An Aching in My Belly, a Craving in My Head

For the first time in three weeks, my room is filled with the scent of coffee and with my first bitter sip my mind stretches, yawns, and agrees to wake up. It is my drug. Tea is too subtle for me; espresso is too fast. I need to swallow freshly ground beans bathed in boiling water to feel alive in the world and for all of my synapses to fire properly. After over half a century of drinking coffee, the grooves it has worn in my nervous system are too deep to sod over and reseed into a refined green tea landscape. I’m addicted as my mother was before me. I’m sure that coffee ran in my veins before I was born.

Dad thrust a cup of hot sweet milky coffee into my fifteen-year-old hands when I came home from a long, wet, chilly horseback ride to pick up mail and library books. I drank it as a sacramental rite of passage but my next cup was black, and so were all of the others after that. I drank it all night as a teenager and was delighted to find that by morning I had lost five pounds—legal speed.

In New York I was always amazed to find that in that city I didn’t need it. The rush of a Manhattan street woke me into life without caffeine, which was fortunate because the coffee in NYC was vile anywhere above 14^th Street. Still I drank that battery acid from the depths of hell that was sold in diners because that was what fueled the city that had given me birth.

My father was the one who bought me my first cup of espresso, down on Mulberry Street, when children still played on the sidewalks with grandmothers in shapeless dresses sitting on stoops to guard them. I drank it with a shot of anisette in a neighborhood joint where nobody questioned my age. As I sipped and felt a tinge of sophistication long before my time, a car pulled up and a man got out wearing a black homburg and an expensive-looking black overcoat. He walked in with an aura of regality and everyone in the place paid him homage with their attention. “Good morning, Large Joseph,” the bartender greeted him as he took his place at the counter and even I, who had barely ever heard of the Mafia, was in awe. Ever since then I’ve associated the taste of espresso with power.

The machine that made that first espresso for me was large and made of gleaming copper; it looked as though it could fuel a small battleship. It took skill to operate, I learned, when I went to a place in Seattle that used a similar system to very bad effect. Before Starbucks, when espresso was still Italian and barista wasn’t a word applied to teenagers who pulled shots after school, what emerged from a well-operated machine could raise a heartbeat from death to hyperspeed in three minutes flat.

And that of course is where the danger lies. I love my little espresso pot with its ceremonial undertones and its chaste little white cups and saucers, but what it makes is not really my friend. Espresso isn’t meant to be sipped; it cools too quickly in those sweet little cups and I could down three of them in the space of writing a paragraph. I need my coffee in a mug that retains the heat, the way I learned to drink it in Alaska.

My parents and their friends drank coffee the way winos clutch bottles of cheap wine, killing a pot at a sitting, their maintenance doses. It was a socially sanctioned time to down tools and talk in long conversations that ranged from the price of chainsaw fuel to the state of the world. In another time and place I use it to fuel conversations with myself and it sparks thought in a way that never comes with the gentler infusion of caffeine in green tea.

This morning I was awake before six, knowing what was waiting for me in the kitchen, and that I know is the thrill of addiction. I’m sure my blood pressure is above sanctioned levels at this moment and I do not give a jolly damn. I have had my drug, and I will have it again tomorrow, and the world is a much less torpid place for me.

And without thinking very much about it, I’ve gone past my first page this morning and am more than happy to write more. The sun is up and so are both of the guys I live with and I am in my caffeine bubble, oblivious.

Thank heaven I never tried heroin.