Through The Grinder

One

“…And he called to tell me it’s on the covers of both the Post and the Daily News. The cover story, Clare!”

Sitting up in bed, I rubbed my eyes, trying to concentrate on the monologue percolating against my ear. But for a good two minutes (5:02 to 5:04 a.m. Eastern Standard Time to be precise), the only thing my mind clung to was the image of something dark, powerful, rich, and warm.

No, this something did not have bedroom eyes, a Swiss bank account, and a heavy, sinewy frame depressing the other side of my mattress. As a perpetual single mother, I’d had nothing remotely like that on the other side of my mattress for years — sinewy or otherwise — just clean cotton sheets and a sour female cat.

In point of fact, that dark, powerful, rich, and warm something I yearned for was a cup of Guatemala Antigua — one of those smooth, tangy coffees, like Costa Rican and Colombian, which would awaken my yawning palette with a full-bodied, slightly spicy flavor and bracing, rich acidity. (“Acidity” being the pleasant sharpness as the flavor finishes in the mouth, not to be confused with “bitterness,” but I’ll get to that later.)

I sighed, almost smelling the earthy aroma of that first morning cup, tasting its nutty essence, feeling the shudder of radiant pleasure as the jolt of heat and caffeine seemed to flow directly into my veins.

God I loved the morning ritual.

My ex-husband, Matteo Allegro, used to say that abandoning the peace of sleep was only tolerable if a fresh pot of coffee were waiting. He and I never agreed on much. But we agreed on that.

“It’s very upsetting, Clare. Not the image we want for the Blend. Don’t you agree?”

The bright voice (displaying more than trace amounts acidity) on the other end of the phone line was finally penetrating my wake-up fog.

“Madame, slow down,” I said, rising from a half-reclined to a fully upright and locked position. The bedroom’s silk drapes were pulled shut, but it being November, no light would be forthcoming even if they had been open. The break of dawn was over an hour away.

“What is on the cover exactly?” I asked Madame through a yawn.

“The Village Blend,” repeated Madame. “It’s been mentioned in connection to — ”

I yawned again.

“Clare, dear, did my call wake you? Why are you sleeping in?”

I rubbed my eyes and glanced at the digital alarm clock. “I’m not sleeping in. I usually sleep until five thirty.”

“With your bakery delivery at six?”

Madame’s censuring tone was abundantly perceptible. But, because of my enormous respect for my eighty-year-old, French-born ex-mother-in-law, I remained only mildly irritated.

It didn’t matter to me if the bakery delivery occurred at six every morning. All I had to do was roll out of bed, shower, throw on jeans and a sweater, and descend three floors. It wasn’t as if the coffeehouse was fifty miles away. The delivery would be made literally at my back door.

Granted, that hadn’t always been my situation….

Just a few months ago, I’d been raising my daughter in New Jersey, writing the occasional article for coffee trade magazines, a regular cooking tips column for a local paper, and working odd catering and child day care jobs to make ends meet when one morning Madame had called. She’d begged me to come back to the city and manage the Blend for her again as I’d done years before — when I’d been her daughter-in-law.

I’d agreed, partly because my now grown daughter had just enrolled in a SoHo culinary school and managing the Blend meant I’d be in the next neighborhood instead of the next state. And partly because Madame’s generous contract afforded me increasing ownership of the Blend as time went on, which included the incredible duplex apartment above the two-floor coffeehouse itself.

Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to one day own a historic townhouse, complete with a duplex filled with antique furnishings, Persian prayer rugs, framed Hoppers, and working fireplaces, in one of the most in-demand areas in Manhattan? Certainly not moi.

“I’ve never missed a bakery delivery in all the years I’ve managed the place for you,” I assured her flatly, “and I’m not about to start this morning.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “Of course, you have it in hand. It’s just that never in my life could I bathe and primp in mere minutes. Your morning routine must resemble something not found outside of sports locker rooms.”

O-kay, it’s going to be one of those days.

I cleared my throat, silently reminding myself that this was just Madame being…Madame. After all, the woman certainly had a right to say anything she liked about running the Blend — and not just because she owned it.

Madame Blanche Dreyfus Allegro Dubois, an immigrant refugee of World War Two Paris, had managed the Blend herself for decades, personally pouring cups o’ joe for some of the twentieth century’s most renowned artists, actors, playwrights, poets, and musicians. Mention Dylan Thomas, Jackson Pollock, Marlon Brando, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Barbra Streisand, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert DeNiro, Sam Shepard, or Edward Albee — and she’d share a personal anecdote.

So, the way I looked at it, if anyone had earned the right to be a pain in the ass when it came to running the Blend, she did.

Still…it was five in the a.m.

“Madame, tell me again why you called?”

“The Blend has been mentioned in the papers, dear, all of them.”

“In connection to what?”

“A suicide.”

“What is it with New York 1, running the same stories, like, twenty-four times in twenty-four hours?”

My Jersey Girl daughter, Joy, was still adjusting to the array of trivialities that characterized Manhattan life. Just before eleven o’clock, she crossed the Blend’s sun-washed, wood-plank floor on her stacked black boots and ordered her usual double tall vanilla latte.

Current conversation topic at the coffeehouse counter — Basic Cable’s Channel 1.

I must have heard thousands of these discussions in my time managing the coffeehouse — the eccentricities of cabbies, bad Broadway shows, sucky bands at CBGB, Time Out’s cover stories, film crews that close down entire blocks, trying to sleep through relentless ambulance sirens, kicking cars that block pedestrian crosswalks, the best slice below Fourteenth, Barney’s warehouse sales, the end of porno on Forty-Second, kamikaze bike messengers, the real meaning of some Yiddish word, the difference — if any — among the Indian restaurants lining East Sixth, the New York Post’s Page Six, the precise contents of an egg cream. And, of course, rents, rents, apartments, and rents.

One of my best baristas and assistant managers, Tucker Burton, a lanky, floppy haired, gay playwright and actor, who also happened to believe he was the illegitimate son of Richard Burton, slid Joy’s drink across the slab of blueberry marble.

“Sweetie, don’t knock New York 1. What other town’s got a cable channel devoted to twenty-four hours of local coverage? Okay, so the stories repeat a lot, but you haven’t yawned till you’ve heard the fisherman’s weather in rural Louisiana. Lemme tell ya, swamp humidity levels aren’t pretty — or in the least interesting. Give me a ‘Subway Surfer Falls to His Death’ story repeated ten times any day.”

“That’s sort of morbid, Tucker,” I pointed out behind the coffee bar’s efficient, low-slung silver espresso machine.

(We actually had a three-foot-tall, bullet-shaped La Victoria Arduino espresso machine behind the counter, too. Strewn with dials and valves, the thing had been imported from Italy in the 1920s; but, like the eclectic array of coffee antiques decorating the shelves and fireplace mantel — including a cast iron two-wheeled grinding mill, copper English coffee pots, side-handled Turkish ibriks, a Russian samovar, and a French lacquered coffee urn — it was for show only.)

“Get over it, Clare,” said Kira Kirk, the eight-pound Sunday edition of the New York Times cradled in her slender arm like a newsprint infant. “What do you expect from a city of aberrant people?”

“Aberrant?” said Joy.

“Devious. Wayward. Offending. Sinning — if you will.” Kira was a crossword puzzle freak. “Where else would goofball kids think surfing on top of a subway car is something to do for kicks? If you ask me, they deserve to get squashed like bugs.”

As a coffeehouse manager, I’d seen many flavors of urban humanity pour through our front door. Kira was one of that group who embodied those lines from the poem “To the Coffeehouse”:

“You hate and despise human beings, and at the same time you can not be happy without them…”

A consultant of some sort, Kira was recently divorced, living alone, and approaching fifty. She’d started coming by the Blend pretty frequently about six weeks ago. When I first saw her, I thought she was a striking woman with refined features, beautiful cheekbones, and an admirable head of long dark hair. Lately, however, I noticed she’d started letting herself go. Her usually creamy skin looked blotchy and wind burned, her body looked far too thin, like she wasn’t eating enough, and she’d even stopped dyeing her hair. It now hung in a long gray braid down her oversized blue sweater.

Kira’s usual Sunday ritual was the Travel and Leisure section, then the crossword puzzle, accompanied by a grande cappuccino and a butter croissant. As a regular, she didn’t need to tell me her order. She just needed to appear.

I half-filled the stainless steel pitcher with whole milk, then opened the valve on the steam wand, warming the milk on the bottom and foaming it on top. Then I set aside the pitcher, ran the ravishingly oily espresso roast beans through the grinder, dosed the ground coffee into the portafilter cup, tamped it tightly down, and, after sweeping excess grinds from the rim, clamped its handle into place.

With the start of the extraction process, I checked the espresso’s viscosity, making sure it was oozing out of the machine (yes, it should ooze like warm honey — if it gushes out, the machine’s temperature and pressure is off, and it’s not espresso but a brewed beverage).

Our machine is semi-automatic, which means the barista (that’s me) must manually stop the water flow between eighteen and twenty-four seconds. Any longer and the beverage is over-extracted (bitter and burnt-tasting because the sugars have deteriorated). Any shorter and its under-extracted (weak, insipid, and completely uninspiring). Like a lot of things in life, making a great espresso depended on a number of variables — and timing was certainly one of them.

“It’s not a real channel anyway, is it — New York 1?” asked Joy. “I mean, it’s one of those community service deals, right?”

“Right. A tax write-off for Time Warner,” said one of my part-timers, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), an NYU student with wild dark hair currently stuffed into a backward baseball cap. She was swabbing one of the few empty coral-colored marble tables with a wet towel. “I’ve got a friend whose sister works there. Apparently, they have a saying in the newsroom — you can get on New York 1, but you can’t get off.”

“What does that mean?” asked Joy.

Esther shrugged. “It’s because they run the stories so often. But you can’t blame them. Because of their budget, their staff is, like, miniscule, I mean compared to an outfit like CNN.”

Joy shrugged. “All I know is, my favorite segment is that one they repeat every hour in the morning, the one where they read you the headlines. It really rocks.”

“True,” said Esther. “I myself can’t get out of bed in the morning till I hear Weather on the Ones, and that hottie anchor Pat Kiernan reads me the headlines from all the New York papers.”

“Word,” said Joy.

(Eavesdropping on the college crowd, I’d long ago assumed, contextually, that word was vernacular hip-hop for “right on” or “and how” — or something along those lines.)

Tucker made a sour face. “You ladies think Kiernan’s a hottie? With that baby face and those insurance salesmen suits?”

“Sure,” said Joy. “He’s nerd hot.”

“Yeah, like Clark Kent or something,” agreed Esther, adjusting her trendy black-framed glasses.

My eyebrow rose. Joy’s last boyfriend was anything but “nerd hot.” With his long dark ponytail, olive complexion, barbed-wire tattoo, and flashing arrogant eyes, Mario Forte looked more like Antonio Banderas’s younger brother. My ex-husband, who shared many of these features, had hated him on sight.

So what happened to Mario? I was dying to ask my daughter. But I’d already read The 101 Ways to Embarrass Your Daughter and Piss Her Off for Decades handbook — and I figured it was better left unasked…for now.

Instead, I poured Kira’s freshly drawn espresso shots into a grande-size cup, slid in the steamed milk, topped it with foamed milk — and changed the subject. “So did Clark Kent Kiernan cover that suicide story this morning?”

“Are you kidding?” said Esther. “He was totally all over it. Pat doesn’t usually do the weekend anchor thing. He’s the weekday guy, but I got lucky this morning. And lemme tell you, my pulse was on overdrive. It felt like he was talking about me.”

“Excuse me, Miss Six Feet Under,” said Tucker, “but since when do you identify yourself as a corpse on the tracks of the Union Square R train?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Queer Eye,” Esther snapped right back. “I meant the Village Blend part. I work at the Blend. He talked about the Blend. Hello? Get it?”

“Yes, sugar-lumps, I got it.”

“Good.”

“Here you go,” I told Kira, handing her the steaming cappuccino and a small plate with a warm croissant.

“Thanks, Clare. You know, I’ve got all the papers this morning if you haven’t seen them yet.” Kira held up a big Lands End canvas carryall. Inside was enough newsprint to wrap dead fish through a nuclear winter.

I hesitated a moment. Since Madame’s predawn phone call, I’d tried to put the gruesome news out of my mind and just focus on serving the rush of regulars that came in on Sunday, which was much different than the weekend crush of office workers and commuters.

Today we’d see mostly dog-walking residents, straight and gay couples sharing fat editions of the Sunday Times, and well-dressed worshipers from the many nearby churches. Interns and staff from St. Vincent’s Hospital would come in around noon, and NYU students would take over most of the tables after that, with their laptops and cell phones.

“Mom, we should probably take a look,” said Joy.

I nodded and poured myself a cup of the house blend — a unique mix of beans that changed annually, depending on my ex-husband’s recommendations.

Matteo Allegro, apart from being Madame’s son — and my ex — was an astute coffee broker, the Blend’s coffee buyer, and the descendant of Antonio Vespasian Allegro, the man who’d originally opened the Blend. He was also a pain in my ass — and, thank goodness, currently in East Africa, chasing a primo crop of Sidamo, if not shapely legs and long-lashed eyes, which was why I’d applied the prefix “ex” to my husband in the first place.

“What’s wrong?” asked Joy as she watched me bolt half the cup of java.

I shrugged, pouring more and moving around the counter. “Death isn’t something a person should face without a fortifying hit of caffeine.”