Coffee Run
By S.P. Carty
It was too weak. The black circle swirling around in my mug. It was far too weak. I could still taste the grey ash from my cigarette and my throat felt like a bad cake mixture; too wet. Come to think of it, the smell wasn't right either. Hints of tap water and mayonnaise, following in tow, the overwhelming stink of perishing rubber. This was not good coffee, it barely passed as dishwater. I didn’t have to taste it, for curiosity’s sake or otherwise. Had I not made it myself, I would have asked for my money back and a replacement. Sadly I could only frown at the hob-bound percolator and then at the crumpled bag of "fresh" Colombian “dark” roast. My mind was made up. I would have to journey to realms unknown to find my morning coffee.
The cold glass walls of the closest coffee chain were a promising start. The disjointed toots and doodle-dos of bebop jazz reverberated around the shop, along with the click-hiss-ksshh-click of the milk steamer. A fabulous array of heavily sugared and steeply priced snacks lined the counter and behind the curve of polished glass; the cakes. I knew the secret of the cakes. That they were as fresh as the bag of coffee on my kitchen counter and their appearance, like many famous actors, relied mostly on the soft, museum-esque lighting. But I wasn’t here for them. Plastered on the cookie-cutter decor around the shop was a poster. A somewhat understated advert for a new blend of coffee; The Roast of Hapzuwanda. I approached the counter and was greeted with the cheerful face of a man whose name tag named him Paul. “Hi there! What can I get for you?” He said in a loud but not grating voice.
“What can you tell me of… The Roast of Hapzuwanda?”
Paul's cheerful demeanor dropped. I wasn’t sure if I had offended him or committed the same crime as speaking MacBeth in a theater, whatever the coffeehouse equivalents may be. Spoken Hapzuwanda in a coffeehouse? It didn’t matter. The man, Paul, who could save me from my mid-afternoon nap looked around the shop.
“What do you know of this roast?”
“It’s new. It’s from Africa. And… it has hints of nutmeg, vanilla and turmeric?” The Roast of Hapzuwanda advert on the video menu behind Paul faded into advertising drivel about a drink for teenage girls who are too young for caffeine but old enough for Type 2 diabetes.
Paul leaned over the till. “Follow me.”
The storeroom was in stark contrast to the front of the house. Instead of the warming aroma of £3.60-a-cup coffee and an ignorable soundtrack, there was a sharp waft of disinfectant and what sounded like an amateur violinist trying to play The Four Seasons with a bow on a bass guitar. Neither was unpleasant but the immediate switch was like an unexpected loud noise. I could feel a slight headache coming on and rising irritability. I needed what Paul was, presumably, leading me to. He put his hand between boxes marked ‘Name Tag Ink’, the metal shelf clunked outward and several boxes fell from the top shelf. Paul collected them from the floor and beckoned me forward.
I walked into a stone room lit by two large sconces. It smelled like the ground underneath floorboards in an old house, and the music reminded me of the masquerade scene in Eyes Wide Shut, when Tom Cruise is exposed as an imposter. Paul had donned a green cloak and an oversized headdress of iridescent scales, like that of a rainbow trout or white-lipped python. With the hand flourish of a magician, a takeaway coffee cup appeared on the altar. The hidden entrance closed behind me with a long pfft. Trepidatiously, I approached the altar.
A pitch-black abyss wobbled gently in the coffee cup; The Roast of Hapzuwanda. Paul raised his hands and stared me deep in the eye. “Seeker of the Sacred Roast, your search is almost at an end. Before you can sup at the elixir of The Roast of Hapzuwanda, you must first be aware of the consequences.” Paul raised a laptop from under the altar and began to read;
“Moonquids Coffee cannot be held responsible for any harm or medical emergency caused by consumption of this beverage; The Roast of Hapzuwanda. Possible side effects are as follows: sweating, heart palpitations, diarrhea, jitteriness, hyperactivity, constipation, loss of motor control due to invocation of the voodoo loa Savanne, and inability to achieve an erection for periods longer than 25 minutes. If these side effects are of no concern to you and you undertake full responsibility for them, please sign here.”
Paul turned the laptop to me. “Aren’t those the side effects of coffee anyway?” I asked.
“Yeah, for the most part. Although some coffees don’t cause constipation, and the voodoo stuff is only an issue with some blends.”
I signed. Paul bowed and closed the laptop. “Do you want any milk, sugar or syrup in your drink today?” I shook my head. “That’ll be £3.10 please. Cash or card?”
I handed Paul four pound coins and picked up the Roast of Hapzuwanda. It smelled like raw darkness, as if someone had scooped out a dollop of space and mixed it with crude oil. I could have sworn, for a moment, that a deep, accented voice whispered my name. My lips caressed the dry paper rim of the cup and a river of coffee ran down the back of my throat. I stopped. I stabbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth and front teeth, and smacked my lips. Then I looked at Paul, who watched me behind his clasped, praying hands. “That’s not good. That’s really not good.” I said, making that face that your grandparents make when you show them your new tattoo. “Is it meant to taste like… that?” Paul looked like a freshly slapped-and-screamed-at baby, the facial clenching before the tears started. I put the rancid Roast of Hapzuwanda down on the altar and exhaled through my teeth in apology. “Keep the change?” I said and left the chamber, then the storeroom, then the store.
I looked at my watch. It was 11:36am. I could feel the near-afternoon sleepiness tickling my brain, making my eyelids heavy and my limbs droopy. Stumbling like a drunken octopus, I wandered the caffeine-barren streets, looking for that right bitterness, that pleasant throat drying, the unobtainable cup. I lay down on a nearby bench and looked up at the light grey fluffs of clouds passing overhead. The Roast of Hapzuwanda was long gone from my mind, the sewage from the percolator even farther. I tried to think of similes, metaphors, any sort of imagery to put onto the page. But my engine had no fuel. My horse, no feed. My intellect, no arrogance. My cappuccino, no foam. I ran through this formula in my head until it began to turn stale and cliché. I covered my eyes with my arm. I had tried to fight the oncoming and poorly timed sleepiness but there was no way to defeat it, I wouldn’t make it home. I would have to sleep on this bench.
As I teetered drowsily on the edge of the cliffs of slumber, I smelled it. Like burnt black toast, like the smoke of a snuffed candle, like… coffee. Coffee. Rich, dark, roasted coffee. If there was any ounce of energy left in me, my nose and feet were using it, taking me to wherever the medicine was. Revival was within my grasp.
The city sank into an opaque black-brown ocean. My feet slipped from the ground, my nose had taken point. I exhaled slowly. On the surface of the opaque ocean, a maelstrom formed. A column of white steam rose from the center of the whirlpool, mushroomed out into a thin cloud and ascended to the sky, a series of parallel wooden boards, pocked with halogen bulbs. "Is that everything?" A voice echoed in the void. Where the steam had risen, a recycled cardboard coffee cup floated. "Sir, will there be anything else?" That voice again. My eyes never left the Vegware lid and beige grip of the coffee cup as I shook my head. "That'll be £2.80, sir." I dropped three pound coins into the maelstrom and retrieved my prize. "Thank you, sir! See you later." I nodded to the invisible voice, marveling at the caffeinated warmth I now held in my hands. As I floated backward from the great coffee dispensing whirlpool, sandstone structures surfaced from the brown of the ocean and the city began to retake its form. Cobblestones clicked together beneath my feet and I tipped backwards until I stood on my own two feet again.
My long awaited prize wrapped my tongue in a bitter blanket, dry but warm, welcome. Whatever creature of frustration that had occupied my body had relinquished control and I could return my brain to more pressing matters, like the familiar face that approached me from across the walkway. Well groomed hair, a clean shaven chin and 70’s concert goer wardrobe. Robert was a man from another era, much like myself. However, his era was decidedly less sophisticated and partial to cocaine and other substances. Not that he did any of that, himself. I’d have to strike preemptively and greet him first so that I had command of the conversation's length.
“Robert!” I raised my hand like those high-booted soldiers who had ‘just followed orders’. He returned the hand gesture that a frantic pianist would use during a long and speedy solo. By the overly-excited facade he put on, I knew this would be a ‘catch-up’ lengthened by the mutual anxiety of both participants knowing whatever was said was under the careful scrutiny of the other. It was like microbiologists viewing other microbiologists through microscopes while they themselves are being viewed through microscopes by yet another set of microbiologists and so on. He approached, reaching his arms out, wing-span, to hug me. The hug was somewhat welcome, despite his overzealous use of an old man aftershave to hide the profuse body odour, emanating from his armpits, chest and groin. His hair was a greasy ponytailed mess that smelled of cheap dry shampoo. He hadn’t changed much since I last saw him.
“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in over a year. I think that party in Edinburgh, who was it that was hosting?” He gossiped. “The guy ended up turning the living room carpet orange at the end of the night. With the dark roots coming up from his bleaching.” Robert gestured a halo about his own grease-laden mane.
“Was probably Charlie. He wasn’t hosting, he lived in the box room during the summer because he didn’t want to shell out for a hotel.” Robert clicked his fingers and his face said ‘That’s it’,
“Charlie, yeah. Haven’t seen him since either. What about you? Where have you been, what have you done?”
This question is posed to everyone almost everyday, twice or thrice a day on planet Earth and I’ll be damned if I answer it honestly more than 2% of the time. It’s one of those questions that trigger a boat-load of others; ‘Are they really interested?’ ‘Are they asking for a summary of life since I last saw them?’ ‘When do I stop talking?’ ‘How much do they really want to know?’.
“Not much, just… doing whatever.” I said, “Still on the caffeine.” I raised a little toast with and to my drug of choice. The interaction was starting to wear on me and we’d been standing at the side of an abandoned department store building for less than two minutes.
“Where’d you get it?”
Obviously I didn’t want to tell him about the magic coffee dispensing, cash accepting whirlpool or the disembodied voice. “Coffee place…”, I pointed in a general direction, down a street, somewhere there could have been a coffee shop but it was equally possible that there was a shop selling overpriced, carcinogenic American foods and tourist-y tat destined for landfill, or maybe a shop selling broadband and TV packages, apparently they still exist.
“You mean Descaffeinados?” Robert said, his forehead had scrunched into a series of confused canyons. I looked at him over, what I now realised was , the cup of decaffeinated poison. “The new caffeine- and gluten-free place?” I studied the ‘I’m embarrassed for you’ frown that stretched over his mouth. He looked like a victim of a severe stroke, a sickness I felt I was about to suffer from myself. Gluten-free I could understand but caffeine-free? It was like a joke I’d come up with; unfunny and downright bizarre. At that moment, I had the overwhelming urge to scold him with the sewage waste in my cup but also cling to him for dear life, beg him to hold me up and drag me to the nearest coffee machine. I must have turned a different colour because the pity on Robert’s face had cascaded into disgusted worry. “It was good seeing you, Robert.” I said over my shoulder, breaking from the conversation before my acquaintance turned into a face made of coffee beans or a person made from a bakewell tart, with peanuts for eyes and a mouth of cherry jam, little bakewell slices for fingers. Either way, there was no chance of me sticking around to watch, I was already hoofing it half a mile to home.
The walls of the halls in my flat block didn’t seem to be collapsing when I ran through the front door and I wasn’t stopping to see if they started to. I plunged into my trouser pocket, pulled out my keys, fumbled with the excess keys and key charms that I kept meaning to remove but never found the spare three minutes to do, and, after what felt like an eternity of pissing about with the lock like a drunk teenager trying to get his end away, I opened the door to my flat. I wanted to hug the walls, kiss the lino, make love to the electrical sockets. I was safe. The once-disappointing percolator sat on the hob, a rediscovered idol, the trusty gateway to Nirvana.
As I drank the coffee that I had bitterly cast aside not two hours before, the bliss I had been searching for washed over me. I should probably text Robert and apologise for my strange behaviour, then again, he made a fatal mistake. He spoke to me before I had my morning coffee.