I hadn’t typed anything in three days.
The laundry was done, the bookshelf re-organized, and the beer bottles thrown out.
Even the taxes from the last three years got filed.
I’d read somewhere that all the big boys wrote in cafes and restaurants, and I thought the same strategy might get my own words going again.
Hemingway, Joyce, and Miller had the Paris cafes.
Burroughs had the dens of Tangiers.
Even Dostoyevsky had those chic Siberian bistros.
I had Portland, which was said to be God’s gift to all things Art and Literary. My odds were good.
I hung up the bathrobe and headed into town.
It was a small place, perfectly stripped and restored to the brick and beams. Local original Art dotted the walls, and the Barista behind the copper counter sported a moustache.
Everybody in there was twenty-three. For a moment, I thought I’d stepped into an Apple store, but at second glance, there were a few Moleskines scattered around.
“Hi,” I said to the Barista.
He didn’t respond, he just stood there looking at me like I was the biggest asshole that ever walked into the place.
“Uh, coffee. Black please,” I said.
“Indonesia or Latin America?”
“What’s better for getting immortal sentences down?” I asked.
He stared at me.
“Look, just give me a Mirror Pond.”
He reached down, slowly, grabbed the bottle from the little cooler, uncapped it, and poured it into a glass.
I paid and went looking for a table. The only thing available was a small round one in the middle of the room. I put the beer and my old legal pad down on it and settled in.
Not being accustomed to public writing, I sat and looked around at the others for a while. They all seemed earnest and engrossed in their work, they were really sweating it. Really writing.
The machine hissed behind the counter, and dishes and silverware were banging around in the back room.
A few more twenty-three year olds walked in, got their hot Latin Americas, sat down.
At the table next to me, two of them were arguing whether Foucault was a postmodern or a modern. I didn’t know what Foucault was, wasn’t, or wore on Saturdays, but I was fairly sure he wanted me to get some words out.
I drank my beer and got to it. Just as I was bringing the pen to paper — a brilliant sentence that the world never would’ve forgotten — another twenty-three came swinging out of the bathroom.
He’d been in there the whole time, and the foul fragrance of his recent work trailed behind him. I blanched, trying not to make much of it, but the kid must’ve been living on nothing but coffee, cigarettes, and chili fries for months.
Nobody else seemed to notice or care. They kept on writing, as if it were some kind of great literary burden to bear.
“What’re you working on?” the guy to my left asked.
I didn’t want to open my mouth just yet, but I managed, “A story.”
“You a writer?”
I didn’t look up, hoping he’d take the hint, “Once in a while.”
“That’s cool man. I’m a writer too, I go to a writing circle every Wednesday night and get my stuff critiqued.”
“That sounds just like a sweaty daymare I had last week,” I said.
He didn’t know how to take it, so he turned and started in on the girl next to him.
I looked down at my yellow page, and there wasn’t a single word on it. The One True Sentence I’d been given moments before had lifted with the fog from the bathroom, and was gone forever.
I sat there for another ten minutes before giving up. I finished the beer, collected the legal pad and pen, and moved to get out of there.
As I pushed through the door, I heard the Barista say, “Asshole.”
I didn’t care what Hemingway, Joyce, Miller, or Dostoyevsky thought, this writing in restaurants thing was horseshit.
My money was on old Foucault. Postmodern, modern, or otherwise, he must have been a stay-home-and-write-in-your-shorts-and-bathrobe man.
So I drove home, locked the door, and got this story out.
Writing in Restaurants
by Robert Bruce
robertbruce.com
Victor Haze 