Café Society

I know which have lots of tables and those that don’t. I have learned which have their tables mostly by the windows–an important piece of information on a cold winter day because, believe me, if you sit right by the window, you will freeze your heinie off.

I never have the coffee, though. In my opinion, only a moron goes to Starbucks for the coffee–especially in New York City, where every corner deli sells a decent cup of java for 75 cents 24 hours a day.

I’m there for the Internet.

Starbucks made an astoundingly smart business move a few years ago by palling up with T-mobile to provide wireless Internet access in its stores. The access isn’t cheap–$30 a month–but it’s well worth the expense. I need the Net to do research while I write, and it’s thrilling to have been freed from the tyranny of the home office. Ever since I began writing full-time, and ever since I bought a laptop with a wireless card in it, I have spent at least 20 hours a week inside a Starbucks.

There are a few other choices besides Starbucks for Internet use outside the home in New York City. Bryant Park in Midtown, a popular hangout in warm weather, actually provides free online access, and the main branch of the New York Public Library (just east of Bryant Park) lets you log in there.

In my own neighborhood, there are 5 Starbucks in a 15-block radius, which means I can walk to one. And if I get antsy there, I can get up and walk to another. I am part of a small army of Starbucks post-industrial freelance workers–one of those people you see while you are waiting for your frappuccino, sitting at a little table, huddled over a computer, wearing headphones attached to an iPod to blot out the noise. (I’m listening either to Ella Fitzgerald sing the Duke Ellington songbook or Bob Marley’s Legend.)

I do differ a bit from my fellow Starbucks scribes. First off, I am older than 24 (two decades older, alas) and don’t have much hair left, compared with the hirsute gang that usually surrounds me. Second, I am not writing a screenplay. And finally, I am writing things that would make most of my fellow Manhattanites gag. Consider my life at Starbucks the twenty-first-century version of Notes from the Underground, as I dash off conservative polemics sitting next to the world’s only remaining Marxists.

You have to admit there’s something indefinably amusing about the fact that I finished the last chapter of my celebratory book Bush Country sitting amongst people who think Bush a war criminal. Half the clientele in the Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway last fall were wearing buttons with the word “Bush” and a big Ghostbusters slash through it.

I would smile at them. They would smile back, assuming I liked the button. After all, I look like any other Upper West Side guy. Unless the Bush-haters had caught me on Fox News at some point talking up Bush or talking down the Democrats–unlikely, given their angry feelings about Fox News–they could have no idea I was a double agent, doing my best with my iBook to discredit their views and contribute to the reelection of a president they hate with a lunatic passion.

I fear my days of passing as a Starbucks bohemian are coming to an end. We writers are getting crowded out. At my favorite Starbucks, on 86th and Columbus, I’ve noted with dismay that the tables are increasingly taken up by traveling salesmen and realtors, who settle themselves in with Palm Pilot, phone, computer, and notepad.

They, too, are freeing themselves from the tyranny of the desk, and, unlike me, they always have a huge cup of something complicated (non-fat decaf vanilla cappuccino with extra foam) sitting in front of them.

Still, I am outraged by this commercial intrusion into a sacred writing space. So what if they’re willing to pay $5 for a bad cup of coffee? If the pencil pushers take over, where will the next generation write its unproduceable screenplays? And where will I, Upper West Side right-winger, go to subvert the politics of my neighbors in their full view?

Stop the capitalists, I say!

–John Podhoretz