Coffee

 

 

Midway through FROSH year and I am fueling myself with coffee incessantly. Grandmother’s coffee pot is a Bunn and looks like a Erlenmeyer lab set. Somehow there is always water in the dual chamber of the machine. There is coffee brewing every morning. There is no coffee pot in our house. Dad keeps a diminutive plastic silo of instant coffee in the cabinet. He goes to Mr. Donuts twice a week and gets and X-tra large coffee and a Bavarian coffee roll which he splatters butters devouring before teaching a classroom of country fourth graders. There is always coffee at church although it is brewed so weak there is a joke by local congregational members that they can read their bibles through it during Sunday School. The coffee at Manual looks like either Coach Nelson or Coach Fauser   doused a road kill tea bag inside the chrome carafe.  Grandma drinks Gevalia arriving in vacuumed back rectangles.

 

“They give you a free coffee pot every time you renew. It only holds four cups but it’s a nice little coffee pot.”

I let the stream of water sneezing from the phallus faucet in my kitchen run for a minute so it is as arctic cold as the water in West Peoria can possibly become.

I grind the beans in at the grinder my grandmother gave me. I am preparing my first cup of coffee. 

 The coffee pot my grandmother gave me looks like a botched junior high volcano project. It is erupting from the top of the lid. Grains mixed with what looks like runoff river water are applauding the top of the lid. It looks like a mortboard swallowed a half-digested tassel and then threw up.

“David you need to have a filter what were you thinking? You need to have a filter.”

. The coffee pot my grandmother gave me looks like a botched junior high volcano project. It is erupting from the top of the lid. Grains mixed with what looks like runoff river water are applauding the top of the lid. It looks like a mortboard swallowed a half-digested tassel and then threw up.

 
David, you need to have a filter, my father says again

 

I feel dumb. I leave the house informing my folks that I am going collecting when I actuality I hike down to the crooked neon blue of Mr. Donuts and get a large coffee with cream and sugar.

I am drinking coffee. I am grinding the beans every morning I wake up before my route. I use the aficionado and dilettante when I talk about mu love of java. After I collect every week I walk to SuperX in campus town and but Maxwell House Irish blend.

I get sentimental when I watch coffee commercials on television.

 

 

 

I am drinking coffee. I am enamored by the ardent gurgle of water percolating, wisps of steam rising like foreign kite strings from the back of the machine. I  scooping out clods of , watching the lumps dissipate in the interior base of the coffee cup, stirring it several times in a row adding  sluice of cream, baptizing my nose like a beak over the brim of the receptacle, deeply inhaling like I have a narcotic impediment before taking the first initial swig. I am drinking coffee. I am making a ritual every morning.I get several bags of beans that look like tackle from Gloria Jeans , rattling the substance in the blender before losing myself in the nasal drill, sniffing every slightly at the powder before planting it under the top hat of the Gevalia coffee maker my grandmother gave me, remembering to adorn the plastic liner with a filter like an upside-down paper hat.

I am drinking coffee.

During breakfast club Mrs. Claussen barks at me when I buy a cup, stating that they normally do not serve students coffee.  Mr. Reents always has coffee brewing in his classroom says that if I would like I cup I am more than welcome to help myself. I always feel civilized when I drink coffee in Mr. Reents classroom listening to classical music as I take my weekly vocab quiz. I am drinking coffee.

My father still harbors an almost averse proclivity for Instant coffee. Doesn’t seem to have instant coffee is when he stops at MR. DONUT after church on Sunday and gets a large coffee with cream and sugar, sitting on the front swing in his Sunday attire reading the paper he helped his son deliver four hours earlier

The only time he  At church I am the only one under eighteen who frequents the peach lightening of the community room and waits in front of the 1940’s coffee urn for the eye to wink on cosigning that the brew is done.

I am drinking coffee. Patrick tells me that cappuccino is one thing but always drinking coffee is like ick. Renae tells me that she hates coffee but that she drinks several Diet Dr. Peppers a day. When Bob and Frank see me ferrying a Styrofoam coffee mug Frank tells me that he just cannot wake up without having a good cup of coffee. Mr. Reents has alluded that the cheapest place in town to buy quality coffee is Sams club because you can buy it in bulk, He calls me honey, stating that honey, any weekend I want to tak e a ride out with him to Sam’s club and purchase coffee I am more than welcome to ride with him because he has a membership. He then states that last we found a deal on toilet paper in bulk and honey, if I ever need any toilet paper just call him.

 

When I tell Dawn how much coffee I am drinking she tells me that she drinks about four pots a day as well.

 

“I thought you only drank Mt. Dew?”

 

I hear her smile on the opposite end of the phone.

 

 

I am thinking about Renae. I am thinking about what will happen this weekend when she sees me in my boots and we finally see each other after all this time.

 

And I start drinking Coffee. Before Mattoon coach tells us that maybe all we should have for breakfast to stay light is just a hash brown and cup of coffee, positing that coffee gets you alert and kicks out your system.  Christmas Hale will give me a golden coin which is   20 dollar Gloria jean gift certificate. I am drinking coffee.  It is a requisite before I go down into the table where my brothers and I used to role-play and  spend countless hours taking meaningless notes on cool Joe Thomas Biology class., in which cool Joe Thomas drinks coffee incessantly form his defactory COFFEE KEEP ME GOING  mug, telling us about his on the side real estate ventures,

 I am drinking coffee.  I brew a pot for every meal. When I get home from school the first thing I do is brew a pot of coffee before either calling Renae or waiting for her to call.

 

None of my peers with the exception of Patrick drink coffee. Eggplant Elmore who always feels impelled to hold an intellectual discourse with me when I am standing over the urinals at Christ Lutheran calls coffee, “Dirty Water.”

I comb the interior hallways of Manual high school with a Mr. Donuts coffee cup in paw. Most Teachers don’t say anything as I swig sporadically during class. Mme Suhr asks me if I go to Gloria Jeans in the mall. Coach Mann always looks at me like I am some sort of burgeoning scholar and smiles as I take copious lecture notes.

 

Every time I catch Blossom’s older brother is already brewing a cup of coffee, removing the pot to allow the autumnal pee-stream to empty into his cup before replacing it with the carafe glass w.out a stain or splotch.

He is my doppleganger. He is the person appearing in the square box everyone worships nightly in their living room who everyone tells me that I look like.

He is drinking coffee.

I am drinking.

I have a hot girlfriend. I am on the cusp of adulthood.

It feels like my world is ready to begin.