Rian Johnson’s 2005 high school noir, Brick, allows you to get a mere glimpse of some seedy cliques, stories, and locations, leaving an expansive history to exist beneath the surface, never to be explored again in the film. One of the most haunting was the local hangout of the reef-worms and dope-rats – the unassuming java house Coffee and Pie, Oh My!.
The Seediest Hop Den in the Burg
What haunts me about C&POM is the host of unanswered questions that its status as a drug den brings up. Is it a front? Do the hop-heads cop inside, then go out back to nod and zone out? Or is it a tragic example of a mom & pop business co-opted and held prisoner economically by the dregs of society? We all know this story. Grandma opens a pie house in the suburbs and initially draws business from the Wednesday night and Sunday morning church crowds. After a few months, a ghoul arbitrarily picks the spot to make one dope deal. Then, out of habit and opportunity he picks the same spot to do his next one. Next thing you know, the place is crawling with riff-raff – chasing away the customer base and replacing it with bleary-eyed scrapers looking to curb their munchies. Grandma still has to pay the mortgage, so she reluctantly serves up slice after slice and turns a blind eye to the crimes against society being perpetrated behind her dumpsters.
Pie House Rats
Enhance!
Another key item is the shop’s only sign – a banner which looks like it was freshly pulled out of a dot-matrix printer from 1994.
Fantastic use of clip-art, Grandma.
The true nature of Coffee and Pie, Oh My! may still be a mystery, but one thing is for certain: If one of these piehouse rats gets laid out off a hot dose, the bulls are gonna give Grandma a pick to the kit kat. Then it’s no more duck soup for you yegs!
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I love this article, it made me smile during an otherwise dreary nightshift working at a cheap hotel
Boy do I have a comment. About the flexibility of some persons. There was a down and out and very tired iHop in West Hollywood, California. A Mormon family moved here after buying the rights to run the franchise. They knew nothing about West Hollywood. Anyway, after about thirty minutes, they got the drift that it is a city with tens of thousands of gay people. The restaurant was in the heart of the bars on Santa Monica Boulevard. Without skipping a beat, they applied for and got a beer and wine liscence and tarted the place up.
Soon they were doing boffo buiseness when the bars closed at 2:AM. A real American can-do success story.
I am sure I read this in the Los ANgeles Times about ten years ago. Someday I will go there and see what’s up.
I’ve had a fun day with your website and now I get to go home having done no work at all! Keep up the great work and again, thank you.
Dennis Purcell