Slackers Find Honey Bear Cafe A Place To Meet

It is mid-morning at the Honey Bear cafe in Wallingford, which each week sells 5,000 pumpkin muffins and 2,500 whole-wheat cinnamon rolls, a good portion of them to middle-aged guys.

Not just any sort of middle-aged guys, but middle-aged slacker guys.

"I've worked here four years, and in all my years, nobody my age has asked me out," Janette Maupin, 25, who works behind the counter, tells me. "It's always guys in their mid-30s, 40s, 50s. Some write poetry to me, definitely sexual, with stuff about `milky white thighs.' "

Apparently whole wheat does have revitalizing qualities.

"What do they call us?" Janette says. She runs back into the kitchen and asks another young woman. "Oh, yeah, `muffin maidens.' "

These days, Janette has taken to wearing a wedding ring, even though she's single. It helps discourage some of the slackers.

If you aren't familiar with the term "slacker," then you obviously haven't kept up with your trend stories. In the past five years, this paper alone has run 110 stories about slackers. But you probably were too busy putting in 12-hour days at the office.

A slacker is somebody who has decided to skip the fast track and its big dollars and live the simple life instead.

Originally it was applied to the twentysomething generation. But then middle-aged baby boomers decided that slacking wasn't such a bad idea.

It was in the May issue of Esquire magazine, "the magazine for men," that the Honey Bear became known as a mecca for middle-aged slackers. Soon, a documentary crew is coming to the cafe to film the slackers in their favorite mode, sitting around.

What the film crew will see is guys like Yasuhiro Nakai, 46. In 1981 he started a teriyaki take-out in Fremont called Yak's. (He's not among the slackers who talk up the women employees.)

Nakai sold the teriyaki joint, opened a succession of cafes, sold them, then decided to take time off to help raise his kids. He didn't give up work completely; he and his wife own some rental units, and he manages some condos.

But for the past five years, although soon he'll open another cafe, Nakai has decided that time with his family was more important.

"You have to be more careful with your spending, but it's worth it," he says. A cheap way to take a break is buying a $1.85 cinnamon roll at the Honey Bear, which, with seating for 100, has plenty of room to hang out with other slacker guys.

Paul Doyle, who's "over 50" (and also not among the slackers who talk up the women employees), is another regular. He runs the Grand Illusion, a small movie theater in the University District. That takes up 20 or 30 hours a week of his time.

The rest of the time, well, he's written a book, and he's raced motorcarts, and he hangs out in a cabin in the San Juan Islands. I ask if he feels guilty about slacking. Guys, I tell him, they're supposed to work, and then they die. Doyle laughs.

"I don't feel guilty at all," he says. "I actually went into the movie business to avoid a regular job."

Sitting with us is Rissa Warner, who owns the cafe along with her husband, Karl Gaskill. They're both 47. Karl recently went the slacker route and spends much of his time on the couple's property on Lake Chelan.

Rissa puts in 12-hour-plus days, getting up at 2 in the morning in a sweat, worrying about that morning's batch of baked goods, or meeting quarterly taxes. It is Rissa who wants to start a bunch of other Honey Bear bakery cafes, and who proudly drives a BMW. The easygoing atmosphere at the Honey Bear is created by a very unslacker individual.

I ask Rissa why there are no middle-aged women slackers hanging around the Honey Bear. There are women customers, but they don't linger like the guys.

"My theory is that men can only focus on one thing at a time," Rissa says.

When men decide to become slackers, they do so with a vengeance. "But women can focus on 1,000 things at a time. I'm a mom, bakery owner, accountant, counter person. Who has time to sit around?"

By now, another slacker guy has arrived, one of dozens who'll trickle in through the day. Coffee, a roll, go sit and hang out.

You're supposed to do that in your retirement years. But you know baby boomers, always ahead of the curve.

Erik Lacitis' column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 464-2237. His e-mail address is: elac-new@seatimes.com.