Coffee Novelist

 

                                              “One reason I write so slowly is I try to make each joke work.”

                                                                                        Kurt Vonnegut

 

 

 

Coffee

My personal history with coffee is very serious and very personal.

I was one of the few people on this planet who was granted hundreds of shares of Starbucks stock options during its IPO. Those shares would be worth well over a million dollars now.  I type here today without a cent of it in my pockets or elsewhere.

Years later, I was let go, fired, whacked, terminated by a small coffee roasting company. This happened with three or perhaps even four young children at home to feed, clothe and house. It was such a traumatic event fostering such a bad time, I honestly can’t recall the specifics. Needless to say, it sucked.

Yet, like the Lazarus of latte’s, I rose. Reborn out of the chaff barrel, I managed to find my way out of the coffee business for employment elsewhere.

Black Coffee

I have stayed out of the coffee business since, for reasons obvious and not so obvious. I am still asked why I didn’t go back into the world of coffee and seek employment. There are thousands and thousands of different jobs in coffee now than when I left. I still worked in coffee for years after getting fired. But that has been a while now and this coffee thing has done fine without me.

Indulge me for second. I am pausing here to consider whether all that emotional baggage has kept me from going back into coffee directly. Very possible. This is why releasing thoughts from the mind, through the shoulders, down the arms to the fingers, out of the body and onto the page is so, so important to me. I may have unpacked something just there. What you do with it is up to you. But I found it quite valuable.

How does this take me to yesterday and buying a rubber chicken for three bucks at thrift store? Because one thing I have consciously kept packed away in my mind is that I can’t’ take all this coffee stuff that seriously.  Not anymore, at least. Coffee has gone and done it, taking itself way too seriously. For proof, read this informative article from The Pourover Magazine, entitled Capitalism on Steroids.

The coffee industry has come a long way since the days of Folgers and Maxwell House. Specialty coffee is now big business, and the industry is awash with cash.

I’ve been there and am not going to do it again. After depending on coffee for my livelihood and to feed my family, and have it taken away, I’m supposed to care about latte art and randomly crowned barista champions? I’m not saying they don’t have a value, just none for me.

Here is the part where I cover my ass and say all the right things about how I am a first world consumer and have enjoyed coffee via the systemic exploitation of the third world producing countries. You won’t find me doing that here. It would compromise to some degree the times I dialed the Hoosier Helpcard phone number to see how much money was left on it, so that my wife and I could budget on food for our kids. I will always remember the automated voice and the pause before she told me the amount. This is my story here.

Black coffee with humor

I think all this added up to me choosing to make the coffee saint, Kaldi, the bad guy in my second novel, The Trier. In the follow up novel, I have continued to use coffee in ways that may be sacrilegious to the baristacrats, to use a word Robert Downey Jr. has claimed to have created. It is a much safer distance from coffee for me. Tripio was my first coffee novel and in it, I took coffee very seriously. Years later, and farther away from counting on coffee to eat, I wrote The Trier and began to put humor in my coffee. I liked how it tasted. And so, I put more in The Trier Goes to London (working title), with no intention of stopping when I begin to revise that novel in a month or so.

Maybe I’m writing to extract a measure of revenge on coffee. I have created worlds where coffee can make me smile a little bit. I still like my coffee black, no artificial sweeteners, but with a dose of very real, hard-earned and organic humor. It just goes down better much better that way.