Insomniacs at the Diner
A letter to the places we love and leave behind
Hello and welcome to the 36th issue of Place! Cafes, bars and restaurants are integral to our experience of place, but local establishments have been hit particularly hard during the pandemic. It seems every week there is news of a beloved cafe shuttering before we were able to sit in the corner booth to sip one last coffee or beer. This week we follow Joel Dickens to Austin, Texas, where he revisits his neighborhood diner and its beloved waitstaff, reflecting on how to hold onto the places that inevitably close, as life inevitably changes.
A brief note before we get into this week’s letter: We will be sending out a separate email on subscription options later this weekend, so be sure to keep an eye out for that in order to support Place and independent writers in 2021. Also Place will be taking a holiday break, with no emails on December 25 and January 1. We hope you get a bit of space for rest and relaxation after this extremely intense year! We’ll be back January 8 and beyond with more, and we’re so excited for what’s ahead.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. If you’re the social type, follow us on Twitter (@place_letter) where you can share your favourite pieces and Instagram (@placenewsletter) for a visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
“Everybody knows, everybody goes”
Magnolia Cafe, at the corner of Lake Austin Boulevard and Veterans Drive in Austin, Texas, was not only an iconic place but an iconic environment. It was a true diner—inexpensive, greasy, and fast-paced, often catering to truckers, police officers, and other laborers with early-morning and late-night shifts. It was also one of the city’s few 24-hour establishments, with what some might call an “Austin-twist”: it served comfort food, such as oversized pancakes and tuna melts, with half-liter plastic cups of water alongside Tex Mex dishes. Its specialty was “Mag Mud,” a mix of canary yellow queso, black beans, avocado, and pico de gallo.
In Texas’ capital, where the population has expanded ten-fold since the 1950s, Magnolia has been a constant since its debut as “Omelettry West” in 1979. Its survival for more than forty years alone granted it legendary status; in a city quickly gentrifying as a product of its tech sector boom, a business lifetime of more than a decade is an impressive feat. At the crux of the MoPac Expressway (posthumously named after the Missouri Pacific Railroad) and Lady Bird Lake (posthumously named after Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, the architect of many public beautification projects), Magnolia acted as a common joint between the youthful central Austin, affluent west Austin, and bohemian south Austin. Convenient for the college scene, the local aristocracy and the hippies alike.
The homely two-winged 1960s ranch-style structure was welcoming. Unpretentious and familiar in the landscape of one-story monuments to outdated Texan architecture, and nestled in its ample parking lot with space for diesel pickup trucks, luxury imported sedans, and police cruisers. Two dining rooms were connected only by a kitchen; patrons in the east wing had to walk outside to access the overcrowded, single-stall toilets in the west wing. The near-constant wait created a social scene out of the front patio, its primary attraction being a gazebo-covered picnic table, carved with graffiti and cigarette burns. The booths were wrapped with a selection of flamingo, Hawaiian, and insect-themed laminates and the windows were filled with red neon signs alerting the public, “Sorry, we’re open.” From the ceiling hung what I imagine is a life-sized construction of a pterodactyl skeleton.
The clientele had no discernible makeup. You were equally likely to run into 16-year-old fraternity-stars-to-be, elderly Texan ranchers, and punks recovering after the shows taking place minutes away downtown. The staff withstood the test of time while constantly shifting; they were always young, always exuberant, and always off-kilter from the social norm. Their eternally gracious and sociable attitude created what was Austin’s most ubiquitous favorite eatery, encapsulated in its slogan: “Everybody knows, everybody goes.”
Despite its iconic stature, this location of Magnolia closed in April 2020 due to financial challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic. Magnolia’s permanent shuttering was, for me, quite possibly the most hard-hitting news of the pandemic. Any long-term Austin resident becomes accustomed and resilient to frequent closures of important establishments, but rarely is it the ones that are so widely valued. Often, there is no satisfying explanation for the demise of local enterprises; the immense disconnect between the city’s long-standing residents and recent transplants means there is no consensus around which historical aspects of Austin are valuable or worth retaining. More often than not, the ultimate decisions are decided or informed by the newer occupants: the nouveau riche of the newly-created Apple, Facebook, and Google offices, those who have more use for a Tesla dealership or a rooftop bar or a luxury condominium complex than they do for a mere diner, regardless of its status as the most foundational site of my—and so many others’—teen years. Developers know this, and that sealed Magnolia’s fate.
I had gone to Magnolia since early childhood, as long as I could remember. It was one of the few restaurants accessible from my house without taking a highway, a feature that gave it an added sense of comfort. However, the inauguration of Magnolia as a true staple in my life was April 11 2014, during the spring break of my junior year of high school. Max, my whirlwind first love-turned first heartbreak-turned-romantically-ambiguous-but definitively-close-friend, was visiting town from D.C., and after a failed attempt to have sex on painkillers and ecstasy, we departed home in a dark hour of the night to meet up with another common friend, Gillian. We met at Magnolia, of course, our only midnight option in a town only beginning its process of rapid urbanization.
Before ordering, Gillian and I were deadlocked in one of our regular and inane arguments over whether or not we happened to have the same physician’s assistant. Both descriptively similar women named Beverly working somewhere in north Austin, I insisted they must have been the same person. As Gillian opened her mouth, surely to vehemently disagree, Josephine strolled to our table to take our orders. She stood tall above our booth with a slender frame, either to be described as gaunt or modelesque. Her thinned skin and eye bags suggested prolonged fatigue and years of smoking, but her demeanor, even in the middle of the night, was effortlessly jaunty and candid. She had an air of inherent familiarity and candor, so I demanded she act as a tie-breaker for this debate.
“Beverly is definitely a period name,” Josephine said, “like in the 1960s everyone was naming their kids Chandelier and Cadillac.” I quickly learned that Josephine always spoke the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was a repulsive quality to some, but attractive to others. I was instantly entranced. She had myriad unique tattoos, she had explicit photos that a drummer of one of the country’s foremost rock bands had recently sent her (a former flame from her high school days in California), and she afforded her rent and alcohol on 30 hours per week, exclusively after 9 PM and before 9 AM. She turned Magnolia from a home away from home into my home away from home. That night, nearly at sunrise, she scribbled her name and her schedule down on my receipt, both as a memento and as a way for me to plan my weekends around her.
From then on, I did. My friends and I desperately sought the independence to drink gas station Chardonnay and smoke menthol cigarettes that we were denied inside of the comfort of our parents’ homes, and the locations for our nightly escapades were severely limited. Coffee shops closed, parks had curfews, but Magnolia was always open. So every weekend, we went to seek consolation and counsel from Josephine and the other insomniacs at the diner. Josephine acted as a confessional, a diary, and a mentor to me. While she always listened to and advised me, she shared the gritty details of her life as well with little filter.
Her idiosyncrasies led us, as callous teenagers, to joke that Josephine seemed like she was on meth, though none of us yet knew that she’d actually gotten the monkey off her back and was only taking a cocktail of mood stabilizers and (legal) amphetamines. She brought forth the life experience of a one-time UCLA student turned routine patient at various Los Angeles and New York City addiction treatment centers. Despite her years of substance abuse, she had a youthful face which fit her 24-year-old body—though she attributed this to the Botox she received via facial injection, the only FDA approved single-serving treatment for her migraine headaches.
At the time, the waitstaff at Magnolia knew more about me than anyone else. Whether with friends or alone, I would sit for hours. The hosts knew me and where to seat me, the waiters knew me and which predicaments to pick back up on each time I arrived, and the managers resented me for the amount of time their staff dedicated to talking to me. In the beginning, if Josephine was working, my meals were free. Over time, the rest of the staff caught on that I was not a paying customer—something I had never asked for, but made me feel infinitely adored. I came elated, depressed, or (more often than not) heartbroken.
I had supportive parents, a psychiatrist, and a therapist, but Magnolia Cafe was the support network that gave me what I knew I was missing. Josephine became the shoulder to cry on, the guru to snap us out of a bad trip, and the muse to inspire us to face our fears in pursuing the boys we all wanted, and who variably wanted us too, but were too afraid to confront such desires.
Magnolia was nearly always the final destination. A place I could go to at the end of a night of drinking—and knew I could stay until the sun rose. A place to celebrate: the first time I kissed my crush of many years at my 16th birthday party, my acceptance into college hundreds of miles away, my high school graduation. A place to grieve: when said love interest chose to date a juvenile girl over me, my final departure from my life with my parents and friends of many years and to said college so many hundreds of miles away, and the seemingly common but dramatic dissolutions of the friendships built throughout high school and childhood at large. Part of what made this diner so unique was that these experiences were not. It was the destination, oasis, and secondary home of so many with such soul-consuming but transient problems as mine.
By the time Magnolia capsized, Josephine had jumped ship. When I arrived home in the summer of 2016 after my first year of college, as with every other break from school, I immediately went to Magnolia as a homecoming celebration. That evening, Josephine sat in the booth with me to make an admission. She spoke softly, completely uncharacteristically, so as not to reveal her words to her coworkers or manager. She informed me that she was pregnant after taking a gender-ambiguous model’s virginity in the West Texan desert. Pregnancy in and of itself had not been uncommon for her. What varied this time is that she had decided to keep it; not “keep it” in that she was sure she would carry it to term, but that she felt she had taken enough drugs, enough morning-after pills, and had enough abortions that she would roll the dice. She told me she would wait—it felt probable she would miscarry, and, if not, she would have a child. She was ready for either option.
Once her daughter was born later that year, Josephine progressively cut her hours to naught. Truthfully, Josephine’s—and Magnolia’s—influence on my life began to wane almost simultaneously with my entrance into my 20s. As Josephine shed her debaucherous lifestyle in favor of motherhood, I discovered a powerful ability to compartmentalize more and share less. Magnolia retained its status as an integral meeting point for my increasingly infrequent trips back to Austin, as the importance of my childhood home itself faded as well. Nevertheless, to have the diner there, even for a biannual sojourn, brought me immense comfort and nostalgia. I’m familiar with her whereabouts due to social media, but I know that her role in my life, just as Magnolia’s, can never be reinstated—or replaced.
Since hearing of Magnolia’s permanent closure during the early stages of the 2020 pandemic, I still do not know exactly what I’ve lost. When upscale condominiums are inevitably constructed in its place, at the crux of Central, West and South Austin, will they sit on the ashes of my adolescence? I am torn between that prediction, and one far more devout; the destruction of a place so beloved to me, holding both my joys and my traumas, will serve to emancipate me from my past, to allow me to grow, knowing these memories have transcended in some sense, as if this eatery had been a journal I had written in to mitigate my lowest points and memorialize my highest.
I fear the latter is a paradox, for as we watch the endless expansion of the divide between rich and poor in our cities, metropolitan sprawl engulfs those fundamental establishments to what we view as home —a phenomenon grieved not just in the U.S., but globally, and greatly abetted by pandemic—an ability to view the places lost as still a part of us is eclipsed by the sentiment that, instead, they are casualties of war. Although it may sound bleak, as a universal truth, virtually everything we know is ephemeral. Either everything we know and love will cease to exist, or we will ourselves; in the meantime, our minds are flooding with memories and sentiments—and ultimately, it’s not the physical places or people that stay with us, but the sentiments themselves.
- Joel Dickens is a student living between Austin, Texas, New York, New York, Trnava, Slovakia, and London, England. He is a fan of politics, history and romanticizing his past.
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AMAZING ARTICLE!!!!! Very well written and accurate of a BELOVED ESTABLISHMENT!!!!!!