Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (3 page)

LET’S HAVE ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE!

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

—
T.S. Eliot

I don’t remember my first cup of coffee. That may not be remarkable on the surface of it, but somehow, it seems striking that that particular memory escapes me. I remember my first drink (back porch, Teen Canteen, Quanah, Texas, 1963—a sip from a half-pint of Thunderbird wine, shared by five guys, one of whom was immediately sick and never drank again). I remember my first “real” steak (Fort Worth, Farmer’s Daughter, 1966—until then, I thought all steak was served beaten, battered, and fried); my first tailor-made cigarette (back seat, Billy Hugh Price’s 1964 GTO—white vinyl, 8-track cassette, 428 cubic inches, bored and stroked, four-barrel carb and twin glass packs, Hurst Shifter and a posi-track rear end—“There’s nothing like a Lark,” I said). I also remember my first sexual encounter (none of your business—let’s not get carried away). But I don’t remember my first cup of coffee. It seems that I’ve always drunk coffee.

Coffee is my best friend, my early morning companion, my late night sentry. Some days, I drink it constantly, and I’ve started no day without it for as long as I can remember. It has staid me on birth nights, on death watches; it has been my sole companion in lonely bus terminals, crowded train stations, and distant airports. It has seen me safely down ribbons of slick, winding highway when sleep nagged my eyes from the road. I have drunk it from china, porcelain, and tin, glass, plastic, Styrofoam and stainless steel. I’ve had it perked, brewed, dripped, and boiled. I’ve sat at a table in New Orleans and sipped bitter chickory while loutishly dressed fools paraded in front of St. Louis Cathedral. I’ve shouldered with it beside a diner’s counter in New York’s Time Square on a frigid New Year’s morning when traffic snarled and crowds pressed against each other like Eliot’s dead undone. I’ve sipped it with truckers along interstates in greasy cafes where the food was always good, and I’ve stood with stamping feet at concession stands and blown a cooling breath over its steamy ebony while my children played their games beneath a blue norther’s sky. It’s skated the black-iced glaze of Philadelphia with me, taught me the wonders of Canada’s Rockies, and helped me hold at bay the pounding memory of last night’s fiesta in the desert mountains of Mexico. I’ve savored its inky richness while contemplating a placid lake, and nervously slurped it while hurricane clouds boiled overhead. I’ve drunk it while sailing and hiking, while fishing and hunting, while studying theatre notices in London and while rocking across the storm-tossed Irish Sea. I’ve sipped it in the fanciest of hotels and the crudest of campsites.

I’ve paid as much as five dollars for a cup in a big city restaurant, and as little as a nickel in a roadside diner. I’ve accepted free coffee from the thermoses of strangers, and I’ve shared a half a cup with a friend when that’s all there was and all there was going to be.

I’ve read the best newspapers of the world while sipping coffee, written reams with a smoking cup beside my keys, talked with the best of my friends, fenced with the worst of my enemies, celebrated victory, mourned failure, pondered accomplishment, nursed regret, all in the gentle steam of a coffee cup. I can’t imagine a day without it.

It seems odd, then, that I can’t recall my first cup.

I do recall when I was very young my mother prepared coffee for me. She would dump in about half a cup of cream, two or three teaspoons of sugar, and fill the rest of the mug with her strong brew. Eventually, the coffee outweighed the cream; soon, the cream disappeared altogether when granulated substitutes started replacing it on coffee bar counters. I never could get the powder to dissolve. Nothing’s worse than lumpy coffee.

I still like a “little sugar,” about half a teaspoon, in my coffee—and only in the first cup—but truthfully, I do that more out of habit than need. Coffee requires tradition. But when it’s fresh, hot, and strong, it doesn’t require anything but itself—and maybe a smoke.

People who say that coffee is bad for you are Meddlers. They’re the sort who lie awake nights trying to figure out how to spoil everyone else’s pleasure. They’re the sort who serve broiled chicken breast to perfectly innocent guests who never did them any harm. They’re the sort who put beans in chili and ketchup on hamburgers. They’re out to ruin everything that’s good in the world. My advice is to avoid them if you want to enjoy yourself.

But the subject is coffee. One of my earliest memories is of my father drinking coffee at our kitchen table. He usually wore khakis and an undershirt. He’d sit there stirring an ice cube into coffee so hot it would take the finish off the table’s surface had he spilled it, so strong it almost didn’t require the cup to hold it. Next to the cup was a pack of Luckys, next to the smokes the morning paper. It was his habit to rise early on days when he hadn’t worked the night before, then sit there and watch the West Texas sun come up, glance at the news, the scores. Sometimes I would come in and find him there, smoking, sitting quietly, reading a bit, and puzzling over whatever problems faced him. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even speak to me. He would slowly spoon an ice cube from a glass of water into his cup, stir it until it dissolved. Then he would sip it. I never saw him use the spoon to taste the coffee. He always just sipped it from the cup.

He liked his coffee strong. One scoop of grounds per cup.

As I grew older, I started getting up and having coffee and a smoke with him. I think we somehow came to understand one another, at least a little better than usual. We never fought over coffee. That, too, was a kind of tradition.

When I eventually became a father, I followed the pattern, and I still do: rise early, pour my cup of coffee, go off by myself and drink and smoke and look over the newspaper, and think. It helps clear my mind, gets me ready to face the day. It’s a lot easier on my knees than jogging.

My children never joined me. My daughter didn’t drink coffee—it was bad for her, she was told in school. Meddlers. But my wife still looks forward to our morning coffee, even when we don’t talk very much. It’s a nice time, and coffee makes it that way.

When my son was in high school, he got up and worked out in the early morning when it was cool. I taught him to make coffee so it would be ready when I rose. He did pretty well with it, but he didn’t drink it. It wasn’t appealing to him. He made it stronger than he should have, but I didn’t mind. It reminded me of my father.

Today, people—especially Americans—don’t like their coffee strong. They prefer it weak, and they prefer it tepid, pre-ground and slowly dripped out, like their politics. Almost no one perks coffee any more. They brew it, drip it, sometimes make a concentrate of it and add it to warm water. That’s not coffee. That’s something else. Strong opinions require strong coffee. They eschew nicety. So does strong coffee. It’s not for the faint of heart, not for the faint of mind.

I know people who drink soft drinks—cola and the like—instead of coffee. They’re just after the caffeine, you see. But they’re cheating themselves. People don’t sit down to share a Coke or contemplate life’s mysteries over a Dr. Pepper. They merely drink them, then forget them. Coffee is a memory. Cola is a convenience.

What makes coffee appealing, of course, is the aroma, not the taste, or the appearance. If it’s any good—and if it’s strong—it’s bitter and black and very hot. What could be less appealing in a beverage? So, it’s the smell.

Coffee also has sound. There is no music in the world that is as startlingly pleasant as the sound of fresh coffee being poured into a cup. There’s a kind of liquid crackle to it, if such a thing is possible. It can awaken the sleepiest dreamer, enliven the drowsiest dinner guest, enjoin the most reluctant in conversation. That sound is a promise, and no other beverage duplicates it. The sound of coffee is the sound of life, a herald’s call to a brighter future. The future might be suggested by tea’s leaves, but it’s guaranteed in coffee’s staccato melody.

Coffee is ecumenical. Anyone who has ever seen a western knows that. What’s the first thing a cowboy says to a stranger who rides up to his campfire? It’s always, “Want some coffee?” If the stranger accepts the coffee, then the audience knows that everything is going to be all right. If he doesn’t, watch out. Gunplay is soon to come.

Coffee is romantic. In a love story, if a guy meets a gal (sorry, I didn’t promise any political correctness here) he likes and wants to get to know her better, he says, “Hey, want to go get a cup of coffee?” If he says, “Hey, want to have a drink?” we know a great deal more about him—and her, if she accepts—than we might want to know (or approve of). But if they go for coffee, we know that nothing bad will happen. At the worst, they’ll lie awake all night and think about each other. What could be more romantic?

Coffee is a treatment for sleepiness, for drunkenness, for depression, and for anxiety. “Just relax, I’ll put some coffee on,” is a standard line in a million movies. It tells the audience that everything will be all right, the crisis will be diffused. Coffee is perking.

Coffee is family. Coffee in my childhood house was always perked, always strong, always hot, always fresh. We were Baptists, so there was no alcohol permitted (in view). But Baptists do drink coffee; it was the beverage of choice in our home, in our church, in our lives.

Some people drink hot tea, but that’s un-American. Tea is something you steep, then ice down to go with chicken-fried steak or barbeque. Hot tea is effete, elitist, aristocratic. Coffee is earthy, proletarian, democratic. When I was young, it made perfect sense to me that the revolting colonists would have destroyed British tea. The Sons of Liberty would never have chucked crates of Columbian Dark Roast overboard into Boston Harbor. Tea is cheap, but Yankee parsimony would have forbidden wasting so much coffee. The spirit of Juan Valdez stood sentry for the Boston Tea Party.

Tea is also brown, and thin, and lacking in character. It goes well with crumpets and doilies. “Strong tea” is a contradiction in terms. Tea is for lightweights. Coffee is for the earnest, the committed.

Coffee has nicknames—java, joe, mud, oil—and they change with the times. Tea is always—well, tea. Even the sound of it lacks character. Say them together: “Tea.” “Coffee.” One sounds like something you do in private; the other sounds like something you might want publicly to be. People have named dogs, sons and even daughters “Coffee.” There’s even a town in Kansas named Coffee. Who ever heard of anyone named for “Tea?” Coffee makes
grounds
and has substance. Tea leaves leaves and has only aftertaste.

Some people believe there’s philosophy in tea, and that may be true. But there’s wisdom in coffee. Given a choice, I’ll take wisdom. You can never have too much wisdom, and too much philosophy becomes confusing, sometimes dangerous.

###

My mother’s family often gathered at my great-great-aunt Minnie’s home. The single constant in all those get-togethers was coffee: gallons of it. Some of my uncles used cream, some of my aunts used sugar, but all of them wanted it perked, hot, dark and strong. They drank it for hours at a time, long into the night.

It was a kind of communal beverage, binding in its informality, its universality, its constancy. It went with everything they ate, but mostly it went with conversation. No one talked about the coffee, except to say, “I’ll put on a fresh pot,” or “Do you want some more?” It was a tie that bound a family together, stimulated conversation, prompted both laughter and tears. No one worried about caffeine in those days. They only worried if the coffee wasn’t hot and fresh.

In high school, coffee took on a special importance to me and to my friends. After we had driven around for hours and used up all of someone’s gas, we would go out to Dutch’s Cafe on Highway 287 and sit for some more hours, well into the early morning, and drink coffee. Then, a cup from Dutch’s “Bottomless Pot” was only a dime, and refills were free. We would sit for hours in one of those raggedy old booths and look out the dust-blown window at the traffic going by to Dallas and Denver and talk out our wonderings about the world away from there. While we talked, we swilled cup after cup of Dutch’s famous dark roast. We rarely ate anything, rarely had enough money for anything, and Dutch never asked us to leave. Our dreams, ambitions, speculations, and fears were all articulated there. They were fueled by coffee. They were strengthened by it, too.

Somewhere along the line, I became a “coffee snob,” but not in the way that sounds. I am not a purist. I merely want my coffee to taste like coffee. I have little patience with people who demand special things from their brews or think they have to be exotic to be any good. Nothing is worse than coffee that tastes like oranges, chocolate, hazelnuts, almonds, or some kind of flower. If people want those tastes, they should eat those things. If they want coffee, they should drink coffee. If they want both, they should eat those things with coffee. Trying to “dress up” coffee by making it taste like something else seems silly to me.

I’m also not much into espresso,
café au lait,
cappuccino, or latte. Espresso has the essence of coffee, but it lacks the familiar and democratic texture of the real thing. It’s also served in tiny cups and sells for too much. It’s just not natural, somehow, or satisfying. As for the others, well, if I want a milkshake, I’ll order a milkshake.

I was in a gourmet coffee shop recently, one of those chain outfits that are more common today than phone booths were in the past, although they’re far less useful. They must have had fifty different coffees available in bean and ground form. If you didn’t see what you wanted, they’d mix it up for you. I looked at the list for a long time, then I went to the counter. “I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said. “What kind?” he said. “Just coffee,” I said. “Make sure it’s fresh.”

He was bewildered. He started telling me in alphabetical order all the names of the coffees they sold. I stopped him when he got to the Ds. “I just want a cup of coffee,” I said. “Just plain, black, hot, coffee.”

He consulted with the manager then returned. “We don’t sell that here,” he said. “You need to go to a café for that.”