Accidental Church: The Diner

An unremarkable evening in New York City

Welcome back to the Accidental Church series, in which author John Paul Brammer describes moments when feelings of religiosity arrive unexpectedly. The series has not been updated in over two years, due to Brammer not experiencing the sublime in any capacity in that time.

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Photo by Tibor Krizsak on Unsplash

I am a wind instrument in space.

Walking toward Greenwich Village on a crisp October evening, there’s an image in my mind of an ornate flute doing helpless, zero-gravity cartwheels through the void. 

My friend and I agreed to meet at Julius, a gay bar, around seven thirty. It’s only six. Ludicrously early, no doubt, but I want to walk in Manhattan. I am a prodigious stroller. I can walk around for hours and hours and be alright. This is despite a growing pain in my left knee, which causes me to limp, but that’s none of my business until I’m in a better financial position. I don’t like discussing this pain with anyone. They will ask why I haven’t gotten it looked at or say something useless like, “that’s getting older!” 

On these long walks, I can get quite self-critical. This isn’t always unpleasant. Sometimes it feels like I’m working things out or coming to important conclusions. It’s whimsical, even. 

Regarding the image of the flute in space, I believe it stems from my belief that there’s a sound I should be making, but can’t. I should be living beautifully, but I’m not. Life is going right through me.

This is especially outrageous considering I’ve organized my life to accommodate music and poetry. I travel often. I go on many dates. During the day, I write. In the evenings, I draw. I’ve made this my job, my living, even if some months are better and more secure than others. I have a good number of friends, different groups for different activities and different kinds of jokes. My apartment, though presently blighted by a severe case of apathy (unwashed dishes in the sink, piles of clothes on the floor), is nice to look at and to live in. 

And yet, for all that, there’s a feeling of lack, of impotence, a greasy film over my skin numbing me to sensation. It feels more obvious in the morning, before my first coffee, when I scrape it off a bit like ice on a windshield so I can push along. I push along well enough. I function. 

But I can’t help but suspect that there are stimulating conversations I could be having in bars and restaurants that I haven’t found yet with people I’m failing to meet because of a litany of personal shortcomings: I’m not charming enough, not attractive enough, can’t let go, too set in routine, looking in the wrong places. I have bad habits. 

Asphalt turns to cobblestone en route to the Village. Harder on my leg, but so easy on the eyes! Quaint little shops that remind me of old movies or watercolor paintings, restaurants with small corner tables on display behind big glass windows offering dioramic glimpses of the New Yorkers drinking and eating with bread baskets and lit candles between them. 

I should be finding myself at tables like these more often. When was the last time I was cozy? Hard to say. More evidence, anyway, that I’m living wrong. 

I like to imagine the lives of these people. Not in any great detail, but in broad strokes. Their jobs, their communication styles, their level of commitment to each other. It’s an odd habit for someone who dislikes people, as I do. Generally speaking, their machinations bother me. I consider much of human behavior to be attempts to trick me into situations I don’t want to be in, or into beliefs that aren’t quite what they seem. I’m not a joiner. I have no faith in groups. I politely decline every offer to ensnare me into this or that. 

Small wonder I’m so lonely. 

But the Village helps. The Village is one of those places that make me feel like I made some good decisions, or even ended up where I was supposed to. Could I really have chosen so wrong, being here? 

Such are my thoughts on this long walk. 

My plan is to find something to eat before meeting my friend at Julius. We’re going from there to an advocate organization’s anniversary event where there will be people who are proud of their work, and no food. I’ve recently decided to change the way I eat. I want to dramatically alter my body in some way, to shed my skin like a snake and emerge as someone else. But it’s not a diet. I don’t do diets. As I said, I would never find myself amongst believers, which is what I think dieters to be. 

To be candid, I am going to walk into Chipotle and order a salad bowl with chicken. The non-experience of eating Chipotle in New York City is an invisible act for invisible people like me. It will feel neither good nor bad, merely appropriate, which is fine. The food bowl exists to keep you going.

But I’ve been walking for thirty minutes or so, and I’m considering my general philosophies on life, and thinking that perhaps my actions are not in lockstep with my beliefs. I believe that every second in life ought to sing in some way, that each one ought to hold within its tiny hummingbird body some music, some color, some significance. If it doesn’t, then I must be doing something wrong. 

During long stretches of silence, like the one I’m in now, when the wasted seconds pile into dead heaps of minutes, hours, days, weeks, and so on, I get desperately unhappy. These periods of nonlife feel out of my control. But I could always try harder. I don’t have to join a church or get too into yoga or attend a seminar. I can change little things. I can decide to go somewhere else for dinner. I don’t think anything in Chipotle will sing for me. 

Where to go instead?

I remember walking into a diner in New York City as a kid with my parents, sister, and abuelos. How my mom got my abuelos on a plane, I can’t recall, but it registers now as quite the feat. We stayed in a hotel in Gramercy Park, a name that to this day retains some gold flecks of childhood. 

The sun was especially yellow that morning, or it was so in my head, filtering in through gauzy curtains and reaching us at our table where a no-nonsense waitress brought us eggs and toast and sausages. I recall the sausage links in vivid detail, how fat, how shiny, how unlike any back home.

That was a governing philosophy for me at that age, that things were better and fuller outside of Oklahoma, that there were realer, more serious things everywhere else. I wanted to see it all. I wanted to see every last corner of the world. I remember sitting in that diner as a kid and thinking I had found one of those places where life happens so gorgeously and so casually, places that hummed with enviable activity while I was asleep or far away. 

With this memory in my heart, I walk into the closest diner I can find. It has sparse Halloween decorations on the front door and in the windows, vinyl stickers of pumpkins and black cats. The bell dings as I walk in, and an older man greets me. He wears a white button-up with a black vest, has coarse black-and-silver hair, and a wide, toothy smile. “Good evening, sir,” he says. He has a dignified affect to his speech and gestures that seems to me to harken to some bygone era. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

I’m wearing nice clothes. A black, wool blazer and matching pants, my most expensive shoes, and a gold ring on my middle finger that feels a bit unnatural. I’ve tried and failed many times before to become “a person who wears a ring.” I suspect others can tell I’m not meant to be one every time I wear it. 

“How about this seat there?” he asks, pointing to the small table on the elevated side of the restaurant, right where I’d hoped he’d put me. The diner is organized into two halves with a narrow aisle straight down the middle. Because of this, there is some emphasis placed on the front door and on the people who walk through it. Eyes fluttered to me upon entering before going back to their plates. 

Everyone here is older than me, probably because I’m eating dinner so early. It’s neither crowded nor empty inside. This number of people emphasizes solitude. You can watch other people’s loneliness. I take my seat as the waiter presents the menu to me with a dramatic flourish. It’s as if he knows I don’t usually eat in diners like this and have come here in all my silly melodrama seeking something special. I wished he would stop reading my mind and dial it back a bit. 

“Coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Very well. I’ll return in just a moment.”

He either thinks he’s in an old movie or knows I think I’m in one. 

The menu is floppy and old-fashioned with brass corner protectors. I take my ring off and place it by the salt shaker. I consider ordering eggs, sausages, and toast, but decide against it, thinking it aligns a bit too much with the memory I’m now a little embarrassed by, for how I believe the waiter has reached in and spotted it. Or perhaps I want to preserve the memory of the special sausage links. They were doubtlessly normal sausages and I’d rather not be offered any form of evidence of this.

“Have you decided?”

“I think I’ll have the turkey burger with fries.”

“Excellent.”

Excellent. I agree! The perfect order for the occasion. Not so excessive as a beef burger, but indulgent in its way. I’m proud that I’m doing something slightly out of my business as usual. I forget, sometimes. What I’m allowed to do.

My mood shifts. I let the charms work on me, the sparse Halloween decorations, the flashy waiter, this happy shade of solitude, sitting amongst the other customers drinking their hot coffee and cutting into their steaks and having dull, rhythmic conversations. I feel like I could melt like warm butter into the world around me and dissipate and be safe. 

This feeling alone is more than I hoped for when I walked in. Then, ding, someone else enters. She’s short, probably in her sixties, with long, dyed yellow hair, wearing a leather jacket and a black bandana tied around her forehead. 

“Good evening, ma’am,” the waiter greets her, and I’m relieved to see that he’s entirely democratic with his theatrics. “Just you tonight?”

“Meeting a friend,” she grunts, scanning the room. She’s one of those people with a prominent theme. Everything about her is black leather, cigarettes, and rock music, right down to her gravelly voice. “There she is right up there.”

“Of course.”

She ambles up to a table near me where an older woman is seated, her silver hair in a short bob and librarian spectacles on her face. Such are the size and design of her glasses. “Spectacles.” Her lips are pursed. Already, they make a funny pair. The librarian and the rocker chick. “Hello,” the former says, rather joylessly, when she notices the latter walking up to her. 

“Well, what do you know,” the woman with the long yellow hair says, taking her seat as my turkey burger arrives with a great tada from the waiter. I hide behind it while I eavesdrop, pretending to be extremely interested in arranging the lettuce and tomato just so.

“What do I know,” the woman in the glasses responds. “It’s good to see you. You look different.”

“I think you look the same.”

“No, I don’t.”

Ooh! I like this, for some reason. 

I wonder if rocker chick caused a lot of trouble for librarian in life. I imagine it was rocker chick that reached out, saying she’d be in town, and it was librarian that acquiesced, perhaps with a sigh, and told her to meet here in this diner. Perhaps librarian had a phase in which she was more like her old friend here.

“How long has it been since I last saw you?” the woman with yellow hair asks.

“Let’s see. I’m seventy-one now. It must have been twenty-six years.”

“Seventy-one?”

“I’m old,” she laughs, warming to the conversation, to her old friend, but maintaining a streak of severity. “Old and gray.” 

They don’t seem to love each other so terribly much, and for this I am grateful to them both, for allowing this delicate moment to be salty-sweet rather than saccharine. My turkey burger, likewise, is precisely as I’d hoped it to be, not especially delicious in a way that would raise my suspicions (you’re forcing it, pretending things are better than they are), but still good. 

“Well, you look great.”

I put my hands in my lap. I was seven years old when these two last saw each other, probably wearing my Catholic school uniform in the first or second grade, perhaps drawing dragons in my notebook or doing math with M&M’s at my desk; a child.

I wonder what sort of lives these two were living then, how they met, what kind of fun they had or didn’t have together, why they drifted apart for so long, but still, after all these years, remembered each other. Felt something for each other. Something just strong enough. Was it here that they met? Here, in New York?

Warm tears well up in my eyes.

Old friends catch up. Forks scrape against dishes. There’s a woman in the corner on her laptop, typing something and sipping hot coffee. Is it a work email, or a novel? The waiter is greeting a couple that just walked in with his regular pageantry. I will remember him, the waiter. The cooks in the kitchen laugh. I can hear them from here.

Here.

I’m here. 

I’m a part: of this gentle orchestra, of a regular and unremarkable evening in Manhattan. I feel I’m supposed to be here. I feel every last person on earth deserves this too. Such peace. Such love for strangers. Such faith. 

“Anything else for you?”

“No, I’m okay. Thank you.”