Third Places Close at Eight

When things in Tunis got to be too much, I walked to a café. There were several I rotated through (Liberté and Ben’s downtown, the Agora and Zephyr out in La Marsa, Café Coste in Carthage), and the point of them was that they had no point. You bought a coffee and you stayed as long as you liked. Old men played cards for hours. The air was had the scent of espresso and cigarette smoke and sounds of a chicha bubbling and the slap of dominoes coming down hard on the table. Nobody was working. Nobody was being productive. That was the function: the function was that there was no function.

I came home and reached for the same thing and found its imitation. The American café has the furniture of a third place (the couches, the wifi, the chalkboard menu) and almost none of its use. People come to a Starbucks to work, or to study, or to take a meeting, and the working changes the air: heads down, laptops up, everyone privately producing in public. There is a name for the third place, the spot that is neither home nor work where a community actually condenses, and the people who study it tend to note that this country keeps running out of them. The reason is in the furniture’s fine print. A third place has to tolerate unproductive presence (people simply being there, on no errand, generating little to no value), and that is the one thing we are structurally unable to leave alone. The café here is a place to be productive in. The Arab café was a place to be.

I was writing exactly this, in a Starbucks, working out the difference between a place that is for something and a place that is for nothing, when—

—8:03 p.m. They were closing. I packed up mid-sentence and finished the thought in my car.

They close at eight, and in closing they made my argument more cleanly than I was making it. A place that exists to sell you coffee shuts the moment the selling is done; a place that exists so that people have somewhere to be has flexible closing times, because being does not keep business hours. The eviction was honest. It told me exactly what the room was for.

So now I do what I suspect a lot of people here do with whatever they cannot find a room for. I drive out across the prairie, find a parking lot nobody is using for anything, and sit in the car and write, carrying my third place around with me because the built ones close: parking it wherever the lot is empty and no one will ask me to buy something or move along. It is a poor substitute, a third place of one. But it stays open, and it is the only one I have found out here that does.