Coffee Shop Interlude

“When you've writing, you’re conjuring. It’s a ritual and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.” T. Waits

On the morning the Mayor announced the end of all remaining plague restrictions, hundreds of thousands of claustrophobic city dwellers were officially released from the uncivil clutches of quarantine captivity. Free at last from the oppressive (if barely pressed) social restraints as well as months of pesky municipal travel restrictions, I could once again feel free to go as far as I wanted for as long as I wanted. For the first time in months, I felt the persistent thrum of unfettered personal liberty rekindling my zeal to wander through the neighborhoods breathing in the sharp tang of a city too long quasi-dormant resurrecting to smelly cosmopolitan life.

Gathering my Essential Writer’s Kit (virgin notebook, pens [2], liberated imagination), and more than eager to reanimate my writer’s rhythm, I threw myself out the front door and plunged into the celebratory chaos energizing the city. I felt carried aloft mentally by the resurgence of that recognizably peculiar narrative voice stirring within me again, as yet only a loud whisper. After a brisk, revitalizing march through the neighborhoods, emotionally and intellectually recharging on the sights and sounds and scents of emergent urban energy, I headed for one of my more unusual usual haunts, an espresso dive in the bowels of a refit nightclub in the Pub District.

After a quick slither through the single functional Art Deco revolving door, grabbing a double-dark Americano, I’m headed for the gaggle of mismatched cafe tables lined up against the back wall. Once ensconced in the murky shadows of the once architecturally majestic department store, now a prosaically intimate coffee shop, I set my mind to conquer the dreaded first blank page.

I spend a few minutes limbering up, selecting The Pen, sipping coffee, scoping the room, sipping coffee, discarding my misgivings, sipping coffee, re-imagining the décor, ignoring my inadequacies, sipping coffee, fortifying my confidence, and adjusting my geo-psychological bearings to determine just where and who I am at the moment, and how I fit into the ambient social scheme. Who am I when I’m not at home? Who among us is all of himself when he ventures beyond his fief?

Gazing around discreetly, I endeavor to suss the socioeconomic and cultural provenance of the several other denizens, ever mindful that you can’t imagine what another person has to go through to wind up being who they want you to think they are. Thankfully, it isn't every day we endure the relative indignities we have to disguise to become what we appear to seem. Then, risking another jolt of caffeine, gathering my wits, I scribble down a pungent phrase or two, effortlessly if not brilliantly capturing the essence of the moment, before I have to pretend to be someone else with a different point of view, and launch into the Moment As Art.

Suddenly I sense the – uh-oh, here comes a feeling, an incipient Emotional Overload Event and as

tempted as I am to try to avoid it completely, to run from it screaming, or sneak by it in an obliterated state, I'm at the mercy of some genuinely crushing sorrows urgently supplicating to be made narrative, driven outward as a surge of my most personally vexing private moments raucously queuing up in my subconscious to announce their grievances against my sustaining human frailty.

Beset by every opportunity I ever avoided, blew off, coveted, delayed or embraced then casually dismissed, I struggle to withstand the onrush of conflicting sympathies and manage to fend off the fervid blandishments of countless random events and messy recollections competing for my attention, all desperate to be given voice. Concentrating my focus on a single moment in time, one not too far afield nor too painful to consider while the tsunami of feeling crashes over me, I manage to regain my balance and scribble a note.

Realizing he might have stumbled upon some insight into the existential foment of some minor chord of American life, he writes down this and then it is written down, now become a vector of truth, right there in front of him.

Emotionally overwhelmed, brutally if only figuratively, I submit to the moment, confessing briefly in scrawled longhand my own willingness to endure the imminence of the painful truth in any moment, every moment, all moments; bloodlessly exposing on the page my eagerness to be overwhelmed by any and every precious Erstwhile crawling out of the past to torment me.

My instant yet abject submission presents an opportunity to engage with my uncollected longings to make fictionally but emotionally truthful sense in that especially cogent literary way that people much like myself (only different) aspire to do on those desolate evenings when they ache to wordlessness in the depths of their souls, while cherishing painful memories of the bypassed possibilities in their lives, living in the moment as if they still aspired to redeem all of their “one of these days” opportunities on some future date, TBD. Not all of this goes unnoticed.

Doomed as we are, how eagerly we await the never-to-arrive, ever-eventual Someday: that special morning when it is at last convenient, when the weather and the mood are just right, when we feel existentially prepared to face the unknown consequences of any or all of our previous actions.

Once we have deceived ourselves of our intentions sufficiently, given ourselves a new shiny coat of confidence, and allowed ourselves to be equipped with the acquired wisdom of our intervening years, we hope to have discovered how to deal with opportunities we passed up once upon a time for another suddenly too-precious moment we have since forgotten, or casually discarded in the jetsam of a life long since abandoned.

In leaving behind some savored moment or unacknowledged eventuality, vague and shapeless now in memory, we travel great emotional distances to rid ourselves of the Fraught and the Vague and the Useless and avail ourselves of the more emotionally tangible, more sanguinary recollections, for the purposes of fiction, poetry and other artistic effluvia. All of this gets noticed by those plucky writers who continue to devise contradictory expositions of human frailty while offering murky metaphors for posterity to unravel. They strain their vocabularies to deploy (or disqualify) readily available facts, while hunkering down to scribble out their personal torments in coffee bars carved out of abandoned retail facilities. To what avail?

I’ve given some serious thought to this question and I could be convinced that I would never have to go through any of that agita if I were a devoted model-train enthusiast living in Hoboken, and/or if my name was Raoul.

Everything would be different, or at least not the same. Metaphorically (albeit temporarily) escaping from the lurking guilt for any responsibility for any previous narrative and/or fictional nonsense, and having vanquished the momentary onrush of despair and desuetude, I might feel inspired to write what might later be described, possibly in error, as “meticulously crafted phrases”, only a few of them describing a character who might as well be named Howard Garner. Alas, here he is, but briefly imagined:

..walking unsteadily down a badly-lit hallway in a floundering apartment house in Gary, Indiana; never for a second wondering why anyone would write about him when the only interesting thing that ever happened to him was the time he went to the hospital to visit his friend Earl, who was suffering from a panoramic back tattoo that turned septic, and Howard accidentally got his picture in the paper.

It doesn't matter what the tattoo looks like because no one will ever see it, indescribable as it must remain among the pages of one of my many notebooks, most of which are rife with all kinds of inconsequential whoop-de-do about any number of imaginary skirmishes I might have initiated to assist in the creation of characters who appear to seem a bit eccentric in their fictionality, at first, but who might in the course of the telling undertake the struggle to become decent human beings. Which is not to say entirely non-fictional, though they will certainly deny that they do not exist only in my imagination.

Then, in spite of my own caffeinated zeal to scribble out a brief sketch, an earnest plea, or a long rant, I'm assiduously fending off distractions again, struggling to remain hopeful that by page three I will have been able to sustain the fragile narrative long enough to arrive at some conclusion:

Howard gets to the end of the hallway, wrestles out his door key, unlocks and opens his door, turns on the kitchen light, removes his coat, and collapses onto his daybed in exhaustion. After some recovery time, a “brief moment”, as we say in the alternative scenario business, Howard will turn on the radio and listen to the baseball game.

Before we go any further, I would like to stipulate that Howard’s radio hasn’t worked since a first draft of another story I wrote or attempted to write in which he hurled his radio out the window in a wildly over-exaggerated gesture of impatience during a rain delay. According to a note I might have appended to the subsequent now-lost text, Howard managed to find the shattered radio among a pile of broken promises in a tangle of thoughtlessly hurled invective in the middle of the sidewalk.

I personally do not believe that would-be characters like Howard should be judged harshly just because they come across as fictional. Ask yourself: what would the world be like if all the imaginary characters from literature refused to complain out loud about their petulant children, their misplaced loyalties or their sore feet?

This is a serious question no one has ever asked me.

I can only imagine why.

One might suppose it has something to do with the idea that when I close this notebook this afternoon, any possibilities that i might have stumbled over in my search for The Truth will join the ranks of my countless fragmentary fictional eventualities filling in the space between here and there, then and now, tomorrow and the day after.

--The End--