Same Room and a Whole New Cast

To my right sat a terribly handsome Middle Eastern man wrapped in honey-toned fur and cashmere. His sunglasses were enormous (think Cary Grant in his later years) and turquoise rings covered his manicured fingers. To my left was a table of middle-aged women with erect spines, white teeth, and Wagner Porter-inspired shirts from some boutique in Austin.

Then the door swung open and a pair of real cowboys walked in with wild rags knotted around their necks. There I stood in The Sentinel—part coffee shop, part newspaper office—trying to figure out where in the hell I was.

My first thought was that everyone here had made a conscious decision to be in West Texas. No one accidentally ends up in Marfa. The playwright in me immediately started writing a script.

Was the man in cashmere an oil heir? Probably. Did those women fly in on a G5 from Teterboro? They must have. And those cowboys surely worked a thirty-thousand-acre ranch owned by some Robert Evans–wannabe movie producer from Los Angeles.

Not that I’m above it. They were probably wondering what this guy in tan Wranglers was doing there.

“He’s probably a tech guy from the Bay.”

I sipped my coffee, ran my fingers across a table stacked with architecture books, Japanese pencils, and raw silk bandanas, and stepped out onto San Antonio Street.

My first stop was vintage shop June TeeZe. Inside it looked like an old service station with a Robert Crumb mural painted across the side. I bought a hat. On the way out I spotted a sticker that said it all: “Marfa—If You Can Make It Here, You’re Probably a Trust Fund Baby.”

Down the street sits The Hotel Paisano, where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson bunked while filming Giant. A few miles outside town, fifteen-foot cutouts of the stars rise out of the desert like a Technicolor billboard.

And if you’re already out there, you might as well drive another thirty miles to the infamous Prada store. On account of vandals, it now stocks only right-footed shoes, purses with no bottoms, and no entrance, because the whole thing is an art installation.

Getting there means a long straight road of dodging tumbleweeds (I’d never seen one before) and when you finally arrive, the silence is absolute. A dust-covered Prada storefront in the middle of nothing, which is exactly the point.

After a double-scoop Butterfinger Blizzard from Dairy Queen—and yes, there is a Dairy Queen—I wandered into Ballroom Marfa, a contemporary art space with rotating exhibitions. The kid working the till had a gentle smile and a warm aura. He studied art at Texas Tech and came to Marfa by way of Austin. When asked why he chose West Texas, I got that furrowed brow look, as in, “Are you serious?” I replied with a laugh and shrugged shoulders, “Well how am I supposed to know?”

I only had ten minutes before the gallery closed, so I darted through it, dodging a full-size Cadillac piñata, Rococo figures in absurdly elongated boots, and a pink station wagon piped in acrylic frosting. I bought a poetry book on the way out, wishing I had more time.

Turns out I passed through Marfa the way drifters pass through most places: catching the atmosphere while missing the architecture underneath it.

What I didn’t see was the work of Donald Judd, who abandoned SoHo in the 70s to set up shop in Marfa, eventually acquiring what seems like half the buildings in town and tens of thousands of acres of surrounding desert.

For a town of two thousand, it’s too large for a single pass. Especially when you realize the old army barracks house a hundred aluminum boxes that Judd made, each one catching the desert light differently.

I left the following morning for Big Bend, but not before stopping by The Sentinel for a coffee—same room, whole new cast.