Over the course of the following nights, I got to know more of the regulars, sit with them, eavesdrop and take photos. I became Dian Fossey scribbling observations on silverback males. I hadn’t noticed till then just how much of an old boy’s club the Med had been, but probably around 70% of the nighttime crowd were men, half of them over 50.

The following Monday was tango night at the Med. An elderly gentleman from Argentina raised himself up by the piano and wailed with such emotion he omitted the consonants.

In the back, the old-timers gathered. Paul, Jos and others besides. The atmosphere had taken on the tone and urgency of a field campaign. They debated the merits of rival locations and discussed the tactics of relocation. The singer carried on and on, and the regulars quieted their tone. They do not like tango night — they find the instructor presumptuous and the canned music asinine — but they respect the passion of the Argentinian.

“It’s a shitty use of the third-to-last night,” Steven Leach said, glaring. Steve is not one of the old-timers. He’s a member of the staff, but his sympathies are more with the group than the management.

“Look, what are you gonna do in another week?” Ed Monroe asked and knocked his knuckles on the table. Monroe is a street artist. On weekends he sells paintings at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way. He’s an admirer of Shakespeare, and talking with him to enter into not so much a conversation as a monologue. He enjoys an audience.

“We’re going to disband in four days.” Monroe spread the fingers of his hands and told about all the qualities that will be gone. “We need table hopping. An atmosphere like Caffe Trieste,” he said, leaning in. “And personally, I can’t concentrate unless a lunatic is raving at me from a few seats away. The laxity and 86’ing of common decency is something I look forward to in coming here.”

Monroe cast a look at me. In these few short days, I’ve become the designated anthropologist. But I’d forgotten my notepad and had to excuse myself to go upstairs to tear the title pages out of the pulp romance novels of the book exchange.

As I come back clutching a few ragged pages, Monroe addressed me directly.

“They used to call that place up front the Fishbowl,” Monroe said gesturing toward the table by the front bay window.

Monroe remembers the old-timers

“Don Clausen was the center of everything there. He was the senior artist of Berkeley, you might say, kind of like how some folks might say now that I’m the old artist of Berkeley,” he said a muffled snort. “But I wouldn’t say that.” He caught and covered his vanity. “And he would just hold court there.”

Monroe launched into a Homeric inventory of every old regular he could remember.

“There was Ole Nielsen, the Swede,” Monroe said. “There was Bob Anderson, who owned the Albatross. Marten Metal—M-E-T-A-L—he was a metal sculptor—that’s why the name.

“You know who else? It’s probably important to include David Bradley, the son of Marion Zimmer Bradley,” Monroe went on. “She wrote The Mists of Avalon. I should name some women. There’s Julia Vinograd—she still comes here—and Alta and Lois Fisher. And Sami—she was a barista here but lives in Prague now.”

“She’s the one who wrote the Medatrocity,” Jos said. It was his only contribution to the conversation before Monroe belted on.

“Smartest mother-fucking people I knew,” Monroe said, nearly bellowing. “They accepted me, and I’m an idiot. The people I hung out with—that I hang out with—they’re extreme. And if you don’t pay attention, you miss the most important things.”