“Where y’all hurryin’ off to?” one called out as we approached our car. “We’re good company here at the Red Dog. Why don’t y’all come back in for a while?”
We muttered something about driving all day, omitting to mention that we’d carelessly allowed our Aryan Nation memberships to expire.
“What hotel y’all staying at?”
I thought about our room with a door that didn’t lock.
“Uh, the White Plaza,” I lied.
“Don’t know that one. Say, you’re welcome to stay at me and my friend’s place.” He pointed down the lightless road. “Just down a way.”
We made vague no-thank-you noises. He came a little closer. His friend got out of his truck.
“Maybe next time,” I jumped into the car. “Y’all have a nice night.”
“All right then,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all run into you again.”
“He seemed sweet,” said Meg, as we drove back to the hotel. “Do you think he could be my new boyfriend?”
THE FACT THAT AMERICA LEARNED TO MAKE DECENT COFFEE ON the heels of its first major military defeat makes wonderful fodder for the coffeecentric history of civilization (not to mention the Joffe Coffee Theory of Expansionism). Unfortunately, it is probably best understood as part of the 60s rebellion against overprocessed food. Think whole wheat bread = whole bean coffee. So it’s no surprise that the specialty coffee movement was born in the counterculture capital of Berkeley, California, when a gentleman named Alfred Peet opened Peet’s Tea and Coffee. They specialized in fresh dark roast coffee and were so successful that his partners soon opened their own places, like Boston’s Coffee Connection, Florida’s Barney’s, and, of course, Seattle’s Starbucks, giving birth to an industry now worth about six billion dollars annually.
At the top of this food chain is the ubiquitous Starbucks. It has become quite fashionable to rag on the little mermaid (that’s the lady in their logo; Starbucks is the first mate in Moby Dick). There are entire Web sites devoted to lambasting the company. But I’m going to have to differ. Sure, they’re a mega-corporation destroying hundreds of mom-and-pop cafés. But that’s just something large corporations do. The important thing is that they serve fine coffee. Their baristas are generally first-rate. I say this with a grimace—it goes against every grain in my body—but if I’d seen a Starbucks in the wastelands of Oklahoma my joy would have been equal to that of al-Shadhili’s when Allah first revealed to him the secret of the coffee bean a thousand years ago. As far as our quest was concerned, however, Starbucks was persona non grata, because it can no more make a great cup of American coffee than Verdi can write rhythm and blues. It operates entirely within an Italian esthetic of espressos and cappuccinos, the antithesis of the indigenous American brewing technique best described as stewing. This tragedy can largely be traced back to the intensely popular White House Cookbook, a collection of presidential recipes whose 1887 introduction boasts that it “represents the progress and present perfection of the culinary art.”
Among the hundreds of dishes, including squirrel soup, is the single most influential coffee recipe in the history of the United States.
BOILED COFFEE
One coffee cup full of ground coffee, stirred with one egg and part of the shell, adding a half cup of cold water. Put in the coffee boiler and pour onto it a quart of boiling water. As it uses and begins to boil, stir it down with a silver spoon or fork. Boil hard for 10 or 12 minutes. Remove from the fire and pour out a cupful of coffee then pour back into the coffeepot. Keep hot, but not boiling, for another five minutes. Send to the table HOT.”
This is nothing less than the atomic bomb of coffee brewing. There is no bean in the world, nay, not the finest Jamaican Blue Mountain, nor the most resonant of the Aged Sumatras, that can retain its exotic overtones when subjected to such abuse. It can, however, when done properly, produce a furry cup, said to be emblematic of the Texas Panhandle through which we were now cruising.
“You’ll find it there, boys. Don’t you worry. That’s Golden Urn country. If you’re near Pflugerville, try Dot’s Café,” wrote ryannon@worldnet. net as we crossed the Oklahoma-Texas border. “I know what you mean, though. Truck stops just don’t do coffee the way they used to.”
I still don’t know where the hell Pflugerville is, because we were determined to stay on the Route 66 highway all the way to LA. Only problem was, we couldn’t find it on the map. It was only when we were deep in the Panhandle, driving on the six-lane I–40, that we noticed a lonely little two-lane blacktop running alongside, appearing and disappearing, like a kid brother who wants to play with the big boys. It was Route 66, removed from the maps by the feds when they put in 1–40, but still there. Fifty years back it was the route followed by thousands of Americans fleeing West, and its little towns—Amarillo, McLean, Jericho, Con way—were mini-Meccas where travelers refueled on petroleum and coffee. Today nothing but a thousand mile long ghost town littered with abandoned gas stations and boarded-up coffeeshops.
It was like this all Saturday. Sunday morning we saw a weathered blue billboard peeking over the edge of a boarded-up hotel. Adrien’s Coffeeshop. We pulled off the main road to see if anybody was home and ran into a handpainted sign that read “Welcome to Adrien! You Are Now Exactly Midway Between Chicago and Los Angeles on the Old Route 66! Come on in!”
We did. The place was decorated with cow skulls and jesus loves you license plates. The bathrooms had screen doors on them. We ordered a cup. It proved to be the first all-American joe we’d found—black, tarry, and powerful, rich with half-and-half, cascading in waves from the waitress’s Pyrex coffeepot and into our mugs, breaking over us, washing through our veins like rocket fuel. It was awful and terrifying and beyond compare.
“Actually, this coffee isn’t that bad,” I said, once my tongue’s trembling had come under control.
“It’s the best,” said Meg.
Church services had just ended, and the locals were coming in, all dolled up in flowered dresses and ten-gallon hats. Even the preachers were there, including an older fellow with immaculate silver hair and his fat-faced son of about twenty, both wearing three-piece polyesters and flashing pearly white shit-eaters. Would have thought they were running for president, the way those two carried on. Our sweet-faced waitresses made us happy with T-bones and handcut fries. We finished with the finest blackberry cobbler I’ve ever eaten, fresh from the oven, crowned with a dollop of creamy synthetic vanilla ice cream. Manna.
“This is the greatest pie I’ve ever had in my life,” said Meg. We ordered another serving. “This is the greatest place, don’t you think?”
I thought that was laying it on a little strong. “It’s not bad,” I agreed.
“This is it, right?” Meg was begging. “No more research, please?”
Meg wasn’t looking too good. We’d been consuming about twelve cups of Black Death a day, in addition to large amounts of ephedrine, a legal speed popular with truck drivers. We didn’t know it then, but the FDA had recently made caffeine ephedrine “cocktails” illegal because they produced a number of symptoms we were both experiencing, such as laughing spasms alternating with intense paranoia and depression.1 I was even getting the twitching-eyeball syndrome common among caffeine-crazy crews on nuclear submarines. I noticed that Meg’s brightly glazed, blue eyeballs seemed about to pop out of her head.
“Okay,” I said. “This is the best cup.”
“You mean the worst, right?”
“It’s the best of the worst,” I said. “And that’ll have to be good enough.”
After Adrien, we understood Texas. The spineless Christian gospel coming out of our radio was supposed to sound the way our air conditioner felt. It was all about smooth living, tight jeans, and the love of the Lord Jesus H. Christ. A-merica, A-men. I was so spaced out I came within inches of sideswiping a station wagon full of kids. But they weren’t angry, they were Texan, and showered us with little paw-paws of Christian love as they pulled up alongside. Th
ank you, sir, said their weird little grins, for almost sending us to Our Savior.
“I could see living here,” Meg muttered over and over. “I could live here the rest of my life. I think I just love Texas. Maybe I was a cowgirl in another life.”
I told her how on fine nights the cowboys parked their pickups in a circle, turned on their headlights, and, with every radio tuned to the same station, held dances in the middle of the prairie.
I thought Meg was going to cry.
“Can you just drop me off at the next town?” she said.
From Adrien we headed north toward Taos, New Mexico. The flatlands shriveled into red-rock cliffs. The air grew drier. But once the Adrien euphoria was gone, we knew we could be anywhere. Every place had the same restaurants, the same buildings; even the same food, all cooked on the other side of the continent, flash-frozen, shipped, and then reheated until any surviving flavor was sent screaming to oblivion. It’s the American way: buy a piece of land in the middle of nothing, divide it into cubicles, then clean it until it smells like nothing, cool it til it feels like nothing, and paint it the color of nothing. When you’ve driven the local businesses out, start raising the rent. None of it was real. If I pushed on the accelerator, the view out the window changed. If I pushed a computer keyboard button, the computer screen did likewise, with more postings pouring in every minute.
“Caffeine allows me to get closer to my god,” came on as we hit Arizona. “But now his voice is fading away I have constantly increased the strength but now I’m putting so much in, the powder has trouble dissolving…I need pure caffeine…PLEASE HELP ME”
It seemed to me, driving through the desolate Navajo reservation in Arizona, that each age had used the bean according to its understanding of reality. The early coffee cults of Ethiopia and the Middle East saw the drug as a doorway to the mind of God. The secular humanists of eighteenth-century Europe used it as a tool to create a reasoned society We citizens of the brave new world, who worship efficiency and speed, are just turning it into a high, another way to go a little faster, get there a bit quicker, and feel a little better. To hell with the consequences.
The rest of the trip is a blur. I remember Meg and me being the only customers in a cavernous Cracker Coffeeshop near Flagstaff at three in the morning, laughing so uncontrollably that the waitress refused to refill our cups. I remember the rancid coffee at the Circus Circus All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Buffet in Vegas, and the lady at the next table weeping as she tallied all the money she had lost; the streets full of the ugly, the stupid, and the greedy and Larry, the blackjack dealer from Laos. And always more ephedrine and more coffee and more gin and Meg always laughing in the next seat, singing out of tune, but laughing, laughing so hard she’s shaking with the strain. Only now she’s in the driver’s seat and there are hundreds of cars swirling around us. We’re in the middle of some monster-size merger on the freeway into downtown Los Angeles—we’d made it to the West Coast!—but Meg can’t stop laughing, and it’s so bad she can’t steer anymore, she’s slowing down to a dead stop in the middle of the freeway while thousands of leather-faced L.A. commuters swirl around us like locusts, screaming and furious, shaking their fists and honking—how dare you slow down! Don’t ever slow down! Go, go, go! But Meg is not going anywhere; she’s gone, gone, gone, tears of laughter rolling down her face, lips curled back in a grin like an angry dog.
1 Our old friend from Yemen, qat, is closely related to ephedrine. Both contain the same active chemical and cause similar effects. There’s also a form of meta-qat, called Jeff, Mulva, or Cat, gaining a following in America’s underground drug market.
Acknowledgments
Thanks, danke, merci, and asante sana to the following. To my wife (if she’ll have me), Nina J. To Tanya La Taz (for refusing to marry me). To my brother Troy and his wife Paula, for lodging me for three months, and Tom Yee of SF for not evicting me when he could have. Gratitude to my editor Juri Jurjevics at Soho for his pithy editorial observations (is ugh! really a proofreading symbol?) and my agent Felicia Eth for perseverance beyond the call of duty. Kisses to Jeff for all those C’s. To Annabel Bentley for her accommodating ways. Special thanks to Abera of Harrar, and a variety of Yemeni men whose names I could never pronounce, and of course Yangi for such outstanding con skills. To Josef Joffe for his insightful speculations. Thanks to the few million that made the trip so annoying, and of course the legions of cyber denizens on Alt. caffeine, coffee, Η -France, etc., whose generous supply of information and misinformation could keep anybody mystified for centuries.
Special thanks to the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, Switzerland; the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum in London; the archives of Catherine Cotelle; the British Museum, Asian Wing; the French National Library; the New York Research Library; the libraries of the Universities of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles; the Municipal Library of Addis Ababa; the Library of the University of Addis Ababa; the unnamed library in Sana’a, Yemen; London’s Guildhall Library; Vienna’s National Library; the municipal libraries of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and probably a few others.
Copyright
First published in the United States of America
in 1999 by Soho Press Inc., New York
Published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2014
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Stewart Lee Allen, 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 751 8
www.canongate.tv
The Devil's Cup Page 20