Our Indiana Jones

Tobacco-stained and moody, the opening images of Salvage City leaned hard on stereotype. There was Sam Coffey, reality TV’s Indiana Jones, in a fedora and a too-shiny leather jacket, cigarette dangling over a hipster beard as untamed as a live red squirrel. Trotter scowled down at us, massive and muscled as Mr. Clean. Mia wore a low-cut top and short skirt, her arms folded with coy attitude, her face open and vulnerable. Hektor the German shepherd played the noble beast, his expression so sad and stoic, the camera crew must have stolen his squeaky toy.

The irony is, it didn’t take much hype. Coffey’s rocked that hat and beard since the ’90s. (“I call it personal branding,” he says. “Everybody always remembers me.”) He used to break the law regularly, scrounging junk—never anything integral to a historic building’s value, he swears—and converting it into saleable stuff. Chris Trotter’s a former athlete whose tough banter is merely proof he likes you. And Mia Brown-Davis, who owns Eve’s Apple Vintage, has a calmer everyday version of that sweet-sarcastic TV persona.

The show was Coffey’s dream: a way to mine his beloved hometown’s history in front of an audience of millions, then turn his finds into furniture and art at The Factory, his Cherokee Street workshop. The show was as unscripted as reality-TV ever gets; all he had to do was ratchet up his usual showmanship. But the result felt fake-tough and forced, and the concept distorted his enthusiasms. He regularly talked about “making a shit-ton of money” off of his salvaged junk. (He makes so little, he can’t afford to keep The Factory going.) He said things like, “When I turn on that Sam Coffey charm, I tend to get what I want,” and the swagger was 180 degrees from charming. The show’s very name alienated its potential core audience, implying there was nothing but junk left in St. Louis.

Maybe it would have worked better if somebody had just surreptitiously filmed Coffey’s earlier exploits, or swept the cutting-room floor for the images that told a different story: Coffey standing in front of marble from a ruined church, squinting into the sunset, the Gateway Arch in the distance, pure reverence on his face. Respectful footage shot in an old African-American neighborhood near Trotter’s grandmother’s home. The crew hanging out at Crown Candy Kitchen and Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, talking passionately about historic preservation.

What people saw instead was a hollowed-out city, not even as pretty as ruin-porn, and a junker all cocky about breaking the law. They got even madder when he pointed out that he wasn’t actually breaking the law: “You can’t pack into a building with a camera crew!” Preservationists accused him of glorifying theft, plunder, and trespassing. Online, people accused him of stealing things from buildings he’d never even been inside. “There would be a fire, and people in chat rooms would say Sam Coffey started it,” his friend Herb Belrose says. “All of a sudden, he was this figure that was responsible for the decay of St. Louis.”

And the show didn’t even get picked up.

It’s not that everything Sam Coffey touches turns to gold—more like rust. But he is extraordinarily good at failure. This sounds like one of Oscar Wilde’s mannered put-downs, but in fact, it’s a rare and real talent. When the Discovery Channel walked away from Salvage City after airing three episodes and his hometown vilified him for ruining its image, he stayed cheerful. When somebody posted on Facebook, “So the show is basically about a half-wit (Sam) with horrible fashion sense, being immature and obnoxious,” Coffey replied, “Pretty much.”

Was the project worth four months of 18-hour days finagling locations, hoisting sheets of glass through windows, and sweet-talking friends into buying giant rusty steampunk art forged swiftly from the salvage? “I chase a lot of opportunity,” he says with a shrug. “I met a lot of great people. Besides, it’s not over yet. It could still get rediscovered. And there’s a lot of footage nobody’s ever seen.”

Coffey knows how to use scrapes and disasters and ignominy to catapult himself forward. As a kid, he was lousy at sports, but he went out for the teams anyway. He got terrible grades, but he made his friends laugh. And he considered everybody in class his friend.

“He was always popular,” says his sister, Sarah Coffey, “but he was never rude to the kids who weren’t.” He liked being in the mix, surrounded by people of all ages, races, classes, and quirks. When his family moved from University City to painfully white Eureka, he convinced his friend Sherman to get bussed out there.

When Sarah called from Washington University to say she’d studied for hours and gotten 100 on a philosophy exam, their bookish mother exulted with her. Sam, overhearing, just shook his head. When his mother hung up, he sighed theatrically. “She wasted four years of high school,” he said (she’d graduated with a 4.5 GPA to his 1.2), “and now she’s going to waste college.”

The world was made up of people, he figured, so if you figured out people, you could do anything. He went to classes in woodworking, psychology, and business, and cut the rest. He learned in motion, with his friends all around him. When his family moved to Chicago at the end of his junior year, he hated it, because Chicago was way too crowded for camaraderie. All the creative types were competing for the same turf.

He returned to St. Louis like a near-drowned man flopping on the beach.

He dropped out of the University of Missouri–St. Louis—a mutual agreement it took the university only a semester to reach. He detailed cars, waited tables at Blueberry Hill, scrubbed kegs at the Schlafly Tap Room, tended bar at the Bottleworks, played puppeteer at Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes, and came up with groaner products, like a bath alert that notified you when the tub was full and a knock-on-wood wooden keychain.

Coffey moved into what he thought was an abandoned loft to work on those keychains, liking the idea of being the renegade tenant who secretly slept there every night. “I built a little daybed that folded out of the wall, thinking speak-easy–style: The landlord comes to get rent and I fold my bed up into the wall. The first night, I had all my saws up and running at 3 a.m., and there’s this pounding on the door. I’m scared shitless. I’m on the seventh floor in this scary-ass building by myself in my boxer shorts, covered in sawdust. So I grab a hammer and answer the door, and there’s this 5-foot, midforties Italian woman in a nightgown screaming at me. The landlord lied. There were about 40 artists squatting in the building.”

From the keychains, he bullshitted his way into a carpentry job, taught himself woodworking, and opened his own custom shop. He found his way to Cherokee Street when it was so rough, a diamond was unthinkable. The street became his emotional home—the anchor he craved, after moving every five years of his childhood, and a focal point for his unbounded energy.

In 2009, he moved into the neighborhood’s vacant Mexican bootery, thinking it’d be fun to live in a storefront. He ripped out the dropped ceiling and discovered gorgeous old tin; ripped up the glued-down carpet and found cool tile. He built a shower out of pallets and slept zipped into a pop-up tent to keep out the sawdust. When he pulled old plywood off the facade, he saw—board by board—a hand holding a crystal ball, then the word “Fortune,” then “Teller Bar.”

“Crap,” he thought, “I have to open a bar now.” He’d never been able to resist the pull of forgotten history. He found partners in bartender Matt Thenhaus, a friend since their days at Blueberry Hill, and Kristin Dennis, a vocalist and songwriter with a gift for administrative detail. Thenhaus’ wife, Sarah Kate Buckles, agreed to read tarot cards, provided Coffey built her a fortune-telling booth that looked like a vardo (the horse-drawn wagon used by the Roma). She showed him pictures. Two weeks later, she walked in and saw a vardo, just as she’d envisioned it, built from parts of an old wooden confessional booth salvaged from a demolished church. “Sam delivers,” Thenhaus says dryly.

Just as the bar was coming together, another friend, Carson Minow, asked Coffey whether he wanted to start a production company with her. His only experience with film was helping her on a few 48-hour films. Sure, he said. He grabbed his friend Ryan Frank to do the concepts and animation, and First Punch Film Production was born.

They staked out space in the Nebula Coworking building that Jason Deem was hoping to develop. “We walked into this bombed-out, abandoned second floor, crawled through a hole in the drywall, and said, ‘We’ll take it,’” Coffey recalls. He warned Deem not to check his credit; it was terrible. “But you can ask anybody in St. Louis—I’m a man of my word,” he said. “I will fix up this space, and I will bring interesting people.”

“You believed him?” I ask Deem.

He grins. “Well, back then Cherokee didn’t have many options. They were the first tenants here. Sam has been an incredible part of building Cherokee. He’s a bridge-builder and people-connector.” Yeah, but what’s his weakest link? “That he cannot resist picking up any piece of junk that might be of use to someone in the next 50 years. I could show you piles of Sam’s stuff in the basement of Nebula, in the old Globe Drug building, in my garage. Sam is a bit of a hoarder.”

Deem likes Coffey’s confidence. “He’s never doing fantastic, but he’s always optimistic that he will be.” Is the optimism plausible? “Um…yeah. I believe it is. You never know if you’re under Sam’s influence of optimism or if it’s real, but when I’m around Sam, I believe it to be real. And I can’t think of any projects where his intent did not come true. Even down to ‘Hey, I’ll help you move this shit next weekend.’ Sam’ll be there.”

From Nebula, First Punch backpacked into Deem’s next empty old building: Globe Drug. But now, First Punch has its own much more polished space a block off Cherokee Street. Coffey’s father, an entrepreneur himself, bought it as an investment. (He also wanted to make sure his son could remain in the neighborhood he was helping to improve so dramatically that soon he wouldn’t be able to afford to rent there.)

That’s a pet peeve of Coffey’s. He’s played Pied Piper on Cherokee Street, luring friends to buy, live, and do business there—and now the street’s thriving, so they’ll have to leave. He thinks the city should subsidize artist housing, not clumped in lofts, but scattered across many different neighborhoods. On the empty lot across from the new office, he envisions tiny houses on wheels where artists can stay, at no cost, when they come to town. (A friend bet him $100 he can’t pull it off.)

Coffey gives me a tour of the new office, starting with the co-working space. Every inch an extrovert, he loves this concept. He actually says things like, “When you guys are through co-working…” He insists that even when nobody’s talking, the very presence of other inventive, smart people gives off enough energy to animate everyone’s work.

Frank’s in there, co-working alone. He looks up from his computer as we enter. Tall and laconic, he tends not to say much, but when he does, the humor’s dry and the intelligence sharp. He and Coffey met back in junior high, and even then, Frank says, “Sam was the opposite of bashful—made a ton of friends, always had some piece-of-shit car that looked really cool on the outside, threw big parties.”

Coffey says he’s “been trying to figure out how to make money off of Ryan’s brain since seventh grade.” Now Frank and Minow do the creative part, and Coffey handles sales, customer relations, and crises. “Say the cops are sweatin’ us and telling us we can’t film on this street, and a car that has a bunch of gear in it breaks down, and an actor doesn’t show up,” Frank says. “He’ll get it all sorted. He handles stress really well. It’s not ego-based; he just gets on a roll. It’s like ‘Step aside. I’ll deliver this baby.’”

The doorbell rang, and Sam galloped over in a flouncy dress and feathered hat. He was 4, and the little Strembicki girls across the street had dolled him up.

The Coffeys’ cousin, who made medical films out in California, had arrived to film “a nice wholesome Midwestern family.” Sam opened the door.

“For this,” she said, “I could have stayed in L.A.”

Coffey’s love of costume is a bit of a paradox; he is always, thoroughly, loudly himself. But being Sam Coffey means playing with the possibilities. He’s been pissed ever since his sister got an Easter bonnet; he thought he should have a top hat. “Men don’t wear hats in church,” his mother, the Rev. Paris Coffey (now an Episcopal priest), informed him. Just her luck, the bishop visited that Sunday—in his mitre. Sam nudged her with his small, sharp elbow all through the service.

Next came his Miami Vice period. Paris found him a tiny white linen suit at Goodwill. In grade school, he carried a briefcase instead of a backpack and built himself a little office under his bunk bed. Now that he has a real office, he carries a backpack. And he schleps it everywhere, lumpy with his computer and camera. “You never know when you are going to run into some good character and need to capture him,” he explains.

Most people would say he’s the character. He’s got the hat (think Steve Smith at The Royale). The stunts (Bob Cassilly, pre–City Museum). The ’hood (imagine Cherokee Street as the Delmar Loop right after Joe Edwards arrived). The ’tude, a love of splash and attention that makes people who don’t know him well bristle at the persona. He’s too young to be a character, they say. He hasn’t earned it; he’s using it.

“Sam’s ego? It’s large,” says Chris Clark, artistic director of Cinema St. Louis. “But he’s got a Midwestern humility meshed in there somewhere. Everything’s not always about him. In New York, he might be a different kind of person.”

In St. Louis, Coffey figures we’re all in it together. He’s genuinely interested in other people, and he knows he needs them. He’ll follow a bit of swagger with an admission so honest, you change your mind midsentence. And he’s generous about giving people credit: “It’s taken me years and years and years working diligently to surround myself with people I want to be surrounded with,” he says. “Motivated people. No drama. Smarter than me, which isn’t a stretch. People that like to have fun. People that don’t see the world as a shitty place to be and that go the extra mile to find ways to say yes. I don’t like surrounding myself with people that work really hard to find ways to say no.”

His friends’ common denominator is their patience with him. In turn, he’ll tolerate almost anything in the name of friendship. Once, he told Belrose he wanted a nice, relaxing vacation with no physical exertion. “So I took him on a 120-mile backpacking trip down into remote canyons in Utah,” Belrose says. “We drove all night and hiked all the next day in 100-degree heat. The whole time, Sam kept saying, ‘I hate you. I hate you. Why did you bring me here?’ The next day, we found this amazing spring in the middle of the desert, and he’s swimming in it, yelling, ‘I love you so much! Thank you for bringing me here! Don’t ever bring me back here again!’”

Once, somebody gave Coffey a hot tub. He was so excited, he spent thousands of dollars landscaping his South Side back yard. He built a pergola and ran electricity to it. Then he plugged in the hot tub, and it didn’t work.

So he filled his failed hot tub with ice and beer (Schlafly donated pallets of beer whose sell-by date had expired), carved ice luges, and threw a Halloween party so memorable, it became an annual tradition. Artists and aldermen, junior socialite philanthropists and train-hoppin’ gutter punks all showed up in costume, left their inhibitions at the door, and struck up not just conversations, but also long-term relationships with the ultimate icebreaker: “How do you know Sam?”

One morning, just before dawn, Coffey, broke but cheerful, sat around the hot tub with the last stragglers. “I just love this place,” one told him.

“You want to buy it?” Coffey asked.

“You serious?”

“Yeah.”

They negotiated, on a cocktail napkin, a contract that would permit Coffey to continue hosting the Halloween party there. (He tried it the first year, but it just didn’t feel right.) Now he’s living in Fox Park—with his girlfriend, her sister, an old friend, and the friend’s fiancé. He invited Belrose to move in, too. 
“I said, ‘Absolutely not. It sounds like a reality show,’” Belrose recalls, laughing. “If Sam could live in a compound with 100 of his friends, he’d do it tomorrow.”

“Sam!” “Hey, man!” “How’s it goin’?” Coffey walks down Cherokee Street like it’s the set of a children’s show and he’s the star. He knows every character by name—a terse old African-American man, a young Hispanic mother, the cozy anarchists who run Black Bear Bakery, the Cherokee Photobooth photographers, a tattooed minister named Godbout, the imported restaurateurs and savvy developers coming in to make a killing.

Half a block down, a young guy pops out of a storefront. “Sam, I hate to bug you, but if I can interrupt and pick your brain for a minute?” he says. “I’ve looked at about 40 apartments.”

“What’s your budget?”

“$500 to $700.”

“$500 to $700,” Coffey repeats, “not including utilities. Any pets?”

“I have a single dove that makes a sound like mmm.”

Coffey blinks twice. “I think you could probably take a dove anywhere. It’s a symbol of peace, for God’s sake,” he says. “You need the place fancy? You don’t strike me as fancy. I mean, you’re a fancy guy, but…”

“Yeah. I make fancy out of nothing.”

“I’ll call you.”

Coffey stops in to see Matt Amato, a

St. Louis boy who lived in L.A. for 20 years and came home to make an indie film, The Makings of You. Coffey, one of the first people he met, found him an old brick rooming house in Benton Park and a couple other perfect filming locations, rounded up a crew, offered The Fortune Teller Bar for wrap-up parties, got permission to shoot on the MetroLink while it was moving, got him Mississippi River water to use as rain and sprayed it himself from a roof.

The movie’s been slated for a November premiere, and Coffey says he’s never seen St. Louis look so beautiful. Overwhelmed by the Cherokee Street community, Amato’s decided to stay and work here. And Coffey got to dance with Sheryl Lee on top of The Fortune Teller Bar.

Now he’s on his way to lunch there with the Rev. David Godbout, the perfectly named pastor. He’s taken over an old movie theater on Chippewa Street, the Melvin Theater. He intends to turn it into a community center, and he wants Coffey’s advice.

“You’ll need to raise money to fix the place up,” Coffey begins. “What about renting the venue? Maybe Lola and The Beggar’s Carnivale…”

Godbout blinks. Lola Van Ella does a burlesque show. “Um…me being a faith-based organization…”

Coffey shrugs. “You need to do something to bring people from outside the community,” he says. “That’s the ultimate for a neighborhood to experience growth.”

His fortune cookie arrives, and he pulls out the tiny scroll: “We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails.” He looks disappointed.

We drive over to the Melvin. “I want to fix up the sign,” Godbout says, frowning up at the old marquee.

“I’d leave it,” Coffey says, and walks inside. He stands still, neck craned. “Look at that gorgeous tin ceiling.” All anybody else sees are foam panels. “Above the grating,” he says, and points through a small tear. He runs up to the projection booth to get closer. “That ceiling’s just amazing. What is it, 25 feet?” He points out the dog-eared tin crown molding that edges the booth’s ceiling. “Just bend it back and tack it,” he tells Godbout.

Outside, Coffey stands in front of the white glazed-brick facade, cigarette in hand, and studies the marquee Godbout wants to tear down and rebuild. “I’d replace the light bulbs and leave it just the way it is,” Coffey says. “It adds a lot of character.”

Take away the leather jacket and cigarettes, and you’ve got a softhearted hipster who’s channeling Dale Carnegie. He’ll talk to a homeless guy for half an hour and try to find him a job. When the film crew told him, “Talent eats first,” he said, “No. God no. Everybody else is working just as hard.”

Still, Coffey knows just enough about marketing to endanger himself. The first time I ask how the show started, he says, “Coolfire seeks out interesting stories and businesses. I like to think of myself as an interesting person. So they came to me.”

Later, he goes into slightly different detail: A friend of his father’s started NoCoast Originals, wanted to do a reality show, and saw what Coffey was doing with salvage. When it looked like the Discovery Channel was interested, NoCoast took the idea to Coolfire Studios.

It’s not as sexy a story. And Coffey knows the power of perception—has since high school, when he wore his mother’s clerical collar to buy beer and cigarettes. He can be disingenuous. And when something crashes and burns, he just learns and moves on.

“He has no fear and no edit button and doesn’t know how to stop,” Clark notes. “So failure to him is just something that’s set off to the side.” Or it’s turned into a tale, his sister adds: “He’ll never tell them as stories where he got into a scrape. They are always successes or adventures.”

He’s not falsifying reality; the triumph of a good attitude is his reality.

“He’s always been determined to be his own person,” his sister says. “He’s kind of fought for that. From a very young age, he had to buck what was expected of him to be happy and to be himself.”

And now, he’s “a character.” People say it so often I get bored. “What makes somebody a character, anyway?” I ask.

“I think when they can just say things, whatever comes into their mind, with no filter,” Joe Edwards says slowly. He is one of Coffey’s heroes, but is not a character, because he tries so hard to modulate, to say things gently. Coffey, on the other hand, comes out with statements like “The governor is too much of an idiot to realize what film could do for the state.” “‘Oh, maybe Interstate 70 should have been underground from the beginning.’ You think? The river’s our biggest asset.” “I just hope St. Louis stops making really poor architectural decisions like tearing down Powell Square. Yeah, it was an eyesore. Do something about it.”

Indiana Jones is famous for “his iconic look (bullwhip, fedora, satchel, and leather jacket), sense of humor, deep knowledge of many ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes,” Wikipedia tells us. Coffey’s iconic look is slightly less dashing, but he’s got the sense of humor. And a deep knowledge of St. Louis’ underground history and subcultures. And a constant, nagging fear that he’s missing something: that college degree, some new opportunity, the entrance to English Cave…

“It’s the holy effing grail of caves,” he says. “English Cave underneath Benton Park. It’s eluded cavers for more than 100 years.”

He tried to find it in 2005.

“It was 3 a.m.,” Frank recalls, “and Sam was drunk, and a friend of ours was trying to talk him out of going to a sewer to find the secret cave entrance. Sam grabs an extension cord and ties it into a harness with Boy Scout knots, so he can be lowered into the sewer. While he’s down there, our friend goes for a walk and smokes a cigarette. Sam’s back, yelling, ‘There’s nothing down here, man.’ He’s exhausted, about to pass out from the methane fumes underground. I’m trying to pull him up by myself, and the extension cord starts to fray. And he’s about 30 feet down, standing almost knee-deep in water, on the brink of passing out, and I’m running around the park looking for our friend, and I finally find him, and he’s chatting with some homeless guy.”

Coffey’s parents think it was his grandmother—a librarian and genealogist—who inspired his love of St. Louis history. She took him on riverboats, to museums, to historic sites, to cemeteries to do grave rubbings… Coffey loved her so fiercely that when the bagpipes started playing and they began to lower her simple pine casket into the ground, he threw himself on top.

But for all she taught him, it was Cherokee Cave that really lit the fire. “It woke something up in me that I didn’t know was asleep,” he says. “Our city is what it is because of those caves. One of my greatest goals in life is to have one of them open to the public—I think about it every day. If Indiana Jones were to see Cherokee Cave, he would say, ‘This should be a museum.’”

He says this straight-faced. Later, I email a question: “The Indiana Jones thing—in what way is the characterization accurate?”

“Do I run through the jungle with a sweet hat, whip, and pistol?” he replies. “No. However, I do often find myself in situations that involve quick decision-making, in which the wrong decision could lead to certain doom. :)”

He doesn’t really believe that. He’s more the “make a decision, any decision” type. He knows he’ll survive the consequences. Caves, though, are his jungle. They’re off-limits. They’re dangerous. They let him reveal St. Louis’ secrets to the rest of us.

And that’s why he’ll never give up on English Cave. “I’m 95 percent sure I know how to get in there,” he assures me. He’s been practicing with smaller challenges, like Salvage City’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” episode. Over Brown-Davis’ objections, he and Trotter dragged the crew to Crystal City Underground, a vast abandoned mine that’s mainly underwater.

At least Hektor could dog-paddle. Coffey could barely swim. He’d been practicing holding his breath—but not in water the temperature of a melted iceberg. After getting up at 4 a.m. and lumbering down to Crystal City in his old 2 ½–ton army-surplus truck, he and Trotter drove around for 10 hours, got lost (no cell signal underground), got separated from the camera crew, and (temporarily) lost Hektor. Along the way, they loaded up a concrete form they could turn into a wood-burning hot tub, a cement mixer that could hold the firewood, a big metal spool they’d turn into a bar, and sewer rings they’d turn into fire pits. Then they climbed into a bass boat and rowed out to the middle of the 150-acre underground lake, Sam shining a flashlight into the black water.

He saw a rusted cogwheel, shouted out, wriggled into a wetsuit and splashed into the water. Everybody held their breath. Somehow he hooked the cable onto the cog on the first try. They hoisted it up using The Boat Wench. (They’d welded a winch to a crane and stuck a pirate flag on top.)

Trotter remembers those 22 hours as one of the worst times of his life. But Coffey? “It was the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” says Belrose, who was watching from a second boat with the rest of the crew. “His face was squeezed together under the scuba mask, and he had this great big grin.”

Coffey—wearing a fedora with an electric blue hatband and a shirt the same electric blue—sits at a long table at The Fortune Teller Bar, surrounded by friends. In the background, “Aquarius” gives way to “Proud Mary.” The conversation goes deep: aging, death, what matters in life, what everybody wants to be doing in 25 years.

“I want a big piece of land in the city, and I just want to build weird shit,” Coffey says. “Like a large village built from boats and cabooses. I definitely want to live in a caboose at some point. And I want to host people that are passing through from all over the place, a big happy family with people coming and going. I want to be surrounded by as many interesting people as possible until the day I die, and I feel like if I build some big crazy world, that will help.” A Bob Cassilly sort of world, like Cementland? He shakes his head. “I’m more interested in building cozy places you can live in, not just play in for a while. I think I need 10 acres in maybe north St. Louis.”

“Call Paul McKee,” I suggest.

“It’s on my list,” he says. “‘Paul, I need 10 acres. I got cabooses and treehouses.’”

Salvage City aired again on the Discovery Channel this past February, and then on Destination America. If Coffey’s crew gets to film more episodes, will they take the same approach?

“I understand the cuts they had to make,” Trotter says. “It’s TV. But we certainly didn’t want to make the city look like a decaying mess. One thing Sam and I talked about afterward was what we would do differently.”

I’m relieved. But when I ask Coffey what he’d insist on, second time around, he snorts. “A remote-control helicopter. Hektor cam. And I would demand that someone cut the crust off my peanut butter–and–jelly sandwiches. In this business and at this stage in the game, I’m not exactly in a position to insist on anything.”

Instead, he’s focusing on what he can control: his own reality. He’s learned enough from Salvage City that he’s ready to try his hand: First Punch has four reality-TV shows in various stages of development. Coffey refuses to divulge the concepts, saying only that they’re driven by “interesting characters.” His ruddy cheeks turn even redder, and his eyes light with excitement at the thought of pulling this off. He and his partners have been “living that ramen lifestyle” for four years, he says, waiting for the right opportunity. He slips into boilerplate: “The industry is changing, and we are ready to be part of that change… Our passion lies in original content development for television. We’ve got an idea to make a disruptive business model that will allow us to be a real player in nonscripted and semiscripted reality-TV programming.”

Frank nods to props on a table: an AR-15 semi-automatic and a 9 mm Glock. “This is our disruptive business model,” he says dryly. Their work’s a lot edgier and fresher than Coffey’s self-taught business jargon. And friends say Coffey’s concern with social issues will show up in these mysterious new projects.

In the ramen era, First Punch hasn’t made a ton of money, but it’s won accolades for its work for Cinema St. Louis, Brown Shoe Company, the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma, and the city of St. Louis.

“After only Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Sam and Carson are my favorite St. Louis business partners,” says Richard Callow, whose public-relations and communications firm, Public Eye, Inc., advises the mayor. “They wrote and produced a two-year series of videos for the mayor’s website based only on the instructions ‘Do something interesting about St. Louis.’ They did.”

Not everybody shares Coffey’s sensibility, Callow adds: “Sam loves the parts of St. Louis that you can only get to from the alleys, the neighborhoods that look best through a haze of smoke after a cocktail or two made from distilled, side-lot-grown milkweed.” Still, when Coffey described the Salvage City concept and said “how awesome he planned to make St. Louis’ historic buildings look to people younger than 90 years old,” Callow was in.

It took Coffey a while to notice.

“The meanest thing to do to Sam Coffey is to agree with him. Immediately. The guy lives to pitch ideas, building visions out of salvaged furniture and pickles,” Callow says. “Since even his worst ideas are more interesting than most people’s best ideas, I usually say yes after the first dozen nouns and verbs. Then I wait until Sam, who has brought snacks in case the conversation continues into a mealtime, notices that I’ve already agreed. It sort of disappoints him.”

In June, Discovery Channel UK picked up Salvage City for a short run.

By then, most people had chilled out about the show.

“I prefer the actual Sam and the actual city to the going ‘reality’ style he pitched for,” Chris King, editorial director of the St. Louis American, says mildly. “Love him; thought his show was silly,” says preservationist Michael Allen.

Still, it was by doing Salvage City that Coffey finally found a woman who might stay: Kelsey Rightnowar. She was the show’s production coordinator, and she’s smart and fun and gets his crazy schedule, works the same way herself, doesn’t demand that he stop working and pay attention to her. So he pays attention to her. “Aw, look there’s my lady there,” he’ll say as she comes into The Fortune Teller Bar.

The bar’s doing well, too. It’s quirky enough for a cult following, but it’s got the right ingredients—atmosphere, good food, fun cocktails and events—to be a mainstream success. Coffey’s hoping for the same fate.

He’s on his first board—for community radio station KDHX-FM. He’s active in the Regional Business Council’s Young Professionals Network. He’s settling into his destiny, honing his image, learning to focus.

“Fear causes a lot of people to say no,” Coffey says. “They dread change. I think they’re scared it will take everything they’ve got to make that change, and then if they don’t like it, they won’t be able to get back to what they’re comfortable with. I’m the exact opposite. Fear causes me to say yes, because I’m afraid of missing an opportunity. But there are only so many hours in a day. I’ve got a bar, a film-production company, and a salvage-and-fabrication company. The things I say yes to now need to complement a project I’m already working on.”

He makes it sound like an epiphany. But it’s also a by-heart recital of advice he just got from the legendary real-estate developer Michael Staenberg. Taken by Coffey’s energy, Staenberg went down to Cherokee Street to see First Punch. “He’s kind of eclectic,” Staenberg says. “A lot of kids have no substance behind eclecticity. But this kid has a lot. What you see is what you get. He’s honest and caring. I told him just to follow through, not try to take too much on. He’ll be a leader in whatever he chooses to do.”

Now that people are starting to take Coffey seriously, everybody’s got a different agenda for him: politics, real estate, special events, something arty.

A few months ago, Coffey’s sister went to a psychic on Long Island, New York. Their grandmother spoke through the psychic, Sarah told Sam excitedly—“and it was all about you! She said you had struggled a lot figuring out what you were going to do to define yourself. She said you could sell ice to an Eskimo, but you hadn’t really figured out how to make and save money yet, and you should take business classes.”

Sam thinks this was just Sarah’s creative way of telling him to go to business school. But she swears it actually happened.

“What’s been hardest for Sam is figuring out what his path is going to be,” she tells me. “It’s great that he’s tried so many things, but it’s also been a struggle figuring out how he’s going to make money and what his deeper calling is. Now I think he’s finding it, with the production company and with the community on Cherokee Street.”

If not, he’ll just keep trying stuff.