Now, I’m not a complete scaredy cat. I mean, I don’t fight tigers or act as a body-double for a third world, war-crime-committing dictator for a living, but I don’t shirk the company of spiders, flee from snakes…and mice, well let’s just say I could eat mice for breakfast – although I choose not too.
Having said all of that, coffee scares the bejesus out of me. It makes my knees quiver, my brow sweat and my eyes twitch. I become skittish at best, catatonic at worst and everything in between whenever confronted with my caffeine charged, beverage nemesis. I see no signs of this abating, if anything it’s getting worse. I’ve been known to avoid entire countries (mainly ones famous for coffee), as a result of this all consuming phobia, and recently, even the very thought of South America makes me break out in hives. In fact, once in the mid-nineties whist flying to London from Sydney, I unsuccessfully tried to hijack the plane to prevent it from making a stop over in (coffee-filled) Rome. Unfortunately, I timed my attack just as the stewardesses were serving tea and coffee, the aroma of the offending liquid forcing me to shudder violently and dribble uncontrollably. I managed to survive the ordeal by breathing deeply through a urine soaked handkerchief – which I understand was a technique employed by the allies when Jerry used coffee on our boys in the trenches – but by the time I had regained my composure, I was in line at an Italian customs desk being asked why I smelled more than a little of piss.
Now my deep seated fear of the henceforth unmentionable drink, while absolute, is certainly not due to the taste. I happen to not only enjoy the taste of a well fashioned espresso, but am also fond of the various combinations of colour and taste that one can brew with the instant varieties. So fond in fact, that a friend and I developed a series of quaint (and in hindsight, vaguely racist) names for our particular favourites. White with two was Audrey Hepburn, black with one was Mr T. I won’t even mention what a Jennifer Lopez was. Anyway, the point is that I like taste of coffee, even instant. The thing about coffee that makes me wet myself on embarrassingly frequent occasions is not the taste, but the unpredictable impact that it always has on my life.
People can’t seem to make major decisions these days without “doing it over coffee”, which spoils the act of actually drinking coffee if you know that there’s a very good chance that it’s going to accompany a very public break-up with your partner or a very noisy dressing down by your boss. And it’s not just the negative possibilities that put me on edge, when she asks me up for a coffee, what does she mean? Does she mean no-holds-barred passionate lovemaking that starts on the balcony, makes a brief – but highly memorable – stop-over next to the toasted sandwich press and ends on a pile of shoes in her walk-in wardrobe; or just an Audrey Hepburn?
These are the possibilities that fire around in my skull when offered a coffee. The possibility of being fired, shagged senseless or dumped in public. The possibility of getting to the bottom of the cup with no job, no partner or no desire to leave the bottom of someone’s wardrobe. It’s the wild, unbridled and ultimately uncontrollable nature of coffee that makes me shiver and sweat, makes me stammer and shake, makes me order a tea instead. After all, nothing weird, unpredictable or exciting even happened around tea.
Kent Valentine (in Boston)