Amorous Cafe Encounters of the Silver-Tongued Insomniac

By AARON CURTISS

Oct. 4, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> Aaron Curtiss is a Times staff writer</i>

As Saturday night settles onto Ventura Boulevard like some smelly, uncomfortable blanket, Victor Von Wright lowers his hulking frame into an old lecture hall chair on the sidewalk outside the Insomnia Cafe. Ten feet away, a stream of cars all washed and shined for a night out, growl and belch toxins.

Von Wright, a 48-year-old actor and film producer whose black leather jacket is adorned with a painting of a busty woman having sex with a skeleton, pulls out his n th unfiltered cigarette of the evening and sets to talking.

“Man, the two most important things people have problems with are relationships and finances,” he says softly and smoothly, the measured words of the actor punctuated by the amber glow of the butt between his fingers. His voice is drowned by the garble of laughter of other coffeehouse patrons and the sound of passing cars.

So it is at the Insomnia Cafe, a Greenwich Village kind of coffeehouse in the middle of Sherman Oaks, a few doors down Ventura Boulevard from a stand that sells orange bangs or booms or whatever they’re called. It is a place where cast-off sofas and garage-sale easy chairs inspire chain smoking and caffeine consumption and dark lipstick and the sort of talk that after enough coffee and nicotine makes one feel like a silver-tongued dialogue writer.

At least, that’s the idea.

But Bohemian is to Sherman Oaks what slam dancing is to the Bolshoi.

Neighbors don’t like the cafe or the insomniacs who hang out there. Seems they’re too noisy and fertilize local gardens and have this odd proclivity for having sex in other people’s driveways. At least, that’s what the neighbors say, although it is a staple of local protests against any unwanted business venture to allege that its patrons perform intimate functions amongst the neighbors’ azaleas and station wagons. Not In My Back Yard indeed.

On a recent Saturday night, the crowd did not seem the type to soil themselves with leaked transmission fluid for a few torrid minutes. These folks aspire to be epicureans in the purest sense. People for whom revelry of the mind is the greatest pleasure and conversations between opposite sexes are not necessarily governed by the internal surges of hormonal tides.

But, remember, this is still Sherman Oaks, the Promised Land of ego homes and strip malls, not Lower Manhattan. Like teen-agers learning to drive, the patrons almost seem ill at ease with the concept of talking for the sake of talking, and without the lip-loosening power of alcohol, besides. The cafe is supposed to feel like Everyman’s living room, but Everyman generally falls asleep in his living room with the TV on and his wife sitting cross-armed next to him.

Keith Miller sits in an overstuffed floral print chair, writing in a spiral notebook, his pen moving in small uniform strokes, black ink smudging here and there as he scripts stanza after stanza. This is a regular hangout for Miller, a 23-year-old assistant buyer for the May Co.

“They don’t have anything like this in Glendale,” he says. “You get the feeling you’re sitting in your living room, but there are other people right next to you.”

Miller comes to write in his notebook; poetry or reflections or whatever else comes to mind. “I like to scare myself and explore a darker side of myself,” he says. He pauses and adds: “That sounds really dumb, huh?”

He hands over his notebook and points to a poem.

A wonderland in this blaze of fury.

This zenith of emotion which moves through me.

Lights the night within my soul and takes me back

To when life was new, emotions were strong

And my mind was open to this

To that

To the beauty of life which I had forgotten

And now shining in your eyes.

Nothing quite so heavy for the group next to the cake counter. As an ant scurries across a sliced cheesecake, four twentysomething men sit crowded around a tiny table littered with empty coffee mugs and cappuccino cups, dried foam clinging to the rims. Behind them, two men sit locked in a game of chess. One twirls the end of his mustache.

But at the table, conversation is casual, almost vapid.

It wanders . . .

. . . to music . . .

“Is this a Paul McCartney live album?” asks Steven, a 26-year-old law clerk in a dark blue blazer. “Before it was very Beatle-esque, but now there is a little too much Paul.”

. . . to art . . .

“She has a tan line, but no nipple,” Steven says, noticing a nude painting on the wall.

. . . to the weather . . .

“I haven’t seen a cloudy day yet,” says 27-year-old Patrick, a Montreal native who lives in a Torrance hotel until he can find an apartment.

“That’s because you haven’t seen the sky,” Steven fires back.

. . . to house hunting . . .

“I’ve noticed a lack of fridges in apartments,” Patrick observes. “Why, of all the appliances that they choose not to include, is the biggest, heaviest and hardest to lug around?”

. . . and invariably to women . . .

“Too much eye makeup,” says Neil, a 27-year-old in a black-and-white checkered jacket as a woman in a tube top passes the table.

. . . and almost automatically to sex . . .

“What’s your favorite position?” Patrick asks the table, but the answer is lost as Neil flicks the penny he has been tapping on the table across the cafe. It hits a woman in shorts sitting next to a friend.

“That was a field goal attempt,” Neil tries to explain, talking loudly and blushing. “It was supposed to go between you. Unfortunately, it hit the goal post.” Then, he leans in close to the table, narrows his eyes and whispers to his friends: “Now come the dollar bills.”

Whether the women were impressed, gaining Neil a brief romance in someone’s driveway, is not known.