Colombian Coffee

(from Portraits of an Imaginary Young Man)

December came and went. It usually does. It was dark and snowed a lot. Go figure. Technically, for the five minutes it was light enough out to appreciate it, we had a white Christmas. I still hated Christmas. Malcolm and I stocked up on the essentials—beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes, TV dinners, playing cards, toilet paper—and settled in like bears intent on hibernating through the creative death of the holiday season. Neither of us got a damn thing done, which I submit was for the best. December makes for sentimental, and usually just plain shitty, art.

Meanwhile, Psycho Bitch was whisked away never to be seen or heard from again, the Trust Fund Kid flew back to Spain for two months, and Slug Jerky took a well-deserved break from rehearsing, leaving only the Korean counterfeiters (who never skipped a beat) down on the second floor as the Funhouse acquired an uncharacteristic air of genteel, soporific monotony broken only by the occasional debauch when Malcolm and I, bursting at the seams with unchanneled energy, tied one on and took turns leaping naked and giggling into the waist-high snowdrifts in the parking lot, then rushing back upstairs and leaping into the claw-footed tub full of scalding bubble bath. After all, we drunkenly reminded ourselves, 1992 was Leap Year.

Things didn’t return to normal (the wrong word, admittedly) until mid-January, when I got back into a writing rhythm with the closing of the book on Christmas and Malcolm, in addition to resuming his word paintings, started making regular trips down to Baltimore every other week, staying four or five days at a stretch with his old RICA pals while working on an Anglican church mural commissioned by some snooty arts council associated with Johns Hopkins. Apparently, it was a big deal as he’d been selected from hundreds of applicants worldwide, and it brought him considerable notoriety, which for an artist is infinitely better than garden variety fame.

The mural depicted a classical religious motif: Saint George slaying the dragon. I should say it was supposed to depict Saint George and the dragon. I never saw the finished product because Malcolm never got to finish it, but he described it privately as a satirical homage to Picasso’s Don Quixote and the Windmill, one that playfully deconstructed the latter’s image by fragmenting it into a highly abstract formalist mosaic, a kind of neo-Byzantine hypercubism that began, disconcertingly, to resemble swollen female genitalia—but only if you stared long enough.

“That should give those WASP fuckers something to chew on,” he said with a touch of Navajo pride.


It so happened while Malcolm was away in Baltimore and I was alone in the Funhouse, during the first week of February, that my imaginary life went to pieces. A whole series of more or less serious catastrophes waited until that exact window of time to rear their ugly heads, setting the stage for the “Colombian coffee incident,” as it has since become immortalized in these pages.

Anything I write about that week is likely to be imbued with bitterness, begging the question: “Why write about it at all?” To which I respond: to detach myself utterly from it ... To see my misery as purely textual ... To view the person who went down like the Hindenburg, who twice burst into tears and wept, realizing in his initial agony he’d never cried before while wearing contacts (a present from Malcolm when my jumper started rimming out) and wondering whether they’d float out of my eyes and stick like cellophane to my cheeks—I say, to view this person as in no way connected to myself, as merely a fictional character with but vague similarities to the unmediated me, to deconstruct Derrida and create a metaphysics of absence, of myself, which might sufficiently distance all traces of my pain ...

That Thursday my afternoon basketball was cut short by a flagrant elbow that opened up the skin above my left eye like a stiletto. I bled my way back to the men’s locker room, where I frightened myself in the mirror.

Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt at all. What stung was the fact I’d been scorching, red-hot, knocking down Houdini shots you typically only make in dreams: Jordanesque fade-aways falling out of bounds, Larry Bird rainbows over the backboard, Magic Johnson reverse lay-ups in lane traffic thicker than thieves.

I spent the next several hours with a bag of ice on my eye waiting to be stitched back together at Maroon University Health Services. But it was late in the day, they were short-staffed, and officially I wasn’t even a student, so I ended up being transferred a few blocks over to a downtown hospital that catered primarily to crack addicts. I finally left that scary place around 7:30, exhausted but not altogether dispirited—yet—with eight stitches camouflaged in the brownish fur of my eyebrow.

The next morning I woke up with the flu: nausea, sweats, pins, needles, nose running like a stripped faucet, throat wrapped with rubber bands, brain foggier than London. For most of the day all I could do was lie there like an ailing odalisque, blowing my nose, coughing up phlegm, floating deliriously on fever waves.

I couldn’t recall ever having the flu before and made a mental note never to have it again. I’d been spoiled by good health, no doubt about it. I wanted to feel better so I could again enjoy the mornings after when I felt like crap. I honestly didn’t know what I’d do when I recovered. I’d probably end up killing myself, I’d be so happy not to be dying.

Then nature called and I staggered up off my futon to find a Chiquita banana sticker stuck to my foot. How it got there was a mystery. Brain on the fritz, I momentarily hallucinated I’d broken my ankle—a thought that vanished into the fog as I lunged for the piss bucket I kept in the corner of my nook that this time served as a #2 chamber pot. I must have sat there an hour, maybe longer, shitting out everything: the previous night’s minestrone, the gyro I’d had for lunch, a bag of Bugles, my large intestine, my ileocecal valve, a rusty Altoids tin, a pair of black fishnet stockings, The Wings of the Dove, a KISS live album I’d been looking for ...

But that was just the beginning. No sooner had I wiped than I started throwing up, then I started shitting again, then I was vomiting fountains and pissing out the ass at the same time—a wicked combination—then I had the dry heaves at both ends—more devastating still—and when there finally wasn’t a single cell left inside me, when I was just an empty shell of a human being, a dry husk of my former robust self, I passed out in my own mess and slept like a fetus in amniotic fluid.


My recovery was glacial in its slowness. Virtually every part of my body ached. I coughed and sneezed so much I felt like an allergic reaction waiting to happen. I kept telling myself, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll feel better.” But every morning it was still today.

I managed to decontaminate my nook and, whenever absolutely necessary, stagger around the Funhouse, a more-vertiginous-than-usual enterprise that gave me a bizarre sensation of speedy lightness as if at any minute I might levitate. But mostly, I just lay on the couch with Dayquil headswimmy eyes watching MTV and the Playboy Channel. At last, on the third day, I rose again. I felt like a river slowly cleansing itself after a flood has washed it full of silt.

On the subject of storms: the next morning, as a prelude to the Colombian coffee incident, we got blasted by a winter hurricane. It started with snow. Imagine that: snow in Endurance. Almost as weird a concept as sand in the desert, fish in the ocean. The sun didn’t even come up. I mean, yes, it came up. You just couldn’t see it with snow funneling in white tornadoes in the wind.

Under ideal circumstances snowstorms inspire a cozy, complacent feeling in me—as if the world and its cares have up and vanished, as if I’ve just been relieved of all responsibility, suddenly reverted to a fairytale childhood. But that morning in my tiny world of illness, I felt like a squirming caterpillar in the toxic cocoon of a nuclear winter.

I made the mistake of venturing outdoors for two reasons: 1) I was starving with no food left in the Funhouse and 2) the grad seminar I’d been auditing at Maroon University was scheduled to meet. Comparative Literature 287, “Hallucinatory Journeys,” a course for which, despite lacking an undergraduate degree, I felt uniquely qualified.

Cherry (from Halloween) had suggested I audit it and personally recommended me to the professor, who happened to be her thesis advisor, an aging firebrand named Ancy Stromboli regarded in circles who cared as the reigning postneoanti-something maven, who agreed to let me sit in on condition I complete all the written assignments. The previous week I’d turned in my first essay, a ten-page writerly reading of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell I’d enjoyed working on immensely, and was looking forward to getting my grade. So even though I still felt under the weather, so to speak, I bundled up in my best Eskimo gear and trundled out into the day.

After approximately a hundred hours quarantined in the Funhouse, I was beginning to suspect—erroneously—I was the only person left alive on the planet. Forty-five minutes from setting out, I managed to reach campus through two feet of snow and gale-force winds, but at least it wasn’t as cold as I’d expected. It was barely below freezing, in fact, and seemed to be getting warmer. The snowflakes had that furry unfocused quality they get just before they turn to rain and I could taste the salty humidity in the air streaming in from the Atlantic.

I stopped at the cafeteria and ate an overpriced Philly cheesesteak before tromping down to Marshin Hall—where I discovered my class had been canceled. A hunchbacked custodian with a speech impediment named Bernard told me. I think that was what he told me. I thought I heard him say all classes had been canceled. In any case they certainly had been. I mean Maroon University never canceled classes—but it did that day.

With nothing else to do, I swung by Professor Stromboli’s office on the odd chance she was in. She wasn’t but the seminar papers were in a cardboard box beside her door. I eagerly thumbed through the stack, suppressing the temptation to peek at other people’s grades, until I found my essay. I’d put the better part of a week into it and felt pretty confident, but was still a little nervous.

For good reason. My essay was so red it looked lacerated. There wasn’t a single sentence without corrections. The grade was an ugly C-, but Professor Stromboli’s comments were infinitely more withering. “I understand that you’ve taken considerable creative—to say nothing of interpretive—liberties and that you probably enjoyed indulging yourself,” she wrote, “but I must inform you that enjoying oneself is not the point of serious scholarship.” I guess deep down I always knew that was the mentality, but to see it actually in writing—well, what could you say?

I left Marshin Hall in the foulest of moods, my self-esteem the size of a poppy seed. By this time the snow had become rain. In the wind it sprayed sideways into my face, subsided, sprayed sideways into my face, subsided. Dejected, disheartened, with the creeping sensation of turning into the buffoon hero of a modern Canterbury tale, I sloshed back across town through the always already wetness as the bone-cold drizzle soaked me down to the stitches above my slightly swollen—and still rather sore—eye.

Why’s all this absurd shit happening to me? I wondered aloud as I trudged along. If I can just roll the absurdity over, underneath I should find profundity, right?


Anticipating a hot bath, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and entered the Funhouse. The rapidly melting snow on the roof must have overloaded the building’s gutters and seeped through the worn shingles, because it was literally raining inside.

Raindrops were splattering on the Ping-Pong table, the Harley-Davidsons, the Box People, Bach’s Organ, Tina Turner, Malcolm’s paintings, my desk, the kitchen stove, the couch, the TV, the stereo. The floor had transformed into a lake three or four inches deep. You could have sailed toy boats on it like the old Italian men did on Sundays in the fountain up at DiMaggio Square. That awful scene of the Funhouse-lake has remained like a bloodstain in my memory. Whenever I think of Rhode Island now, regardless of any other images that come to mind, I immediately picture Atlantis.

That was when I cried first. I sat down in the water and wept like a new widow. I lay down in the middle of the lake and squeezed out a torrent of self-conscious tears, feeling the universe closing in, tightening around me like a boa constrictor, sawing me in two with iron scales. If I’d let myself I probably could have cried all afternoon. The situation was so far beyond my control I was at a total loss, but eventually I mustered the strength to get up and go into the kitchen to wash the dishes in the rain.

Washing dishes has always been my principal form of meditation. I’ve tried guided meditation, transcendental meditation, primordial sound meditation, zazen, qigong, yoga—but nothing has ever given me the clarity and peace of mind washing a stack of filthy dishes does. Something about the warm soapy water, the circular motion of the sponge, the little squirts and whooshes, the release of impurities followed by a cold, cleansing rinse ...

But that day I should have had a dishwasher. I was down to just a few cups and some silverware, when the ceramic mug I was washing suddenly broke and nearly sliced off my pinky. Blood erupted from the wound and the sink turned instantly crimson.

This time it hurt like hell, but the real pity was it was my favorite mug, the one with the cross-eyed cows that reminded me of the salad days with Dante et al in Lipton Hill. That mug had come to symbolize a time when the spell of youth wasn’t yet broken, and now that it was in pieces, the mug, my loss—after five years—finally hit home.

I stood there at the sink bleeding with tears streaming down my face again, not so much from physical pain but because of a sudden flashback to our last summer together at the fishpond, a time swaddled in love and laughter, and I suddenly felt extremely old at twenty-three as I watched my carefree youth recede and disappear like a spaghetti noodle sucked down the drain.

I was in the bathroom having just finished bandaging my pinky, which really needed half a dozen stitches it never got as evidenced by a scar I have to this day, when the phone rang. With a vague foreboding, a leaden throbbing in my gut, I walked across the lake under the rain and picked up the receiver ...
 
(I should explain that, at long last, in order to pull my own weight around the Funhouse and take some of the financial pressure off Malcolm, I’d found a steady source of income: credit cards. Even though, technically speaking, I didn’t exist, I’d been issued several with extremely generous limits and was using one to pay off another. The interest was outrageous, I admit, but that was okay since I didn’t plan to pay it.)

My intuition was justified. A metallic, scarcely human voice representing some first national bank or other verified my identity and proceeded to inform me I was three months behind in my Gold Card payments.

“Three months!” I exclaimed.

Metallic Voice: “That is correct. Just what have you been thinking, Mr. Soloman?”

“Well, you see, I really haven’t been thinking—”

Metallic Voice: “It is my duty to inform you that you are in default. Can you understand the severity of this? You owe six billion, four hundred million, three hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighteen—”

“Come on, be serious!”

Metallic Voice: “Okay, you owe four hundred and twenty dollars.”

“But I never received a bill! I certainly never opened one!”

Metallic Voice: “Failure to receive billing statement does not relieve you of the responsibility of paying your bill on time.”

“Isn’t that a Catch-22?”

Metallic Voice: “Of course. Repayment of past due amount is due immediately. Late charges will continue to accrue until full payment is received. Did you notice how I rhymed?”

“Yes.”

Metallic Voice: “Hold just one hour, please.”

“What!”

Metallic Voice: “Sorry. Have a nice day.”

I replaced the receiver and stood perfectly still a very long time, maybe an hour. I was still standing in the rain feeling debt’s cold finger, feeling my own finger throb hotly, contemplating various methods of suicide, wishing I had one of Ben Vautier’s little Fluxus kits for just that purpose—when Malcolm walked in the door.

His train had just arrived after several hours of snow delay. He looked around the Funhouse with an utterly blank expression. I was reminded of those pictures of disaster victims you see in the news, the ones who have lost everything. Walking slowly over to the south wall, he touched one of his drenched paintings as if he expected it was all just an illusion.

On the verge of a third round of tears, I told him everything that had happened in his absence: my basketball injury, the downtown hospital, my stitches, my flu, the winter hurricane, Professor Stromboli’s comments, the breaking of the mug, my pinky, my default.

Malcolm was, as usual, magnanimous. Putting aside his own not inconsiderable concerns, he poured two glasses of Cutty Sark and handed me one. I drank it. He poured me another. I drank it as well. Slowly, things were coming back into perspective. After a third Cutty Sark, I was able to get a grip.

“It’s simple,” I said. “If I just ignore my problems long enough, they’ll disappear.”

I drank a fourth Cutty Sark, soothed by this knowledge.

“You’ve been through hell,” said Malcolm.

“That’s putting it lightly.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I guess. What time is it?”

“Two-thirty. Let’s go up to Arnolfini’s and have some baked ziti.”

Needless to say but I’ll say it anyway, the mention of Arnolfini’s hit me like a ray of sunshine. Just minutes before I’d hoped it would keep raining and wash me away, but now I had a reason to go on living.

“But what about the Funhouse? What about your paintings?”

“What about them? They can’t get any wetter. And we still have to eat. Some hot food will do us both good. Let’s go.”


Before really getting to know Malcolm, I suspected that, being an artist, he was more self-consumed than his outwardly altruistic behavior would indicate—but he never proved otherwise. We left the Funhouse to rain on itself and headed for Liberty Hill. In normal conditions it was only a ten-minute walk, but with two feet of melting snow to negotiate under that shotgunned wineskin of a sky, it took us twenty.

In that time we heard three different sirens go off. Sirens were always going off in Endurance. Things were always being stolen in Endurance—especially, as previously noted, cars. Virtually everyone I knew had had at least one vehicle stolen. But what could you expect from a state run by the mob?

Naturally, Arnolfini’s was closed because of the weather. My spirits sank back into my soaked boots and I started swearing. I was pretty drunk. Malcolm had to calm me down. We tried several other restaurants, all closed. I was teetering within inches of a nervous, hypoglycemic breakdown—when we finally found a restaurant serving lunch!

I’d walked by the place dozens of times but had never eaten there. Neither had Malcolm. There was some scaffolding outside and a sign: PLEASE BEAR WITH US—WE’RE REDOING OUR FAÇADE. The place was practically empty. I’d heard they had good coffee. We decided to give it a shot.

The dining room was nice enough: white linen tablecloths, real flowers in vases on the tables, Vivaldi over hidden speakers, large color photographs of Palermo and Agrigento adorning the walls. Our waiter was rather handsome in a vaguely sleazy way and spoke with a fresh-off-the-boat accent.

Something about him gave me the creeps, but as a waiter he was extremely proficient. Malcolm and I sat by the window discussing Jackson Pollock and stuffing ourselves with focaccia and penne pasta in a pink vodka sauce (the waiter’s suggestion) washed down by several glasses of decent Chianti. It wasn’t Arnolfini’s, but it wasn’t bad.

I had a level-three buzz going and was feeling quite excellent about my imaginary life again. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but wasn’t Jackson Pollock the leader of the Diarrheal Movement?”

Malcolm didn’t bat an eye. I realized he wasn’t exactly sober himself.

“I believe you’re thinking of de Kooning.”

“Maybe.”

“That reminds me. I once had diarrhea for a solid month.”

“A solid month?”

“A solid month.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Worse. It hurt. I’d just turned eighteen and was spending the summer hiking by myself in the Rockies before starting art school. I got giardia and then got stuck under my tarp in the rain for a week. I was so sick all I could do was roll over and shit as far as I could out into the rain.”

“That’s adulthood for you. Isn’t it a bitch?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m trying to hurry up and get through with it.”

“What do you think about dessert?”

“In general or right now?”

“Right now.”

“I think I’d explode. That focaccia seems to be expanding.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Some coffee would be nice, though.”

“Yes. I’ve heard they have very good coffee. Where’s our greasy waiter anyway?”

“I haven’t seen him lately. He slipped into the back.”

“How’s that for service? It’s barbaric, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait.”

Just as I finished speaking, our waiter reappeared and rattled off the desserts of the day. The tiramisu was tempting, despite my full belly, but I decided against it. “What I’d really enjoy,” I said, “is some of your wonderful coffee I hear so much about.”

The waiter cocked an eye and examined me with an intrigued expression. “Do you really like coffee?” he asked.

“Like? I love coffee. I admit I once preferred the smell. But now I couldn’t survive without three cups a day. It’s one of my principal food groups.”

Without responding, and without bothering to ask Malcolm whether he wanted coffee, the waiter turned on a dime and walked quickly back into the kitchen. Malcolm and I looked at each other and shrugged. “It’s got to be better than that antifreeze from Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said. Several minutes passed before the kitchen door reopened. Along with our empty-handed waiter, the maître d’ appeared, also empty-handed but wearing an unctuous smile.

“Giuseppe tells me you like coffee,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “I do.”

“I see. If I may be so bold, what type of coffee do you like really?”

At three-thirty on a snowy Tuesday afternoon in a restaurant where by now we were the only customers, this question made absolutely no sense. Then again, maybe I was just too frazzled to understand it. The past few days had been pretty trying. Maybe the maître’s question was altogether profound. For one reason or another, I decided to go along as if I knew what he was talking about.

“Well,” I said, “I appreciate many kinds of coffee. But my favorite is Colombian.”

“Why you don’t tell me you’re a connoisseur! And so young! How long have you known coffee this way?”

How long had I known coffee? What kind of question was that? Nothing—I mean nothing—about this conversation was adding up. I glanced at Malcolm for guidance, but he simply shrugged again as if to say, “You’re on your own, kid.” I looked back at the maître, who was sort of talking to Giuseppe with his eyes, with the panicky sensation I was on the wrong end of Candid Camera.

“Actually,” I persevered, “I’ve known coffee a long time. I started drinking it when I was in high school. I was just thinking about getting my own espresso maker—”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how many kilos do you purchase at a time?”

I was accustomed to buying my coffee, when I bought it in bulk, in pounds—so the kilos bit threw me for a second. But then I figured the guy was European.

“Oh, one or two,” I said.

The maître beamed. “Would you please be so kind as to accompany me to a more suitable room?” he asked with a sweeping gesture. “I’m sure the manager would like to meet personally with a client as special as yourself.”


In retrospect, maybe I should have been able to figure out what was going down. But at the time, I was totally clueless. Fear and curiosity waged a brief little war inside me. Curiosity won.

“Wait here,” I told Malcolm as I stood and followed the maître into the kitchen. He ushered me through a small door leading down a dark winding corridor that eventually opened up into a banquet hall complete with red carpet, crystal chandelier and grand piano.

In the center of the room, behind a massive mahogany desk that resembled a coffin on legs, sat an imposing square-faced man dressed in a tailored blue suit playing with an enormous gold ring on one of his fingers. I turned to ask the maître if this was the right room, thinking maybe we’d taken a wrong turn, only to discover he’d disappeared.

“So you like coffee?” the square-faced man asked in a deep Sicilian voice.

I was starting to sweat ... bullets. The man had to see I was nervous.

“I’m sure you know how it is,” I said, stepping forward in an attempt at nonchalance. “A cup or two now and then—”

“Do you prefer your coffee mixed or pure?”

“Pure. I never take cream or sugar.”

“Certainly not. Sugar is a terrible mix for coffee.”  While speaking the man regarded me intensely, practically mowing me down with his sinister black eyes. Then, after an excruciating silence in which I could have heard my own heart beating from across the room, his face twisted into an ironic grin. “Look, kid. Tell me if I’m wrong. But I believe you’re only interested in coffee. I mean just plain coffee. Am I wrong?”

“Yes—I mean no! I mean you’re right. All I wanted was some coffee. You know, a cup of Joe. Java. What’s all this about?”

“Calm yourself. Relax. It’s not about anything.”

With cold deliberation he opened a desk drawer, a gesture that sent shivers from my cranium to my tailbone, but instead of a .38 he produced a thick wad of bills. He thumbed out five one-hundred-dollar notes and handed them to me between his fingers. “Take this as a little present. Between friends. Just be sure to forget you ever laid eyes on me.”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

“Good. Then we have an understanding.”

As I was stuffing the money in my pocket, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find the maître motioning for me to follow. I did—on legs wobblier than piano wires. He escorted me back into the dining room where Malcolm was waiting. I didn’t even bother to ask if he’d taken care of the bill. I knew it was on the house.

“Tell me what happened, Luke. You look like you’ve just seen a UFO.”

I was in no mood for small talk. I was stone-cold sober now. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

Only later, when we got back to the Funhouse, did I lighten up. I still didn’t feel great physically—“marginally functional” would be a better description—but at least I was gaining ground. I brewed a pot of coffee and sat down in the rain in the middle of the lake at the kitchen table to tell Malcolm the whole story, thrilled at the realization I’d made enough money to pay, should I have chosen to, which I didn’t, what I owed on my credit card—and then some.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All rights reserved.