Robert Borsodi, 64, New Orleans Bohemian
Louisiana Lou
Coffeehouse owner jumps from bridge
Monday November 03, 2003
By John Pope
Staff writer
Hours before dawn on Oct. 25, Robert Borsodi awoke for the last time in the
Uptown bohemia where he had reigned for a quarter-century.
Without disturbing his partner, Karen Rittvo, Borsodi dressed and parted the
hanging sheets of cotton fabric that separated his cot from the cluttered
Soniat Street coffeehouse where he had brewed coffee, staged plays and
poetry readings and, on special occasions, made croissants.
Borsodi, 64, paused long enough to grab a scrap of paper towel and dash off
a four-line poem about Maddy, his and Rittvo's hefty cocoa-colored dog. Then
the gray-haired man with the trademark wispy beard that hung nearly to his
waist climbed into his dark-blue Nissan truck, painted with flowers, and was
gone.
His next stop was the Hale Boggs Bridge over the Mississippi River at
Luling. Parking on the shoulder of the southbound lane, Borsodi walked to
the middle of the span and jumped. His body was found four miles downriver
on Wednesday, said Maj. Sam Zinna, chief of detectives in the St. Charles
Parish Sheriff's Office.
"When I saw the truck had gone, I knew," Rittvo said.
Although the autopsy said the cause of death was drowning, Rittvo and other
close friends had no doubt that the suicide was a response to untreatable
cancer. It had spread throughout his body, including his bones. The pain was
so acute, friends said, that Borsodi recently had gone from one friend to
the next, asking for help in killing himself.
"He wasn't grandstanding. If he was in pain, he probably was thinking of
getting the job done the best way possible," his friend John Koeferl said.
Borsodi's suicide, friends said, was a consistent act for a man who had
spent his life well outside the mainstream.
"Robert constantly said that he belonged to slower times," said Christina
Miller, a former companion. "He really felt people have forgotten how to
communicate with each other. That was his thing: To communicate with each
other on an intimate level is something profound."
Borsodi eschewed such modern trappings as air conditioning and e-mail and
seldom bought anything new. He grew a beard, Rittvo said, because "he just
got sick of shaving when he was 45."
Those who knew Borsodi trace his eccentricities to his childhood. He was the
grandson of Ralph Borsodi, a self-taught philosopher whose antidote for the
Depression's economic misery was a series of small, nearly self-sufficient
communities.
Ralph Borsodi brought up his grandson after Robert Borsodi's parents
divorced.
Borsodi prepped at Choate, a New England boarding school, and had a Yale
degree in drama, but made a point of downplaying this pedigree. When he
applied for work as a carpenter to help him keep a string of coffeehouses
open in California, Washington state and, finally, New Orleans, Borsodi, who
was right-handed, filled out the forms left-handed "so people would think he
was an illiterate Joe and not overqualified," said Linda Cicada, his
companion for 11 years and the mother of his son.
Borsodi operated coffeehouses on Danneel and Freret streets before buying
the Soniat Street duplex in 1993. He never advertised for the coffeehouse
known as Breezy's, and never charged admission for the plays he staged in a
tiny, sunken area Rittvo referred to as the "Theater in the Hole."
"It was a warm and very welcoming atmosphere," said Peter Cooley, who
participated in several of Borsodi's poetry readings.
Cooley, a Tulane University professor, said Borsodi was a unifying literary
force because he brought together white and black audiences.
"It was a place everyone went to," he said.
During summers, Borsodi hopped freight trains, staying on the road for
months at a time and sending back hand-drawn postcards.
And when it was time to move on, Borsodi did just that, regardless of
whether he was heading for the freight yard or walking out of a
relationship.
"When he left me, he walked out in the middle of the night and left me a
note: 'Linda -- Had to go. Robert.' " Cicada said. "He didn't tell us where
he want. He had to go, just the same way he had to jump off a bridge."
He and Christina Miller were living on the West Coast in the mid-1970s and
hating it when, Miller said, she suggested moving to New Orleans, a place
she had liked to visit while growing up in Florida.
So they drove across the country in a station wagon named Queenie, arriving
in New Orleans during a storm "when the sky turned green," Miller said.
Borsodi opened his first coffeehouse at 5104 Danneel St. and his second at
5104 Freret St. During his first 15 years in New Orleans, Borsodi made
enough money to buy a former crack house on Soniat Street and convert it
into a coffeehouse, his friend Brad Ott said.
That last establishment, in a prim row of duplexes, would look familiar to
anyone who went to college in the 1960s or '70s. The floor sags, and the
dark walls are covered with postcards, street and business signs, yellowing
business cards and concert schedules with edges so old they curl. The only
indication that the year is 2003 is that some of the newer additions to the
collection of business cards have e-mail addresses.
Also stapled to the walls are quotations Borsodi liked, coming from such
diverse sources as the writers Isak Dinesen, Edgar Allan Poe and George
Bernard Shaw and the rock band Little Feat. Just inside the door, written in
fading ink, is Borsodi's statement of purpose for his coffeehouse: "There
should be some common ground somewhere, after all, where free spirits can
gather and not seem peculiar and out of the way."
"He just had his living room," Ott said, "and he welcomed everyone that
would sit down."
A memorial service will be held, probably in late December, but the date and
time have not been set.
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Bob Champ
Bob Champ
"Louisiana Lou" <Louisi...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bo5spm$3ti$1...@emac1.ocs.lsu.edu>...
