Walking into Nau’s Drugstore at the corner of 12th Street and West Lynn is like wandering off of the street into the 1950’s. There are the shelves of candy, the old school pharmacy feel. To walk to the back of the store is to be transported to a time before McDonald’s, when soda fountains were king. The Nau’s soda fountain serves up swoonfully delicious burgers (patrons can order large or small), grilled cheese, and ice cream sodas in tall glasses.
Recently I went to Nau’s with Denis Johnson, 2007 National Book Award Winner (Tree of Smoke), and his wife Cindy, when they were in town for the FLAIR Conference at the University of Texas. Cindy and Denis had matching burgers and ice cream sodas, which somehow made them look as in love as they are. We talked about the panel on “The Future of Reading” Denis was going to be on the next day with novelists Amy Tan, Tim O’Brien and playwright Lee Blessing.
“Reading has no future,” Denis said, grinning as he drank his chocolate shake through a straw.
Afterward lunch, we headed, fat and happy, to the Blanton Museum for some art.
Denis was taken with an installation exhibit by the Argentine artist Marcelo Pombo called Ornaments in the Landscape, and the Museum as Hotel Room. The exhibit took up an entire room of the museum, which had been hung with Pombo’s canvases, but also furnished and decorated with ornaments and fake plants, to look like a hotel lobby. The paint ran down the glossy acrylic canvases like psychadelic melted candy.
The exhibit didn’t do it for Cindy or me, but Denis kept saying, “I like this guy’s work. I like being in this room…It’s like being inside the mind of a madman.”
I just finished reading Denis’s new noir novel Nobody Move. The slim volume blew me away with its succinct grit, hilarious dialogue and sheer audacity. Not to give anything away, but in one scene a beautiful woman beats a wheelchair bound man in the face with his own brimming colostomy bag. “I like reading this novel,” I kept thinking. “It’s like being inside the mind of a madman.”
