Where People Talk Instead of Work

On Escape and Community

Hanoi has more cafes per city block than anywhere I’ve ever been.

I’m an escapist. If there’s anything true about me, it’s this. I like to joke that if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s quitting. Any time I discover something that I like, there’s a good chance I’ll have to learn to say goodbye to it at some point because it will take over my life. Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and video games are on the list of things I have successfully quit, one day at a time. On the list of things I keep quitting over and over: sugar, reddit, and smartphone scrolling.

There are a few things that other people have to quit that I will never become addicted to: Work, exercise, and gambling. I simply don’t see the appeal. I could use a bit of compulsion with work and exercise. I feel like the universe simply gave me a pass on the gambling.

But I do not view life as a series of bad habits I pick up and put down. I love my life, and what I love most about it is sitting around and talking with friends about fun things. Whenever I’ve been able to do that, I’ve had a blast. It’s the talking that I like. The exchange of ideas. The being together. The community. But a funny thing about community, I can’t really chase it, as much as I’d like to think I can.

There was a magical time when I lived in San Francisco in the ‘90s when it felt like people’s lives were structured around conversations in cafes. There was a group at Muddy Waters, and another at Cafe Internationale. Some of my friends spent their entire day going from cafe to cafe, yakking with pals here and there.

There were no laptops then. Nobody went to a cafe to work. They went to read a book, to talk to people, and to sketch. I remember meeting a friend once, a former stripper at the Lusty Lady, who had an exhibition of the photos she took of the men who watched her from behind filthy glass. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and I had a handwritten list, like a shopping list, of topics we had to discuss before we could leave the cafe. I wish I still had that list, I’d love to see what was on it. She laughed when I pulled it out.

I’m sure that list had my recent trip to Mexico on it, where I had foolishly tried and failed to take up with the Zapatistas and wound up hitchhiking across the country from Chiapas to Mexico City instead. I had found drag bars in the jungle, slept in a hammock made by prisoners in Oaxaca, and swam at a nude beach filled with weirdos like me.

That trip had been amazing, except for a darkness that chased me from place to place. A compulsion to return to a woman who I knew was bad for me and could not forget haunted me. I found myself in Cuba, at a Santa Ria celebration. A woman danced like she was possessed by a chicken while people chanted and shouted. Someone handed me a shot of rum and a smoke. I passed on the rum and compromised on the cigarette. I knew which one would be easier to quit.

A man at that service looked me up and down and said, “A woman cast a spell on you,I can see it.” I did not and still don’t believe in magic. But I made an exception for him because I knew he was right. I’m sure that was on my list of things to discuss with my friend. When I returned from that trip, I found myself immediately back with that woman, the spell caster. I woke up beside her one morning and she said, “I cast a spell on you.” In that instant, all my compulsions to be with her lifted. It was a shock to be so free so fast. But another spell was brewing, one that I would never shake and would have us all in its thrall.

When I was in the cafe, relating stories, and listening to my friend, I noticed a man beside me acting the way I acted when I had a new compulsion that I would one day have to quit. He was dope-fiending over a glass table in the center of the cafe. The table had “SF NET” stenciled on the side. It was some kind of computer. He fed quarters into it and typed at a keyboard. I had seen this device in the cafe before, but it was always empty. Now this madman was furiously pumping in quarters with the urgency of a customer at a peep show who just needs another five minutes, or a lover at a payphone on a long-distance call who just wants another minute with their beloved. These things, quarters in strip clubs and payphones are the grimy tokens of the analog age. Old compulsions measured in cents became new compulsions measure in hours and days, perhaps in lifetimes.

I did not understand this device and I did not want to. I suspected that if this strange man could love this object with such passion then so could I. That’s been my experience. If someone is in trouble with something, I can be too. Well, I was right. That device was an early connection to the internet, before websites. It was chat. It was the first social media. The beginning of cyberspace. It was the end of cafe chats with lists of topics for friends. All of that is gone now. A new spell has been cast, one that doesn’t vanish with a confession.

I was reading this essay in the New York Times about leaving America because of politics and the line about cafes where people talk instead of work brought those San Francisco days rushing back to me. A part of me, the part that always feels left out, started to ache. I want to live in a neighborhood in Athens where people talk about books and art and find respite from the treadmill of work spend work spend work spend. But I know I wouldn’t find it there. Not for me. Besides, the great message of that essay is not to run from anything, but to build a community that you serve whether it is at home or somewhere you choose to be.

That’s the thing. Always. The more I scramble to belong, the less I feel that I do. Feeling a sense of belonging that penetrates the deep loneliness inside is like chasing a butterfly that keeps bounding just outside the net. My lunges are futile. Cute as a child, but embarrassing as an adult.

I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I catch wind of these communities. The latest about some alt-lit writers and magazines and the things they do together fascinates me. “Literature, performance, and social spectacle merge with exhilarating unpredictability.” Sounds amazing. I hope I catch a glimpse of it sometime.

But I have a community. I have friends whom I adore. I have a church community that brings me great solace and gives me opportunities to serve. The solution for the escape, the dream of the cafe where we all talk instead of work, the hope of belonging is something I’ve learned not to search for but to provide. That’s the twist of the spirit that gets me every time. The spell lifts, and the obsession ends, when I become the community giver rather than the community getter. When I seek to be the place that people run to instead of viewing my place as something to escape.

I’m not built this way. I forget it from moment to moment. I will always live in a ground hog day reality of awakening to a list of things I have to get until I come around to the fact that the list is all the things I’m supposed to give. Such is life, this is the nature of the spell we are all under.