Coffeehouse Stories, Part 3: The Snakeman
Some of you may not know that I owned several cafes from the mid-90s to 2012. Somehow, the most interesting life stories and people I’ve met came from that first cafe in the 90s.
Our all-time most interesting customer was the “Snakeman.” One day circa 1998, Josh, one of our staff, said a guy came into the cafe and slithered on his belly like a snake. It seemed a bit far fetched, so I didn’t think much of it.
The next Saturday morning, a guy at the doorway got on his knees, then onto his belly, slide across the floor up to the pastry case, kissed the glass of the pastry case, turned around, and slithered out the door. Somehow no but me seemed to notice this man. I wondered if I was hallucinating.
The Snakeman, as Josh named him, turned around as if to crawl across the floor again. Concerned someone would trip over him, I asked for help at the bar, and I stood in the doorway. The Snakeman looked up, I shook my head, and he turned around and walked away.
Confused, and not wanting to miss an opportunity to talk to this man, I asked “hey, why did you crawl across the floor?” The Snakeman took a long pause, then answered in a gravelly voice “it’s something I need to do to survive.” That caught me off guard, and all I could say was “good answer.”
Over the next weeks, the Snakeman (real name: Bill) became a regular. He never drank coffee, but he would come to the cafe to borrow our broom and trash can — usually without asking — then spend his day cleaning the ground around town. Townies got used to Bill crawling into traffic to pick up a piece of trash.
Around this time, my friends Brandt and Tuck from Small World Coffee in Princeton, NJ visited to check out our roasting machine, as they were preparing to buy a roaster. While we watched coffee roast, we decided to trade crazy-customer stories.
I began to tell them about Bill, and they interrupted, and said “is he about 40, olive skin, usually has his shirt unbuttoned?” I was dumbfounded, and figured they had seen Bill around town. But they hadn’t; it turned out Bill lived in Princeton (a four hour-drive) and Bill regularly crawled on the floor at Small World. That was too much of a coincidence for me to handle.
The next day when I saw Bill, he said “chairperson (his nickname for me) I have to talk to you! What were the guys from Small World Coffee doing here yesterday?” “What were THEY doing here? They’re my friends. The question is what are YOU doing here, and why do you choose to crawl on the floor at our cafes?”
Bill didn’t try to explain, so I asked him if there were any other cafes where he liked to crawl. He said he sometimes went to the Haymarket in Northampton (six miles away) and Buchanan’s in Boulder, CO (2000 miles away). That was fascinating. SWC, Buchanan’s, Haymarket, and my cafe were all exceptionally busy, buzzy places. Bill didn’t drink coffee, but he seemed attracted to vibrant cafes and went out of his way to visit them.
Over the years the staff and I learned a lot about Bill. It turned out his father was a physicist at Princeton and was involved in the Manhattan Project. Bill formed relationships with many businesses around town. The businesses would give him free food and beverages, and every two weeks, Bill would cash a small check from a trust fund and put twenty-dollar bills in the tip jars of the businesses. Bill never paid for anything, but he tipped regularly each month.
Bill lived in homeless shelters and occasionally took bus trips around the country to his favorite cafes. Once when it was raining hard, Bill was walking without a shirt. I gave him my sweatshirt, he put it on, walked across the street, took off the sweatshirt, dropped it on the ground, and walked away. Bill did everything on his own terms.
I saw Bill many times over the years, even after I sold the cafe and moved from that small town. Bill would quiz me on the details of my life whenever we crossed paths. I don’t know what ultimately happened to Bill, but his legend will always live on in Amherst, MA and Princeton, NJ.