Excerpt: Searching for Stan Cornyn

Prologue: Jack’s Empyrean Playlist

It started three years ago at a Fourth of July party. We were all discussing which five cds you’d wish you could have if stranded on a desert island. Of course, the discussion first dealt with the fact that you couldn’t choose ahead of time. It’s not like you know you’re going to be stuck on an island, and so would plan accordingly. But then the argument over which cds were most important or necessary became the main focus of discussion, and Jack so completely took it to heart that he wandered around for the whole rest of the summer worrying over creating the complete perfect cd wallet, should all other cds become forever inaccessible. 

We all have mp3 players now, mostly iPods, and our cds are relegated to neat wall racks, the glove compartment, and whatever we left in the stereo changer last time we bothered to fill it. 

You could put around 24,000 songs on a 120 gb iPod. That’s 2,000 albums, more or less. So the cds on a desert island question is sort of moot, and it becomes more of an issue of how long the battery will last and if it could be recharged by someone who is surrounded mainly by seaweed and sand. 

Even if you just have an 8 gb iPod touch or iPhone, that’s still 1600 songs; approximately 133 albums. This might be the size of a typical cd collection for someone who really appreciates and enjoys collecting music from time to time. Hard-core audiophiles would have much more, of course. But if you can just carry your entire cd collection around with you in your pocket, you are no longer thinking in terms of the minimum amount of music you can live with. 

Jack still does, though. He’s never really let go of the search for an empyrean, sort of holy playlist. How long should the playlist be? That’s only one of the important questions to be answered. Currently, he thinks he could narrow it down to ten essential albums and 100 singles that would form a complete picture of the post rock and roll era catalog. This is probably a little more than a gigabyte of music, which would require about twelve traditional cds, but is only a drop in the mp3 bucket, of course. 

Jack’s list has changed and evolved over the past three years, as people themselves do, and it’s become a sort of town game that we all indulge him in because he’s just so sweet and earnest about the whole thing. Additionally, Jack provides us with one of our most important resources: donuts and coffee. 

The sign on the donut shop down on the ocean road literally says “DONUTS AND COFFEE,” but we all call it Jack’s. He started working there over fifteen years ago, mostly against his will, and has been there ever since. He became the manager after only six months when the previous one, Bert Roberts, flipped out and ran away after one of the machines malfunctioned and started flinging half-cooked raised donuts in the air instead of just flipping them over in the oil. People say he thought he was back in ‘Nam, being air-assaulted by the Viet Cong. 

Jack has a degree in broadcast journalism, but came home to care for his mother, who has MS, after his father died. And he’s been here ever since. Jack’s mom had been doing fairly well, with the disease still in the early intermittent stage for over a decade after being diagnosed while he was in high school. But after her husband John died, she became very depressed and had a hard time managing for awhile. Jack stayed around to help out; her doctors and therapists told him she’d regain most of her strength and independence and have plenty of time left before things got worse. She did seem to recover her spirits after a few months. Yet Jack never left, worried about what would happen to his mother if she was completely alone during an attack, worried she’d sink back into depression with both her husband and son gone from her daily life. 

He told some of us once at a theater meeting that he didn’t like the direction broadcast journalism was taking in the late 80s; it wasn’t the world he’d hoped to enter when he made his career plans in high school. A couple people speculated he was just afraid he wouldn’t make it big in the city and gave up, but he told us he simply realized, like so many other Sea View residents, that the city doesn’t offer anything to match the kind of life we’re able to live here. This is a very special town, and most of us do find our way back to it after heading off to explore the wider world. So now Jack manages the donut shop, he started the theater company, putting on two plays and a summer revue each year, and he takes care of his mother, who began showing signs of disease progression over the past few years as she headed into her sixties. 

Sea View is inhabited by about four thousand year-round residents. Three seasons out of the year, it’s a forgotten little quirky kingdom, except on pleasant weekends in the fall and during the holidays when people from the city come to shop at the art galleries and visit the B&B. Of course, residents of surrounding towns attend the plays and eat at the seafood restaurant, Angelo’s . Otherwise it’s pretty quiet here most of the time. But the population doubles in summertime when New Yorkers come to fill the cottages along the shore, spend lots of money at the seaside bars and restaurants, and clog the main road in and out of town. 

Every Sea View resident visits Jack’s, though, on a weekly if not daily basis. It’s kind of the hub for locals, and Jack keeps it that way by hosting community and club meetings, and by never completely acquiescing to the latest trends in gourmet pastries and coffee. He has the idea that donuts have always been accepted for just exactly what they are, no more and no less, and that high quality coffee need not be given special size names or come in eighteen flavors in order to taste good with a donut. There is an espresso machine at Jack’s, and if the right person is working behind the counter in the morning, you can get a caffe latte or a cappuccino, but what you won’t get is any attention paid to you if you order something half-caf, extra foam, no whip etcetera. Instead, you’ll get an arm flung out to the left, finger pointed toward the highway where sits the big franchise coffee giant, and an arm pointing up to the menu board, on which are written simple names for simple drinks.  There’s no mocha listed up there, but you can ask for your caffe latte “with chocolate,” and they’ll make it with hot chocolate instead of regular milk. 

Actually, Jack says that in Italy, where he took his mom for Christmas a number of years ago, they don’t drink a caffe latte or cappuccino after breakfast time, only plain caffe, but he figures since he’s sort of selling breakfast all day long, it doesn’t matter when people like their caffe lattes as long as they’re not pretentious or asinine about ordering them. This is New Jersey, after all, not Veneto. There’s just no need to carry the thing so far. 

Jack has stopped using trans-fats, at the firm request of Mayor Black, whose partner Jill was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis recently. But otherwise, the donuts are pretty much just as they’re always been; there are bear claws, cinnamon twists, Boston cremes, lemon and raspberry filled, glazed, vanilla and chocolate iced, and a few varieties of cake donuts each day. Jack doesn’t make the donuts, Hector and Sal do, but he does know how all the machinery works, and can fill in for one of them as needed. Jack says his dad taught him that a good business manager should be able to perform each job of the operation he’s overseeing, and Jack has taught each of his assistant managers over the years this philosophy as well, though most of them are only there for a few seasons before moving on to what they believe are bigger and better things. 

When the elementary school was renovated recently, Jack bought one of the old classroom blackboards and had it installed at Donuts and Coffee, and now people can write their suggestions for the desert island playlist right on the wall for Jack or others to muse over, argue over, get angry over, or incorporate into the running tally. People also leave notes for each other and reminders about meetings, but if a pre-teen writes something “naughty” on the board and Jack catches him, the kid is made to wipe tables and sweep the floor as penance for the deed. 

If any outsider is caught writing something such as “it’s spelled doUGHnuts, you moron,” they are banned for life from Jack’s shop, shooed out the door to a background chorus of laughter and sarcasm. Jack can get fairly pedantic about a number of subjects, but the sign says DONUTS and he sees no reason to change it other than to freshen up the paint after winter. 

Jack accepts song and album suggestions from 1955 to 2005, and will not permit the addition of repackaged compilations or greatest hits collections, for obvious reasons. Soundtracks are also excluded, and there are a few bands and singers you shouldn’t mention unless you want to incur a withering dressing-down either by Jack or one of the regulars who hang around all day drinking coffee and playing gin rummy or Canasta. There’s an ongoing argument between two of the older regulars, Tommy and Vinny, about whether Dean Martin or Tony Bennett is the better vocalist, and Tommy even put up a little tally chart where people could vote on which they prefer, but Jack says that since neither of them has an album good enough for the list, it really makes no difference to him how long they argue about it or what they decide. Jack does have some Dean Martin albums, though, inherited from his father. He rarely plays them, except the Christmas one in season, but he cherishes them for one special attribute they each contain; liner notes by the master, Stan Cornyn.