It was really exciting and fun to have lots playing customers, but our real education at the Triv. came after one A.M. when the paying customers were gone and the regulars came in. It was then that I learned that everything they told us in the nineteen fifties was a lie. Everything!!! It was then that we began escaping the fifties.I remember one night after closing, I'm sitting at the big brown table by the front window listening to a long drawn out story from Sol Weinstein, the comic who writes for the Trenton Times. Vance sits next to me. Across the table, the black capped little poet, Mark, laughing at all the right places his green teeth showing; John, descendent of African Kings, eyeing up the new kid, and hoping to walk him home to the room he rents away from home; Black Barb, leaning back, eyes closed and legs wide open; White Barb, leaning forward, with eyes wide open and legs tightly closed... As I listen, I remember the guy from Philly, Cal, with the same last name as Sol, and how he told the six Fort Dix soldiers that Jack and Vance were his friends, that he'd kick their butts if they didn't return the coffee cups, that they could fight him like men one at a time or he'd take on all six of them. They shake his hand and return and buy more coffee toasting his courage...

It was the little poet, Mark, who turned me on to Philip Wylie. In Wylie I discovered that discontent with Mom and Apple Pie is not out right blasphemy. Vance's good pal, Frank, got on as night copy boy at the Trenton Times. With his key, we snuck into the book reviewer's office, and pawed over the paperbacks. It became cool to have a book in your back pocket, to pull it out over coffee. A writer from the Times gave me a copy of James Michener's Fires of Spring. I thought how the protagonist gave up his chance for a teaching fellowship to go on the road with a troupe of Broadway Players. Christ, I don't have nothing to give up, I told myself.

Through I read little of the Beat literature that was making the rounds, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac permeated the very air we breathed behind the Trivia counter. There, in 1959, everyone was Beat, writing poetry and stream of consciousness novels, or at least dreaming about doing so. More than the Beats, I was turned on by Robert W. Service, Sandburg, Frost, and John Ciardi. And, especially the poem, “Don’ts" by D.H. Lawrence. "Don't be a good little good little boy being as good as you can. Fight your little fight my boy, fight it and be a man…" I carried Lady Chatterley’s Lover in my back pocket pulling it out on the bus, the train, and while I was hitching.

I remember another night around the big table, a little Dave Brubeck or Cal Jader in the background. Frank and Donna are finishing up the dishes. Just a candle or two reflecting off the high glossy walls. Mark is standing at the door in his long black cape. "How long you been standing there?" Vance asks as he unlocks the door and escorts him to the table. Mark pulls his copy of Durrell's The Black Book from under his arm. For the next hour or so, we listen to his critique. Around three A.M. Sol Weinstein comes and keeps us all in stitches until sunrise.

And, how many all night conversations did I sneak out on around two A. M.? How much did I miss while I caught forty winks on the single bed in our side office? The office that could be used for more intimate conversations. No desk, just a couple chairs and the table on which sat our stereo receiver, telephone, and the drawing "Jack Be Quick" that Sally gave me. Forty winks, and up at five A. M. to dump our garbage in the river. I pass my foster father on the stairs as he comes down to make ready for work. "Going to bed when you should be getting up. You turn the night into day," he whispers.

At the Triv., for the first time in my life I was hanging around people who actually read and discussed the books they read. All the authors were new to me, Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, Freud, Jung, Henry Miller. I read the Brother’s Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. “You are a scoundrel! A scoundrel!!!” is etched on my brain. That and “We are all responsible for all!” In Dostoevsky I find for the first time the concept of ordinary and extraordinary men. From Freud and Jung I am introduced to the concept of the unconscious, and the collective unconscious. I have a whole new world for exploration. But most of all it was Henry Miller who opened up my mind.

After we went bust at the Triv. I picked up a copy of The Intimate Henry Miller. Here at last was truth in words that I could understand. If only I had known that Henry Miller, too, sold encyclopedias how much happier I might have been about my little sortie into the world of the white-collar confidence game. Instead, I failed as a salesman, and got hired at Mercer County Airport where I went back to pumping aviation gas. But, I didn't let it bother me too much. After all, didn't Miller say that earning a living has nothing to do with living? More than anyone else, Miller reinforced my feeling that there is something more to life that getting ahead. From his writing, I get a whole new view of the world of spirit. I also see that maybe it's not just me that's screwed up. Maybe it's the whole world.

I also learned a little more about people. So many of those who hung at the Triv. were playing the role. I never saw before how superficial people can be. So many changed their style just to try and fit in and be what they considered beat. I discovered that people are not always what they appear to be. And, that people do not fit into the stereotyped roles that society would give them.

Several of the “in crowd” were African American. In the fifties, African Americans were stereotyped as being dumb, lazy, and untrustworthy. Since I spent the first twelve plus years of my life in a ghetto in Philadelphia, I didn’t completely buy into the stereotype. John had a Master’s in Engineering, and was one of the smartest men I knew at that time in my life. Black Barb. was one of the sweetest girls that I have ever known. We were just like bother and sister and cared for each other so much that we wouldn’t even think of having a sexual relationship. Concho was friendly, funny, happy, and would do anything for a friend without expecting some thing in return. He spent hours trying to teach me how to play the Congo. I remember once we went to an after midnight party that a couple guys from the Triv. were attending. When we enter the pad, we discovered that everyone there was Afro-American. As we sipped our drinks I heard one guy whisper, “What dem white dudes doing, here?”

“Oh, dey cool. Dey from de Triv.,” his friend answered.

There were several gays at the Triv. Before my coffee house experience I thought of gays as queers and would have nothing to do with them. One of the gays was the little poet, Mark. Though he was still in high school, he was better read than anyone I knew at that point in time. He shared his knowledge of literature and always had a humorous comment to make. He was very concerned about the day-to-day operations of the Triv. At our coffee house, none of the gays who hung there ever tried to make a move on me. They knew who was straight, and respected their straightness.

My experience at the Triv. changed my whole attitude to life. Before the Triv. I had accepted the plastic mom and apple pie ideas of the fifties. I thought that life was about making money and getting ahead. Even though I was making little side trips drinking and playing poker, the fifties emphasis of material things had me in its grip. After my coffee house experience I realized that there was a whole new world for me to explore.

"What's it all about, man?” Is the question that Vance and I were asking during our time at the Trivia Coffee House. We began to search for a meaning and purpose to life beyond that which we had learned from our parents, teachers, and the mass media. We turned to books to get an answer to out questions. And though we found some answers in the reading that we began at the Triv., we knew that we wouldn’t find the answers in the written word. We discovered that to find the Truth, we would have to go out into the world and look for it, not only into the world but deeper into ourselves.