Midtown Houston Back Then

It was an enjoyable quick read of Bryan Washington's short story titled 'Last Coffeehouse on Travis', published in The New Yorker on September 8, 2024. 

The narrator was going through a rough patch in his life. He just broke up with his boyfriend, and moved in temporarily with his Aunt's friend, a woman named Margo and her young son Walter. He lives rent-free this summer but 'works' at Margo's coffeeshop in Midtown Houston before it was all gentrified, high-rise condominiums move in, and property prices skyrocketed. 

The author showed us a bit of the queer community in Houston, and how the city was in the 1990s till it slowly gentrified in the 2000s. Many young people moved into the community and had more children, and along with a whole slew of exciting F&B development, there was a vibrant nightlife too. Likewise, the narrator was also considering whether to stay.

It was a tiny coffee shop, really. Nothing important. If you blew too hard, you could wipe it clean off the map. But it was something to the people who spent time there: a place to go. Now I know how important this is. 

Even then, in the back of my head, I knew that things couldn’t continue like this. So easily. But I still tried allowing myself to wonder if it could be possible.

The narrator was relegated to cleaning the shop and serving customers and learning who the regulars are before being allowed to finally make coffee. He wondered if he could and would stay on in this town, doing this for a long time to come. He also hooked up with someone in town for a bit to look after his ill father. 

Then we see Garette, Walter's father. Margo and Garette are on the brink of divorce, but the latter still co-owns the house, of which the narrator now stays in. Juxtapose that relationship with the burgeoning one that the narrator has with Ken, and we have a reason for everyone to stay in town after summer ends. 

I grinned mid-way through because randomly, the writer threw in the characters watching a television drama titled 'Crash Landing on You' (2019) and Hyun Bin was on a motorbike before flinging it at an oncoming truck, and an explosion ensued. And damn. I know that scene. 

This is a new-to-me author, so I went to have a read about how and why this odd scene might have popped up. As if K-drama is so popular in mid-town Houston in 2019/2020! Okaaaaay, while the author grew up in Houston, he spent a lot of time in Osaka, Japan. In an interview, the author said that he is inspired by Japanese culture and books as well. He said, 

This story is heavily indebted to Banana Yoshimoto’s “Moshi Moshi,” Nao-Cola Yamazaki’s “Dad, I Love You,” Naoko Ogigami’s film “Kamome Diner,” and also the television series “Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?”—four narratives where relatively quotidian scenarios are heightened, and given deep emotionality, by their specificity, and the structural flexibility their storytellers utilize. I’m always amazed by narratives whose primary antagonist is the passage of time—this particular story’s characters certainly have their interpersonal challenges, but finding ways to navigate them in communal spaces (homes, workplaces, third places) creates pockets to play with character progression and change that aren’t too demanding for the reader to track, while also leaving space for complexity, because the parameters presented are relatively straightforward.

A challenge I’ve faced writing narratives set in Houston is trying to acknowledge the city’s nuances (or at least the ones I’m privy to) while not giving way to stock narrative arcs. Attempting to capture even a microcosm of that on the page is challenging enough. But I’ve been more outside Texas than not over the past half decade—mostly in Tokyo, lately—so a number of things that may have struck me as routine by way of immersion—for better (the city’s diversity; its many different layers of living; how each of these layers manages to coexist with one another; the earnestness) and worse (a headache-inducing governmental infrastructure; the nightmare of living in a car-centric city, particularly if you’re unhoused or disabled or otherwise othered by the state; the nightmare of navigating American health care in Texas; the earnestness)—have been further magnified when I’m back in town. That freshness is useful, narratively, for me. 

Also, music helps. I was listening to a lot of Fishmans and Lee Kang Seung 이강승 while drafting this one, and then Rei Harakami and Clairo through edits.