise of a refrigerator compressor, backgammon dice, and an occasional car slushing down Cottage Street. A cheap Yamaha acoustic is perched on a guitar stand in the front corner. I swear it’s the exact beginner model as one I bought at Daddy’s Junky Music in Salem, New Hampshire in the ‘90s. Then I notice the PA amplifier next to it, which is almost the same exact cheapo Peavey PA as one I bought at Daddy’s Junky Music in Salem, New Hampshire in the ‘90s. This intersection of memory and reality causes me to float from my seat. The guitar is in my hands, and I find myself serenading the backgammon ladies with The Dead Milkmen’s “Beach Party Vietnam.” I am asked to leave before I get to shout “COS I DON’T HAVE ANY ARMS!” Once I’m outside, I dump my coffee on the sidewalk. I’m not a coffee snob (at least I don’t think so) and I’m cheap to boot, so this is not a choice I make lightly. Normally, I’d suffer through a bad cup of coffee. But not this one. I walk down Cottage Street to Bliss for a reliable cup of coffee that tastes exactly like coffee, which is a real plus in my book. I order from a woman who, every time I’ve interacted with her, seems like she has just received terrible news moments before. Bliss is always quiet, which worries me on a selfish level, because it’s the best cup of coffee closest to my house. I’m personally invested in this business succeeding. They have great sandwiches and chili and you should eat here but save me a seat and don’t hog the wifi. A rising tide lifts all cups.

I’m still wearing the earflap hat. Wearing a goofy-looking hat is a little out of my comfort zone. It’s like dancing, or wearing colored socks, or telling a waitress she made a mistake on my order. I prefer to fly under the radar, because I incorrectly assume there is radar and that someone is watching it and that it matters. I sigh a big sigh that means I’ve taken too long of a lunch break. On the walk home, I pass my brown coffee stain in the snow. “Fuck you,” I say.



DENNY’S (HOLYOKE) I’m not sure if I’ve ever set foot in a Denny’s during daylight hours, and if I have, it was twenty-plus years ago. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and I’ve just bought a scratch-and-dent refrigerator at the Sears outlet (for the record, a dent is worth approximately -$230). The Denny’s is in the same shopping plaza, an expanse of suicide-inducing cracked asphalt, so I figured why not.

I’m greeted by a claw machine full of stuffed animals by the entrance. More businesses need these. Original Grand Slam and a coffee. Both my fork and spoon have a bit of crusty shit on them. The food arrives unsettlingly quickly, the meat cool and the pancakes radiating heat like miniature suns. The sausages worry me and the fake maple syrup comforts me. When I finish my scrambled eggs, I remember that I’d ordered over easy. There’s a Marvel/Fantastic Four promotion happening. I could’ve gotten a Thing Burger. The waitress clears the dishes from the next booth, saying “Let me steal these from you” as she collects the plate and paper placemat from a chubby, pale, goateed gamer who has left his basement apartment for the first time in days to go to Denny’s, trust me on this one. The coffee mug lets you know that “A good diner has open doors, open arms and open hearts,” but apparently not Oxford commas. “Grandma! Drink your soda!” a teenage boy in the next booth demands from his grandmother. “Oh, that’s my soda. Ha ha!” She is diabetic, we all quickly learn. He reads the menu out loud to her, alternating personas: The Best Grandson Angel versus The Impatient Verbally Abusive Prick. “I can’t decide, Grammy!” He asks her to pick a number between one and ten. Whatever number she picks is the wrong one. “Aww, you suck!” he says in a friendly tone that isn’t all that friendly. “Now I have to order the Baja Quesadilla Burger!” He tells her to pick again, but she refuses. He gets mad, persistent, insistent, and she keeps refusing. “Pick again. Pick again.” This goes on for a full two or three minutes, this boy-man demanding she re-pick a number. She finally relents and quietly says “ten.” Whatever ten is, he doesn’t like it, and orders Zesty Nachos instead.



SILVER SPOON It’s never pleasant starting a day with a headache. It seems unfair and cruel to wake up bad, in the red. I drive over to The Silver Spoon, squinting the whole way, even though it’s sort of an overcast morning. I sit at the counter and I’m mercifully handed a cup of coffee. I order the Lumberjack breakfast, eggs and meats and homefries and pancakes, even though the Lumberjill is a bit smaller and I’m not super-starved or anything, but there are gender norms and expectations to conform to, people. Boys drink Buck Rogers and girls drink Shirley Temples. Everyone knows this. So I will force Jack down my throat. Hmm, what? This is the kind of place where I can’t tell who my waitress is. One young lady brings the coffee, another takes my order, another delivers it, another offers a refill. It’s not that I need to know, it’s just that I like to know who to bother in case I need to bother someone, even though I hate bothering anyone. Two old men sit facing each other in two adjacent booths. It’s hard to say whether they’re conversing or just making loud declarative statements towards each other. On the topic of the Vietnam war, one guy says “I don’t know about anyone else, but I had a good time over there.” My notebook is covered with egg yolk and syrup, but it’s okay by me. I watch the girl at the grill, deftly slipping the spatula under some over-easy eggs and flipping. No broke yolks here. Clean, professional, a practiced flip. When I flip an over-easy egg, it’s like a crime scene from Dexter, with Detectives Bunk and McNulty shaking their heads in disgust and muttering “Fuck fuck fuck.” Christ, these homefries are great, really. I eat my Lumberjack, every bite. WHO’S A BIG BOY!

FLORENCE PIE BAR Pie bar. Two words, one syllable each, three letters each. Pie bar. Is there a more wonderful, perfectly-balanced combination of words to be had? So pure. So simple. So pie. So bar. I visit on a Thursday afternoon. I order a slice and a mug from a city councilor and sit at a counter seat. This is the sort of business that has its shit together right off the bat. Like The Quarters in Hadley, these folks opened with a clear identity, a clear goal, and they’ve given people something they want in a room worth sitting in. My first visit to the pie bar and I want to buy a mug. That there is good business-makin’!

Customers happily wait in line the whole time I’m here, including some good friends, which makes the pleasant experience pleasanter. Yeah that’s right I said pleasanter. After my slice of apple lattice is gone, I snag one of the last slices of blueberry from Councilor At-Large Dwight. Not for the day—though they usually run out of everything by the end of the day—but the season. Two-pie lunch, man. there’s nothing like a motherfucking two-pie lunch. “Pie bar.” Let the words roll around in your mouth. “Pie bar.” Pie. Bar. Pie bar!

