Don Selle decided to close his coffeehouse last month. He held a quiet funeral, not even bothering to notify his regular customers, and offered a reduced menu, since he hadn’t been shopping for a week. The final night’s fare at Don’s Coffee Club was coffee, tea, cocoa, ginger ale, milk, lemonade, limeade, pie with ice cream, various store-bought confections, sundaes, and one slice of ice cream cake roll. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread was not available. Don had a rationale.
Don’s Coffee Club was an institution defined by inexplicable paradoxes, which often drove Don, and his customers, crazy. He opened the storefront at 1439 W. Jarvis in 1993 with the intention of running a place where middle-aged adults could hang out and talk calmly, but for most of the shop’s life span it was overrun by teenagers, whom Don despised. In 1998 he attempted to drive out the kids by outlawing smoking, and it nearly killed the business. In the seven years he was open, Don offered such items as bratwurst, spaghetti, and root beer floats, which became popular and made him a lot of money. But when an item became too popular, Don rubbed it off the chalkboard. “It was driving me crazy,” he would say. “I can’t stand all these people.”
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Yet in his years in Rogers Park Don was one of the neighborhood’s most prominent citizens. One summer, when drug dealing on the corner of Jarvis and Greenview was especially prevalent and the alderman and police weren’t doing much about it, Don organized a group of neighbors to sit on the corner in lawn chairs until the dealers went away. For the last four years around Labor Day, he threw an elaborate prom on the concrete patio outside his building, complete with refreshments, decorations, and hours of swing dancing. One year Don donated all his prom proceeds to a neighborhood arts group and another year to the widow of a nearby Russian cobbler who’d been killed in a brutal holdup.
“She never liked it here,” Don said. “She was no good for you.”
The next week Don went to see The Ice Storm by himself. He walked out during the opening credits.
“It’s finally come,” Don said. “Just you wait.”
“It was inevitable,” Don said. “He didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who he was. But we walked together down the street and I just knew. He’s a Greek. His parents have all kinds of money. They own restaurants, they own everything. You know how the Greeks are. They’re like the Jews. They’re what the Jews want to be.”
