‹ chat statusThe Door Coffeehouse Chicago, 1967
When I was a 17 year old runaway, there was a coffee shop , little hole in
the wall, where I hung out, sometime waitress at the counter-only shop.
Located at Belmont and Broadway in Chicago, with the competition being
Ricky’s Famous Deli across the street
It was as close as I had to a home. I worked there, and at the five and
dime, F.W. Woolworth’s as a sales clerk, and at Davidson’s Bakery, selling
Lemon Crunch Cake the likes of which the world won’t see again.
I “celebrated” my 18th birthday in that coffee shop, broke, scared.
The counterman gave me a thirty cent hamburger with fries for my birthday, threw in a free coca-cola.
The juke box played Mick Jagger singing “Don’t want you out in my world,
Just you be my back street girl.” I was cold, homeless. Stupid. By gosh,
nobody was going to tell me I had to be in at ten p.m. Forget that the
hippie crash pads were breeding grounds for head lice and body mites,
and the girls there were sexually abused and stolen from. I was on my own.
How stupid I was! I worked practically around the clock.
I married the first man who asked me, just to get out of the crash pads,
and was pregnant within a month. I discovered within the next month that he
loved to play “Let’s pretend you’re a dead body, Go take a cold, cold bath. Soak in it.”
And he loved Margaret, whoever she was. He was constantly calling me
Margaret. That is decidedly NOT my name. Asking about Margaret was
forbidden. I could get really badly hurt for asking. I didn’t ask any more.
That didn’t last more than a few weeks. When I didn’t take cold baths, he
liked to beat me up. A cultural mix made in hell. I grew up in a house
with domestic help. His parents were domestic help. That sounded
incredible classism when my therapist first said it. As I recovered from
being battered, I began to see that we were different in every imaginable
way. Neither of us had any idea what words like love and marriage and
fidelity or commitment meant. We were both little animals out in the cold rain,
huddling together. Today it is obvious even to me that we were children.
He used the name “John” because his scraggly beard and dirty blonde hair
made people think of “John the Baptist.” He was still using that name when
he and I parted ways, me four or five months pregnant. That was Bernhard Friedreich
Botscharow. He wanted supper on the table the moment he walked into the house. Not
almost ready, not started, not in ten minutes. And if it wasn’t there, I
got beat up. I finally started making his dinner right after he left for
work, and let it sit there all day, on the plates, which I would warm up
in the last half hour before he came home. The relationship was sick and twisted. It
was situational insanity.
That didn’t last more than a few weeks. When I didn’t take cold baths, he
liked to beat me up. A cultural mix made in hell. I grew up in a house
with domestic help. His parents were domestic help. That sounded just
incredible classism a few years later, when my therapist first said it. As I recovered
from being battered, I began to see that we were different in every imaginable
way.
As I got more pregnant, he got more nervous.
Then he was gone. The government had locked him up in a psychiatric
hospital for public urination on a police officer, from the top of the
police car. The baby, tiny Katherine, was placed for adoption right out of
the hospital. How many ways can one’s heart break and still she lives?
I wasn’t even married to him long enough to learn to spell his last name.
Bless you, Bill Southwick, wherever you are, for opening The Door
Coffeehouse in Chicago. His original plan was for founding a coffeehouse
where Christian College students could meet and get to know hippies and
homeless street kids, and have an edifying and salubrious effect upon
the street rats.
What happened was more like people coming together from every direction
and finding similarities in each other, forming friendships, sexual bonds,
and deeply intimate friendships. It wasn’t what the church fathers,
backing the project, had in mind. They demanded that Reverend Bill
Southwick “Shut down this project,” thinking it too wild and out of hand.
Christian kids were tuning in, turning on, dropping out. Street rats were
discovering spirituality, melding and mingling into something like
community. Into Community!
What happened was the Door lived on, being a safe haven for so many of us,
uniting the Music Fans with the Chess and Bridge – players, what Studs
Terkel once called the refuge of the intellectual outcasts, the Spinoza
Spouting Cab Drivers, and the street rats with the desire and potential to
get their lives connected and, as Baba Ram Dass Put it: “Be Here Now.”
From “Art the Junkie”, who took the time before he died of an overdose
to warn dozens of kids not to follow in his footsteps, to homeless kids
and people whom the Social Workers would now call “Marginalized People,”
to serious young geeks, whose idea of a good time was factoring prime
numbers, to the woman with the snake around her shoulders talking about
surviving The Coming Revolution. From burned out men who had left Viet
Nam social and emotional wrecks. We were the family of “The Door” Crowd.
We sold coffee and later sandwiches, barely maintaining our health
license, using the proceeds to buy more coffee grounds and learning that
paper towels were almost as good as coffee filters, and we had a home. My
Dog! We even started selling apples and oranges! We had a family with lots
of different people. The Republicans who liked to follow the hippies
around making peace signs into crude drawings of bombers, and Jazz and
Blues fans and Science Fiction fen and the occasional odd lot who thought
Ayn Rand was a truly original thinker. (and the earth still cries back: “Fat
Chance!”)
Some of the more together members of the Door coffeehouse regulars
hatched a plan to buy the lease, in effect, buying the name and the
coffeehouse, lock, stock and barrel. It was more than a bunch of used card
tables a huge coffee making machines and a lot of mugs. It was a good
thing. Some of the Moody Bible Institute volunteers called it a God
Thing. A community had come together, with the focus on “The Door”. It
had achieved life of it’s own. As was common to say in those later years,
“It’s Alive, Jim.”Perhaps it was. Nobody really wanted it to close, so it
lived on through many incarnations, handed on from one group to another,
burning out managers at the rate of one every three months.
I made a friend or several, got a roommate, a man who in retrospect was the
personification of the word pig. Sorry to insult the pigs. Still, he paid
half the rent, sometimes. We carried on for a whole year that way. Then
I noticed that, although he had a job, one job that paid better than my
three, he NEVER paid any bills. He was Larry Westermeier. He finally
moved, West, somewhere. (the Goddess loves me. She DOES take care of
fools! He went away!)
The first woman friend I had in those times stole from me every time I
took her home to my apartment, once I had an apartment. Stupidly, I kept
letting her come to my house to visit. Funny, I can’t remember her name,
even. She helped me to learn that not everyone who seems kind has my
best interests at heart. A valuable lesson. And I know she was a victim too.
It was a time when it was popular to put oneself in danger, free love (translate:
lots of free sex for men, lots of sleeping in the wet spot for women.)
I had the baby in August, She was adopted by an older couple who loved her. And I turned 19 in December. Being eighteen was dreadful time, and I felt less like a grown-up every day.
Who might have imagined it could get worse. It got worse, it got better,
the Door Continued to be a place where people who were very different from
each pushed each other into making changes in ourselves and each other, unalterably
changing the world.
The Door Coffeehouse eventually moved from 3124 N. Broadway to someplace on School Street, where it was called “The Other Door.” It stayed alive, and when it gave up the Ghost, everyone took up Kingston Mines, a bar which eventually became the Kingston Mines Theater Company, now only remembered as the birthplace of Jim Jacob's “Grease.”
posted on Mar 20, 2008 7:29 PM ()
Yet, you are such a positive, loving person. Rather than destroying you, the tragedy has been a refining process--so much good from so much pain.
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