One Night at Sahara Lounge

WHEN I SAW the man with the Carl Jung messenger bag walk through the door, I knew my night was going to change.

I was knocking out some writing at Medici on Springdale, late in the afternoon on a Saturday. In typical writerly fashion, I was only capable of about an hour of work before I started looking for an escape route. But as I reached for my backpack, convincing myself that Saturday afternoons were simply antithetical to prolonged writing, something made me hesitate. Something that I’ve come to learn is an occasional divine tremor in the atmosphere of Austin. Something that signals greater forces are at work.

That’s when Dan walked in.

“You’re right on time,” I said, grinning as I walked over to hug the man with the Carl Jung messenger bag. Dan Cohen is a fellow writer and musician in Austin who to me is equal parts sage, mentor, and friend. He’s the kind of multifaceted, creative personality that made me fall in love with this city: in addition to being an amazing singer-songwriter and saxophone player, he sells used and rare books, writes fantasy novels, and organizes various shows and open mics around town. He once had a bit where he’d play under a new stage name every week (my favorite: Silly Joel). He’s prone to rattling off bits of wisdom from the Tao Te Ching and analyzing your astrological sign.

Dan and I, both being writers, found strength in numbers and did some work together for another half hour. Then, over the lid of my laptop, I saw his eyes glimmering.

“What’ve you got going on tonight?”

There was an undeniable expectant energy in his voice and in his eyes. He had something good. But the introvert in me hesitated. Although I’m a Sagittarius and thus I should, by Dan’s reckoning, always be up for adventure, I rarely agree to sudden, day-of plans to hang out. Maybe the loss of my freedom (i.e., the preexisting plans I had to stay at home and cook dinner that night) was concerning me. But, Dan was also not someone I just ran into all the time, especially outside of music circles. It was rare for him to be in that part of town, and I had never seen him at that Medici before. So, something special was seemingly bubbling up.

“Not sure. What’s up?”

“Sahara Lounge. Tonight. You in?”

He mentioned the place as if I should know it, and I did, but not the details. It was just some vague name I’d heard floating around in the ether of Austin.

He held up his phone to me: that night, Sahara Lounge was featuring live Afro Jazz music along with a buffet of African food. I’d never heard any kind of Afro Jazz music, didn’t have any experience with African food, and had never set foot in Sahara Lounge. My introverted side had every reason to say no. But the serendipity of Dan showing up here to present this experience to me made it clear I simply couldn’t pass on it. And if nothing else, this would be a solid excuse to avoid the writing I didn’t want to do.

“I’m in.”

* * *

As I pulled into the parking lot of Sahara Lounge, I got the distinct sense that it was a hair’s breadth away from being bulldozed to make room for a condo or fashionable new coffee house and bar. The building had just enough life to not seem condemned, and its faded, flimsy beige exterior looked as if it hadn’t changed in at least 20 years. Dan and I were the only ones in the parking lot, and contrasted with the clean, modern, gentrified homes I’d passed nearby, Sahara Lounge seemed critically endangered.

We walked in to the unmistakable signs of a dive bar. To our left were two pool tables with rectangular Miller and Bud Light shades hanging over them. Blue, green, and red string lights crisscrossed the low ceilings throughout the interior and gave it a vaguely Christmas feeling. The wall behind us was a collage of various framed pictures and old posters for shows, along with a shelf of books, a salt lamp, a map of Africa, and another lamp with a crooked shade casting a warm glow.

At the bar, an old-timer with shaggy, surfer-y gray hair, deeply tanned skin, and a faded purple shirt whose original graphic was hopelessly lost turned to face us.

“Nice hat,” he said, pointing to the Boston Red Sox cap I was wearing. “You from Boston?”

“Thanks man—not from there, but I’m a Red Sox fan, for sure.”

“I’m from Boston.” He looked around, then gazed back at me with a sly look, the sort of look that barflies have when searching for new friends—ones that might want to join in their mischief. The fact that he vaguely resembled Ben Mendelsohn only accentuated the slyness.

Dan and I were friendly with him but also gave him a bit of space. Those grizzled regulars can swallow you up in aimless conversation if you let them, and my introverted self was wary of entanglements. I wasn’t all in on Sahara Lounge just yet. We paid our cover with the bartender and moved out to the back patio.

Sahara Lounge’s patio was a bit grungy and, like the rest of Sahara Lounge, seemed as if it hadn’t changed in many years. Hanging on the back of the building was an assortment of license plates, a rusty metal cutout of a cowboy and another of a gecko, an old wagon, and various plaques for Lone Star Beer or Dos Equis, alongside posters for local shows. Rows of picnic tables stretched all the way to the back, and beside them, smaller tables with little red and yellow folding chairs, faded from the sun, added an oddly youthful quality, as if it were a recess area, but for alcoholics.

“Sahara Lounge, buddy—this is it,” Dan said. We sat on one of the picnic tables, the two lone patrons, while an employee wearing a reflective vest who looked like he might also repair rides at the state fair turned on the faucet for a hose and started spraying something down around the corner.

Dan tucked into some rice and beans from the buffet. But I was feeling twitchy, anxious—the gamble of socializing didn’t look like it would pay off. Was this really it? I should have stayed at home. I imagined me and Dan being the only ones there the whole night, plus a few other bawdy regulars, shouting over to us and forcing us to join their group. We’d be burdened with hanging out with them all night. Arms around us, drunken breath wafting over us as they laughed and hollered. No crowd to disappear into. Just loud small talk with strangers. It was an introvert’s worst nightmare. If this was all there was to Sahara Lounge, just a skeleton of a once-happening joint, then that bulldozer should just come along and get rid of it for good.

But I remembered that this was no ordinary night—at least, I had to trust that was true. And Dan was here. I had to hang on.

When Dan finished his rice and beans and the sun inevitably became too much, we went back inside. I hit the bathroom, gave my reflection a speech about not making up an excuse to leave, and came back to find Dan sitting in a row of chairs, stage left.

On that stage, the regular we’d met just twenty minutes ago at the bar was blowing into the mouthpiece of his saxophone.

My mouth dropped open. “What?”

Dan, mouth equally agape, shrugged.

“Never in a thousand years would I have guessed.”

The barfly-turned-saxophonist let loose a few supple, sultry notes from the instrument.

We grinned at each other. “Dude, how?”

“I dunno, man,” Dan said. “First lesson for us tonight—don’t be so judgmental.”

After a few more minutes of us watching the warmup, at a loss for what else to expect, Dan nodded toward the back corner of the room, where several pots of food were set up. “You sure you’re not gonna have some of the buffet?”

Again, I hesitated, partly from shock at feeling hoodwinked by the saxophonist and partly from old habits. When I was younger, I was an incredibly picky eater. Anything that wasn’t pizza or a cheeseburger was cause for alarm. Over the years, I’d made incredible strides to break out of that, but sometimes I still avoided new foods, especially if I had easy access to other things I knew I liked (i.e., my dinner waiting at home). But with the saxophone player already defying one set of expectations, I figured it was worth a try.

The buffet looked surprisingly familiar: a giant crock pot of rice and another of deliciously spicy-smelling meatballs in a stew with vegetables. Was this really African food? I had the vague sense I might be taking the easy way out—meatballs, especially, weren’t what I expected. I didn’t know if this was the proper entry point for African cuisine. But I loaded up.

Dan and I switched seats to get a better view of the stage as more of the band members set up, and I tore into my rice and meatball stew, which was hearty and full of flavor. Maybe it was just because I was so prepared for something I wouldn’t like, simply because it was outside my normal frame of reference, that its familiarity was extra comforting.

The makeup of the band, however, was both familiar and exotic. A saxophonist and drummer were to be expected of jazz, but two men with what looked to be traditional African instruments presented something new. One of them, wearing a brown dashiki, khaki slacks, and sandals, had seated before him a giant gourd with a neck and strings—what Dan and I learned through some Googling was a kora. He plucked the strings mostly with his thumbs, his fingers gripping two handles a few inches apart as though he was holding a video game controller. It had a beautifully clear, harmonic, yet somewhat twangy sound, like a harp and sitar combined. Beside the kora player, another man in a white dashiki set up an instrument that looked xylophone-esque, but more natural, with wooden supports and straps and gourds beneath that appeared to resonate the sound. This was a balafon.

A few people walked in as Dan and I watched the band start warming up. The balafon player tinkled out a bright pattern of notes, over and over, while the drummer—a young white dude with a bucket hat and beard who looked like he might’ve shown up for the wrong gig but stayed anyway—rode a simple pattern on the cymbal and snare. The kora floated over top, and when the saxophone came in, rich and deep and buoyant, all the sounds blended perfectly. After a few minutes, it was almost hypnotic, lulling us into some other state of being.

Before I came to Texas, I spent all 27 years of my life in North Carolina, and I never encountered anything remotely resembling West Africa while I was there. And I certainly never expected to find it in Texas. I was mostly ignorant of everything I was seeing, and that amplified a sense of childlike discovery—I felt light and playful. I grinned to myself and gripped a hand on Dan’s shoulder.

* * *

Crack. The cue ball smashed into the solids and stripes. Dan and I were one team, his sister and her boyfriend our opponents. We circled the table, the music and the energy of the room building. There was a line out the door. Every few minutes, Dan would tap my shoulder or catch my eye and gesture incredulously at how busy it was. Tables filled up. Drinks flowed. At the buffet line, two old black men who looked like they’d lived in Austin since the 50s were talking, straining to hear each other, while behind them stood the Austin transplants. Surprisingly, most of the people filtering in were young, mostly white millennials who were ostensibly the greatest threat to an old Austin relic like Sahara Lounge. Weren’t they supposed to be at some trendier, newer, more expensive place? Or, shouldn’t they have gentrified this place by now? This wasn’t their territory. It was a strange juxtaposition—antelopes and lions crowding around the same watering hole.

“Living the life of love, get together and have some fun,” the singer called out. The song had only been going on for a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours—in a good way. I didn’t want it to stop. At the pool table, we were acting goofy, hilariously bad and out of practice but still having fun. Between various turns, we glared at each other in mock threat and crossed the cues like swords in a duel. I pantomimed rubbing a chalk block on Dan’s bald head and accidentally got too close, leaving a streak of green behind.

“Living the life of love, some people can’t smile no more.” Another game of pool was happening at the table beside us, and a few feet to my right, an older couple danced.

Dan whirled his pool stick around in a vaguely vaudevillian way. “This is awesome, man. So glad we came here.” He bounced on the balls of his feet. And so did I. The music was lifting my spirits, making me feel almost weightless.

“Live it, live it, live it, live it, my brother…you got to live it!”

There was some social message going on in the song, and it wasn’t entirely audible over the noise of all the people talking around us, but maybe physically I was absorbing the spirit of it. Even I—the introvert—started dancing a bit. Not good dancing by any means. And not prolonged either. Just brief flashes of movement. A jerk of a foot, a rotation of arms and shoulders. It was awkward honky dancing: uncoordinated, unplanned, but inspired.

The saxophone player launched into a solo as the chatter in the room swirled around us like a steady current of air. A woman came by and spoke with Dan, and I later learned she was the owner, Eileen Bristol. She was an ambassador of old Austin, looking as funky as you’d expect a white lady hosting Afro Jazz music to look: tall, with a shock of frizzy white hair, wearing a vibrantly patterned long-sleeve shirt and matching pants.

While they talked, I looked around again, trying to reconcile what I was seeing. The bar regular unmasking himself as the saxophonist, the condemned exterior yet lively energy inside, the impossibility of so many of the patrons being young Austin newcomers. Old Austin and new Austin were somehow coexisting here. War between the two—a constant struggle for old Austin’s preservation in the face of new Austin’s growth—was not a given.

After another hour or so, a different band set up, seven or eight members total (including two drummers) and the floor in front of the stage was packed with people dancing as the African rhythm stirred them into a groove. I went to the bathroom again and when I came back, I’d lost everyone. Dan texted me that he’d had to step outside and was now back in line, and I spotted Dan’s sister and her boyfriend on the dance floor, smiles flashing as their bodies twirled around. I watched them for a minute and marveled at the diversity of the crowd. People old enough to have gone through multiple zeitgeists in Austin were bumping and moving along with people who only knew Austin for the last few years, perhaps even less. No one was taking sides. There was just music, and food, and people—all together.

With everyone preoccupied, it seemed like my time to go. Despite the West African experiences of the night, my way of saying goodbye was still firmly rooted in Ireland. Stepping out the back door, I saw that the sad patio that had threatened to send me away before was cozier, more inviting now, lit up with string lights. Young people were eating, talking over drinks—on dates or hanging out with friends. Walking past them towards the parking lot, I almost didn’t recognize it: it was as full as the parking lot for a concert.

I got into my car, pulled up the first band of the night on Spotify, and found that one enchanting song. As “Living the Life and Love” by Zoumountchi flowed out of my speakers and I drove away, the neon sign for Sahara Lounge shined in my rearview mirror, brighter than anything else in the neighborhood.