New York Stories, #1: The Coffee Incident

One of the most charming things about living in New York City is the number of strange human appearances and behaviors it allows one to witness every single day. Even during my half-hour commute to work in the morning, and back in the evening, I regularly see a figure so odd, or overhear a snatch of conversation so perfect, that I feel I have to tell my roommate about it, or tuck it away in my mind for later.

For people like me, who tend to get stuck in their own heads a little, the stimulation afforded by the streets of New York can be a gift. Watching keeps our clanging minds safely busy.

Although I know that many if not most New Yorkers have an appreciation for the city’s human spectacle, it is easy to feel as though I’m the only one on the street at a given time who’s having an aesthetic experience. I often feel invisible, as though I am walking around the city behind a one-way mirror. On that side of the glass: the frieze of people I call New York City. On this side of the glass: me, a kind of disembodied seeing eyeball.

A few weeks back, though, something happened to shatter the glass, and remind me that not only is Weird New York a thing that I watch; it’s also something that I’m part of. The watched are watchers, too.

But how far to back up for explanation? Let me set it up by explaining something: I love coffee. I drink coffee every morning. When I gave up caffeine for several months, I brewed myself a mug of decaf every morning and called it my “coffee.”

Another thing: I habitually run late. Not catastrophically late, just late enough to feel a little pressured. These two factors together often mean that I am forced to enjoy my coffee on the go.

I have been a to-go coffee drinker since before latté culture was hegemonic. In high school, I used to take my morning cup to school in a tall plastic Caribou Coffee travel mug with a lid. Then, one sunny spring morning, lounging in a car parked in the back lot behind the school, I panicked and dropped a burning cigarette into the Caribou Coffee mug when I glimpsed a police officer making her rounds of the area. The mug was ruined, and maybe that’s when it started, the drinking coffee out of anything handy.

In college, I used to save the nice Atlas mason jars that ‘Classico’ brand pasta sauce came in. I’d rinse them out, carefully sponge off the label, and pour my AM coffee into them. I liked sitting around the table at my morning classes with a big jar of brown water in front of me. It made me feel tough, and serious.

These days, in the Brooklyn apartment, Meg and I brew coffee one cup at a time using a cone filter and one of those plastic cone contraptions. The filter apparatus sits on the lip of a mug. My current favorite mug is white café-wear, larger at the top than the bottom, like an oversized teacup.

The coffee we make is, if I say so myself, sublime. I’m not much better at leaving the house with time to spare than I have ever been. I have a five-minute walk to the subway down Smith Street, and how could I leave a sublime cup of coffee behind? More days than now, I carry it with. I hold it out from my body as I walk down the sidewalk, marveling at the powers of balance that allow me to adjust my wrist so not to spill any. I perch it in the crook of my arm as I fumble for the MetroCard in my wallet, and continue drinking, on the train, as I ride. Sometimes my fellow passengers shoot me a glance, and sometimes they give me a wider berth, which I don’t mind. Still, I hadn’t considered my coffee-drinking patterns eccentric until the morning I passed the two men resting outside the Met supermarket on Smith.

The Met is our local large grocery store. Meg won’t shop there because she claims that it smells like corpses inside. I agree that it smells like corpses, but I am stingier and lazier than she is. Every morning, workers open the metal hatch on the sidewalk outside the Met, a truck full of food pulls up, and a team of laborers tosses cardboard boxes down from the truck; the boxes shoot down a metal ramp, through the hatch and into the corpse-smelling bowels of the store. I often look at the ramp, and the foam of dairy or maybe vegetable matter on it, and tell myself not to shop at the Met anymore. But by evening they are gone.

So one morning, I was walking by the Met, leaning forward from the neck to get a sip from my mug of sublime coffee without slowing down, and I caught the eye of two men, employees of the store, who were lounging, maybe having a cigarette, in the shade of the overhang of the store.

I sensed the first one smile, and I thought: ‘Oh no, street harassment?,’ but he just looked at me and said, in the most bemused tone of voice:

“A cup of COFFEE?”

I smiled, taken aback and also relieved, and said the first words that came into my head. “Why not?” I raised the mug to them, slightly, as I said it.

The two men paused. Then the other one raised a beefy hand as if in blessing, and exclaimed: “Enjoy!”

As I walked away I imagined the men, coming home from work, pulling out a chair at the table at home, sitting down heavily on it, and then cracking open a brew and in the relaxing, winding-down minutes at the end of the day, saying to his wife or girlfriend or whomever he debriefs with usually, “I saw the damndest thing this morning…”