David Lerner's Uneasy Relationship with Delight

Sylvia Carter, a food writer who was one of my mentors and also a favorite of David Lerner (the founder of the shimmeringly great Manhattan Mac store, Tekserve, who died recently), loved a quote from a soul food chef named Ruby, who said "If the people shut their eyes when they eat, that means someone back in the kitchen is keeping their eyes wide open."

It can be read lightly as a reminder that quality requires diligence. Or it can be considered more deeply as a profound insight about the self sacrifice required for delightful outcome. Delighters don't participate. They're rarely delighted. So why do they do it? Well, few do. Which explains why true delight is rare.

Until 1997, I was a brashly free-wheeling writer/musician. Never a leader, always a sideman, though too creative to be happy blindly following orders. In the 1990s, I perpetrated a series of larks, pranks, schemes, and brainstorms. Only one gained traction, but traction was never the goal—I did stuff to do stuff—so it threw me. When your kooky conceit succeeds beyond imagining, you're faced with the need to knuckle down and serve the machine. In the first installment of my series about the sale of Chowhound, I wrote:

I had started Chowhound as a lark, out of fondness for discussing food and swapping tips with others. But my life had come to have nothing to do with food or its discussion. It's a uniquely American problem: you start off with a passion and talent for something, and natural inertia draws you away from that thing and into managing a structure wherein others indulge their passion and talent for that increasingly distant-seeming thing. All energy winds up going into maintaining the structure, which is generic (you may as well be operating a tanning salon), and starkly divorced from your original interest. And so I found that I'd become a businessman, a manager, a marketer, an editor, a publisher, a retailer, an umpire, and, most of all, a tireless janitor, all in the interest of keeping alive an operation facilitating other peoples' discussion of food. None were roles I desired or enjoyed. I'm a writer and musician.

I shoveled coal at the tanning salon for ten years. I could not do my signature disappearing act because this, for once, was genuinely cool and useful. It rang every utopian bell in my fevered psyche. If not Chowhound, then what?

So I actually learned to manage, finding ways to ensure that Chowhound—which, in its raw state, was a cesspool of spam, mendacious raves, and out-and-out brawls—gave the impression of a sparkling wonderland of savvy, kindness, and on-the-level great tips. "What a swell group of guys!" enthused its users, as I managed an eyes-open staff while my own were splayed back like Malcolm McDowell's in Clockwork Orange.

I devised ways to recruit busy volunteer workers, and to acculturate them into our way of doing things while keeping it all as fun and delightful as the forum itself. I instituted a ground rule: "Show up whenever. If you get busy, or go on vacation, or just don't feel like it anymore, no problem, thanks for everything, and stop back if you ever get a spare minute." How well did this glue workers to our operation? When CNET bought the operation, every one of them stuck around to keep helping, unpaid.

They believed in the mission. As did I, so it was existentially necessary to glue it all together, forcing me to become a weirdly good manager against every inclination.


Tekserve was a Mac shop run by and for people who loved Macs in an age when this was a countercultural choice. Customers weren't treated merely "right", but delightfully so. It was a new model for principled retail. Not ala Starbucks or Ben & Jerry's, where a brand image is self-consciously stoked via cheezy gesture; David and his partner Dick really meant it. It was real, and this intention helped them stoke delight.

The new retail model never widely caught on, but we customers sure loved it. Tekserve had an antique Coke machine dispensing bottles for a nickel (they took a loss) and a porch swing hung from the rafters. Everything was ultra honest and helpful. It felt like bubblegum from Walter.

When I was very young, there was a substitute school bus driver named Walter, an older gentleman who'd periodically appear, like an apparition, and give out bubblegum to kids as they got on the bus.

It gobsmacked me that such a person could exist. Bus drivers - I recognized with the instinctive reflex of those low on a food chain - were a nemesis for children to fear and avoid. You don't need to be a particularly clever bunny rabbit to know to run like crazy when a german shephard comes prowling. So you get on the stupid bus, walk all the way to the back, and try to avoid setting off the driver at all costs.

Imagine if you discovered that a certain mosquito, once you slow down its whine, is actually singing Mozart arias just to soothe you.

Walter Crowther rocked my world. Representing more than just a good version of a bad thing, he spurred a fundamental shift in my childhood experience. It had never occurred to me that anything positive could ever come from a bus driver. I suddenly realized, thunderstruck, that the world was studded with hidden and delightful Easter Eggs. A hunk of bubblegum had squarely launched me on my life path.

David and Dick conjured the change they'd longed for. It entailed exhausting themselves and fighting their slackerish, non-corporate impulses. David was no manager (and Dick, who did design, didn't even try), but he was forced to figure it out. Intensely introverted and curmudgeonly to the point where his eyes could barely unroll themselves, he set mechanisms into play and let others inhabit them while he remained back in the kitchen with his eyes clockworked shriekingly open.

You might imagine an idealistic utopia masquerading as a business—where customers feel uncommon delight and workers feel part of something great—as run by a boss who's a jolly giggly teddy bear frequently hugging members of the happy family.

No. Jesus, no. There's no time or energy for that. If you have resources to devote to being that person, it means you're not leaving it all on the field. That's not a labor of love, that's an image of a labor of love. Real love means investing everything. No time for image creation or self-mythologizing. No room to seem delightful, or even to feel much delight. Those are all separate projects, and if you have assets leftover for all that, that means your eyes weren't fully open.

Ruby was not urging us to "enjoy the journey." The secret to making and keeping a thing delightful, and to stoking morale and preserving mission, is to work like a slave. For people to shut their eyes when they eat, someone in the kitchen keeps their eyes wide open.

Trying to do a cool thing, David was pressed into being a businessman and manager, both inherently uncool. But he never stopped finding ways to inject anomalous coolness; aka delight. His operation was delightful. His employees were delightful and delighted, and it rippled outward into a jolly enterprise imprisoning him in his basement office, compelling him to shovel coal interminably.

I rarely had time to read Chowhound postings and was eating cold cereal. David wasn't much of a Mac enthusiast by the end. He finally sold out, and Tekserve was in short order ruined and shuttered, just like Chowhound. He and I couldn't muster full-throated spite over the ignominious fate of our babies. We'd done what we'd set out to do, and, never feeling particularly capitalist, hadn't intended to create enduring operations. It was a ride, a lark, a utopian project that began and ended.

We showered strangers with candies for a while—really good ones, not just Werthers caramels—which they savored with their eyes clasped shut in delight.