Makris Café sleeps in the littered streets of Shattuck and University, its peeled paint faded by the sun. From outside there is no way of telling what is within, the windows covered in telltale poster boards claiming daily specials and “Yes, We Are OPEN.” No light escapes the cracks between the cardboard. Spray-paint graffiti lines the tiles at the base of the foundation. Inside, yellow light fills the room from florescent globes above. The room is a hall of stools lining a dark red counter, which separates customers from the kitchen. The kitchen is fundamentally a freezer, a cabinet, and a grill, which constantly bubbles white and yellow bursts of light reflected in the bacon grease and the shiny blue surface of the metal. Quiet radio crackles through a tiny speaker in the corner of the café.

      I had passed by it many times before. It had always sat quietly, squeezed between downtown restaurants and office buildings. It was a place you might only notice if you tripped on their newspaper stand. I had never tripped on such a paper stand. In fact, I had never noticed the place at all, and never would have if Oliver hadn’t pointed it out to me. “Look,” he said, “it’s one of those greasy-spoons.” As I looked up the first thing I noticed was the flickering neon-red BREAKFAST sign illuminating an otherwise unlit windowpane.

      As we walk inside, our eyes adjust to the yellow glow surrounding us. A bell rings behind us as the door closes. We sit down at the bar and look at the menus. A middle-aged Korean woman approaches us and asks us with a thick accent, “you wan coffee?” After we agree, her husband scrapes his metal spatula on the greasy grill and asks us what we want to order. I order the number two – hotcakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs.

      Oliver looks down and clumsily points to something on the specials menu saying, “I’ll have this… Pork chop.”

      The balding Korean grills like an artist. Eggs crack and slip onto the bubbling table as pork chops are pressed against the hot metal. Billows of smoke rise up and out of a shaft in the ceiling. As we wait for our breakfast, we drink our coffee and absorb our surroundings. We are the only customers in the room.

      Oliver breaks the silence, “This looks like the kind of place Tom Waits could eat at.” I chuckle and imagine Tom’s raspy gravel voice crackling through the tiny speaker. Perhaps he’s singing “Frank’s Wild Years” or maybe “Train Song.”  
 

      Two years later, I look down at a piece of paper that reads AP Studio Art: Concentration Semester. Ms. Stahl is explaining to us that we need to complete twelve pieces of the same topic by May, when the AP board will examine them and the work we did in the previous semester. “Make sure you choose a topic you’ll want to stick with,” she warns us, “You don’t want to get sick of your subject halfway through the semester.” The classroom resonates in murmurs as I lean back in my chair and smile. I knew exactly what topic to choose from the moment I read the assignment. Makris Café would be easy to do twelve pictures of. I certainly won’t be getting bored of it any time soon. After two years of habitual visits I can’t see myself losing interest in it now. It has stood the test of time. The place completely reeks of potential. It’s dark but it’s warm. It’s mysterious but simple. It’s lonely even when crowded. It is absolutely art and I need to capture it. 
 

      I walk in through the squeaky door as the light from my entrance floods into the room and almost immediately is swept back outside. The door shuts and I hear the ringing of the little bell attached to it. “Morning, Suzy.” I say to the Korean woman as she brings me my coffee. Then I pull a digital camera from my coat pocket. “Would you mind,” I ask, “if I took a few pictures to paint for my art class?”

      She looks puzzled, but smiles and asks, “Uhhh, say again?”

      I explain to her that I would like to paint pictures of Makris Café for my art class. She says, “one second,” and calls for her daughter. They murmur in Korean for a few moments until Suzy points at me, then points at her daughter. I repeat myself to her daughter, which is then followed by more foreign murmuring. Finally Suzy says, “you paint? Here?”

      “Yeah, if you’ll let me.”

      Suzy nods her head, “Yeah, sure!…”

      “Okay, then, in that case I’ll have the number five with hash browns.” 
 

      I’m looking down at the few pictures I managed to take before the digital camera had run out of batteries. I see a blurred, dark kitchen. A half eaten breakfast. Hot sauce and napkin dispensers. I choose the napkin dispenser to begin with. As I begin, large blocks of grey, black and red fill my canvas. There are no details. A student teacher, Jamie, approaches me as he makes rounds about the class. He points at a dark spot on my photograph. “What color is that?” he asks.

      “Black,” I respond.

      “Is it?”

      I answer that it looks like black to me.

      “Okay, then. What is that color?” This time he points to the black I had painted on my canvas.

      “That’s black too.”

      He puts the photograph on top of the painting so the two colors are touching. They look nothing alike. He looks at me with a smile.  “I think you aren’t really looking at the colors. You’re thinking what the colors should be, but you aren’t seeing what they really are. Now I’m seeing a lot of dark green in this ‘black,’ aren’t you?”

      There is green in it. I scratch my head. There is no logical reason for any green to be a part of the shadows I’m painting; yet there it is. Why would there be green there?

      “You should see each color individually. And not for what you think it should be, but what you actually see,” says Jamie.

      I thank Jamie and dip my plastic knife into a tub of phthalo green. And when I get down to details, I use blue and red to shine the metal dispenser. I tint a white plate blue. Until this point I had been filtering these colors through my own limited understanding, but now I accept that I don’t have to understand them in order to show them. 
 

      After painting the first few pictures, I begin thinking about why I wanted to paint Makris. It must be because it’s not everyday you come across a place with real personality and atmosphere. And it must be that I want to capture its intense atmosphere. There’s a feeling I sometimes get from the place. An utterly romanticized, desolate feeling. The feeling I get when I overhear a man ask over the counter, “don’t you ever get sad, Suzy?”

      Suzy’s answer is almost inaudible but I barely hear her say, “Every day.”

      It’s that feeling that makes me look up from my grits and, even with the quiet bubbling of the stove and the light crackle of the radio, experience true silence. So I paint shadows, rust and coffee stains. Devoid of human life. 
 

      Heeding Jamie’s advice and my own experience, I continue to paint. Slowly at first, but as the AP deadline draws closer, I feel a push to produce results faster and more frequently. I’m pulling late nights with stained newsprint, a paintbrush and “The Freewheelin’.” I’m painting in grandma’s garage on family trips.  
 

      Flocks of teens pour through the doors of the art room, blathering about their last final and plans for the summer. Yearbooks are passed around and hugs are exchanged. Ms. Stahl asks everyone to settle down for a minute. “Today we’re taking a little field trip,” she grins as we all raise our heads. “So, I don’t know if all of you got to see Evan’s concentration, but he painted pictures of a little greasy spoon diner on University, and I just thought it would be cool to all go there for our last class together.” Then she asks me if it was okay with me.

      “Yeah, sure…” I say, “If we can all fit in there…” 
 

      “Morning, Suzy.”

      “Hiii. Any frens today?” says Suzy, wiping down a red counter.

      “Yeah, I brought a few friends this time.” The bell on the door behind me rings as another student enters, followed by another, and another. The bell rings somewhere around twenty times. Suzy’s eyes widen as she signals for her husband to get the grill ready.

      “Who want coffee?!”

      I had never seen Makris with more than five customers in it at a time until now. And I had never seen the customers happily chatting. Now instead of worn-out police and disheveled businessmen, I see smiling faces in all directions, laughing and interacting with each other. It makes me think they don’t see the place like I did. They aren’t seeing the Makris I see because they are distracted by their own priorities. I realize that most of what I associate with the café is purely in my own imagination. I had been seeing it as a gathering place for urban spirits and a silent, gloomy company, but in reality it’s just a dining establishment. I doubt other customers share the awe I have for the diner.

      But I don’t care. I know the personality I found so attractive when I first set foot in Makris Café is mostly my own projection, and I still choose to project. If I’m the only person in the world who looks at it that way, I could care less. Now they can all just see my paintings to understand.