Café Racer Love: A Story of Loss From a Pre-Teen Perspective
On May 30th, 2012, forty-one-year-old Ian Lee Stawicki murdered five innocent people and took his own life. Prior to this event I was counting down the days until May 31st, the day of my graduation. I was looking forward to graduating for years, the pictures in my navy-blue gown and cap, the eighth-grade retreat, getting a diploma, and saying goodbye to being a kid; I would get all that and more.
I could see freedom on the horizon and it was smooth sailing until then. I had run the Kindergarten to Eighth grade gamut and had plenty of discarded papers and friendships to prove it. Eighth grade wasn’t easy for me. I had a total of zero close friends after one of my best friends moved to Luxembourg at the end of seventh grade and the other stopped talking to me as he started high school. Until then I had spent many days upset that my parents would not allow me to have a friend over after school, but around this time, my parents started asking why I wasn’t having anyone at the house any more.
Between school, Minecraft, and scuffles with my siblings, I would often go out with my parents to Café Racer, a small, eccentric yet homey, low-lit mixture between a bar, café, and restaurant. My parents curate the OBAMA room, or the “Official Bad Art Museum of Art,” a satirical collection of kitschy thrift store black velvet paintings and grotesque caricatures made by various unknown artists displayed for patrons of the Seattle cafe. My parents still work on it to this day and are good friends with previous owner of the café, Kurt Geissel, and habitual art-collectors with a love for odd music. We would go there almost every week to grab breakfast or dinner and listen to our friends Drew and Joe’s band, God’s Favorite Beefcake; a carnivalesque folk group that produced grimly honest tunes about life and living it to the fullest. Any and every special occasion would be celebrated there, from Mother’s Day to birthdays to Christmas Eve and we were known between all the regulars, and we knew them as well.
My family had just finished eating a family plate of corn-beef hash breakfast there; it was my fourteenth birthday and Cissy the bartender sauntered towards me with a chocolate muffin topped with a single lit candle. Drew, or as I called him, Schmootzi, which was his stage name from his time at Circus Contraption, came to our table beaming. He put one foot up on the chair across from me to balance his guitar on his knee and preformed a birthday tribute in my name, getting the few other people in the establishment involved in the act. Before we left he handed me the green Dunlop guitar pick he played the song with, and I still beat myself up about losing it.
Roughly three months after my birthday the sun was smiling over Seattle as my classmates and I piled on to the Starline Luxury Coach and chattered excitedly about what the day had in store. Each year there was a surprise field trip for all the Eighth Graders the day before graduation that everybody was in on except the students. After a grueling half hour in the bus broiling with the smell of seventy pre-teens, we unloaded at Pier 55 Downtown with the announcement we we’re getting on the Argosy cruise ship to go to Blake Island. It was cold outside but facing the wind on the bow of the boat was a refreshing contrast from the previous situation. Once on the island, we split into groups that we had been placed in earlier that year and talked about our goals for high school and our feelings about leaving middle school, followed by a salmon luncheon.
After a bit of exploring the island, taking class pictures, and me awkwardly standing between groups of people talking, we loaded back onto the boat and were all given envelopes and told to try to find a place to read the contents alone. I found a secluded spot on the floor and rifled through mismatched pieces of paper containing hand-written notes that made my heart heavier with each word. Each note contained sentiments of me growing up so fast and how much I’ve changed and excitement about my future. The note’s authors ranged from my immediate family to relatives to previous teachers. They hit me hard, but apparently not as hard as others, for as I looked around roughly half of my peer’s faces were covered in tears.
When the bus pulled up to the school, parents were waiting there to pick up their children. I only lived a few blocks from school, so as usual I avoided classmates hanging around to play football or walking to Tully’s to get Italian Sodas and took the quick way through the alley. Upon arriving home from school, I turned on my Xbox and collapsed onto the leopard skin couch in the family lounge. Before I could start playing I hear my mom call “Jo, Sam’s home!” followed by the sound of my dad shuffling down the stairs. They entered the room simultaneously with unfamiliar faces, I wasn’t sure whether I was in trouble or if they were expecting me to rave about the emotional letters I received.
“Sam,” my dad started as he turned off the tv and my mother wailed, cowering behind him with her hands on his shoulders, “we didn’t want to take you out of school and damper your field trip but there was a shooting at Café Racer today.” My mom wept loudly, turning her head away from me, “Drew and Joe were pronounced dead at the scene, three others are in Urgent Care, including Leonard, the chef.”
I stared in disbelief, all I could muster was “Okay.”
He started to well up as he tried to maintain composure, “The shooter continued to kill a mother on First Hill in a parking lot, stole her SUV, drove to his house, and shot himself, he is in Urgent Care as well.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“A little before noon today.”
“Okay,” I replied.
They left me to deal with my emotions, but my attention was drawn towards the audible crying coming from my mother in the other room that would prove to go on the few weeks following. I put on my headphones and listened to a God’s Favorite Beefcake album, my eyes glazed over, reading article after article, new ones emerging every few minutes with more details. That day five people died, three in Café Racer, a cornerstone of my childhood and a misfit relic of old Seattle. After listening to the song Hello G’Bye on their debut album about twenty times, I hesitantly made a Facebook post recounting what had happened that day, sharing my shock, and I settled into bed noticing I still had not shed a tear that day.
I walked into the Eighth-Grade hallway presumably late for the rehearsal, donning my graduation gown and felt knowing eyes on me. Jacob Bailet quickly walked through the bustling mass towards me and calmly gave me a hug, followed slowly by more people who I didn’t know cared about me. There, being group-hugged by classmates is where the pain hit me, tears periodically streamed from my eyes throughout the rest of the rehearsal. It was a half day at school and graduation was in the evening. I went home after the rough couple hours to clean myself up and put on some classy attire, returning to the official ceremony later that day trying to act like I wasn’t sobbing in front of everyone just a few hours earlier. I was all smiles to the camera, but not my usual self.
Students went out to dinner after graduation and in the wake of death I managed to appreciate the merriment of the evening, the past two days had been a rollercoaster of emotion. When the bus took us back to the school where parents were waiting to pick up their children, classmates were locked in hugs, crying and laughing, I stood just outside the crowd in a deadlock of emotion. I felt I now knew the importance of the company I was in and the value of the emotions filling the scene, but I couldn’t feel sad or happy at the time. I just stood there thinking about the significance of saying goodbye and realized that those people we’re all a much bigger part of my life than I knew at the time. Within a minute or two I began walking home alone yet again.
In the weeks afterwards, the outside of Café Racer was laden with memories of victims, countless flowers and mementos littered the sidewalk and crowds of people converged outside spilling into the street. The remaining members of Drew and Joe’s band played in the adjacent ally while people cried and downed Pabst Blue Ribbons. Memorials went on for weeks as Kurt contemplated whether to reopen the restaurant. While visiting Leonard, the sole survivor of the massacre who took a bullet to the head, Kurt shared with him he was thinking of closing the café, to which Leonard, who was unable to speak, replied by slowly displaying his middle finger. With that, Kurt determined to reopen the café after gutting out the bar, painting the floor, and placing items from the memorial outside into a chest which still sits upstairs. Who knows it may have that green Dunlop pick in it, I really don’t remember what happened to it.
Leonard eventually came back to cook after recovering, live music started emanating from the venue again, and outside there has since hung a neon red sign that read ‘LOVE’. Many patrons agreed the only place to heal from the hurt is where all the good memories took place, at the café. The OBAMA room was moved upstairs when Café Racer was purchased about a year ago from Kurt, my parents overhauled everything in the move for the tenth anniversary of its creation a couple months ago, going as far as painstakingly painting the floor a vibrant leopard-print.
In less than 48 hours it had seemed that two tight-knit communities I had been in disbanded, with the painful memories resonating a lasting impression on my perception of community; that every interaction is important, and one cannot heal alone. I come back to Café Racer time to time and I’m reminded to never give up what makes me happy, one cannot heal alone, and to live out the love and creativity the victims shared with others. I look back on the notes I received and that group hug, I remember that every interaction is important. I’ll still hang out with friends I met in middle school, many of whom I weren’t close with during those years. I even threw a reunion a couple years back when my parents were out of town, and a lot more people showed up then I was expecting. When I recall my graduation, I’m prompted to see the big picture, that there’s a lot more behind a smiling face and accepting a piece of paper. In those 48 hours I learned that humanity alone is complex and fragile, but when we come together we can create a community that is profound and enduring. Drew and Joe’s legacy has lead me to embrace who I am and has challenged me to live in the moment.
“Hello my friends I came by to say farewell, it’s been nice to know ya,, I’ll see ya’ll in hell. When I get there rest assured, I’m gonna ring that bell, and let the devil know, I have arrived.” — Drew Keriakedes, Hello G’Bye on A Beautiful Trainwreck (2009) by God’s Favorite Beefcake
Café Racer Love: A Story of Loss From a Pre-Teen Perspective
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