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P. Style: Raffle's Cafe/Bookstore. By Hank Whittemore.
could not have been better. There are just 30 seats at the eight cherrywood tables and along the formicatop bar, but on busy days, up to 500 patrons come through the door. In the morning, there's a brisk take-out line for "choice coffees" and baked .goods, and the place is usually jammed with business people ordering "energy-intensive" vegetarian salads at lunchtime. But throughout the day until 6 p.m., there is also a continuing flux of book-browsers along with a stream of writers, musicians, poets, artists, scholars, and students who, if not holding intense discussions, are content to read or take notes or simply think by themselves.
The other day, for example, a middle-aged man in work clothes went to the periodical section in the rear and picked out an Englishlanguage edition of Pravda, the Soviet paper. Meanwhile, a woman was sipping espresso and reading Psychotic Reactions, which she had found among the new hardcovers along the side wall. At another table, two young men were debating the merits of self hypnosis for creative writing. "It's like you're searching for the perfect place," one said, "but instead of an outer thing it's an inner thing, you know?"
Which, come to think of it, is a good description of the way Raffle's works. With its green-gray carpet and modern furniture, its small potted plants and hanging sculpture, its nonstop jazz from the stereo ("Hey," someone asks, "is that Robert Johnson?"), its high-ceiling fans and green-shade track lighting
- well, the atmosphere of the place is very much an "outer thing" at first. (You might even think, God forbid, that you've landed in some trendy spot in the Old Port!) After a while, however, the external trappings seem to fade and one's inner world can begin to set the mood. "We wanted to stay away from the Old Port," Mary Falla says, "not only because of the high rents but to avoid the elitism over there. We wanted to be more down-to-earth, in an urban setting with a greater variety of people. And we feel ,strongly that with Portland's downtown growing again, this whole area is really up-and-coming."
In the early 1970s, we might have expected to find Raffle's in the Old Port. Back then it might have been a modest coffeehouse serving the arts-and-crafts community in nearby lofts, studios, and storefronts. By the 1980s, when prosperity had pushed out many of those pioneers, a bookstore-cafe in the Old Port might have catered to new, young professionals - let's face it, the pre-Crash Yuppies! - who were replacing them. Also, Raffle's of Old Port would have drawn heavily on tourists fresh from windowshopping at the posh new clothing stores and gift shops.
UT these days we not only have an Old Port but an evolving New Portland; and a hangout serving health food, good books, fine music, and "atmosphere" can avoid the Exchange Street area and safely survive. Increasing numbers of specialized retail outlets, with distinctive character, are either relocating out of the Old Port or starting up elsewhere in scattered' locations. They include
not only a Moser Cabinetmakers or an Alberta's Cafe or a Hitchcock Gallery but other, smaller places like, say, Mater:ial Objects, which has moved not far from Raffle's itself. "We saw New Haven become a very exciting city," says Mary Falla, "with lots of old buildings being renovated, and later we saw the same thing happening here - on Congress Street, as well."
The three-story Raffle's building was, most recently, a branch of Sun Savings & Loan. Originally it had housed Portland's first fire station; and later, in the early 1900s, it became a shoe store - high on its facade, WALK OVER SHOE is still
imprinted. When Tim and Mary removed the bank's suspended ceiling, they found a second-floor tier surrounding it and discovered that the old shoe store's wooden shelves were all intact, as if just waiting to hold a large collection of quality paperbacks for browsers above the cafe-and-hardcover section. "We didn't have a lot of experience in either foo.d or books," says Mary - she graduated from USM in social welfare, while her husband earned a communications degree - "but we did know that either a restaurant or a bookstore by itself would be a difficult business."
"What we did have," Tim adds, "was an idealistic vision that people's quest for knowledge, combined with the fact that everyone needs to eat, could create a kind of magic."
The early reviews of that magic, from Portland's most avid cafe conversationists, are still mixed: "It's a wonderful idea," says Benton Marder, a scholar commonly known as the Bear, "but the furniture is too new. It's not beat-up enough. The place needs to be more homely, in the old-fashioned sense, with some grubbiness. And they should provide some handy reference books, so we can settle arguments."
"They offer a good alternative bookstore," says Pat Murphy, the used-book dealer, "but in terms of the cafe, it's been adopted already by the so-called yuppies. They tend to sit up front, while us cultural misfits stay in the back. Raffle's isn't a real neighborhood place, like Woodford's Cafe, but that would be possible if it stayed open at night."
Tim and Mary Fallo do expect, within a year, to keep Raffle's open on some nights, but only "after we learn more about the business and don't have to sacrifice what we're doing well during the day." As for the ambience, Tim adds, "It's the people coming through the door who, in time, will create those physically ragged edges. The same people already create a feeling. On any given day, we get the full spectrum. They're not all dressed the same, they don't all think the same way - like the books themselves, which represent so many opinions and views."
Meanwhile, local artists drop in asking to hang their work in Raffle's; poets and authors give readings (formerly on Thursday evenings, now on Sundays); musicians drift in to listen to the jazz; and various members of the Portland Stage or Mad Horse Theatre companies are often among the cafe crowd.
For the browsers, bookstore manager Russ Warner tries to specialize in university presses and "things that people can't get elsewhere." He sells a good deal of poetry and modern fiction; he's particularly proud of his sections on comparative religion, mythology, and psychology; and students from the Portland School of Art are always drifting up to the second-tier shelves to find special editions.
On the other hand, Mary Fallo says, "The browsing sometimes doesn't happen the way we had hoped. We had pictured people mostly browsing around and then getting a cup of coffee. As it is now, many people have lunch and walk out without ever looking at the books."
As Benton Marder, the scholarly Bear, sums it up, "A good literary coffeehouse always takes a fair amount of experimentation and fine-tuning; but the combination of a restaurant and a bookstore is unusual in Portland, if not unique, and Raffle's could be a real institution here."
After all, Singapore's legendary Hotel Raffles has been fine-tuning itself since 1899, for nearly a century ...
•
II
"I:t01AV.1 NHOr AS
AT LARGE
F it is true that the "yuppie phenomenon" is now history, as the national press has declared, what difference will a yuppieless future make to life in Portland? Depopulation? Collapse of the restaurant trade? Are we soon to witness in the Old Port an epic clearance sale of red suspenders organized on a scale that will be celebrated for generations to come?
Black Monday may well have been the harbinger of difficult times, and some of the economic readjustments that await us could indeed prove hard to bear. Yet it seems unlikely that the yuppies themselves and their alleged disappearance will have much to do with the outcome. Despite the publicity accorded them, yuppies represented nothing new. Because their tastes were expensive and some of their preferences out of the ordinary - sushi rather than sirloin - they made good copy. And as every journalist knows, pop sociology is too much fun to resist.
The standard procedure is to invent a class, that is, to assert that Dick, Jane, and Harry somehow constitute a definable group because they have something, never mind how tenuous, in common - the yuppies were born after 1946 and before 1964 which is to say they were young and also more numerous than some other age groups. You then proclaim your invented class to be new, as if youthfulness had no precedent, and at the same time credit yourself with having made a brilliant discovery. Finally, you complete the exercise by thumbing your nose at your own invention. It's all very satisfying, yet the assertion can be defended that much of what has been written about the species called yuppie does more to document the incorrigible shallowness of the American press than it does to illuminate current social reality. No doubt more than one reader will dismiss this article as a case in point.
Alexis de Tocqueville encountered the yuppie more than 150 years ago while doing fieldwork for Democracy in America. Indeed this study is all the evidence we need to conclude that the yuppie has been a conspicuous American type since the earliest decades of the Republic. Though no one was called a yuppie
in those days - the term was not to gain currency until the election year of 1984 - what we have lately come to think of as yuppieness was, according to Tocqueville, everywhere on display: "It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it." Characteristic American unease and haste were already in evidence: "Their taste for physical gratification must be regarded as the original source of that secret disquietude which the actions of the Americans betray ... He who has set his heart exclusively on the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it." De Tocqueville ascribed this behavior not to American character or the temper of the times, but to the conditions of life inherent in an egalitarian democracy. Having remained all these years both democratic and egalitarian, we remain on the make as well, some of us more noticeably so than others. Only the term itself - yuppie - is new, and some would say superfluous. It is worth noting that in The Closing 0 f the A merican Mind Allan Bloom goes on for nearly 400 pages without resorting to the y-word even once. He deplores the careerism that pervades American life and holds the university at least partly responsible for the prevailing exaltation of career. Though over the years he must have taught a good many students who later lapsed into careerism, he nevertheless refrains from calling them yuppies. Yet his book weighed in as a best-seller, the publishing sensation of 1987. Perhaps the reading public's appetite for journalistic chimeras iii less robust than some of us scribblers like to think ... OR a free home demonstration of just how inadequate the term yuppie can be, ask yourself whether Portland is the yuppieville some say it is. At a glance it appears to be: all those young professionals of just the right age, all those pretentious restaurants, all those pricey boucondarinas - on the freeway to yuppie heaven (admission granted to BMWs only), hasn't Portland got to be at least halfway there? Yes indeed, halfway, but it will never move a millimeter closer.
If yuppie means anything, it means careerist, and for this reason, despite appearances, a yuppieville Portland is not. So bless your young . professional hearts, each and every one. You are exonerated. To qualify as a true yuppie, to win, indeed to deserve your suspenders, you must be willing to take on and stay with the BIG TIME, which for most Easterners means New York, Boston, or Washington, D.C. Portland is not, never was, and never will be any part of the BIG TIME (except for those who toil at Union Mutual), and for many young professionals this is, of course, the whole point. Like the yuppies they tend to be . transplants, but with this distinctive difference: for many of them the decision to settle in Portland is also
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and necessarily a decision to subordinate their careers to some other consideration, whatever that might be - family life in a small town setting, ready access to the Great Outdoors, the novelty of an environment that is both urban and pleasant, and so on.
Because we are careerists all, to one degree or another, simply by virtue of being American, choosing the SMALL TIME caq.Joster wistfulness about might--have-beens. Every transplant in Portland knows there is more money to be made in New York in every occupation other than lobstering. The question, of course, is whether he would have been among those making it had he gone to New York insteag, or had he remained there long enough to cash in. Some of the transplants in Portland might do wellin the Big Apple, whereas for othet's the inescapable strain of life in New York would be intolerable. The one certainty is that neither group will ever know what might have been, not knowing being part of the price they must pay for choosing, or having chosen, the SMALl: TIME.
The good news for Portland and for the society as a whole is that the energetic young have become willing to pay that price, and in substantial numbers. Nor is northern New England the only resion to benefit. Seattle, for example, has seen a steady influx of men and women in their late twenties and early thirties, most of whom risk going all the way out there with no job in hand. Yet except for those few who manage to land jobs at Boeing, Microsoft, or Weyerhauser, the Puget Sound region is no place to go if a brilliant career is the goal. Salaries are 3D-percent lower than on the East coast, the cost of living is no bargain, and most of the labor markets are overcrowded. Even so, the migration continues from all over the country, presumably because Seattle enjoys a good press and life there is reputed to be easy going. At any rate, few who move to the region ever leave by choice, once they have explored that scenery.
It appears, tnen, that even tnough Tocqueville's analysis remains valid, that even though the main tendency in this society continues to be the unremitting pursuit of career. we have nevertheless managed to create something in the way of alternatives. No one becomes a yuppie except by choice, and this is a choice that no one has to make. Many will continue to make it, of course, for that is the way we are, even if we discard the label yuppie, as now seems likely. Though it may be too much to say that the language will be impoverished as a result, terms of abuse are too valuable by far simply to be thrown away. Yuppie has been one of our more felicitous coinages, freighted as it is with double-sided, double-density hard disk contempt, and we'll miss it when it's gone. To compensate ourselves we might consider canceling the presidential election, which thus far has proved to be a stupefying bore, and hold instead a national contest to see who can come up with the most corrosive repla'cement for yuppie. Just think of owning that copyright. Now there's a potential pot of gold that should bring out the careerist in us all.
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