First Taste
1.
I can’t imagine I had coffee before the age of 32. Perhaps myopia drove the aversion, but more likely it was spite. My older brother would often tell me that it was my destiny to drink coffee, that I would be like everyone else in the family, that I had no choice but to succumb to my heritage.
It was like Vader lecturing Luke, at least in my tedious, protagonistic view of reality. My brother and I would repeat these face-offs through the years: hummus, tehina, and even olives would ignite screaming matches. To prove the mettle of my will, I abstained from anything forced on me, holding firm to the kid’s menu like Pharaoh hardening his heart.
I was a child with a powerful mind, capable of shutting anything dangerous or challenging out of consciousness. If I can’t see it through my keyhole, it has no meaning. I still don’t really know what wine is. Or money. I know they exist, but by the time I’ve typed a sentence about them, it’s like I’ve already forgotten. What were we talking about?
As a child, I’d hear stories of the gradual shifts that come with adulthood. When I’d complain about the gap between my front teeth, my mom assured me that she used to have the same, and that with age it closed. Then there was my stepmom’s rebuttal. “Gapped teeth are considered lucky,” she’d say, “in Japan.”
It seemed impossible that those valleys could be bridged: familial, conceptual, dental. I believed that people can change, but not necessarily that I could.
2.
Coffee was occurring all around me, though I was the last to know.
If café society is the last bastion of civility, my dad and stepmom are its paragons. By 8am every morning, they’re at the same joint, with the same cast of highbrow characters, holding court. They met at their favorite café and even held their wedding reception there. My stepmom wrote the copy for the invitation:
He is coffee
She is cream
She is water
He is steam
Their latte love is caffeinated
Their brewing marriage celebrated
So no, it’s not like I was raised under the table of a Maison Kayser. There’s some pedigree here, lost on a child prone to dissociation and fantasy. These blind spots around coffee would prove inconvenient when I worked as a barista.
3.
The first café was in Crown Heights, owned by two sweet gay men in their fifties. One, Felipe, had owned what used to be called a “card shop,” where men could go to buy smut and cruise one another in the aisles. His business partner, Paul, was a volcanic Rhode Island Italian who hadn’t slept in years and was somehow still ripped from his circuit party salad days, which must have been circa Erotica, or maybe Bedtime Stories.
As with any job I’ve had, it’s a miracle they hired me in at all. I’d just moved to the city a few months earlier. I was incompetent, and certainly not allowed near the food. Suffice it to say, at my hands, hordes of gentrifiers were disabused of their latte art. Once, Paul made me cry—he shouted at me when he realized that I didn’t know how to count bills. One time Kathy Bates came in, and I waited on her, shaking and stuttering in awe. It was 2014. She was kind to me.
But for all my ineptitude, the elder gays adored me. Felipe told me that he lost the love of his life to AIDS, and that holding him as he died in his arms was the most important thing he’d ever do. Paul would call me “my David” in the voice of that synagogue hag from Sex and the City, or just refer to me endearingly as “thingy.” We laughed a lot, doing Miranda Priestly impressions, and his stories of White and Black Parties past are now the stuff of oral legend. At one edition, in Miami, some DJ made a mess of their set. Paul stomped up to him and hissed: “you’ll never work in this town again.”
It only lasted a few months, before I pulled one of my usual leaps into oblivion. I became a busboy at a bourgeois restaurant, then quit, then did an IndieGogo for my comic book, which imploded, then I got a magazine job. The café was gone within a year.
4.
That was the beginning of my time in New York. The end, nearly a decade later, came in those liminal years after we got the vaccine. The city had changed, and it wanted me out. By this time I’d come into my sensitivities and gifts, and it felt like long COVID was becoming my identity. Through the wonder of Obamacare, I had a Russian neurologist check out my migraines. I was offered free weekly IV drips, which my father assured me would do nothing. “They give those to French women in their seventies,” he said, “who wanted to sit in the Alps.”
Maybe coffee would help with the migraines, he suggested. Why not? I went to a diner in Bushwick, which my roommate had long ago forbidden me from entering. “It’s a front,” he said, without looking up, as he filed his nails. I took a seat in a cinematic red booth and ordered a cup of coffee, feeling like Kyle McLachlan. I sipped it triumphantly. It was harsh and unforgiving, and kept me up until 4am.
Ultimately, it would not be caffeine or acupuncture or vitamin drips that would cure my migraines, but getting the hell out of Bushwick. “You’re too sensitive to live in New York,” my Akashic reader said to me. It felt like permission to start over.
5.
We mark great change in the company of others; it’s why initiatory rites require an audience. But there are some revelations which hit us when we’re out sight, some syntheses which can’t take form under surveillance. They have to be felt, experimented, without meaning or commentary.
My first sip of coffee was a private rapture. It was the summer of 2023. I’d gotten a lucky break after working a high-paying corporate tarot gig. When the paycheck came in, it afforded me a few months of security. I could live a healthy, happy person’s life. Without the hustle, the martyrdom, and any-minute-now delusions of success, I found my vital life forces rebounding. I even had the first shadow, the first whisper, of abs. Everything felt possible.
My brother had just come to visit, and, out of nowhere, we had the best time together, the best time we’d ever had. There was no need to define myself in opposition to the world anymore.
It was August, and I was dog-sitting my cousin’s dog Nicole, walking the boulevard like the Marvelous Mrs. Odyssey. Nicole and I strolled past the Paté & Puff, where the pastry chefs looked like Lebanese Gaultier models. I was ready to sip from the wellspring of life; this couldn’t be some bullshit hibiscus ice tea.
I ordered an ice Americano. They let me pour my own almond milk. It was like watching a lava lamp, a psychedelic watercolor bloom before my eyes. With that first sip, I became an adult.
6.
That same August, I took too much ecstasy, too late at a party, and was awake for 43 hours. The next night, at an anti-Netanyahu protest, I was still grinding my teeth, even dancing a little to the cheers of SHAME, SHAME, SHAME around me.
Caffeine would prove to be similarly exhilarating, and devastating. I felt like I could lift houses and write entire manuscripts in a matter of hours. And then came the crash, which would render me dazed and paranoid, like Renfield eating flies in the asylum, waiting for his dark master to return.
One night in February, my then-boyfriend and I stayed out until sunrise. It was a beautiful rave, but the surge of shirtless bodies set off the usual Auschwitz oven flashbacks. He was crashing with me, in my studio, and wanted to bring someone home, who clearly wasn’t into me. I had officially been up for 24 hours, and hadn’t eaten in ten. I thought a coffee would perk me up for the coming shenanigans.
Nobody ever taught me how to take care of myself. And so I more or less ended up in a fugue state, between sleeping and waking, watching two other men make love in my bed, like Diane Keaton at the beach house in Annie Hall. Eventually, they cut it short, and someone had to fetch me a bagel. I swore never again: to the drugs, the circuit parties, sordid sex, and to coffee.
7.
In the spring, I flew to Croatia, to meet my friends Henry and Lulu. I booked through Lufthansa, which I’ve long considered to be the pinnacle of elegance. But the flights were licensed through Austrian Airlines, those bastards, whose service can only be described as anti-Semitic. We were herded through the airport like mules. On the flight, when you opened the air conditioning valves, nothing came out. It was like a mummy movie, when they creak open the sarcophagus and dust spews out.
At the Croatian airport, I was stopped by four stunning lady security officers, who looked like they came out of a Fascist-Chic spread in Vogue. They know about the acid I stashed in the Tylenol bottle, I thought, it’s over. But they let me through. I called my dad from the cab, and we talked in Hebrew. “Better switch to English,” he said, “they haven’t had Jews in that country for seventy years.”
I got to Split, where I rolled my luggage over cobblestones, through charmed alleys, great and powerful cats watching my every turn. And there, at a café that looked like an old set from Roman Holiday, sat Lulu and Henry, enjoying an afternoon espresso.
It’s rare that I can afford airfare for a trip, or enjoy myself once I’ve arrived. I hadn’t seen my friends in months, and in this country I knew nothing about, none of the old rules applied. I sat down, crossed my legs and ordered one for myself, feeling like Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk. I could handle it. I didn’t have to be afraid of myself.
8.
Without cultivated intention, all discoveries become mundanities. Over the last month, I’ve had an iced Americano—single shot, so that I don’t turn into the mom from Shameless—every day. I fear that the magic is gone, and when next I see my brother, he’ll have scored the final victory.
Lulu and I laugh when we talk about eating in Manhattan, recalling how many times I’d be caught eating Whole Foods sushi above a trashcan on 14th street, running late for something I deemed important. I don’t want to do this to coffee, not when it’s still precious. It has only just arrived into consciousness, and should not be rushed back out into the blind spot, flattened as all things are by addiction and repetition. It deserves a languid morning, a table at the corner, a pastry shaped by a pornographically hot chef, and the time to sip it down, without fear of mania, observing the rustle of the trees and the drool of a sleeping dog.
