Even here, I’m sat across from another screenwriter sipping his coffee and scrolling through his tablet. The sticky sweet smoke from his pipe wafts over to me. He puffs with his left hand, scrolls and sips with his right. Still, it’s preferable to the clouds of cigarette smoke which choke me on most patios.
He’s taunting me with his air of accomplishment. His buttercup yellow button down. His relentless pipe smoking. I think he’s watching dailies. Definitely a director then. And I am the ghost of a screenwriter, haunting him.
He hails a waitress without looking up. One slender finger in the air. Another coffee. Yes, I think I’ll have one too. Though I can feel the buzz in my veins already, I cannot bear the thought of sitting here without one. I look to catch her eye, but she has gone back behind the counter. Fine, he’s more important. That’s almost certain. I can tell from his degree of focus, something is being made. That rare result.
The world’s cafe bars are our office, the Writer-Director and I. We are at the cafe and we are at work. The distractions are constant and necessary. It is of vital importance to be in the world. Novelists hide themselves away in cabins, screenwriters haunt cafes.
New York. Los Angeles. Toronto. Barcelona. London. Istanbul. Always the same. The chatter around us shifts into more or less foreign language, but always we sit alone, staring at the page. The people mill about in much the same ways. No, that’s wrong. The point is to look closer. There, a handshake, there, a kiss on the cheek. Here, two. Vessels morph from oversize mugs to slender ornamented cups. The coffee inside them weaker, stronger, now muddy. Lipstick stained the Parisian glasses (a cliché to be sure, but apt). The English drank their pints and the volume steadily increased. And here, the drinks are fewer; the smoke much thicker.
Suddenly he’s gone. I look up and he isn’t there anymore. He’s left without my noticing. Gone too is the pungent, fruity smell of pipe tobacco. I don’t know how I missed his departure. He must have swept up his tablet and whisked himself off into the afternoon. I hadn’t had a chance to note the color of his scarf. I miss him a little. He was one of my kind.
Lyla Porter is an international writer and filmmaker. A passionate scribbler since childhood, she studied creative writing at Vassar College and has co-authored several plays and short films. Her work spans fiction and nonfiction, film and television, on and behind the camera.