Monday, May 17, 2010
I drank my first cups of coffee at the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house on Bird Street in Joplin. Grandma brewed freeze-dried Sanka or whatever other decaffeinated, pre-Starbucks aberrations they drank back then — before flavor, before nuance, before standards — in a dinged vintage aluminum percolator in which the electricity heated the water down below so that it bubbled up through the perforated basket of grounds and signified its transformation into coffee by turning the hollow glass knob at the top of the pot brown in the center with the occasional pop, bubble or spatter.Grandma brewed it in a percolator
I wouldn’t love the taste of it until much later
I just wanted to be like Poppy
Sitting at the breakfast table
Drinking our coffee
— a verse I wrote at Slimbolala’s behest
to his readers to sing their praises of coffee
We drank from Bakelite plastic cups of a pale brown not far off from that perfect shade one creates in one’s coffee by adding just the right amount of milk or creamer or half-and-half (the latter being my grandmother’s ubiquitous creamer of choice).
In those days, I added whatever I could — milk and sugar — to make the taste more palatable. It didn’t matter so much then that I was weakening it — I was only 5 or 6, just dipping my toes in the warm, dark waters of that mysterious morning potion. The drinking was the thing: Poppy was a god to me back then, and if he was drinking coffee, then so too was I.
We would sit with our breakfast — which always included toast with apple butter or the little six-packs of powdered Hostess Donettes that my grandmother always seemed to have on hand — and perhaps pore over the pages of that morning’s Joplin Globe before Poppy left for the furniture store, and I would look forward to the day when I could drink my morning coffee without wincing at the taste, just as Poppy made the act of drinking coffee seem as effortless and elemental as breathing.
In the interim I developed an affinity for Pearson Coffee Nips1, a coffee-flavored hard candy of which Grandma also maintained a steady supply. The idea being that I was priming myself for the inevitable: If coffee was to become my fix of choice, then Coffee Nips would be my gateway drug.
Probably I was enrolled at KU before I actually drank coffee again in earnest. The event that stands out in my mind is a study session for midterms or finals comprising me, my best friend, Andre, and some indeterminate, attractive girl from our residence hall whom we (read: Andre) had miraculously finessed into our orbit for the evening. We converged on the Perkins Restaurant on 23rd Street in Lawrence, knowing full well that if we hoped to study diligently into the night, we would require Perkins’ trademarked Bottomless Pot of Coffee to take us there.
I don’t think we actually got there. While Perkins may have been open 24 hours back then, we very likely gave up the ghost around midnight or else were shamed into leaving by the implication that we were loitering at a table at which some hardscrabble waitress could actually be serving paying customers.
In any event, the die had been cast. Coffee and I were now circling each other, onetime adversaries making diplomatic inroads — first détente, then peace, then a lasting partnership.
The road at times was rocky. I recall a night late in my college career when I pulled an all-nighter at my parents’ house to write a paper, probably for Prof. Carothers’ 20th Century American Novel class. I brewed a pot of coffee on whatever drip coffeemaker my parents owned at the time2 and set to work.
I had knocked off the entire pot and was getting a lot of work done, when at about 4 a.m. or so I was laid low by searing abdominal pain. Not much more got accomplished after that, and my father likely found me curled up in the fetal position when he left for work.
Lesson learned: Eat something.
Then came the ascendancy of the coffeehouse, and destiny began to shape itself in my imagination. I was out of college by this time, but I was spending a lot of free time with friends in Lawrence, where we were drawn in by the tractor beam of La Prima Tazza near Sixth and Mass.
The baristas there introduced me to “coffee drinks” — the notion that you could do something more creative and flavorful with coffee than just brew it and pour it in a cup. Espresso was now part of my vocabulary, and La Prima Tazza did things with it and to it that made one completely unaware of how much caffeine was actually pinballing between one’s neural receptors. (They served, for example, a red velvet latté that tasted more or less like the cake that was its namesake and was a great conversational aid. If I had two in one sitting, all my ideas poured out of me at once in a Scorsesean staccato.)
I also can’t recall a time I visited La Prima Tazza when they didn’t play Coltrane over the sound system — a perhaps minor but serendipitous detail that nonetheless awakened my sense of the coffeehouse as an extension of one’s personality, a place that was comfortable because it felt like you had left some of your stuff lying around.
Over time, though, I would become less enamored of the cloying sweetness of those liquid confections and flavored coffees in general. (Interesting to note: This was also about the time I threw in the towel on drinking cleverly named, curiously concocted shots in bars — your Kamikazes, your Sex on the Beaches, your Mind Erasers, etc. — and got down to the heart of the matter: tequila, vodka, whiskey.) Another defining moment was right around the corner.
November 1993: Tagging along with my friend Todd on a business trip to Los Angeles, I experienced Starbucks for the first time. The Seattle-based chain hadn’t yet unveiled its blueprint for world domination, but to an evolving coffee drinker, it was like Lourdes.
We stayed at the Beverly Plaza Hotel at Third and Orlando, mere blocks from the Starbucks at the Beverly Connection, one of a select few Starbucks locations at which I would spend many long hours behind the cup after I moved to L.A. four years later. Our morning ritual on that trip, however, was to stop at the location on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, where we’d grab coffee and a scone and observe that morning’s parade of the beautiful, buff and Botoxed from a sunny sidewalk table before embarking upon our day. There the latté would emerge as my drink of choice.
Over time, I have refined my preference:
- I favor the 16 oz. (or grande) size, despite the allure of the insurgent 20 oz. (venti) cup, because I stand a better chance of finishing a latté before it becomes completely tepid.
- For that reason, I also prefer lidded to-go cups3 over mugs, regardless of whether I’m staying or going, because I can take my time and enjoy a long, luxurious latté instead of slamming the whole pint like a frat boy while it’s still warm.
- I added a third shot of espresso because — let’s face it — two shots is a kiss on the cheek, but three shots is like Grace Kelly waking up James Stewart in Rear Window.
- Two packets of Sugar in the Raw. I like to imagine that some of it hangs in the foam at the top, like a built-in time-release mechanism for sweetening the drink.
- Finally, I have an inexplicable preference for skim milk. I mean, who the hell am I kidding, right? I’d probably add bacon bits to my latté if they kept them at the stir station next to the sugar packets. Yet here is where I’ve decided to make a concession to healthy consumption. I mean, really.
After I moved to Los Angeles in August 1997, coffee became more than a beverage to me. In those depressing early days when I was mostly alone in the world and hating every minute of my short-lived tenure as The Worst Personal Assistant Ever in Burbank, coffee became the most important 20 minutes of my day.
I would wake, shower, dress, and make the harrowing, breakneck daily commute up the 101 and over the Cahuenga Pass — without any caffeine whatsoever in my bloodstream. I could park my car and have enough time to cross Riverside to the Toluca Lake Starbucks, order my morning fix, and sit for a few minutes, to sip, collect my thoughts, and come down from the morning commute before walking back into the frying pan of a job I hated.
You read that correctly: I required coffee to curb my adrenaline.
But it wasn’t about the caffeine at all. It was about the ritual. There was something comforting, soothing, almost Zen-like in the sequence — order, wait, receive, uncap, shake, rip, pour, stir, recap, sit, sip, think — that made the rest of the morning that followed seem somehow more doable, like the final preparations before being fired out of a cannon. And to this day, those individual steps are as essential to my coffeehouse experience as the coffee itself, a modicum of reliable order amidst whatever chaos the day might entail.
On days when I wasn’t at work, coffeehouses gave me a way to be out in the world. In addition to the aforementioned Beverly Connection, I became a frequent flyer at the Starbucks at Melrose and Stanley, which boasted a big, somewhat shaded patio area from which perspective I observed the great unwashed, the skate punks, the unmedicated state-hospital castoffs, the insufferable hipsters, the badly shod women and other fashion victims and fame-whores along that corridor of dubious taste. (I even saw Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco there once early in my residency.)
That patio was also where I first got serious about my fiction writing. (I had long been dedicated to keeping a journal, so much so that I was often “mistaken” for a writer long before I ever truly considered myself one.) In the days before I purchased my first laptop computer, my M.O. was to write out notes and dialogue longhand in whatever spiral notebook I happened to be carrying, then return to my apartment and transcribe everything on my desktop computer. I discovered that I was more productive when untethered from the temptations and distractions of my apartment (TV, Internet, bookshelf, bed), and the coffeehouse environment is where I would enjoy my greatest productivity.
In time I discovered the Bourgeois Pig on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, a milestone not unlike Columbus discovering the new world. It became first my refuge, then later my neighborhood haunt. In the beginning I was more or less anonymous and generally left alone to my work. But spend enough time someplace and before long you become a regular, a patron, a piece of furniture; people strike up conversations, baristas learn more than just your usual, and before you know it, it’s the proverbial place where everybody knows your name.
It’s OK, though, because I met some good people there — particularly those I’ve dubbed the Counter Intelligentsia, as that’s where we congregated — people I’ve kept in touch with across the miles. I also met some real assholes there, execrable people I’m happy to be rid of, but they are thankfully outnumbered by the good. (Confession: I’d suffer them all over again if I could recapture the Pig’s particular lightning in a bottle.) In the meantime, those people — good and bad alike — respected my space issues just enough for me to become an accomplished, if not produced or paid, screenwriter. Of the three screenplays (and their various drafts) that I wrote while an Angeleno, I am confident that at least 80 percent of those pages were written under the influence of precious, life-affirming caffeine served to me by the Pig’s cadre of excellent baristas, many of whom I count among my good friends, none of whom I count among the assholes.
The Pig stays open until 2 a.m., which contributed to my productivity and accounted for the fact that I rarely fell asleep before 3:30 a.m. The words poured from my fingertips in a torrent on those nights, and while I enjoyed certain extravagances during those years, it’s likely that more of my disposable income ended up in the Pig’s till than at any other establishment in Los Angeles. Which is all for the best — after all, I wasn’t just getting a fix; I was renting office space from them.
A less expensive, more conducive work environment I will never find.
After I departed Los Angeles, it became harder for me to carve out that time to write, as there is no place in Kansas City analogous to the Bourgeois Pig. That and a litany of other disruptions of my routine do not add up to an acceptable excuse for anyone seriously calling oneself a writer, but there you have it.
Now I and my beloved live in Sacramento with a long-underutilized Capresso CoffeeTec — a serious coffeemaker for serious coffee drinkers, amigos — and a new neighborhood haunt that closes at 11 p.m. I don’t know what course of action will present itself, what revelations await, or whether I’ll ever again be as prolific as I once was (notwithstanding this post), but I know who’ll be co-writing this next chapter with me, and I know that coffee — sweet, dark, exotic, essential, illuminating, invigorating — will provide the ignition, fire the pistons and drive the engine of my creativity in whatever form it takes.
1 The Pearson brand name was assigned to the dustbin of history by Nestlé in 2000. To the conquerer belong the spoils.
2 My parents don’t actually drink coffee. I don’t know my father’s exact opinion of it, but my mother is adamant that she doesn’t like the taste of coffee, nor can she stand the smell — she often won’t even enter a coffeehouse with me to wait while I order a latté. I have always found this remarkable (not so much the drinking but the smelling), given that she grew up in the aforementioned kitchen where the seeds of my love of coffee were first sown. In any event, ever the gracious hosts, my parents have always kept a decent drip coffeemaker on hand “for company” and left it to said company to make the coffee themselves, the process being seemingly as alien to my parents as though they were keeping a RAND supercomputer in the spare bedroom on the off chance some analysts from the State Department should drop by for dinner.
3 I know it’s more environmentally conscious to choose the mug over the cup if you’re staying at the coffeehouse, but the lid really does retain a lot of a drink’s heat. Because I’m a volume drinker, I have always reused my cup and lid instead of getting a new cup with every drink; in this way I have always tried to reduce what I refer to as “my caffeine footprint.”
Recently, however, the proprietress of my erstwhile haunt Black Dog Coffeehouse shamed me into purchasing a Black Dog tumbler and bringing it back to receive an additional 25 cents off every latté I drank if only I would stop throwing coffee cups and lids into landfills. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse and a logic I couldn’t deny, and I still carry my Black Dog tumbler with me, representin’ Lenexa even in the far-flung coffeehouses of Sacramento.
4 Onetime barista, now my good friend, Daniel Joseph may in fact hold the record: three visits. He earned Rookie of the Year status for that; his bust today stands alongside those of his colleagues in the Cooperstown of caffeine.
