Javavino

a reminiscence

I’m sitting at Javavino in Candler Park. It’s one of my favorite coffeeshops in all of Atlanta. There’s nothing especially special about it. It’s a neighborhood establishment with a bit of a hodge podge aesthetic (not to be confused with another Atlanta coffeeshop whose name is actually Hodgepodge). The interior is a mismatch collection of modern lighting fixtures, shellacked tables with faded magazine cut-outs of coffee cups, and an overstuffed faux leather couch that has seen decades of butts. They haven’t touched the place much since opening in 2004, at least not in the 8 years I’ve been coming here. Nevertheless it’s one of my favorite places to write.

Javavino is a timestamp of nostalgia for me. It was 2015 and I was 26. Los Angeles had kicked my ass and I was back home living with my mom. The coaching job I had lined up turned out to be something of a nightmare. The restaurant I worked at in Decatur ran me completely ragged with excessively late hours and long shifts. By October I was ready to be completely done with acting and had started the grueling process of getting my real estate license. Thankfully I didn’t have a crystal ball to see that that too would eventually crumble and discard itself onto my ever-growing pile of failures.

“Huh,” I muttered as I stared at the mobile storage unit. It was a cool fall day with November right around the corner. The unit’s contents weren’t as robust as I remembered from 10 months earlier when I packed them up in L.A. At the time the metaphor was pretty on-the-nose: packing up both dreams and belongings. The only thing missing was a literal midnight train to Georgia. As I took a quick scan of the unit, it looked down right pathetic. A bed, a dresser, some lamps, and a few boxes. It hardly warranted the thousands of dollars I’d spent in order to ship it. And it certainly seemed silly to have stored it for 10 months while I lived at my Mom’s house.

“Let’s start with the bed,” my brother-in-law said.

Twenty minutes later the storage unit was empty and all my worldly possessions sat in disarray on the floor of a 500-square-foot apartment. This would be my first time living alone. I’d paid the deposit and signed the lease with the help of no one else, no cosigner. It felt like one of the more adult things I’d ever done. As my brother-in-law drove away I felt an overwhelming sense of possibility. This was about to be a new chapter.

And it was a new chapter. I was getting a fresh start. Even though I was in a city I knew with a network of friends and my family nearby (minus one sister), I couldn’t help but feel like something was beginning rather than simply continuing. My time in California had left me changed. I was different in ways I had yet to discover. A different Patrick was now living in Atlanta than the previous Patrick. With L.A. behind me, I could see a vast expanse of opportunity ahead. Of newness. Of something better. At least that was the hope.

That’s what that 500-square-foot apartment in Candler Park came to represent. It was a second-floor walk up with shoddy heat, an outdated 1950’s bathroom, and a barely functional A/C window unit. Some of the paint on the walls was chipping and a few of the windows refused to open. And it was a sanctuary. It was a space of joy. It was mine. As time went on even the relics leftover from my former life - the bed frame I got from an artist couple in Glendale, the desk I assembled from the Target in Burbank, the framed quotes my L.A. roommate Sofia gifted me - took on new meaning. They morphed. They didn’t represent a place. They represented me. Turns out that I was the constant in my own life.

It’s funny how words stick with you. When I was 18 and soon to be moving to Chicago, I confided to my high school English teacher my level of terror. What do I do when I get there? How do I start a life in a new place? She calmly put a hand on my shoulder and said, “just find the closest grocery store. Everything else will fall into place after that.”

That proved to be mostly true. I’ve kept the advice over the years but added a revision. Start with grocery…then find coffee. Within days of settling into my new Candler Park life, I found Javavino. I thought it was incredibly eclectic and the perfect setting for a sorta-actor-waiter-real-estate-agent to claim as his spot. For the next two years, I went to Javavino multiple times a week. I tried everything on the menu several times over, though I personally fell hard for the breakfast burrito. On any day one could find me with my laptop or notebook scribbling away in the corner or out on the patio. It was my place.

That coffeeshop eventually became the birthplace of Pat Does Words. In the summer of 2017, I launched a blog version of PDW and posted all manner of long-winded essay there (some might say my work is still long-winded). Over time the title of “writer” was added to my multi-hyphenate litany of jobs. In fact it became pretty prominent, as “real estate agent” and “Segway tour guide” and “dog walker” were bumped off the list. Nowadays as I reflect back, it’s hard to separate the coffeeshop from the writer who found his voice there.

After two dreamy years, rent hikes ran me out of Candler Park, out of that 500-square-foot sanctuary, and back into the arms of roommates and rent I could afford. Since then I’ve moved 4 times. I ended up in downtown, then Kirkwood, then Ormewood Park, and now Benteen Park.

I’ve lived a lot of life in that time too. I ate chocolate in Switzerland and had paella in Spain. I drank wine in Paso Robles, saw shows on Broadway, and smoked cigars in Miami. I watched friends get married and have babies. I’ve gone on hundreds of auditions and even booked a few jobs. I abandoned real estate and dozens of other lofty tangents. I wrote and published a book then wrote and produced a television pilot. I worked out a bunch, laughed a million or so times, and got a dog.

As I write these words in the coffeeshop that’s forever frozen in my memory, I can’t help but think that life is a little like Javavino. It’s a hodge podge of everything. There’s no cohesive aesthetic. No consistent through-line. No one unifying theme. And maybe, like the coffeeshop itself, that’s part of the appeal. Rather than search for these things and wrap a tightly-wound narrative around arbitrary points on a timeline, labeling some ‘failures’ and other ‘successes,’ what if we…didn’t? What if, instead, we just showed up? What if we just ordered a breakfast burrito, sipped some coffee, and tried to make something beautiful in the middle of a place that doesn’t really make sense but feels good anyway? If nothing else, doing that consistently might  provide some memories for the future - sweet, bitter, beautiful memories.

And all those in between.