The Penguin, Charlotte, NC

The Penguin, Charlotte, NC

In Charlotte we just lost “The Coffee Cup”, a black run vestige that lost out to land developers. It even had received historic status but to no avail.  Gone!  Charlotte used to have a place, and still does, called “The Penguin”. It was a popular hang out that opened in 1954 and had burgers, red hots, a drive in.

By the time Marie and I moved here in 1989, it was reduced to a true greasy spoon known for caffeinated cab drivers and late night hookers. Amazingly, it was run by the original owner, a retired vice cop who had a pistol on his waist as he slopped chili into your plain white china bowl.

I ate there once. It was after a late night music show and I wanted to see it for myself. It didn’t let me down.  A long bar separated the willing from the wanted. The pistol-packing sad sack behind the bar handed me a two-sided menu barely readable through the plastic carapice sheaving it from certain stain. I dared only a hot dog and fries.

I probably had a coke instead of coffee and there you have it,  it was just me, a silent couple sitting in one of the booths drink beer from the can, and “Cookie” from the funny pages. I wolfed down the dog and was finished with the experience. The food didn’t kill me.

I had learned of The Penguin from the owner’s daughter who, every Tuesday morning, brought me the recycled aluminum cans her Pop had salvaged from a long week of the same thing every day.  The cans were saturated with spit and stale beer. Really nasty loads that were transported by a beautiful youngish woman who I remember as Nancy because of the Beatles song, Rocky Raccoon.

She filled me in on the source of her bags of literal Goo!  She came in every Tuesday like clock work and with a regular customer, you develop a casual relationship with the familiar. She, like her father, was a cop for the Charlotte Police Department and kept me informed of the ins and outs of the local crime scene.

One morning while reading the local rag, The Charlotte Observer, I caught sight in the local section of how the night before, the owner of the Penguin had caught a crook throwing his safe out the joint’s back window. As the startled thief followed the purloined safe out the window, “Cookie” shot him in the ass with his sidearm. The bullet went straight up the guy’s spine and out the top of his head. He landed on top of the safe, ‘doornail dead’. No charges of course.  “Cookie” died several years later. The place was shuttered, Nancy didn’t have the Tuesday beer can trove anymore and, alas, Charlotte moved a little closer to the World Class Status it dreamed of where restaurants all were homogenized tract palaces owned by corporations and managed by junior college graduates.

In the very late 1990s, gentrified revitalization struck and stuck. The Penguin, now a Phoenix , was transformed from boarded up savage chic to the hippest hash house in the Queen city. Nothing too special on the menu, burgers and beer, winky-tinky dogs, and Tanqueray with a twist. But, the place is very alive with crowded booths filled with too loud millinialists reminding us that all we really need to get through until Nancy shows back up with a wet bag of cans next Tuesday in the memory of taxi driving hacks and pre-crack whore hookers not really enjoying their too strong coffee but celebrating their community and commonality.

Don’t go get shot in the ass now!

Submitted By Forrest Lee

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