Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Sometimes I Write at the Cosmic Cantina  
Paul Austin

THE BEST MEXICAN FOOD ON THE PLANET is painted in sans-serif letters in a bold red paint on a long white sign, bolted to a bare brick wall. Cheap burritos, and salsa they make in the back. Plaintive songs from wall-hung speakers, horns and guitars, and Spanish words that I sometimes understand — love and tears and shame, and the singer wails something about this-very-moment. Right-now. This-tiny-bit-of-time, and then the trumpets scale up and down, and the moment is gone and the next song is playing.

If I can hear the words to the song, I know I’m not writing. If I can’t hear the words, I am.

Sometimes I stop at the Cosmic Cantina on my way home from work — midnight, two AM — and have to wait in long line of drunk Duke students who fumble through every pocket to find a credit card. Loud voices. Laughter. Arguments.

But at lunch the crowd is less raucous, and quicker to place an order at the blue-tiled counter. Professors. Electricians. Students. Concrete finishers, their boots powdered with pale grey dust and splattered with wet cement, speaking rapid Spanish. Guys from the Regulator Bookstore, just around the corner. John the mailman, who brings my family our letters and catalogues, in his blue trousers with a black stripe down the side. He carries doggie-treats and news of our neighbors. John and I enjoy seeing each other here – me with a laptop, him without his mailbag.

To get to the Cosmic, you climb a long and narrow staircase. At the top, you can turn left to a dance studio, or right, to the Cosmic. The risers of the stairs have all been painted white, and in carefully painted black letters, on each riser, is a line from “The Love Song of J Alfred Proofrock.” To get to the Cosmic you climb a poem.

Once inside, you get in line. When you place your order, you tell them your name. They call it out when your food is ready. The guy behind the counter has a Spanish accent, and some of the names are easy to understand. Some are harder. I’ve told them my name is “Escritor Famoso,” just to hear it booming out over the music. But I work in an ER, and one night I took care of the guy who folds the beans, rice, and salsa into the tortilla, and places it in a steamer, and then gives three quick jerks on the handle. I recognized him, and the manager who had brought him in to the ER. If they were surprised to see me wearing scrubs and a stethoscope, they didn’t let on. Their English was fluent, my Spanish fair. We didn’t need a translator. As we were winding up the visit, I told them it was good to see them, but I’d rather see them where they work, than where I work. They both laughed, and nodded. We shook hands.

So they know me. They say “Paul,” when my food is ready.

*      *      *

Sometimes I write at The Mad Hatter Bakery. A cut crystal top hat sits by the register, for tips. I always drop in a dollar and they’re always glad to see me.

People sit with laptops. People with manuscripts, double-spaced, sometimes stapled, sometimes not. Teachers and students. People meeting. One man four tables away leans back, and talks about an annual report. At the table next to mine, a man and a woman lean towards each other, foreheads almost touching. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but they’re holding hands.

When the sounds of conversation recede into the sounds of surf, or waterfalls, or go away completely, I know I’m writing. If I’m aware that a businessman is bragging, or that lovers are whispering, I know I’m not.

*      *      *

Sometimes I write on my bicycle, a Schwinn Legacy. White-wall tires and chrome fenders. Blue metallic paint. It has a comfortable seat and handlebars at a height that encourages good posture. Single-speed. Pedal brakes. If I can get the words to sound right, as I say them into the air I’m coasting through, I know they’ll sound right when I get home from the Cosmic Cantina, and sit in the small walk-through office leading to the bedroom.

If, at my desk, I hear the sounds of the house: the clunking rumble from the ice machine in the refrigerator, or our seventeen-year-old talking to a friend on his cell phone, or Sally, my wife, pulling up in her Mustang, I know I’m not writing.

*      *      *

Some mornings, just as I wake up and before the alarm clock chirps, words will come to me, unbidden. Words I’d worried over at the Cosmic, that had sounded so flat and dead, even on my way home on my bicycle, riding along with all of the majesty that particular bicycle can impart — flaccid words resisting every effort of resuscitation — those words sometimes come to me with a new pulse.

Under those flannel sheets, before I pee, or stretch, or move closer to the warmth of the woman I’ve loved for twenty-six years, in those moments when I hear the right words — almost as if whispered to me — it feels as if I am writing.

 

Paul Austinis the author of Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER, which was published in 2008 by W.W. Norton. His essay, “Tucker Put His Gun To His Head,” was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays of 2005, and his work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, The Gettysburg Review, The Southeast Review, Discover Magazine, and others. He is at work on a second book, Beautiful Eyes: A Memoir of Down Syndrome.