Coffee in the Mountains

I’m on vacation in Vermont, where my sister and brother-in-law and I took a 70-mile drive from the bustling metropolis of Burlington to the sleepy town of Troy. Ryan had been going on about 4 hours of sleep, and was in desperate need of coffee about halfway through the drive.

So we happened upon the Lovin’ Cup Cafe in Johnson, Vt. They were shutting down for a private party, but were kind enough to give us a couple cups of delicious dark roast for our travels. Thanks, Lovin’ Cup! We’ll come back for sure!

The Walls Have Ears (or: Meth. Not Even Once)

At the shop, they like us to keep our conversations “appropriate.”

That word: appropriate. It thankfully allows for a lot of flexibility. And that flexibility sometimes morphs into downright elasticity. Which is one of the reasons I love working at a coffee shop.

But when I started back in March, my supervisor reminded me that even if I think no one’s listening, I should still be careful about what I say while on shift at the shop, lest some sensitive-eared customer complain to the owners. But really: it’s a coffee shop owned by two gay men in a left-of-center town in Jersey. There’s considerable wiggle room.

And yet, my coworker Ed flouts even that loose guideline. He’s a tall string of a man with short hair and mutton chops, gangly with a wit as sharp as his angular elbows and joints. I’ve actually known him for close to a decade. He used to come into the shop I worked at in high school, and would often appear at church basements and rented VFW halls for the punk shows in which my band was playing.

The other day, Ed was headed out to grab a smoke. On his way out, he wryly announced to me (and the entirety of the shop): “I’m gonna gooooooo smoke a bag of meth!”

Photo from U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

I chuckled. He had his cigarette, came back in and cleaned the dishes before leaving the shop to catch the train to Philly.

But yesterday, he tells me this story:

So I was on the train the other day, when you came in that morning. And I’m sitting there, staring out the window, when I hear this guy calling to me. He says, in this real nasally tone, ‘So how was your meth?’ And I realized that he heard me tell you I was gonna smoke some meth. And, uh, I didn’t know what to say. So I just said, ‘It was great. Want some?’

He didn’t answer.

This is one of the mild Ed stories. I assure you there will be more. Until then…

I’m gonna gooooooo smoke a bag of meth!

A word about the Montana Meth Project:

Let’s be clear: meth is not a good thing. It’s a fucked-up drug that destroys people from the inside out. But honestly, those cheesy after-school-special PSA’s make me wanna try meth (just once!) to spite them. Scare tactics don’t work. But thanks for telling kids about a drug that is so good it’ll make you sell your body to get it. Smart move.

Coffee on the Road

I’ve been camping the past few days. My first day I made coffee myself at the site. The second day, I’d run out of propane and ventured to a truck stop just outside the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area for a morning cup.

I used to do a lot of driving across huge chunks of country. I thought nothing of driving 800 miles in a single weekend to go from Twin Falls, Idaho to Missoula, MT just to visit friends and do some fishing, or going from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Dallas. And I spent a lot of time at truck stops, filling up my feeble 16-ounce mug next to a trucker filling what appeared to be an oil drum with a handle and a travel lid.

Truck stops have their own kind of regulars. They’re truckers, obviously, looking for a shower and a distraction from the road, whether it’s watching TV in the truckers’ lounge or chatting with other drivers at the counter of the truck stop diner over pie (or a Johnson’s Corner cinnamon bun). Or they’re families on road trips to Orlando, to Yellowstone, to visit the grandparents, kids pestering their parents for candy or trinkets from whatever corner of the country they’re in. Or they’re people, like me, on the move, not really sure where I’m headed in the long term, and looking for a little familiarity.

It’s easy to sneer at people who only eat at chain restaurants, who stop at Cracker Barrel every time they’re on the road, or hit the same TA or Flying J on the route they’ve driven a thousand times, rather than trying somewhere different. But especially when you’re trying to get somewhere far away, you want that kind of sameness so you can get back on the road. Coffee’s on the left, on the way to the bathrooms in the back, restaurant off to the right, just past the wiper blades on the wall.

That need for familiarity is what brings people back to my shop in South Jersey. We crave recognition, whether it’s the layout of a travel plaza off the interstate or the face behind the counter at the local coffee shop. We’re creatures of habit, looking to put an unpredictable world into some kind of order. And if that order makes a halfway decent cup of coffee, I’m on board.

The Flailing

He’s at the shop almost every day: tall, and tan from all that time he spends outside cartoonishly puffing on cigarette after cigarette like an exaggerated version of a smoker. His face contorts into a sniveling expression as he meets another pair of eyes. The other pair looks away.

His hands, especially his left, flail in the air as though each finger is being electrocuted by some vengeful force. They steady when he holds a plastic cup that he drains of water over and over again, eager for an excuse to come to the counter and talk to me or whoever happens to be working. He stands at the counter, shuddering, waiting for us to acknowledge him again. He does this for hours.

Aaron has been coming to the shop for years. The staff’s patience with him waxes and wanes, and he knows it. On my first day on the job, he introduced himself and told me to let him know if he was being a problem. We’ve only had to ask him to leave once, after he gorged himself on salad and sandwiches and cookies until he vomited in the bathroom and left it looking like a frat house crime scene.

Most customers are too polite, or too nervous, to do anything if he makes them uncomfortable. He slides his way into groups, like a parasite with no real goal in mind, just to show up and see if the host acknowledges its presence. He sits down at a table near people, or in a circle of armchairs. He doesn’t talk, just leans back and forth, waiting for an opportunity to say something. And then, when the opportunity comes, he doesn’t make a sound. He just leans back and forth, in and out of the silence, waiting. Scared.

Or he does speak, out of turn and context, changing the subject to what’s floating through his mind: the cost of cigarettes, the sound of a heavy metal band. Some regulars humor him, work to draw him into their own conversations. But most often his words are jarring, misplaced and confused. They fall out of his mouth and clang onto the floor beneath him, where people let them sit.

I’ve heard he’s schizophrenic. Or autistic. Or a savant. Or just an asshole who never learned how to make friends, how to move in and out of social settings with relative ease or just basic competence. I imagine it’s some combination of those afflictions, all reinforcing one another with each awkward interaction.

But he’s trying. And on days when he feels like he’s succeeding, when people talk to him about his day and what’s on his mind,  he doesn’t rock back and forth so much, or rush over to the counter for another glass of water, and his hands slacken a little. The flailing becomes less severe.

Name changed.

More Grizzlies than a Montana Football Game

My shop is owned by two gay men. They’re not around much, even though they don’t live far from the store. They’ve got the shop running like clockwork so they can focus on their other projects. They pop in for a cup of coffee every once in a while, we chat about the weather and how business is going, and they’re off again.

But they’ve also been instrumental in making our town into a gay-friendly community (which, really, should be every community). One thing they’ve done is helped organize a social group of gay men that meets at the shop once a month.

Which put me in a room full of bears on a Wednesday night. (It’s been hard to write this post without making all the requisite bear/cub quips. But I’ll leave that up to you.) It’s a strange feeling to be in a room full of nearly 30 dudes and be the only one glancing out the window to check out the woman in the sundress walking down the street with a sultry hint of perspiration on her shoulders.

Nights when the shop is flooded by a niche community, like these men or the knitters, are always a bit hectic. Large numbers of people showing up at more or less the same time makes for a lot of running around. They’re good for business, there’s no question about that. But I worry that people who come in on a whim, who aren’t part of the group, feel like they’re intruding.

Apparently it didn’t bother the two girls who came in around six or so, before the men started showing up for the seven o’clock meeting. They popped open their laptops and unloaded cinder block-sized texts books for a quiet evening of studying. Slowly they sank into the background of men giving effusive hugs and pecks on cheeks. The crowd got bigger, the din of voices rose, and they stayed parked at their table by the cream & sugar station listening to music while they worked, focused and practically oblivious to the mass around them.

The Past Comes Back on a Cheap Bicycle

When I was 19 or so, I moved out of my mom’s place into a cheap apartment in Westmont, a town dotted with liquor stores and corner bars frequented by residents of the three dry towns that surround this boozy oasis. Rent was about $350 per month, if I remember correctly. It had roaches. I didn’t trust the outlets. When I did my dishes, the sink backed up into my shower stall.

I lived on the second floor. The apartment below mine was occupied by a middle aged man I’ll call “Dan.” Dan had about 7 teeth and spent most of the hot summer nights standing in his doorway, the screen popped out of his storm door so he could lean out and smoke cigarettes while his shirtless gut sagged over the edge of the screen frame. He sniggered and leered as high school girls walked by.

But Dan was over 21—well over 21. So my buddy and I asked him to buy us beer one night. He agreed, and we dutifully drove him to the nearest liquor store and sat in the parking lot in a mild panic while Dan chatted with the cashier for what was probably only 13 seconds but seemed like half an hour. When he finally returned to my beat-up Honda with 24 Yuengling Lagers, we said we’d join him for a beer or two at his place.

But what started as a friendly gesture of gratitude ended with my buddy and I backing slowly out the door of Dan’s apartment while he snorted lines of cocaine off a replica samurai sword, the type you see for sale at flea markets for $30. He’d pulled it out and started waving it around like a baton in his apartment after downing at least six beers in half an hour, asked us if we wanted to do blow off his sword collection. Even at the reckless age of 19, we could see a line we weren’t quite ready to cross.

That was back in 2001. Yesterday, Dan rolled by the front window of my shop on a squeaky old bicycle, chained it up out side the store and came in. He began chatting with someone in the store he recognized, and I kept my head down as much as possible while getting his coffee. He didn’t recognize me on this visit, but I’m sure there will be more. And I’m sure we’ll have to go through that awkward conversation, about where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing.

I’ve had a lot of similar encounters since starting at the shop this spring, especially since I’ve recently returned to Jersey after years of living out west. Little snippets of my past life here come back at unexpected times and order lattes like it’s just another cup of coffee, but for me it forces a recounting of scenes I’d totally forgotten I was a part of, scenes I’d repressed as I thought I’d become more mature and left parts of my life behind and exchanged them for other memories.

But that’s not how it works, and that’s what makes it fun. I get to relive all these experiences without the actual drama, without the crippling fear of having my fingers lopped off by a crazed coke head who just wanted to fit in with the two young guys who had our whole lives ahead of us, who might not end up in an apartment the size of a horse trailer buying beer for underage kids so we can feel young again, if only for half an hour.

Knitting on a Sunday

Sunday nights are low key for most businesses. The coming work week leans down on the evening like humidity, and most would rather stay home in a television’s cool glow than venture out after a busy weekend.

But at my shop, about a dozen women plant themselves on rearranged couches and armchairs to knit for three hours every Sunday, from 7 pm until we close. They trickle in, snagging chairs where they can and sprawling across our tiny space until they conquer the front of the store. Back by the coffee bar, tables stand without chairs around them, looking naked and self-conscious.

I don’t usually work on Sunday nights, and almost every one of them seem perplexed that I was there and not our usual closer. They’ve seen me before, but I was interrogated anew, over and over: who are you, how long have you been working here? Where’s Ed? They’ve been coming in for years, but study our menu as though seeing it for the first time. We were out of lemonade, and that threw one woman off even further. She took several minutes to decide on something else.

They spoke to me and said the things most customers would say, but the inflection was off. Rather than words coming in light and warm, they were stiff and shot out quick and loud like a rubber band being snapped on skin, sometimes giving them a snide tone. For example: around 9:55, I let them know I’d be closing up soon. One woman wore an expression of kind understanding: it’s late he wants to go home, we should start packing up. But then she briskly sniped: “We know what time it is.”

I didn’t take offense. I’d been watching them all night, come to the counter and not look me in the eye, avoiding other customers that just popped in for a cup to go. They quieted when a couple teenagers came in to use our bathroom, waiting for the interlopers to leave before resuming their talk. Their conversations with one another tended toward the very personal at times: two women discussed health issues and regularity, rather audibly. The coffee shop became their living rooms, their own coffee tables ringed with condensation and floors flecked with crumbs.

With their need for familiarity and their ease with which they met and picked up conversations from the week prior, I realized that this is the social outlet for most of these ladies. Sunday nights at the coffee shop are the limited time they connect with people in their own ways, the people they want to talk to most. They don’t come to chit-chat with the barista, or to make nice with passers-by, and they follow customs and cues of a world that’s foreign to me. But for those hours, the shop is theirs.

Welcome to The Knock Box

I’ve been serving coffee off and on for about a dozen years now, at neighborhood shops, bookstore cafes and coffee carts across the country. I’m currently working at a small independent shop in South Jersey, just a few miles from Philadelphia.

Most of the customers are just in-and-out, hurrying on their way to work. They swing through and chat with friends for a few minutes while adding cream and sugar before disappearing into the world.

But coffee shops also draw in people who otherwise don’t have anywhere else to be. A person can be there for long periods of time—whole days, even—and spend remarkably little money. So people come there for all sorts of reasons: to ostensibly get work done while really watching kitten videos on YouTube, to take advantage of the air conditioning their apartments lack, to feel like they’re part of a community they just can’t seem to break into on their own. I see couples on first dates, couples on last dates, wedding photographers trying to win over potential clients, schizophrenics obsessively counting change for one more refill, addicts indulging in the vice NA still allows them.

It’s the people that inhabit my shop and others like it that make the work interesting. Sometimes they tell their stories outright. Sometimes I have to suss them out over time, shift by shift, in the canned conversations I have with them while I’m making their drinks, or in the phone calls I overhear and the books they bring with them. It’s these stories I hope to share here.

A quick note about the blog name: a knock box is a stainless steel bin with a bar running across the top of it. A barista uses it to knock out the spent espresso grinds from a filter. It looks like this:

Image from webrestaurantstore.com

It’s a bizarre device that serves only one very specific purpose, but it’s also totally indispensable. Kind of like a barista.