A baby yelled on one side of the room while another one chuckled. A woman with pearly white hair sat alone in a corner, lazily chewing a golden doughnut dusted in sugar as white as her locks. Students bobbed their heads to the music in their ears, their faces illuminated by laptop monitors.
It was 10:31 on a Friday night, and I struggled to eye an open seat as I waited in line for black coffee and three beignets at one of Baton Rouge’s iconic restaurants — Coffee Call.
“It got busy all of a sudden,” a man ahead of me said to a jolly employee taking orders.
“We ain’t busy, nuh uh. We’re steady, and that’s good,” replied the man, known by most as Eddie.
He was a stout, older gentleman with a raspy laugh, salt-and-pepper beard and waddling step.
I paid my $4.80 bill and snatched a wooden stool at the bar in the center of the room. A dense crowd of variety surrounded me.
Each table’s inhabitants engaged in their own conversation, which created a buzz that seemed to materialize above the crowd when they melded together. The sound of black wrought-iron chairs scraping against filthy white tiles as customers took their seats penetrated the symphony of muddled conversation and laughter.
I finished my three triangles of fried perfection by 10:56 p.m. My stomach was beyond satisfied. My fingers were sticky, despite licking them clean. My laptop’s keyboard was dusted in specks of white powder.
I took a final sip of my coffee and joined the never-ending flow of people venturing to the coffee pot for their one complimentary refill.
At 11:27 p.m., 13 tables and most of the bar was vacant, and 12 of the tables were occupied — mostly by the same people as when I walked in an hour earlier.
A couple of workers made their rounds, small-talking with regulars.
People continued trickling in through the door, bringing cool gusts of night air with them, but there were more people leaving. The hardcore studiers, who were settled for a long haul, were the only familiar faces by midnight.
There were increasingly more empty spaces in the room’s conversations. Suddenly, the restaurant experienced a lull in business.
Napkins lay scattered on the floor like fallen soldiers on a battlefield of powdered sugar. A few tables, cluttered with leftovers from previous occupants, patiently waited for the busboy to wipe them off.
He was in no rush. Nobody was — save for the couple of employees clocking out for the night.
The busboy ignored the unkempt bar, caked with sugar, to joke with a young female patron, who procrastinated on her studies to entertain the older jokester. He cracked himself up, falling over tables and wiping imaginary tears from his face until he lay on the dirty floor, chuckling like a madman.
Nobody batted an eyelash at his wacky behavior.
I migrated from the bar to a window table, and two friends joined me after ordering a large serving of beignet fingers. They burned their tongues on the scalding treats and choked themselves on the sugar. I followed suit and helped myself to some of their order, remembering my dad’s old warnings about accidentally breathing in the powder through my nose while eating.
At 12:33 a.m., the busser began stacking chairs on the empty salad bar. Eddie collected sugar shakers from each table. He asked us for any containers we weren’t using but promised that Coffee Call wasn’t closing.
“We’ll be here all night baby, don’t worry,” he said as if singing a blues song. I said I would be joining him.
The busser completed flipping the chairs in the half of the restaurant closest to the kitchen and began flipping tables onto tables before dragging them to one side of the room. He half-heartedly swept the floor.
We met Eddie at the cash register to order another batch of beignets and asked if there would be another rush that night.
“Nah man, we had our time. We’re gonna get some stragglers,” he said. “We’re getting the place fresh for tomorrow.”
Old-school hip-hop blared from the kitchen and Eddie sang along.
Three groups of people had walked in since 12:15 a.m. The most recent group of five ordered their food and asked the busboy to take a picture of them with Eddie — Baton Rouge’s own celebrity.
An older man from the group tap-danced for Eddie, who watched and laughed, then watched and laughed some more. The man beckoned his friend, who began singing while her friend slapped her chest and thighs in rhythm. Eddie moved to the woman’s soft voice while a third friend recorded the whole production.
There was way more play than work going on and more laughter than anything.
At 1:34 a.m., the busser paced back and forth across the restaurant floor, dragging a sopping wet mop behind him. It didn’t clean the floor so much as spread the dirt evenly.
Only three tables of customers remained. Two of them consisted of students, who had been in their seats since before I showed up, and the other was occupied by myself. My friends were gone, and a few students were slowly starting to pack up their belongings, succumbing to temptations of sleep.
It was 2:01 a.m., and Coffee Call would officially be closed on most nights, but it was one of two nights during the week that the restaurant stays open for 24 hours.
A group of seven people, the first in about an hour, walked in holding 32-ounce styrofoam cups. They had their drinks, now they needed their grub.
The last familiar face, which belonged to a woman who was studying since before I showed up, finally called it a night and left Coffee Call at 2:25 a.m. — just as Eddie and other workers began restocking cups, cleaning dishes, scrubbing appliances and blending fresh batches of beignet dough and cafe au lait.
She was done for the day, and they were just getting started.
When the clock struck 3 a.m., only a half-filled cup of water and a plate full of powdered sugar remained on my table. The plate’s contents spilled over its edge and onto the wooden table, resulting in what looked like a cocaine fiend’s final hurrah.
By 3:27 a.m., the restaurant looked tidier than when I walked through the door at 10:30 p.m., and the employees looked much more bored and tired.
But they kept on like the city’s insatiable craving for the restaurant’s beignets with Eddie at the helm.
The chair I sat in begged for me to stand up and go home at 4 a.m., and I was too tired to argue. The activity in Coffee Call had reduced to nothing but yawns and a continuous hum of the dishwashing machine.
With sunrise approaching in a few hours, I could barely keep my eyes open as I walked out of Coffee Call’s front door. The busboy told me to have a good day as I walked to my car.
I already was.
