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She asked: "Anyone here going to St Louis?"
On Friday, March 1, 2002, I waited in line at San Francisco airport, hoping to check in my luggage. I wasn't sure I could make my flight. Neither was American Airlines. Thus, a supervisorial lady walked up the line asking, "Anyone here going to St Louis?"
I was going to St Louis. Soon I was in a special line, a shorter line, a swift-moving line. My special destination had catapulted me into a level of convenience normally associated with first-class travel.
On the plane, the head stewardess welcomed us aboard "for T.W... for American Airlines." American Airlines had taken over TWA a few months before, but old habits were dying hard. St Louis had been a TWA hub; this was no doubt a TWA crew, trying to adjust to a new regime.
At St Louis airport, I retrieved my luggage and caught the MetroLink streetcar into town. The first time I'd rode this train, I'd been surprised and dismayed at the white-trash-looking people who had boarded the train. This time, my fellow passengers seemed normal. Maybe the cold weather forced them to bundle up; maybe there aren't any winter clothes made in floral prints and pastels. Maybe it's because most of the people getting on were African-American, with a fashion sense more aligned with my own. Maybe there wasn't a football game letting out. For whatever reason, I felt more comfortable this time.
Maybe I had become accustomed to St Louis. But that could never happen. St Louis is strange. I'd been there once before, and it had been unsettling. This time would be stranger.
Soon I arrived at the house of my friends Bryan and Elissa Clair, saying howdy. They'd bought the house recently, and were fixing it up. They'd just painted and stained the dining room. Paint-trays, brushes, and rags covered the table. I like looking at other people's home-improvement projects; they give me a vicarious sense of accomplishment. Bryan told me that the staining had taken the most time. Paint allows slop, but stain does not: you have to go back and make sure that the stain is evenly spread on the surface. The dining room had taken about forever. The hallway threatened to take longer. I made a note to myself to quash my liking for exposed wood before buying any real estate.
It was Elissa's birthday, and the kitchen was strewn with cookies and candies. I think I may have gaped. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen so many sweets. I like the occasional piece of Badtz Maru cola-flavored chewing gum as much as the next guy, but I got queasy just looking at all of this sugar. Fortunately, we weren't going to hang around in the kitchen right then. We piled into the car to go out for dinner.
Along the way, Bryan and Elissa thought to drop by the school where Elissa taught. There were some bottles of soda there, extras from a recent party. They seemed like a good thing to have on hand for Elissa's upcoming birthday party. The school building would still be open this late. Tonight was Trivia Night. Teams of people were gathered in one of the big rooms for a trivia competition. As we snuck into the building, an amplified voice asked what the longest-running show ever on Broadway was. "Is it 'Cats'?" I asked, but Bryan shushed me. Hopefully, I didn't mislead any of the contestants.
In the classroom, there were low desks. There was a rice table, like the sand tables of my youth, except that rice was less likely to end up tracked all over the classroom than sand was. There were signs up on the wall over the blackboard with the letters of the alphabet, except that the "D E F" sign wasn't up yet. Elissa let me (designated tall man) put the sign up. I puffed with importance. Elissa's classroom library had a section on Conflict Resolution. I wished, not for the first time, that my elementary-school peers had had a chance to learn about conflict resolution. And then we picked up the soda pop and brought it out to the car.
Next, we went to an okay Indian restaurant. Bryan seemed disappointed. He said that that the restaurant usually better. I believed it. When we'd set out for the place, his eyes had danced. Though Bryan's tastes aren't always the same as my (perfect) tastes, his priorities are pretty close: restaurants loom large in his worldview. (You may recall that a crowning moment of my first trip to St Louis was a meal at Shu Feng.) We'd driven a ways West out of St Louis to get to this place; it had probably taken Bryan and Elissa some effort to discover it. They probably had good reason to like the place, and were no doubt capable of explaining their reasoning.
For a moment, I suffered a moment of self-centered worry. What if the restaurant had gone downhill permanently? Did this mean I was cursed? Hadn't Shu Feng gone downhill within months of my visit? [Addendum: according to some 2002 mail from Jill Posey-Smith, the Shu Feng goodness has re-emerged as a place called Insoo, a couple of doors down. Just avoid the old management-changed Shu Feng.] What if I had some mutant power that caused restaurants to implode, but it only in St Louis (perhaps due to the magnifying effect of some green kryptonite-like substance concentrated nearby)? But I got over it, and made a mental note that we should try that restaurant again some other time.
Next, we came back to St Louis proper, into the Lafayette Square area. We hopped out of the car and hustled through the cold to our next destination: the Chocolate Bar. I'm not very good at describing things that I like, which is a pity because the Chocolate Bar deserves a rather glowing description. I liked it a lot. Now that I look at this advertisement of theirs, I see that the place was a cafe in the morning, and a lunch place at lunch. But at night, when I was there, it like a cafe/bar, except that they served hot chocolate instead of espresso/booze and they had candy and desserts instead of teeny wienies and nachoes. That doesn't really describe it, does it? Oh dear, I'll try again:
Okay, so we're walking in out of the cold, cold night and it's warm inside and there's people. The lighting is dark, most of the decor in dark wood like you'd expect in a cafe. A counter ran along one wall. Under the glass top of the counter were desserts. Or rather, there were displays representing desserts. I think the actual desserts were in the back. Behind the counter were people to take your order. In front of the counter, a line of people waited to order. Beyond them were some tables. Beyond them, on the wall opposite the counter stood a cabinet containing candies, not so fancy as those on the counter. There were lollipops and pez and other wonderful things. Further back along that wall, past the cabinet, there was a bar. The bar extended way back, and there were people leaning against it, sipping hot chocolates. The bar extended back, past the kitchen, into the back room which contained the rest of the bar, some art, some tables, and a live DJ.
I ordered an El Moro, which had some hot pepper in it, like a good mole sauce if it turned into a hot chocolate. Mmm, yummy. We stood and talked and sipped our hot chocolates while listening to music.
The clientelle ranged from young folks in their 20s to older folks in their 60s. Most people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Lots of people were laughing. One young couple standing at the bar stood smooching, suggesting that chocolate might be as good as alcohol when it came to inhibition-lowering. I bopped my head to the music. Bryan noted that his hot chocolate was almost as thick as pudding. On our way out, we drank some water to prevent our teeth from dissolving.
We walked around a little to work off the chocolate, but not very far--it was pretty cold out. We walked onto Benton Place, a cul-de-sac of mansions. Bryan said that back in the day, Lafayette Square had been posh. Looking around, I thought it still looked pretty posh. But apparently things get pretty slummy a couple of blocks away. My mind wandered: maybe, with a few more places like the Chocolate Bar, Lafayette Square would be able to bootstrap its surroundings into a bustle. About an hour later, this this vision seemed unlikely. I think it was a side-effect of the hot chocolate. Think of that: hot chocolate good enough to turn me into a rosy-eyed optimist. And I don't even like chocolate that much. I'm generally an apple pie kind of guy.
I wished that someone would open a place like that in San Francisco.
Ahh.
I'm beginning to remember why I don't normally let myself wax rhapsodic about things that I like. Ugh. But I'll let this stand.
Back at the house, I wrestled with some puzzles. Bryan was working on an article for Strange Horizons, a science fiction website. Specifically, he was writing an article about paper folding, for which he'd researched some puzzles.
I spent a little time with the puzzles. It was getting late, though. I struggled with one of them, the Devil's Fold puzzle, (which Bryan attributed to some guy named Robert Neale) until my eyelids were heavy. I put the puzzle down, promising myself that it would be much easier in the morning.