When I first reached the age of reason and started considering possible career paths, and having abandoned my childhood ambitions of becoming a tiger or a candy manufacturer, I set my sights on two possibilities: cop or lawyer. I envisioned myself as a crusading figure in the mold of Atticus Finch or Frank Serpico, righting wrongs in the face of opposition and advocating for justice and decency. While I have spent enough time in both courtrooms and police stations to qualify for a pension in both fields, the irony of my actual chosen field of endeavor is just too obvious and sad to even comment on.
After a few early brushes with the law and an introduction to, and deep and abiding interest in, methamphetamine, I was forced to rethink those noble pursuits and choose something more in keeping with my freewheeling, catch-as-catch-can lifestyle, and opted simply to go where the wind blew me. Those winds, capricious and whimsical forces that they are, wafted me into various and sundry dead-end gigs with neither future nor dignity — never mind what your dad told you about the virtues of hard work and the inherent nobility of the working man, if your dad was one of those types.
All that Steinbeckian foolishness is rooted in feudalism and Protestant brainwashing. I suppose someone has to dig the dishes and wash the ditches, but I’m damned if I’ll take any pride in doing it. Unless, of course, it’s my ditch or my dishes. In that case I will dig and scrub until the cows come home, naturally. Say what you will about Marx, he knew the value of a piece of the action.
When you come into rehab, one thing you’re expected to do is clean up after yourself and perform some sort of necessary function around the place, usually some kind of housekeeping duty, both to reinstill basic concepts of responsibility and self-care and to keep the place in order, public rehabs not being overwhelmed with extra funds to hire masseuses and manicurists like the places movie stars go.
Drug addicts, being equally underwhelmed with any pesky notions of responsibility or personal hygiene, generally agitate violently toward any suggestion they might make their bed or wipe the piss off the toilet seat and will go to extravagant lengths to avoid any sort of useful work, expending far more energy than it would take to do the job. Forced to comply, they will drag ass as if they had Kardashian-grade rumps weighing them down, whine piteously, and sabotage the project as a firm declaration of their displeasure at having to do anything more than lay around and scratch themselves.
Not to be tooting my own horn (upon who else’s horn would I toot? That idiom, like so many, does not stand up to scrutiny. Musicians in general don’t like other people messing with their instruments, and horn players particularly, given the intimate nature of the player/instrument interface), but I am an exception.
In active (addict) mode I am as lazy and unproductive as anyone else, except in matters regarding the procurement of more drugs. Then, I am relentless and unstinting in my labors. In recovery mode, though, I become a model of responsibility and productivity, seeking out ways to prove that I am not, as previously believed (by me), an irredeemable bucket of walking sewage. I return to the ass-kissing, teacher-pleasing days of my early youth and volunteer freely for any and all opportunities to be of use and burnish my self-image.
The job of coffee-maker here at the Ukiah Recovery Center requires both the most energy and deepest commitment, beginning at oh-dark-thirty and continuing throughout the morning as the residents filter in to get their substitute fix.
On first arriving I actively lobbied for the position, being a morning person and a coffee aficionado of near-pathological degree, but the gentleman occupying the gig did not want to give it up. He was a power-mad scrimper who took perverse pleasure in meting out limited quantities of pathetically weak brew and creating a distinctly unwelcoming atmosphere in the coffee area. This, I vowed, will not stand.
The provision of caffeine is a sacred duty and my mission was clear. Luckily, certain supernatural forces intervened to interfere with Andre(the incumbent coffee dude)’s waking apparatus, which was lucky for me in that I was able to slide in as understudy as he lay abed. Not only did I arise earlier, giving the fellas (it is a coed operation, but the ladies prefer sleeping) earlier access to the bean, but I made it at least 50% stronger and provided a welcoming, convivial atmosphere in which to enjoy it. Word got around quickly and it wasn’t but a minute before a groundswell of support for my campaign forced Andre into bathroom duty and me permanently into the coffee job.
My years of interfering with sleep patterns have rendered me unable to get more than 4 or 5 hours at a stretch, and I’m generally up by 4 at the latest. At that hour I am fizzing with energy and ideas, and my 5-8 am Breakfast Club, in which we don’t actually eat any breakfast but only down prodigious quantities of dangerously strong coffee and shoot the shit, has become the Place To Be in the morning and a conclave of Algonquinian degree, if that august panel were composed of tweakers, wet-brains, junkies, and coke-sniffers. We have an enormously good time and while we may have shot our collective wad by 10:00 AM and returned to our default condition of worn-out dope fiends, we have at least enlivened and enlightened one another for a few hours. The jokes are immature and well-worn, the laughter loud and long, and the roastings brutal, in a friendly sort of way.
All of which brings me to my point: that I have missed my calling, or one of them, by not becoming a coffeeshop proprietor. Not in the modern incarnation where skinny-jeaned hipsters drop serious coin on complex coffee-based concoctions and poke at their electronic devices while they ignore their actual friends. I’m talking about a place and a time that no longer exists, specifically a small town sometime between 1945 and 1975, a time when coffee was coffee and could be paid for without folding money. A place on the town square where the men of the town gathered before work to grumble about their wives, tell jokes, discuss the weather, and enjoy the bonds of brotherhood and coffee. A bygone era when people and their pleasures were simpler and did not require exhaustive research to understand and enjoy.
Of course, depending on where I’ve located my little fantasy cafe, it would be either legally mandated or tacitly understood that minorities were unwelcome, never mind gays. They couldn’t even safely exist, much less get a cup of coffee in small-town America. Jews would probably be out too.
I realize that I’m engaging in something like reverse discrimination here, but the truth is that many of the most interesting people I’ve ever met fall into one or more of those categories, and if they can’t come into my coffee shop and accompany their cuppa joe with a bagel and schmear or a dollop of whipped cream or a shot of Hennessy, then screw it. Herb and Sam and Carl and all the rest of those fat racist bastards can make their own goddamned coffee, and I hope they choke on it. I’m packing up my beans and moving to the Village, where I’ll create an atmosphere welcoming to communists and beatniks and other weirdos. I’ll have a giant espresso machine that looks like a steampunk fantasy contraption and learn all the fancy Italian coffee recipes. Troubadors will warble, ideas will flow, and from the tables of my establishment will grow the seeds of dissatisfaction and revolution. I will be the proto-shop that eventually evolves into the salon-cum-patisserie-cum-conference room-cum-homeless shelter that is the coffeehouse of today.
I like lattes and capps and while I don’t truck with all the syrups and gunk clogging up some of the more elaborate concoctions available today, I say that dropping $7.50 on a caffeinated bev is not necessarily foolish, as many people of an age so often and loudly assert, because what else is going to give you that much pleasure for that much dough?
My grandpa, who was born in 1903, used to say that he could get drunk, fed, a piece of ass, and then drunk again for less than five bucks when he was young, and I don’t doubt it. Without a time machine, though, twenty ounces of triple-shot latte will have to do.
No discussion of coffee in this space would be complete without a shout-out to the finest coffeehouse in all Mendocino, the Headlands in Fort Bragg. They get top marks in everything — quality, variety, food, atmosphere, clientele — and at fairly reasonable prices. Sorry for all the drugs I did in your bathroom, guys. I always cleaned up after myself though.
To be fair, I haven’t visited all the coffee places in the region — not even all that many, really — so there may be some undiscovered gem out there. Feel free to invite me in for a complimentary cup and an evaluation from a self-professed expert.
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