Karlen's Karma

Sebastian Joe's, of course, is the beloved local ice cream powerhouse that sells fancy sorbets in flavors like orange-basil, or rich ice creams with an Italian accent, like danza di limone and chocolate amaretto. They also were one of Minneapolis's first coffee shops. And they also sell what I think is the Twin Cities' only drink named after a living writer--a living writer who has not only written a lot of books, but has written a good number of the pages within them while inside of Sebastian Joe's. And so now, in the grand American tradition of, say, people at the Algonquin Roundtable documenting each other, and before some snot-nosed American-studies major beats me to it: the deal with Karlen's Karma, the story behind the coffee, and a little bit of oral history of this little corner of the world we live in.

"I moved back here in 1989 from New York," Neal Karlen told me. Karlen, the Minnesota-born baseball nut, is the author of quite a lot of books, including an estimable biography of Henny Youngman, written with the King of the One Liners, and a recent book on the Saint Paul Saints, and he is also my friend, and so he told me these things on my sofa one evening. "I moved back here after I got kicked in the head when I was mugged. I came to have medical tests, and to chill out, and then I thought, 'Hmm, I like this. This Minnesota. I think I'll stay.' I was living across the street [from Sebastian Joe's] in the Belmont. All my stuff was still in New York, but the Belmont was an old vaudeville hotel, so you could actually get a furnished apartment.

"There weren't a lot of coffee shops in those days, so everyone would come through Sebastian Joe's. And because of where it was, on the intersection of Kenwood and Hennepin and the Wedge, which was then one of the most diverse places on Earth, you had this intersection of wealthy, Lake of the Isles people--those people who you had to climb a hundred stairs to do a college interview with, you know? And right next to them would be people in the worst band in the world, and then yuppie-business guys in their BMWs, and then guys who looked like they should have been in a sideshow carnival.

"I didn't know anyone in town, everyone I knew from growing up had fled, so Sebastian Joe's became my Cheers. And like Cheers, you only know a little about someone--their role, what they want to tell. I got married and divorced, and nobody there knew it. Because it's not a high-irony state, I had to train them. I'd come in in the morning and abuse them: 'My God, you look like Charles Starkweather this morning.' It took a while, but soon enough they were nice Minnesota Lutherans giving New York Greek-coffee-shop banter: 'Oh, you got out on parole even after that letter I sent?'

"So I'd up the ante, I'd start putting them in stories for the New York Times, like this thing I did for the Arts and Leisure section, on guilty pleasures in music. I went through Sebastian Joe's and asked people. This woman actually whispered 'Axl Rose' to me. So I put all that in, I called the manager a slacker in the New York Times, and he was deservedly pissed. But it was like--Gotcha!

"It was a very specific time. Courtney Love was like the 74th person from that corner to get famous. She was living [in Big Trouble House, on Colfax off Franklin, next to the liquor store parking lot] there, and the Mondales were living five blocks in the other direction.

"And whenever anyone was mad at me about a book, I'd go into Sebastian Joe's, and they'd say, 'We still love you.' Karma, that's what I talk about all the time. You better be nice to people because you're going to see the same people on the way down that you saw on your way up. Don't you hate people who are nice to people who have more power than them, and mean to people who have less? Karma: Leave big tips for tired waitresses, wink at old women, or flirt with old men, don't lie to your friends, and never talk to a reporter--including me.