Summer stock

Remembering the Coco Mocos, the love, and the rock and roll that make living in Worcester fun

by Walter Crockett

It was a hazy, summer, Tuesday evening, and Bobby Chin had the night off at Peking Wok. So me and my baby climbed into the rocket '89 and rolled west by northwest into the verdant wilds of Paxton, Rutland, Hubbardston, and points beyond, keeping an ample distance between us and the gendarmes of Holden.

Bobby Chin makes the world's best Coco Moco -- a creamy frozen froth of pineapple juice, several rums, something with orange in it, and a bunch of other stuff, served in a ceramic coconut and topped by a red toothpick lancing a maraschino cherry and a chunk of pineapple. He's told me a million times what's in it, but deep down I really don't want to know, just like I never wanted to know how my mother made the world's best BLT. I just want to enjoy it.

We joined Bobby Chin's fan club when he and Sam ran the bar at the Aku-Aku on East Central Street. They kept the comedy crowd in the next room up to their eyeballs in scorpion bowls, lubricated the pu-pu platter legions in the dining room, and still managed to get drinks to us regulars in the bar as soon as we needed them. I haven't seen a better bartending combination in my 31 years on the barstools of New England.

But all good things run down, and our patronage at the Aku-Aku declined with the departure of Sam and the advent of Roger, a transplant from the Cambridge Aku-Aku who was in tight with one of the owners. Roger was rigid and aloof and a bit of a bully with the staff. He didn't know how to make a Coco Moco, and he didn't want to learn.

One night, when nobody was in the bar but Roger and us, we had a summit meeting. "Coco Moco not Aku-Aku drink," Roger informed us in the thickest of accents. "You want Hayhunh!" Gradually I realized that a Hayhunh was a Headhunter, and that I didn't really want one because it didn't taste as good. It turned out that on the official Aku-Aku menu there was no mention of the Coco Moco. And even though I had been imbibing the nation's best Coco Mocos right there for five years or so, a rule is a rule to the Rogers of the world. "All Aku-Akus must be same," Roger said.

In a gesture of generosity, however, he pointed out that what I really wanted, even more than a Hayhunh, was a "frozen Coco Moco." And he made me one. It was passable, but the thrill was gone.

With the thrill went Bobby Chin, to greener pastures at the Peking Wok on Grove Street. And with Bobby went a whole bunch of regulars.

Bobby takes Tuesdays off, so last week we headed west, taking the back roads as the sun slowly set and the songbirds sang on the meadow's edge. I can never go west without running into people I knew from the '70s, from the Zonkaraz days, the days when I would lie on my bed in a Wachusett Street rooming house with a longhaired girl at my side and know I was rich as a king: I had music, I had love, and I had a roof over my head, what more could you want? Yes, I was rich as a king -- until the rent came due or the green '69 Beetle broke down. And I remain rich as a king to this day on more or less the same terms -- different car, different girl, different roof, same music, better love.

We hung a left onto Route 62 and climbed the back way into Barre Center, looking for a place to wet our whistles and discovering the bar of the Col. Isaac Barre Restaurant, run by old Zonkaraz fans Matt and Greg Donlin. The restaurant's a classy upscale place with polished furniture. The bar is very Barre, which means, among other things, that it's down-to-earth and not overly crowded on a Tuesday night. I had a tart blue Mai Tai made by a bartender named Honey, and then it was time to push on.

We cruised down through Hardwick, the most refreshingly rural community this side of the Quabbin; took a right in the mill town of Gilbertville; crossed a covered bridge; and found ourselves on a timeless, shoulderless blacktop, narrow enough in places to pass for an English country road. Through farms and forest we wound, down into Ware, "nationally known as the town that couldn't be licked" (I'm not quite sure why, but that's what the sign on Route 9 used to say), emerging onto Church Street, a delightful neighborhood of gingerbread and Victorian houses that put Worcester's remaining domestic architecture to shame.

In three decades of music, I've played most of the towns between Kelley Square and the Quabbin -- more places than my battered brain cells are disposed to retrieve. I've never played in Ware. Driven through it, though, which is plenty good enough for me.

We turned left onto Route 9 and climbed up out of the town that couldn't be licked into the woods that can't be clear-cut: the dark and beautiful Harvard Forest, which extends all the way from Ware to the Salem Cross Inn, or the "Salem Crofs Inn" as those people who can't read the antique "s" are wont to call it. Straddling the high hillsides between the Blackstone River valley and the Ware River valley, with its big houses set way, way back from the street, West Brookfield always maintains an aura of real New England gravity that sets it apart from Suburban Assault Vehicle towns like Holden and Ford pickup towns like Oakham.

We swung into the parking lot of Ye Olde Tavern, where a bartender named Lisa, who also harks back to Zonkaraz days, poured me a tasty frozen "Lisa's Love Potion" that numbered among its merits a couple of rums and some Peachtree. The guys at the bar were talking fishing, of course, which was relief from the endless Mo Vaughn routine you get in the city these days.

Having caught our own legal limit of buzz and facing the prospect of motoring home right past the state police barracks on Route 9, we reluctantly climbed back into ye olde car and coasted toward Worcester. In East Brookfield, an old abandoned brain cell flickered on for a moment, and we remembered the time one of our roadies -- I'll call him Fred, because I'm not sure the statute of limitations has expired -- went to Sir Morgan's Cove and then spent the night partying with the Lynch Mob.

Fred was so drunk coming home that he climbed up onto the railroad tracks across from the YMCA and lay down on a flatbed car. Pretty soon, he noticed that the train was moving beneath him. "This is cool," he thought. Half an hour later he decided it wasn't so cool, so Fred uncoupled the car and the front of the train chugged off before him, while the back half of the train slowly rolled to a stop. He walked a couple of miles in the middle of the night to the center of sleepy East Brookfield, where he took a fancy to a truck at a service station with a key in its ignition. When Fred started it up, it made the most God-awful grinding noise. He only drove it 30 feet before abandoning it and fleeing back to the railroad tracks. How he got home I don't recall, but Fred didn't look very good for about a week after that, but, to tell the truth, he hadn't looked so hot beforehand. That's rock and roll for you.

The highway rolls down, down, down from the Brookfields to Spencer, climbs back up to Breezy Bend, and then falls down, down, down again all the way to Webster Square. It was too late to stop by the bar at the Castle, and Emil Haddad and Dick Odgren wouldn't be showing up at O'Flaherty's Piano Pub until Saturday night, so we descended through the grime and haze to our home in the never-quite-picturesque Beaver Brook Valley.

Thinking about Emil, and how his music is still so playfully romantic after more than 50 years on the flugelhorn; and about Dick, and how incredible his piano playing has become in the past 10 years; and about how you can go out to O'Flaherty's any Saturday night and revel in their music, even dance to it, whether the bar is crowded or empty -- thinking about this in my semi-altered state on a balmy Tuesday evening halfway through the penultimate summer of the second millennium, I suddenly realized what sex, music, a Coco Moco, and a BLT had in common: the magic of each is much more than the sum of its parts.

Well, it seemed like a pretty cosmic revelation at the time.