"Coffee and Cigarettes with St. John of the Cross and Jack Kerouac" by Aarik Danielsen
- Roi Fainéant
- 23 hours ago
- 8 min read
Set me down inside a diner scene—in a film, a novel, on TV—and I’m bound to settle into whatever story you’re telling.
My back intuits the vinyl of the booth; my small breath quickens to mingle with the sighs aspiring from warmed coffee; surrounding chatter about new storefront churches, high-school basketball and the weather becomes the weather I know.
David Lynch, that great, mad American filmmaker, touched the truth when he said, “There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”
Lynch always meant what he said.
From a wide canon of curious moments, the sun-stabbed diner scene in his noir Mulholland Drive—and its strange afterword—still passes viewers’ lips 25 years later. Cherished moments from his TV masterpiece Twin Peaks nestle into the warm, wood-paneled world of the Double R Diner.
(I’d die to visit the real thing, still a working cafe in North Bend, Washington; though rumors say the pie is itself a tourist trap, nowhere near as good as Dale Cooper and the Bookhouse Boys claimed.)
Plenty of my favorite artists understand this safety Lynch identifies, this sacredness. In his Coffee and Cigarettes, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch pillowed diners with reverent black-and-white, escorted us to table with the likes of Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, translated the dialogue of weary, knowing nods.
And while After Dark is considered a “lesser” work, legendary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami made me a disciple for life by visiting a Tokyo Denny’s on its early pages. First leading us there at 11:56 p.m., Murakami reveals the personality of the place by night; “everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable.”
Yet roles are performed and routines observed in diners like Murakami’s; touch is transferred, from fingertips to ceramic coffee mugs, then to forehead temples. This nearly blank and transposable slate, these modest gestures, bend toward twinned meaning. There’s the inherent meaning of being anywhere at all and the meaning to come if and when another person joins us in our rituals.
In the diner, where we comb a menu of choices yet so often stick to the usual, this want for meaning becomes softer yet more sure. This is why patrons make sad eyes at waitresses here and would-be philosophers lean back to unburden themselves of deep-down wisdom before loosing a low whistle and waving a hand as if to say It all matters. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Here we enjoy our meandering conversations, punctuated with silence and shrugs and non-sequiturs, conversations which call up details no one needs to remember even as they breach the questions everyone is asking.
Insecure party hosts and seasoned silence-fillers love to pose some variation of a worn-out quiz: Tell me the people, living or dead, you would invite to a dinner like this one.
To me, the supremely more interesting question is who would you take with you into the diner?
Two fellows come to mind. I reach backward more than 50 years, then nearly 500 for very different men who almost share a name. Into the East Coast and the middle of the 20th century, I call up the Beat prince, Jack Kerouac. Facing the heart of 16th-century Spain, I ask one more favor from St. John of the Cross.
For all the strangeness of these invitations, we three intersect—minds and souls, now embodied—at the night.
Kerouac wrote so many different nights: nights on the road and tucked into your hometown; nights of much wine and much song; nights of consolation and without conclusion; nights when you touch something or someone miraculous without caring whether they will fade to stardust in your palm.
Mattering most, the ways Kerouac treated night as a three-dimensional possibility. In the company of childhood friends or would-be lovers, whether moving your body through the tangles of New York City or to the edge of a shy New England creek, Kerouac’s belief came through. We might be different people inside the night and on the night’s other side. This faith keeps him like a patron saint on my shoulder.
I picked up St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul at a time I would read any night-bearing word. His lyrical writ, enduring some 450 years, tests the night as metaphor for the Godward life, a place and a condition of co-equal darkness and light. In his night, we know the blessing of emptiness. Strange comfort permeates the souls which feel themselves turning over, being restored to a more austere happiness in God. Here, even desperation and doubt count as blessings, drawing us up into inevitable holy love. We endure the night for the sake of eternity growing within us.
John’s commitment to the image impresses me. While he still treats night as something to be overcome, his surprising tenderness with these dark hours keeps me coming back. The more evident saint, he is no lesser mystery.
I reach for them to indulge the questions I keep asking. Must night be a metaphor for where we meet God or may we actually meet God there? Is night a good unto itself? Am I right to tour these late hours, naming lights whose brightness passes all understanding? Or am I deceived, too faithless to wait for the sunrise?
In his story collection The Coast of Chicago, Stuart Dybek writes of “an all-night diner to which, sooner or later, insomniacs find their way.”
“In winter, when snow drifts over curbs, they cross the trampled intersections until they come upon footprints that perfectly fit their shoes and lead them there. On nights like this in summer, the diner’s lighted corner draws them to its otherwise dark neighborhood like moths.”
This is where I propose we meet.
One man at a time eases into a back booth, and even in the easing, our dissimilarities grow obvious. From his wise-cornered eyes, John looks around perplexed, perhaps even offended, at shifting stacks of hot cakes. Jack sinks into the place like a man who knows the contemplative appeal of a steak-and-eggs platter.
Seated and thus smaller, John carries the charisma of a sage still, as if the very particles around him are charged with the electricity of God. Jack lights a cigarette, huffs and puffs and coughs a blue joke, speaks of a couple saxophonists nobody but him knows.
Before the coffee delivered and plates of biscuits, John performs the sign of the cross as if to consecrate the body and blood of Christ. Waiting for his new friend’s hands to fall into rest, Jack offers some weak but not unkind wordplay about this true man of the cross.
I am not embarrassed by him. For each way Jack mildly irritates me, he enunciates a dozen things I forget to thank God for; Jack teaches me to number the trees, notice the hearts burning within strangers, to slacken my grip and extend my hands in front of me as if I might perforate the night, become one with its glories. I want Jack’s voice in my ear, at the table.
My whole life, I have played the translator. Growing up, I served groups of misunderstanding friends and still go between adults whose values live closer than they might appear. So I don’t mind translating now; the labor causes me to listen ever closer to these saints and their words.
Already, I hear the consonance as coffee comes. Coffee keeps us common. The diner does its magic. In this place, time both stills and, as Murakami wrote, reflects “deeper stage(s) of night,” darkness softening and sharpening just outside our window. Eventually we speak the same language.
Realizing this without needing to comment, we breathe lighter, talk louder. Sometimes we even roar. Rare moments resemble a better, truer rendering of 2 a.m. dorm-room conversations where you talk about everything and nothing at once.
Jack tells stories, and inside them, hums themes neither John or I know as if to ring our bells. John’s eyes twinkle as he uncovers a punchline that cuts the centuries.
And I keep the center, sliding questions back across the table. Somewhere in a second or third hour of conversation, we turn the night inside-out. Jack and I occasionally stick out our chests, flip John’s words around like a prod:
You really think a soul can come to see “penances are its pleasures; fasts its joys; and its consolations are to make use of the sacraments and to occupy itself in Divine things?” We lace the question mark with exclamation points.
John really does. His conviction begets intimacy. He talks, and Jack and I listen with intention, murmur what sounds like “amens.” Once, I swear to God, Jack mutters “when you put it like that ...” under his breath.
My friends never quite achieve a shared understanding of the word “sensual.” I lose count of how many times John speaks of purgation, and how many times Jack swallows the term like his coffee’s ground-speckled dregs.
Jack tips ash in the tray and John subdivides sentences, pausing sometimes to gaze at the ceiling as if waiting for divine permission to keep speaking.
Our words finger sides of the same coin, even if we stop short of spending the silver. Night is for traveling through, John asserts. Jack agrees, though for him the motion is its own prize. We all believe God, or some God-force, bids us come, whistling our way through and waiting for us at the sidewalk’s end.
We all want the same things from the night: to meet our created selves and transcend them somehow; to stumble into proof of love; to know light enough to keep us walking toward that great and indissoluble force.
Reaching the longer lulls, my friends—to their credit—seem willing to live within them. In this quiet accord, this acceptance, I know why we gather.
Sitting with Jack to my right and John across the table, hands drawing remnant warmth from mugs our waitress long abandoned, I am free to reject false choices, to broker two visions of the night and however many more the night may abide. The night is big enough to harmonize.
For a kid who grew up with the metaphor alone, freedom attends the notion of living with the metaphor and in the physical night without fear. Contra John, I believe my desires will deepen rather than flatline there. Only night will tell.
I pick up the check as Jack offers genuine thanks and John’s downcast gaze speaks a humble word. Stepping into the night, really early morning—into the myth of it, its dimensions both known and beyond speech—I am already losing my friends’ words. They leave me their texts to retrace, but there is something truer at work.
In diners, the impression of the conversation, that which we carry away, means as much as the conversation itself. This is the usual, and it is not.
I carry away gratitude for a person’s own saints, for their momentary guidance and unintended consequences of their unintended prayers.
Of course, I carry gratitude for the night itself, more sacred than I believed before we sat for coffee and communion. Blessed is the night, and blessed are those who will be found therein.